Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1929moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 6, 1930

Man of the Year

Owen D. Young



     To which of his fellows might the discerning U.S. citizen
point as Man of the Year?

     Civic loyalty would automatically turn the citizen toward
Washington and the White House, where 1929 saw Herbert Clark
Hoover installed. But the first Citizen is obviously in a class
by himself and really, psychologically, belongs to the year of
his election.

     For heroism plus skill, 1929 was undoubtedly Richard Evelyn
Byrd's in the popular mind, just as 1929 was Charles Augustus
Lindbergh's. Through their Congress the citizens paid
acknowledgement by raising Byrd from Commander to Rear-Admiral,
an act unprecedented since Robert Edward Peary discovered the
North Pole. But fair-minded citizens might dispute Admiral
Byrd's preeminence by bringing in Pilot Bernt Balchen, who
actually flew the Byrd ship to the South Pole, or by pointing
to Endurance Flyers Dale ("Red") Jackson and Forest O'Brien who
kept the St. Louis Robin aloft longer than any living thing has
ever flown (420 hr. 21 min. 30 sec.).

     Undoubtedly there may be historians who will find the name
of Frank Billings Kellogg brightest in 1929, for it was the year
in which 57 nations signed the world-peace treaty with his name
on it. But researchers and analysts could show that Mr. Kellogg
did not originate the outlawing-war idea; that a comparatively
obscure lay figure named Salmon Oliver Levinson, Chicago lawyer,
was invited to the White House the day the signatures were
affixed in recognition of certain conversations he had had years
prior with Senator Borah of Idaho and others.

     An enormous body of citizens might turn to Alexander Legge,
prime "new patriot" of the Hoover era, the man selected to cope
with the country's most pressing politico-economic problem as
chairman of the Federal Farm Board. But Chairman Legge only
began his task in 1929.

     Contemplating education as an important field, many a
citizen might hail the feat of Robert Maynard Hutchins, who
became president of one of the country's hugest universities at
the age of 30.

     All these and many another were Men of the Year, but the
discerning citizen would pause long before putting any of them
ahead of the man, apparently the one man, who could and did
perform the year's largest politico-economic job for the world's
leading nations. Economic tangles which must be straightened out
before society can proceed in peace. The man who spent four
months as foreman of the high financial wrecking crew which was
the Second Reparations Conference, was Owen D. Young of Van
Hornesville, N.Y.

     Last January when European powers, President Coolidge not
objecting, asked Mr. Young and John Pierpont Morgan to come to
Paris, Mr. Young was reluctant to accept. He knew and his
countrymen were beginning to know how large a part of the so-
called Dawes Plan had been his handiwork in 1924. There was no
patriotic compulsion to go and do some more hard work,
especially since it then looked as though no amount of work
could bring success. When he did accept and reached Paris, it
became apparent that the other nations' delegates could agree
on him alone for chairman.

     One delegate died of overwork in those five months. Never
in his life did Mr. Young have to subject himself to such severe
physical discipline as then to keep going. He got away from
Paris for exactly one week-end -- and got back to find weeks of
work virtually undone. The other delegates were at each other's
throats. It took him three days to restore harmony. On three
other occasions the conference was actually declared dead -- but
he revived it. For besides the stupendous detail and the
baffling interplay of economic facts and factors, he had to cope
with his foreign colleagues' temperaments. This called for rigid
self-discipline of another, subtler kind. When Germany's
bristling Herr Schacht came to get his ear privately after a
day's sessions he had to convince himself and Herr Schacht that
he was treating him exactly as though French Delegate Moreau
were present. When M. Moreau came, similar convictions were
necessary. In his preservation of the confidence of all the
parties, in his resuscitation of their confidence in each other,
lay Chairman Young's greatest right to have his name applied to
the Reparations plan which was finally adopted. From the Orient,
where such things are most highly appreciated came Chairman
Young's highest praise, when Delegate Keingo Mori of Japan said:
"I could not have conceived, unless I had seen it, of an
American having such patience."

     When, looking five years older, Owen D. Young returned to
the U.S., he was as weary as he was modest in asking New York
City not to give him a public reception. Also, he was in a hurry
to get back to his private life. His son Charles was getting
married next day in Cleveland. (A second son, John, was killed
in a motor accident in 1926. The daughter, Josephine, was
graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1928. Philip, third son, is a
sophomore at St. Lawrence College. Richard, youngest son, is in
primary school.) He was due after that at Elihu Root's college,
Hamilton, to receive an honorary degree. From there he wanted
to go home to Van Hornesville, which is still his home town in
a very real sense. He was born there the day the late great
Theodore Roosevelt was having his 16th birthday party, Oct. 27,
1874. Everyone there still calls him "Owen." He has kept Van
Hornesville growing up with him, not by taking it in hand the
way Henry Ford or a Rockefeller might do, but by getting his
neighbors to join him in improvements. He has not expanded his
home farm to gobble up the town, but stayed at 700 acres. When
the little red schoolhouse was rebuilt along colonial lines as
suggested by him, he put on overalls, helped gather fieldstone,
and swung a pick, beside paying all bills. He wanted this school
to be a model of city and country advantages for rural
education. When they put up a plaque with the names of the
builders and what each had done, he paired his name with the
village patriarch's: ABRAM TILYOU AND OWEN D. YOUNG -- Rocking
Chair Consultants.

     The activities of a Man-of-the-Year are bound to be
manifold. Being board chairman of General Electric Co. and Radio
Corp. might not keep some men very busy, but it keeps Owen D.
Young busy because of another quality which made him
internationally invaluable at Paris; his sensitiveness to, his
prescience of the Future. Never a technician, he is nonetheless
obsessed with the idea that some day it may be possible to write
a message on a pad at one's desk or bedide and have it
instantaneously transmitted to the addressee anywhere on earth.
No trained artist, he has been stirred, by Radio Corp.'s
development from a communications business into an amusement
business, to ponder the potentialities of radio as the basis of
a new national art form, especially for a new generation
unhampered by old art forms. Never a moralist, he has said: "In
no other profession [besides Business], not excepting the
ministry and the law, is the need for wide information, broad
sympathies and directed imagination so great." Always that kind
of a businessman, he has foreseen the necessity of national
communications monopoly, wires and wireless, government-
controlled if not government-owned, to meet world competition.

     It was this last foresight which took him last month to
Washington D.C., and, by a quirk of human affairs, to the
borderland of another phase of the future. The Senators who
asked him to come and tell about Radio Corp.'s plan for selling
its communications business to International Telephone &
Telegraph Co. were far less interested in his business ideas
than in the effect which those ideas, publicly expressed, might
have upon Owen D. Young's chances of becoming the Democratic
party's candidate for President of the U.S. in 1932 or 1936. No
man of Mr.Young's acumen could have failed to sense the
undercurrents of that hearing, with Senators Wheeler of Montana
and Dill of Washington trying to embarrass him and Senators
Tydings of Maryland and Hawes of Missouri trying to protect him.
Perceiving the situation Mr. Young insisted on talking
economics, nor did he hesitate to startle the Senators -- and
many of his conservative business acquaintances -- with his
frankness, notably his opinion that investment value is a fairer
base than replacement value upon which to scale the profits of
such public utilities as radio companies.

     His visit with the Senate was not Mr. Young's only visit
in Washington last month. As deputy chairman of the New York
Federal Reserve Bank he has given far more time to stabilizing
the U.S. financial structure than to Europe's. It was in this
capacity that President Hoover asked him to go down for two of
the post-stock-crash Confidence Conferences. Mr. Young went, of
course. He has never refused Herbert Hoover anything except, in
1928, his vote. He would hate to refuse Herbert Hoover anything
and Mr. Hoover knows it. Regardless of what the Democrats do to
make or unmake Mr. Young as presidential timber, it is unlikely
that President Hoover needs to worry. He is probably the last
Republican, as a person and as a type, that Democrat Young would
choose to run against. The same is true in the case of Dwight
Whitney Morrow, his onetime colleague on the General Electric
board of directors, with whom Mr. Young has already received a
headline nomination for 1936. It is also true, however, that no
man has ever refused the official nomination.