Man of the Year

(See Cover)

By the close of 1941 Franklin Delano Roosevelt had become a war President, the leader of the nation in a deadly war of survival. But that fact alone did not make him the Man of 1941. For there were others who had a great claim to that distinction.

The nation Franklin Roosevelt led had yet to demonstrate to history that it had the stature, moral as well as physical, to stand up and trade blows with the Axis--not for three weeks or six months but year after year, giving odds if need be and fighting the enemy to a standstill. Such a demonstration has been given by the people whom the son of a Chinese peasant led--Chiang Kaishek.

His people had been beaten and battered from one end of China to the other. Their cities had been bombed, their soldiers gassed, their women raped. From Valley Forge through Valley Forge he has fought and gone on fighting. The aid that the democracies promised him was never enough. But he kept on. In earlier years he fought a retiring battle. But in 1941 he fought the Japanese to a standstill. That was an achievement neither British nor Americans have yet accomplished. If he does not measure up to the standard of Man of the Year, it is because other men have greater claims.

Nor has Franklin Roosevelt yet led his people in such a gallant, courageous fight as Winston Churchill has led the British.

Washington last week had a sample of that extraordinary man, who, like some astonishing Shakespearean character, full of great speeches and thundering images, appears only when the going gets hard. In 1940 he was hailing the merging of American and British interests: "Let it roll. Let it roll on in full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days." By the end of 1941 he watched it rolling. U.S.-British cooperation, that had seemed a dim hope after Dunkirk had become a living reality.

But Winston Churchill had no great moment in 1941 to measure up to the history-arresting instant in 1940 when he spoke for his people in their finest hour: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. . . ." Churchill was still awakening men to the meaning of the war, and no one had done a better job. He was a man of the year, of the decade, and, if his cause won, of all time. But as Man of 1941 he had one great weakness. Twice his soldiers had conquered Cyrenaica--they had to, because they lost it betweentimes. In Greece and Crete his armies had met disaster. After more than two years of war under his leadership, Britain was still losing campaigns.

As Chiang Kai-shek is still the only leader who has successfully fought the Japs to a standstill, the only leader who has yet to face a major German drive without a military disaster is Joseph Stalin. After six months of war, Stalin's armies have thrown back Hitler's armies from within 25 miles of his capital. Against better equipment and the greatest war machine the world has yet seen, they have fought, and yielded ground, have taken and inflicted stupendous losses, and gone on fighting. The credit for that achievement, for taking untold punishment, may belong far more to that unsung hero, the common Russian soldier, long-suffering and long-courageous.

As Man of the Year Stalin, too, has certain grave disqualifications, one moral, the other empiric. Even Stalin himself could no longer hold up the banner of the proletarian revolution as the hope of mankind. All he now holds is the strength of the Russian armies battling in a war that he long sneered at as "imperialistic."

But even on the grounds of realistic, hardheaded self-interest, he had no triumph to record. He was Man of 1939 for the deal he made with Hitler--a deal which sold out the foes of Naziism, plunged the rest of the world into mutual slaughter so that Russia might be the sole survivor of the cataclysm. The day last June when Hitler turned on him, it became clear that all Stalin had bought was a mess of pottage. His great coup of World War II proved in 1941 a grim joke at the expense of Joseph Stalin.

No moral accomplishment elevated any of the Leaders of the Axis to the rank of Man of the Year. And in 1941 the practical accomplishments of those men were not up to standard. No exception was Adolf Hitler.

In 1939 he swept through Poland. In 1940 he conquered all the strongholds of Western Europe. In 1941 he conquered Greece and Crete--and Libya for a time. But in 1941 he tackled Russia, failed for the first time to conquer promptly and instead involved Germany in an exhausting war--a war whose strain has shaken Germany to the core and seriously undermined her chances for ultimate victory.

Greater have been the physical achievements of Japan's Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He struck a blow which for the time at least has paralyzed both Britain and the U.S. in the Pacific. But he also launched Japan on an operation which, if it is not totally successful, is likely to endanger her worse than Hitler's Russian campaign has endangered Germany. The measure of his achievement could not be taken from the events of 1941.

Men of Ideals. By contrast to the men of the Axis there were other candidates for a place in history who won no material victories, who sent no armies into the field, who fought their battles on another plane.

One of them was Religion's undoubted Man of the Year, the Most Rev. William Temple, the Archbishop of York. At Malvern, and recently again at another gathering of British churchmen (see p. 41), he took the lead in attempting to set up better standards for the world to follow when slaughter is done. When his work is complete--if it is as farsighted as it is good-willed--he may do more to influence the future of the world than all the leaders of state. That fulfillment, however, is yet to come.

In the U.S., no single heroic event, like the flight of Lindbergh to Paris in 1927, cut through the dead inertia of the prewar months--and the hero of that exploit now stood as one of the most tragic figures of U.S. history. No great books, plays, inventions, discoveries, testified to any creative vitality surging through the nation. No poet came up with a war song thundering the modern equivalent of Julia Ward Howe's "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," that appeared seven months after Bull Run. In music, the Man of the Year was a German, Beethoven; the first four notes of his Fifth Symphony became the international signal of the anti-Nazi V-for-Victory campaign.

Men of America. In 1941 over the world's measureless acres of misery the war lay like a burden too great to be carried, too great to be thrown off. The year 1940 had been the year of surrenders, but in 1941, from France to Poland, each day brought proof that the peace of surrender, balanced against the peace of death, left little choice between them.

The alternative to surrender or death was victory over the Axis. And one thing that 1941 made clear was that only the U.S. could make such a victory reasonably possible. Thus on the people of the U.S. as a whole and as individuals descended a great responsibility and a great opportunity to turn the tide of battle.

The plight of the world had of itself practically determined the claim of some American to be Man of 1941. Of the actual accomplishments of 1941 the most striking was the very real beginning made in turning the U.S. into the arsenal for all the democracies. Credit for that accomplishment belongs rather to U.S. businessmen than to SPAB or OPM or Lend-Lease Administration. The plants that were built, the planes and tanks which were actually turned out were planned and executed by businessmen.

If a businessman deserved to be Man of 1941, he might perhaps be Henry Ford, the oldtime enemy of war who in 1941 turned the processes of mass production which he himself fathered to the service of the nation, and became one of the great plane builders of the U.S. (see p. 56). But Ford is only one of many--a striking example because of his past pacifism--who have helped to turn U.S. ingenuity to a new weight in the balance of world affairs.

To people who believed that the size of the plant meant nothing unless a genuine national unity powered the turning wheels, another type of American was Man of the Year--Wendell Willkie, who in 1941 went to England as a defeated candidate and came back arguing for the Lend-Lease Bill; in tune with the year, he had gone on fighting as if he refused to admit that his defeat had taken place.

What Wendell Willkie contributed to the world in 1941 was epitomized by words he spoke last week: "Never has there existed such hope for mankind as there exists today. Never has there existed on the surface of this planet so many human beings who know what freedom is and who are determined that ... it shall endure. . . . During the last ten years the democratic peoples have learned in painful lessons what democracy . . . asks of us, and what we must deliver in the future if it is to survive. Out of this great knowledge and our great yearning, we can say with realistic confidence that we shall be able to build a new and more fruitful society of nations . . . strengthened by the common purposes of free peoples everywhere to make freedom live."

Balance of Power. But no one private individual summed up the hope that the U.S. stood for. It was the U.S. of Ford--and of Lindbergh in his untroubled, heroic days--of factories, of a willingness to change; it was the U.S. as a whole, the strongest power on earth, if it could find a key to its power. Nor could any private citizen stand against Franklin Roosevelt as Man of 1941, for one simple reason: as leader of the U.S. at war he had become leader of the democracies against Hitler. The use of the strength of the U.S. had become the key to the future of the war, and Franklin Roosevelt was the key to the forces of the U.S.

At the close of 1940 the two great figures locked in the world struggle were Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. In midsummer of 1941, Stalin and Churchill perhaps shared the position of being Hitler's chief opponents. By the time that 1941 ended, Franklin Roosevelt stood out clearly as Hitler's major adversary. Stalin, Churchill, Chiang Kaishek, whatever their individual stature, had their future dependent on the help that the U.S.--and Franklin Roosevelt--alone could give.

In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt obtained the Lend-Lease Act, which gave the U.S. the beginnings of that preeminence. When he signed the declaration of war, that pre-eminence was inescapable. Betweentimes, in the long nightmare of the "undeclared war," in the exhausting debate about convoys, he had guided the U.S. to the strategic spot where its weight could become the deciding factor in the world struggle which he, but not all of his people, believed was real.

In his own right and on his own record, President Roosevelt stood out as a figure of the year and of the age. His smiling courage in the face of panic, his resourcefulness in meeting unprecedented threats to the nation's economy and morale, his sanguine will place him there. The intensity of his feeling for what America can be and therefore will be--a feeling that awakened the country to master its creeping paralysis--these qualities prepared the nation for its struggle in the depth of depression. On a far greater scale, for a far greater cause, against a worldwide sense of hopelessness, those same qualities were called into play when the Japanese on a sunny December morning descended from the sky on Pearl Harbor.

War President. The U.S. has had five war Presidents in its history, and for Lincoln, the greatest of them, the war was civil war. In the wars with foreign foes, Madison, Polk, McKinley, Wilson--predecessors of President Roosevelt--faced no such task as he faces. Never before has the U.S at the beginning of a foreign war found itself on the defensive, in diplomacy, on land, at sea. Never before had a U.S. President faced so great a task in unifying the country that had made him President, of summoning up the spirit that would make the factories produce on a scale equal to the needs of the world's worst war.

In 1933 U.S. citizens who had been beaten by the hopelessness of the Depression were electrified by the words and actions of the man who said that the wheels could turn, that the good life could flourish, that all groups in the U.S. could work together in a cause bigger than any one of them. But the hopelessness they had felt then was nothing compared to the hopelessness that was felt by millions over the world, in the year 1941. The relief and release that U.S. citizens felt in 1933, when the President broke the paralysis that had gripped them, was nothing compared to the lifting of heads all over the world when the power and might of the U.S. was thrown into the war. Once he told the people of the U.S.: "This generation has a rendezvous with destiny." Now there could be no mistaking the fact. He was the man of 1941 because the country he leads stands for the hope of the world.

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