Heywood Campbell Broun, newspaper columnist, author, and one of the founders of the American Newspaper Guild, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1888. After attending Harvard, he worked for several New York papers including the New York Tribune and New York World and the New York Telegram and World Telegram. While at the World, he began a syndicated column, It Seems to Me, which he wrote until his death. In his column, the first of its kind to disagree with the policies of the newspapers that carried it, Broun championed the underdog, criticized social injustice, and supported labor unions. In addition to his journalistic and literary endeavors (he wrote several books and edited a literary weekly), Broun was also active in politics. In 1930, he unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Socialist. He also served as the first president of the Newspaper Guild from 1933 until his death in 1939.
Fulton Sheen, who was formerly challenged by Broun on the subject of evolution, oversaw his formation in the Faith. While his conversion remained largely avoided by friends and colleagues, publicity on the subject was widely circulated. An editorial on Broun in Time Magazine entitled, Conversion, speculated its impact: “Columnist Broun will be received into the Church late this month. Thereafter he may well become the U. S. equivalent of a famed British convert—the late Gilbert Keith Chesterton, stylist, wit, rough-&-tumble fighter for the Faith.”
Beyond his publicized conversion, the public impact Catholics hoped for Brown was, sadly, never realized. Broun died the following year, spending only a brief hour in the vineyard. Another Time editorial communicated the eulogy given by then Prelate Fr. Fulton Sheen:
Heywood Broun, said Monsignor Sheen, had tried psychoanalysis, had lain on a couch for hours of "questionings on trivial incidents," but "never once did he find peace." He turned to the Church, he told Monsignor Sheen, for four reasons:
" 'Firstly, a visit I made to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. . . .
" 'Secondly, the election of Cardinal Pacelli as Pius XII convinced me that there is only one moral authority left in the world and that is the Papacy.
" 'Thirdly, a fear of death. I should dislike to appear before the judgment seat of God with my soul in the condition that I believe it is in now. . . .
" 'Fourthly, to me there is nothing more ridiculous than individualism in either economics, politics or religion. ... I love my fellow man, and particularly, the down and out, the socially disinherited and the economically dispossessed. ... I want, therefore, a religion which has a social aspect. ... I have never been a Communist and never will be a Communist. I have very often defended birth control. But I would not do it now; for I have begun to see a spiritual significance of birth.' "
Said Monsignor Sheen: "I never met a person who had a clearer premonition of death. 'Let us hurry,' he would say, 'I may not live another month.' ... At the next to the last instruction, I reminded him of the seriousness of the step which he was about to take. ... He arose from his chair, put his arm around me and said, 'Father, you're worried. You will never regret receiving me into the Church. I promise you that.' . . .
"He who might have been a Chesterton for America, as he hoped a certain literary colleague of his would one day be its Belloc, was given only one brief hour in the vineyard of the Church. . . . Thus ends the biography of a soul as far as this world is concerned. To but few men of his profession has come the thrill of living as he has lived. . . ."
Monsignor Sheen's remarks were more than funereal eloquence. They were probably intended partly as an answer to those Catholics who still viewed Heywood Broun as an unreconstructed Red, who ought never to have been accepted by the Church. And they were undoubtedly voiced, by one of the nation's most influential Catholics, as the sincerest tribute he could make to a man who had sincerely been his friend.
Sources:
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers. "Heywood Broun." Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt, ed. by Allida Black, June Hopkins, et. al. (Hyde Park, New York: Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, 2003). 13 March 2007 <http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/broun-heywood.htm>
“Biography by Sheen.” Editorial. Time Magazine 1 January 1940. 12 March 2007 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,763317-2,00.html>
“Conversion.” Editorial. Time Magazine 22 May 1939. 12 March 2007 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761385,00.html>
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