Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1935moy.001

Text File | 1993-07-21 | 20KB | 376 lines

                                                                              ╚January 6, 1936

Man of the Year:Hailie Selassie



   The alert U.S. citizen last week could pick from among his
fellow citizens as Man of the Year at the close of 1935 whom?

   When accountants had added up box-office receipts, Miss
Shirley Temple emerged as the Cinemactress of the Year.

   Crime's grisly Man of the Year was the German carpenter who in
his death cell in Trenton, N.J. last week heard that Charles,
Anne and Jon Lindbergh were in the act of becoming the Exiles of
the Year.

   The Schechters, with their Supreme Court suit which sent NRA
crashing, proved themselves Brothers of the Year.

   In 1935 an unsmiling Negro named Joe Louis fisticuffed his way
up from $50 fights into a $215,375 sensation as Heavy-weight of
the Year.

   In all the world no transport achievement in 1935 equaled that
of President Juan Terry Trippe of Pan American Airways with his
inauguration of Cippers winging the Pacific to Manila.

   On Broadway appeared four successful plays all by Playwright
of the Year Clifford Odets.

   On the thin edge between Science with its august curiosity and
Mankind with its idle curiosity, Dr. Alexis Carrel awakened in
1935 with his best seller, Man, The Unknown, fresh and healthy
faith in medicine's sounder marvels.

   Yet from Hauptmann to Carrel, from Temple to Trippe, from
Louis to Odets and from the Schechters to the Lindberghs the U.S.
obviously produced no Man of 1935 with the world weight of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was Man of 1932 or Man of 1934.
In 1936 voters may make him President again and perhaps for the
third time Man of the Year.

   In 1935 Europe's perennial Men of the Years, Stanley Baldwin,
Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kamal Ataturk and
Dr. Eduard Benes held undiminished sway. The outstanding
exhibition of the century in French political tight-rope walking
was given in 1935 but as the year entered its last hours the fate
of Premier Pierre Laval, 1931's Man of the Year, continued to
tiptoe. In Asia practical control of North China was obtained by
Japan in 1935 so adroitly and inconspicuously that it was a major
Japanese triumph to have avoided producing a Man of the Year.
China's perpetually harassed Man of the Year, Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek, entered his most excruciating morass of
dilemmas.

   Both as human beings and as crowned symbols George & Mary in
the glory of their Silver Jubilee were the King-Emperor & Queen-
Empress of the Year, inseparable in the public mind. The year
restored George II as King of Greece but his Throne trembled last
week as he sought to master Greece's ousted Dictator.

   King of Kings. In 1935 there was just one man who rose out of
murky obscurity and carried his country with him up & up into
brilliant focus before a pop-eyed world. But for the hidden
astuteness of this man, there would not now be the possibility of
another world war arising out of idealism generated around the
League of Nations in behalf of Ethiopia. But for His Majesty
Haile Selassie the year 1935 would have been a distinctly
different year. If by some unhappy chance the Italo-Ethiopian war
should now spread into a world conflagration, Power of Trinity I,
the King of Kings, the Conquering Lion of Judah, will have a
place in history as secure as Woodrow Wilson's. If it ends in the
fall of Mussolini and the collapse of Fascism, his Majesty can
plume himself on one of the greatest feats ever credited to
blackamoors.

   Above all, Haile Selassie has created a general, warm and
blind sympathy for uncivilized Ethiopia throughout civilized
Christendom. in the wake of the world's grandiose Depression,
with millions of white men uncertain as to the benefits of
civilization, 1935 produced a peculiar Spirit of the Year in
which it was felt to be a crying shame that the Machine Age
seemed about to intrude upon Africa's last free, unscathed and
simple people. They were ipso facto Noble Savages, and the
noblest Ethiopian of them all naturally emerged as Man of the
Year.

   Outside Italy, the Emperor was clapped and cheered during 1935
in almost every cinema house in the world. His name entered the
U.S. vocabulary in such homely exclamations as, "Well! If that's
so, then I'm Haile Selassie!" In the last week of 1935, Haile
Selassie reached Broadway as a character in the new George
White's Scandals. Cries he: "Boys, our country am menaced! What
is we gwine do?" From then until the curtain falls amid applause
which almost stops the show, His Majesty and guardsmen execute a
hilarious tap dance.

   Goodness & Wisdom. Without quibble or qualification the best
and wisest rule ancient Ethiopia has ever had is the present Man
of the Year.

   Ethiopia, contrary to popular misconception, is not a
Christian country. It is not even Coptic Christian. Unroll an
authoritative religious map of the Empire, such as that in the
current January issue of Foreign Affairs, and the facts are
evident. In trifling quantity a few Christians are to be found
near Addis Ababa, and the Coptic Christians, to which faith the
Imperial Family appertains, form an island in the Mohammedan and
pagan sea of peoples which is Ethiopia.

   Until 1935 the country was known mainly to foreign savants as
a "museum of peoples" who remarkably preserve the habits and
customs of their various antiquities. It was known, incorrectly,
to hasty readers of a popular book, as the Hell-Hole of Creation.
Actually the high plateau on which Addis Ababa stands and which
comprises about half the Empire is suited in climate to the taste
of an ordinary U.S. citizen although the altitude is trying.
Rushing rivers criss-cross the plateau with deep gorges.
Transportation of fantastic difficulty is enhanced by
unimaginable mud in the rainy season, but the obstacles of Nature
on the plateau are in every sense susceptible of being overcome.

   In the desert regions, blazing and scorching some 8,000 ft.
below the plateau toward the sea, are the Hell-Holes of Creation,
inhabited by tribes of extraordinary hardihood and savagery.
Explorers report that "some of these peoples have never heard of
Haile Selassie." It is they who today with complete impartiality
harry, snipe at and loot any small detachment of soldiers, be
they Ethiopian or Italian.

   The peoples of Ethiopia are very old but the Empire is very
young. When Chief Justice Charles Evans Highes was a youth of 18
there was properly speaking no Ethiopian Empire and the future
Emperor Menlik ruled, as King of Shoa, the vicinity of Lake Tana,
Aduwa, Aksum and Dessye. Three-quarters of the present Empire,
including Harar and Ualual, he did not rule. Haile Selassie was
born 44 years ago at Harar and in 1930 succeeded his cousin
Menelik's daughter, Empress Zauditu, on the Throne.

   The legend that Ethiopia's Imperial Family is descended from
the seduction by King Solomon of Sheba's Virgin Queen is pure
myth. Last month Oxford's University Press exploded it anew with
A History of Abyssinia in which the adoption of this legend by
Coptic priests to give Ethiopia's present dynasty a savor of
ancient lineage and of Biblical if not Divine authority is traced
with British scholarship.

   Intimate Glimpse. Although good and wise, Haile Selassie, as
recently pointed out by Dr. Sassard, his French physician of
many years, has never been popular among his turbulent subjects.
Every conversation the physician has had with his Imperial
patient, writes Dr. Sassard, "gave me further reason
to admire and respect this Sovereign, who is so different from
those who surround him and from his own people, and who is so
superior to them. . . . In his motionless face only his eyes seem
alive -- brilliant, elongated, extremely expressive eyes. They
bespeak boredom as well as polite indifference, cold irony, or
even anger. The courtiers know these different expressions well
and retire suddenly when the monarch's glance becomes
indifferent, then hard. On the other hand, especially when he is
dealing with Europeans, his eyes know how to be soft, caressing,
affable -- even sincere."

   Referring to his royal patient's frequent and serious
illnesses, Dr. Sassard observes:

   "I have always been surprised by the reserves of energy and
courage that exist in so frail a body. . . . The attention of the
public and of Europe is directed at the two sons of the
Sovereign. The first, the Heir Apparent, is now 19 years old. He
generally lives far removed from the capital, surrounded by
spies, restricted in any independent action he may take,
frequently and harshly rebuked by his father. . . . Prince
Makonnen, who is 12 years old, is his father's great favorite. .
. . Whereas a teacher was not accorded the Heir Apparent, a whole
retinue of French educators has been designated to take care of
the last-born son. . . . He has good sense, but he is perhaps a
little too aware of his exalted birth and the destiny that he
believes to be awaiting him. In any case it is unquestionably in
Prince Makonnen that all his father's hopes are centred.

   "We must give the Emperior credit for having lent prestige to
moral values in his country and for having made courage, work and
persistence respected in a land where only physical force had any
value. . . . The numerous Ministers are generally more or less
related to the Emperor and the Emperor considers the granting of
a Cabinet post a simple method of calming a noisy cousin or a
belligerent vassal. . . . Disorder and misadministration make
each Ethiopian Ministry a bottomless barrel into which money
flows. . . . Emperor Haile Selassie inherited a savage country. .
. He will never be a leader of men, the chief of the wild hordes
that his predecessors were. The Emperor knows this and the
knowledge saddens him."

   Gold Chains; Ice Water. After so intimate a glimpse through
the eyes of Man of the Year's longtime physician, His Majesty's
achievements in 1935 are all the more staggering. They are the
ripened fruit of a physically frail Semite's lifetime of goodness
and wisdom. It was good to cast into golden chains the Ethiopian
who would otherwise have been Emperor instead of Haile Selassie,
for this individual had strayed into the Mohammedan faith. Had
the late Lij Yasu been on the Throne today the League of Nations
might not have displayed such anxiety for the country of an
infidel.

   His greatest wisdom is the result of meditating on the fact
that in 1914 his beloved Ethiopia was saved from being
dismembered by the Great Powers by the assassination of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand. After the establishment of the League
of Nations, the Emperor, or Prince Tafari as he then was, figured
out wisely that if Ethiopia could possibly win membership in the
League, she might never need another World War to distract the
Great Powers from dismembering her. To get into the League,
though, was most difficult. Egypt was then and is still barred,
for the reason that Britain suspected then and now knows for
certain that Egypt, once inside the League, would scream bloody
murder for the British to evacuate Egypt. Ethiopia was at first
barred. Then Ethiopian statesmen, largely inspired by Prince
Tafari, began yielding deceptively to French and Italian efforts
to obtain more important concessions in the empire than had ever
been granted before.

   In 1923 the French and Italians congratulated themselves that
a most profitable and pleasant era of Latin-Ethiopian co-
operation and economic exploitation was about to open with mutual
goodwill. To top off the deal with pink icing, Ethiopia at Latin
insistence was admitted to full membership in the League. Only
three years afterward Tafari, who had become Regent, complained
of Britain and Italy to the League, having caught them exchanging
notes with a view to recognizing the possession of "spheres of
influence" by each other in Ethiopia. With the same technique
that the Man of the Year used in 1935, but without causing an
explosion of world interest, Regent Tafari in 1926 shamed and
reproved white men thus: "We should never have suspected that the
British Government would come to an agreement with another
government regarding our Lake Tana!" Ethiopia quietly won the
first League round then & there, causing Italy and Britain to
drop the matter, much as the Hoare-Laval Deal was to be dropped
nearly a decade later with a crash heard around the world.

   Suckers. Many white men personally familiar with events in
Ethiopia since then say that the Emperor for years played Italian
and other foreign concessionaires for suckers until Benito
Mussolini gradually evolved his theory that the White Race is
being aggressively menaced and must recover the dynamic attitude
of Victorian England or ultimately suffer eclipse. Japan, during
Depression, secured virtually the whole of Ethiopia's import
business in cotton piece goods, while Italians were supplying
Haile Selassie with a powerful radio station at cut rates. As
soon as it was in working order, His Majesty turned around and
fired the whole Italian staff of technicians, made a sucker out
of the great Italian electrical firm of Ansaldo Lorenz.

   Fatefully in December 1934 the issue between Italy and
Ethiopia was joined. Each shrieked to heaven that a collection of
mud huts called Ualual, located variously on various maps, had
been subjected to aggression by the other. Months afterward a
League of Nations commission decided that for the Ualual Incident
neither Italians nor Ethiopians nor anyone else was to blame. By
that time, though, the Man of the Year was fully in the making.
He flashed off cables smoking hot with pathos, righteousness,
defiance and more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger which made front pages
throughout Christendom. It was sheer genius for Haile Selassie to
deny that Italians used dumdum bullets instead of charging them
with that military offense. It was again genius for him to cable
out that in Ethiopia the local press had been ordered by the
Emperor never to apply discourteous epithets to Benito Mussolini.
Finally only genius could enable the Emperor to put himself -- a
frail, exquisite Semite who speaks French -- on terms of friendly
respect with robust Anglo-Saxon correspondents when they arrived
in Addis Ababa and promptly nicknamed him "Little Charlie."

   If the Covenant of the League of Nations be law, then in law
Ethiopia and Haile Selassie are right and Italy and Benito
Mussolini are wrong. The only trouble is that that portion of the
white race represented by 44,000,000 Italians has opened
hostilities and in the sphere of law Italy contends -- much too
late for popular acceptance -- that under the League Covenant,
membership in the League of Nations is barred to states in which
slavery still flourishes, as it unquestionably does in Ethiopia.
Therefore, argues Italy, the original mistake of admitting
Ethiopia to the League should be corrected by ousting Ethiopia,
after which Italy would have exactly as good a right there as
Britain has in Egypt.

   In successfully brushing aside these contentions of a Great
Power; in dexterously pitching the issue of war on such grounds
that the white race in general feels the future of the League of
Nations to be at stake in the future of a Museum of Peoples in
Africa; and in impressing even his own French doctor with his
courage, his elevated moral stature and his peculiar genius for
brow-beating Ethiopians while he charms foreigners, Emperor Haile
Selassie emerged in 1935 not only as Man of the Year but as the
world's own inimitable "Little Charlie" for as many years to come
as health sustains him.

   So What? In the actual zones of Ethiopian war, the number of
square miles over-run by Italian forces as the year ended was
about 30,000 -- a mapmaker's fact of doubtful significance.
Neutral military experts in Washington, Berlin, Paris and London
consider that Premier Mussolini's deepest purposes have not yet
been revealed, but that unquestionably he has hamstrung his
soldier's war in East Africa by political and diplomatic
back-seat driving from Rome. Darting raids by Italian bombers,
unaccompanied by troop operations on the ground, have resulted
in little more than the enemy's terror and disorganization. After
major advances there have been sudden, desultory lulls. Because
concurrent maneuvers on the Diplomatic Front have been secret and
clandestine, Il Duce is perhaps as good a judge as any of whether
bombs and calms judiciously sprinkled in the world press have
much affected the game on Europe's green tables. In soldiers'
eyes the Italians have made a wretched showing in Ethiopia, and
to soldiers Italy's diplomatic showing looks even worse, with
Anthony Eden up.

   The first and drier half of Ethiopia's "dry" season, in which
alone military operations are possible, is now over. Bombs
sprinkled around the Man of the Year have failed to get him. If
Calvin Coolidge and the U.S. Marines, unhampered by Sanctions,
never did succeed in bringing General Sandino to reason in
Nicaragua, all the more reason for Haile Selassie to feel that
his goose hangs high. On the other hand, should Mussolini decide
that the diplomatic game is up, Italy's forces should be able to
give a better account of themselves than they have thus far.

   New Deal. Few months ago Dr. Sassard wrote of his patient:
"The Emperor will undoubtedly fight at the head of his troops."
In ringing proclamations His Majesty has more than once promised
to do so. Simple Ethiopians expect any ruler worth his salt to
remain for the duration of the war physically in the thick of the
fight. Instead, both before hostilities began and since, Haile
Selassie has kept Europe's diplomats well supplied with offers to
make peace by selling or bartering parts of the empire, emitting
at the same time declarations to the world press that he will
part with "not an inch" of Ethiopian soil. If these Imperial
activities resemble a Semitic tradesman's strident, righteous
protestations and simultaneous readiness to compromise, they are
not the Man of the Year's fault but aspects of his God-given
character.

   In Addis Ababa warrior chiefs of the Noble Savage type
bitterly and contemptuously complain, "Our Emperor is a
businessman!" They should thank Ethiopia's stars. The astounding
marvel is that Africa's unique Museum of Peoples has produced a
businessman -- with high-pressure publicity, compelling sales
talk, the morals of a patent medicine advertisement, a grasp of
both savage and diplomatic mentality, and finally with plenty of
what Hollywood calls IT. The Emperor was "too smart" only once in
1935, when he tried by granting the Rickett Concession to
Standard Oil to embroil the U.S. directly in Ethiopia's defense.
In His Majesty's favorite phrase the entire situation is still
"subject to negotiation."

   Fortnight ago the Imperial Businessman had instructed Al
Smith's publicity director, Josef Israels II, to tell the world
that His Majesty was willing to settle on terms only slightly
more generous to Ethiopia than those offered by The Deal of Hoare
& Laval. He was willing to yield a great chunk of his empire in
exchange for peace and a corridor to the Red Sea. The resignation
of Sir Samuel Hoare and the tribulations of Premier Laval last
week caused the Imperial Businessman to propose a completely New
Deal. Ethiopia's new "basis for discussion," with which the Man
of the Year masterfully closed 1935, are that: 1) Mussolini's
forces are to withdraw; 2) Italy is to pay an indemnity to
Ethiopia, and 3) the Great Powers excluding Italy are to be
invited to a new game of giving economic, administrative and
financial "assistance and advice" to Ethiopia, with Haile
Selassie holding all the trumps and calling it Civilization.