America’s Roads More Dangerous than China in 1932, so says Floyd Gibbons

These days journalists (sorry media folk) just aren’t trusted much. It would be a brave advertiser that used a hack to endorse a product and expect the public to react well. Not so in the 1930s it seems. Floyd Gibbons was an amazing self-promoter and a journalist. He was a veteran reporter with the Chicago Tribune who had covered the Mexican border war of 1916, the torpedoing by the Germans of the Laconia (on which he was a passenger), the fighting at Belleau Wood in the First World War (where he lost his eye and took to wearing his trademark eye- patch) and the 1921 famine in Russia. In 1932 he headed to China to cover the fighting in Shanghai and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Still, he found time to endorse Goodrich Tyres. His point was that while he was watching the death and destruction in China even more people got killed and injured on America’s roads in car accidents….war correspondent with a mortgage to pay? maybe it’s time to call your agent?