Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1930moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1931

INTERNATIONAL

Man of the Year:Mohandas Ghandi



   To which of his fellowmen might a discerning citizen of the
world point as Man of the Year?

   Most worldwide concern of the year was the Depression, its
U.S. focus Wall Street. Down there no man carried a bigger load,
none fought the Boojum more effectively than Albert Henry Wiggin,
sagacious, resourceful, confidence-inspiring board chairman of
Chase National Bank. But other great bankers carried great loads.

   In winning the four major golf championships, Robert Tyre
Jones Jr. was easily Sportsman of the year. The Nobel Prize
winners, especially the onetime newshawk Sinclair Lewis who is
the first U.S. litterateur to receive the accolade, were Men of
the Year. But the work for which they were honored was done in
other years.

   Potential Statesmen of the Year were Prime Minister James
Ramsay MacDonald and those who helped him make the London Naval
Treaty. But they failed in what they tried to achieve --
reduction of five navies -- and had to compromise on limitation
of three.

   Surely one Statesman of the Year was Josef Vissarionovitch
Dzhugashvili, called Stalin (pronounced Stahl-yn), Dictator of
Russia. By "dumping" (or its practical equivalents) Stalin has
sown uneasiness among "the enemy." With his ruthless Five-Year
Plan he has wiped Unemployment from the map of Russia (as Scot
MacDonald could not do in Britain). Finally Stalin, who for years
ruled Russia obscurely as a "political boss" (General Secretary
of the Russian Communist Party), has just thrown off this mask,
assumed public office for the first time during his dictatorship,
and proved who is absolute master of some 150,000,000 people by
kicking into oblivion their nominal Prime Minister, luckless
Comrade Alexey Rykov.

   Germany's Adolf Hitler, with his mobilization of 6,401,210
unexpected Fascist votes, was a Man of the Year insofar as he
personified a great cause of unrest in the western world. But
Herr Hitler's flash in the pan has at least temporarily been
smothered by old President Paul von Hindenburg.

   The year 1930 was a memorable one for the world's most potent
criminal, Alphonse ("Scarface Al") Capone of Chicago. He emerged
from jail, having served a nine-month term for minor offense
(gun-carrying), and though widely publicized managed to remain at
large.

   Curiously, it was in a jail that the year's end found the
little half-naked brown man whose 1930 mark on world history will
undoubtedly loom largest of all. It was exactly twelve months ago
that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's Indian National Congress
promulgated the Declaration of Indian Independence. It was in
March that he marched to the sea to defy Britain's salt tax as
some New Englanders once defied a British tea tax. It was in May
that Britain jailed Gandhi at Poona. Last week he was still
there, and some 30,000 members of his Independence movement were
caged elsewhere. The British Empire was still wondering fearfully
what to do about them all, the Empire's most staggering problem.

   "Cold English Brains." A British journalist of standing lately
re-visited India and reported his findings to North American
Newspaper Alliance. Journalist Henry Noel Brailsford is a
graduate of Glasgow University, where he remained for a time as
assistant professor of Logic. Later he was a leading writer for
the Manchester Guardian, a member of the Carnegie International
Commission in the Balkans (1913), and editor of the New Leader
(1922-26).

   "In India I saw what no one is likely to see again," reported
Briton Brailsford. "Bombay obeyed two governments.

   "To the British Government, with all its apparatus of legality
and power, there still were loyal the European population, the
Indian sepoys, who wear its uniform, a few of the merchant
princes, and the older generation of the Moslem minority.

   "The rest of Bombay's population has transferred its
allegiance to one of the British Government's too numerous
prisoners: Mahatma Gandhi."

   Carefully Briton Brailsford described the system of parallel
government in Bombay, whereby members of the Indian National
Congress themselves marshal and police their demonstrations. He
reported that the Gandhiwomen who picket shops selling British
goods, and who fling themselves down to be trodden on by any
Indian determined to enter, will stand aside for occidental
shoppers. "The shopkeepers themselves signed a requisition to the
effect that they made no complaint against this peaceful
picketing, and for a time there were few arrests."

   In and around Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Benares, Mr.
Brailsford examined many Indian men and women bearing "wounds on
the feet or bruises on the  stomach, made with the butt end of a
rifle . . . one man with a terribly swollen arm, fractured or
dislocated, hanging in a sling . . . a woman (with) a badly
swollen face caused by a blow."

   In the opinion of Briton Brailsford, "cold English brains"
devised the system whereby bands of native police, especially in
the rural districts, set upon individual Indian men & women and
beat them. "The execution (of this plan) was left to hotter heads
and rougher hands," notably to Mohuntal Shah, chief Indian
official of the Borsad Taluka in Kaira District, who, Mr.
Braisford reports, has not only presided at numerous pouncings
and beatings, but also "occasionally assisted with a heavy
walking stick."

   Individual beatings are applied, in the main, to extort from
the victim his land tax. Mr. Brailsford traveled through district
after district where the peasants had taken and kept this vow:

   "We will pay no taxes until Gandhi is released from jail."

   For Mr. Gandhi, for the Mahatma, for St. Gandhi, for Jailbird
Gandhi not thousands but millions of individual Indians are
taking individual beatings which they could escape by paying what
His Majesty's Government call, quite accurately, "normal taxes."

   Physical extortion, even of taxes, is in law virtually
everywhere a crime. Briton Brailsford reports that the Indian
agents of the British Government have pursued tax evaders out of
British India into the native State of Baroda and beaten them
there. This is a crime for which the Man of the Year in Yerovila
Jail at Ponna is to blame.

   He is to blame because, although His Majesty's Government have
got him in a jail staffed by British jailers, they have not yet
stopped him from producing writings which are smuggled out
somehow, week after week, to his people.

   What Chance Success? The Viceroy of India last week admitted
at Calcutta that "some concessions" will have to be made to the
Indian Nationalism, which for twelve months he has been trying to
stamp out. Meantime, in London, before adjourning for the
holidays, the Indian Round Table Conference decided "in
principle" that the upper and lower houses of the new Indian
Legislature which they are trying to create, shall be called the
"Senate" and the "House of Representatives."

   The Irishmen, asked independence but were content with the
"Irish Free State," which has a "President" and a "Senate." If
Indians would be content with so little, it is still not likely
that Britons would grant it. Up to last week the Round Table
Conference had not touched the red-hot question of India's
status.

   The Conference had touched, and showed signs of splitting on
the question of Hindu-Moslem representation in the new
legislature. India's 70,000,000 moslems are "the
largest minority in the world." When the Aga Khan, No. I Indian
Moslem, left London for Paris (he has a home in Paris) last week,
it was rumored and denied that he was not gone "for the holidays"
but to India for momentous consultations.

   Stock reasons why Britain must hold India: 1) "she cannot
relinquish her trust"; 2) deprived of the Pax Britannica, India
would be torn with Hindu-Moslem civil war; 3) "Britain is the
only sure defense of the Untouchables," some 45,000,000 souls; 4)
politically Indians are too "childish" to rule themselves.

   In India Last Week:

   -- The Viceroy re-imposed his decree gagging the Indian press
which he lifted when criticism became keen.

   -- A newspaper straw vote among the occidental community in
Bombay brought 1,000 ballots, 830 of them for granting India
"dominion status."

   -- The Indian National Congress maintained its grip on the
entire native market for foreign cloth in Bombay (several hundred
shops), which has been closed for six months. Nevertheless Bombay
(chief commercial city) and Bombay Presidency are not India, and
imports to the entire continent fell only 25% during the first
eight months of 1930. Mr. Gandhi's boycott is credited with
reducing imports (i.e., sales by Britain) 5%, the rest of the
decline, 20%, being charged to "Depression."

   -- Strikes and mass demonstrations have decreased in frequency
throughout India, but in the punjab (north) and Calcutta (east),
the districts furthest from Gandhiland proper (the Bombay
Presidency), the Government faces much spontaneous violence:
assaults, attempted assassinations, assassinations of British
officials, particularly the military. The British Inspector
General of Prisons in Bengal (east) was recently assassinated.

   -- In Burma Province a force of 1,000 well-armed native rebels
swept through the villages of southeast Tharrawaddy, murdered
British Forest Ranger H.V.W. Fields Clarke. British and Indian
troops including the famed East Kent Buffs, scourge of many an
Indian uprising, moved against them. In London Mr. U BaPe,
Burmese representative at the Round Table Conference, sought to
exonerate his countrymen on the ground that despatches said the
rioters wore "only blue pajama bottoms." "That dress is not
Burmese," said he severely. "It approaches more nearly the Shan
dress.

   -- Correspondents nearly all believe that if the British
Parliament (on a recommendation from the Round Table) grants
India full "dominion status," the Gandhite Independence Movement
can be diverted into that channel.

   If, however, the name only of "dominion status" is granted
(with its implicit "right of secession" temporarily reserved),
there is about an even chance that the Indian National Congress
can be horn-swoggled into quiescence.

   If, finally, the Round Table breaks down, enough spontaneous
violence is expected to give His Majesty's Government enough
provocation to use at strategic points the weapon of massacre, so
effective when Brigadier-General Dyer sprayed with machine gun
bullets and killed some 400 Indians at Amritsar in 1919. General
Dyer received the censure of the House of Commons by a vote of
230 to 129, was endorsed by the House of Lords 129 to 86, and
finally accepted from the Morning Post a large sum of money
spontaneously made up by individual Britons.


INTERNATIONAL
D'Abernon On Gold

   Gold may well be Question of the Year in 1931. What heads of
central banks all over the world are going to do about gold is
just now their closest secret, the subject of earnest, secret
conferences. Last week England's noted elder economist Viscount
d'Abernon of Stoke d'Abernon, who was her Ambassador to Germany
directly after the War, spoke up, as more active financiers
cannot very well do.

   Said he: "This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous
in history!"

   All the existing essential circumstances "except monetary
wisdom," he declared, favor a return to prosperity and well
being. Gold is the thing about which 1930 was stupid, about which
1931 must be wise.

   "The explanation of our anomalous situation," declared Lord
d'Abernon, "is that the machinery for handling and distributing
the product of labor has proved inadequate. The means of payment
provided by currency and credit have fallen so short of the
amount required by increased production that a general fall in
prices has ensued.

   "This has not only caused a disturbance in the relations
between buyer and seller, but has gravely aggravated the
situation between debtor and creditor. The gold standard, which
was adopted with a view to obtaining stability of price, has
failed in its main function. In the meantime people wrangle about
fiscal-remedies and similar devices of secondary importance,
neglecting the essential question of stability in standard of
value."

   Most startling, provokingly cryptic was Lord d'Abernon's
conclusion: "The situation could be remedied within a month by
joint action of the principal gold-using countries through the
taking of necessary steps by the central banks." This amounted to
saying that if things do not look up within 30 days five men will
be largely to blame:

   Governor Montagu Collet Norma of the Bank of England.

   Governor Eugene Meyer of the Federal Reserve Board (U.S.).

   Governor Clement Moret of the Bank of France.

   Governor Bonaldo Stringher of the Bank of Italy.

   Governor Hisaakira Hijikata of the Bank of Japan.