The Fifty-First Dragon: Analysis (Empty Slogans = Propaganda) in “The Fifty-First Dragon” “It is simply this—man is not sufficient. He must have a rallying cry, a slogan by which to die and by which to live.” Heywood Broun Heywood Broun sold his first short story, “The Fifty-First Dragon”, to the New York Tribune. It was written during the post-Great War period and as such reflected the amount of empty propagandizing the Americans did to entice young people to join the war effort. It can in fact be argued that, as Broun puts it in his 1939 Nutmeg preface to this story, “The story says that an empty slogan is better than no slogan at all... but it is a doctrine on which some