Happiness Quote by Heywood Broun

“Brotherhood” is a word Broun refuses to leave in the sanctuary. By opening with “not just a Bible word,” he’s prying a feel-good moral term out of religious rhetoric and dropping it into the gritty, negotiated world of labor, politics, and daily survival. The move is shrewd: he keeps the emotional authority of the religious ideal while stripping it of pulpit ownership. If brotherhood is only sermon material, it stays safely abstract; if it’s comradeship, it becomes actionable, testable, and collective.

Broun’s key bet sits in the plainspoken certainty of “can come and will come.” He’s not describing a mood, he’s selling an outcome. That doubling is subtle propaganda in the best sense: it’s meant to stiffen resolve during a moment when solidarity is expensive and cynicism is easier. As a journalist of the early 20th century, writing in an America wracked by strikes, the Great Depression, and fierce battles over unions and class power, Broun is pushing against the era’s dominant story that happiness is a private purchase, earned alone.

The subtext is also a rebuke to charity-as-performance. Brotherhood isn’t pity; comradeship implies equality, shared risk, and mutual obligation. “Happy life for all” reads almost utopian, but Broun anchors it in a concrete mechanism: people bound together not by doctrine, but by lived alignment. It’s an argument that the good life isn’t a reward for virtue; it’s the byproduct of solidarity built on purpose.