Thanks Heywood Broun – Shanghai 1912 – “A Land Where Chop Suey is Unknown”

Heywood Campbell Broun, newspaper columnist, author, and one of the founders of the American Newspaper Guild, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1888. In 1912 he visited Shanghai. He occasionally commented on China for the rest of his career after the trip. Edgar Snow thought him responsible for stopping Red Star Over China from being a book of the month club selection in the 1930s. He was supposed to be reporting on the new republic of Sun Yat-sen but mostly sent back flowery pieces to the New York Tribune, including this nugget of wisdom below…He reportedly made a small fortune playing poker in Shanghai while there. Most of his reporting was of the instant expert variety with conclusions drawn from a few meetings and the fly-in/fly-out (or rather sail-in/sail-out) variety – sort of a Thomas Friedman of his day….widely read and considered authoritative by some even less knowledgable but for no obvious reason!