SOURCE: “Broun,” in Rogues' Gallery: Profiles of My Eminent Contemporaries, Murray & Gee, Inc., 1943, pp. 125-34.

In the following essay, Scully offers an anecdotal remembrance of Broun.

The last thing I saw Heywood Broun do, was at a dinner in his honor in Los Angeles in the summer of 1939. More than five hundred persons attended—including a mayor called Fletcher Bowron, who said he used to be a newspaper man, himself.

Broun was talking about the American Newspaper Guild, which he founded; in connection with it, he was telling of Upton Sinclair's Brass Check—an indictment of journalism and, in Broun's opinion, true during the first quarter of the century.

“But when I die,” said Broun, “I won't have a brass check (the symbol of prostitution) to get me by St. Peter. I'll have this!” And he held up and proudly waved his membership card in the American Newspaper...