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                                                                              ╚January 3, 1938

INTERNATIONAL

Man & Wife of the Year

Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek



   Man of two years (1932 & 1934) was Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
but certainly he has not been Man of 1937. For 1937 is the first
year since he became President of the U.S. that Franklin
Roosevelt has not clearly been the dominant figure in U.S. public
life: In his one big political battle of the year, over the
Supreme Court, he was worsted. Had any one man been primarily
responsible for that defeat, he would be a towering figure of
politics, but in fact -- while many figures, including Senators
Wheeler of Montana, Borah of Idaho, Burke of Nebraska and Vice
President Garner, contributed in one way and another -- Franklin
Roosevelt largely wrought his own defeat by antagonizing opinion
in Congress and out.

   Certainly if there is a U.S. Man of 1937 he is John Llewellyn
Lewis who made his C.I.O. a primary force in the affairs of the
nation, fought two great automobile strikes, unionized the
greater part of the U.S. steel industry for the first time in
history and in a twelvemonth built a labor organization the equal
of the old A.F. of L. in size and power, its superior in
leadership. The measure of his achievement is that his two
runners-up were his two vis-a-vis: 1) Chairman Myron Charles
Taylor who without a blow being struck negotiated for the
unionization of great U.S. Steel Corp. and 2) President Tom
Mercer Girdler of Republic Steel who battled John L. Lewis to the
last ditch and largely prevented the complete unionization of the
steel industry.

   But there are good reasons why no U.S. citizen is the Man of
1937. In the last five months of the twelve the U.S. led the
world not forward toward prosperity but backward toward
depression. However great was John L. Lewis' accomplishment, by
year end he was in the position of every labor leader and every
industrialist when business is receding: battening down hatches
to ride out a storm.

   Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson was Woman of 1936, but the
Duke & Duchess of Windsor, with the assistance of Herr Hitler and
Mr. Bedaux, eliminated themselves as completely as possible from
an important place in the history of 1937. Their names would
scarcely have been mentioned in print at year end, had not
London's blatant Daily Express been filled by a story of how the
Duchess sent a doll last week to the Miners' Federation of South
Wales where King Edward VIII once popularized himself, declaring
"Something must be done for Wales!". The doll, instructed the
Duchess, is not too be raffled off for charity but given to the
child of an unemployed Welsh miner. "Will the little mother of
this doll," wrote Last Year's Woman, "kindly name it Wallis?"
During 1937 the $1,350,000 yacht Nahlin on which King Edward and
Mrs. Simpson cruised was bought by King Carol of Rumania for his
henna-haired Mme Magda Lupescu, who many a Rumanian feels is
perennially That Woman of the Year.

   Meantime England has a new King & Queen, but in 1937 it was
Mary, the Queen Mother, who discreetly used her immense
popularity and prestige to win public sympathy and kindle warmth
for her second son and his wife. But while George VI ripened as a
ruler and Elizabeth every day became less "The Smiling Duchess"
and more Queen of England, Mary remained still superbly The
Queen. King of the Year, if any, was certainly Leopold III of the
Belgians, dynamic maker of international treaties, wise maker of
Belgian cabinets, and a handsome, eligible young widower not to
be overlooked by any lady of royal blood.

   In statecraft few Europeans shone in 1937. In the struggle for
mastery of Spain, no man, in Spain or out, could claim to have
distinguished himself, much less to have won victory. In Germany
statecraft & business came under the control of Four-Year Plan
Economic Dictator Hermann Wilhelm Goring, but he has not yet
finished disposing of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. In the United Kingdom
a new Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, won no laurels --
although the middle-class policies for which he stands (like his
predecessor Stanley Baldwin) made perceptible headway in Europe
during 1937. In France, where Socialist Leon Blum was Man of
1936, new Premier Camille Chautemps carried forward his middle-
class policy, "The Pause." In Russia Joseph Stalin helped his
country to "come of age" with universal suffrage, but morally and
politically he shrank in stature because he found it necessary to
make a bloody routine of the execution of his oldest supporters.

   Ranking certainly with any of these stood Getulio Vargas,
President of the vast United States of Brazil, (Larger than the
continental U.S.A. exclusive of Alaska.) who ruthlessly
tightened up his dictatorship along lines which superficially
resembled Fascism and remained typically Latin American.

   In other fields there were greater figures than these.

   In Sport the unquestioned Man of 1937 was John Donald Budge --
the only man ever to win Wimbledon's three titles (men's singles,
men's doubles, mixed doubles) and directly responsible for the
Davis Cup returning to the U.S.

   No less outstanding as Man of the Year in Science & Medicine
was Dr. Thomas Parran Jr., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public
Health Service, whose significant accomplishment was to carry on
against venereal disease the first U.S. drive comparable to those
with which other human plagues have been worsted.

   Foremost U.S. Books of the Year were certainly Dale Carnegis's
How to Win Friends and Influence People, which sold 750,000
copies, and Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, which sold
308,000.

   Cinema's box-office-tested Actor of the Year was Clark Gable,
its Actress of the Year, Shirley Temple, but Deanna Durbin, 15,
who rose to stardom in 1937, reputedly sang Universal Pictures
out of impending bankruptcy as their Girl of the Year.

   Beyond humanity two great distinctions reaming: 1) Radio's Man
of the year Charlie McCarthy, the greatest ventriloquist's dummy
in 3,000 years of human history; and 2) Animal of the Year,
Congo, the rare okapi (resembling a cross between an antelope and
a giraffe), sent to the New York Zoological Society by the
Antwerp Zoo "as a gesture of friendship and gratitude" for 325
birds & animals sent by the Society to Antwerp to restock the zoo
which Kaiser Wilhelm's troops ravaged. With his 14-in. tongue,
the Animal of the Year is adept at washing his long furry ears.
Not in the Americas, however, not in Europe, not in Africa, not
in Australia, but in Asia are to be found 1937's outstanding
public characters.

   In 1937 the world's most populous nation -- China -- was
engaged  on land, sea and in the air by the only non-white people
who have ever shown aptitude for conquest by machine-age methods
-- the Japanese. Last week, in remote and neutral Stockholm the
great Swedish explorer of Asia, Dr. Sven Hedin, said in a lecture
before the Swedish Academy: "Recent events in China constitute
not only a warning but a final signal that the white man's burden
soon will be taken over by a very willing Japan. The reign of the
white race in the Far East is coming to an end."

   If in 1937 any Japanese had been responsible for creating the
situation which Sweden's Dr. Hedin thinks has been created, then
that Japanese would assuredly be Man of the Year. There is no
such Man. No one Japanese leads or even controls the avalanche
which Japanese ambition has in motion. Much as a hill of ants are
driven by their impulses to conquer another ant hill, the
Japanese have gone forth to war. No Napoleon and no Bismarck
guides them. The Japanese Emperor & Elder Statesmen, the Army &
Navy chiefs in Japan, the Cabinet, the Japanese Army & Navy
chiefs in China, are all mutually rival groups.

   But while Japan launched her great adventure without
outstanding leadership, China, the victim of the adventure, has
had the ablest of leadership. Through 1937 the Chinese have been
led -- not without glory  -- by one supreme leader and his
remarkable wife. Under this Man & Wife the traditionally
disunited Chinese people -- millions of whom seldom used the word
"China" in the past -- have slowly been given national
consciousness.

   He is a salt seller's son, she a Bible salesman's daughter. No
woman in the West holds so great a position as Mme Chiang Kai-
shek holds in China. Her rise and that of her husband, the
Generalissimo, in less than a generation to moral and material
leadership of the ancient Chinese people cover a great page of
history. (On January 25, Houghton Mifflin will publish the first
really good biography of China's Chiang: Strong Man of the East,
by Robert Berkov, longtime United Press bureau manager at
Shanghai.)

   Every headline reader knows that in 1937 the Japanese War
Machine was halted at Shanghai for 13 long weeks, its timetable
shattered by the first Chinese War Machine worthy of the name
which the modern world had ever seen. No fault of Generalissimo
Chiang was it that he was forced to use his War Machine at least
two years before it was finished. His hand was forced by
overzealous Chinese patriots, by canny Japanese who believed that
unless they beat China in 1937 they might never do so. Today
Generalissimo & Mme Chiang have not conceded China's defeat, they
long ago announced that their program for as many years as
necessary will be to harass, exhaust and eventually ruin Japan by
guerrilla warfare. If Generalissimo Chiang can achieve it, he may
emerge Asia's Man of the Century. Such success is highly
problematical. Meantime, he and Mme Chiang have made themselves
Man & Wife of 1937.

   Miss Mao. Thirty-six years ago in the village of Chikow lived
an indomitable woman. She had a 15-year-old son, Chiang Kai-shek,
who had the reputation of a wastrel and under her thumb,
according to custom, she had Chiang's bride, a Fenghua maiden
named Miss Mao. The bride lived to see her husband become great,
to be discarded as his wife, to go back to her village and live
on a pension of $3,000 Mex per month. His mother lived to
contrive, by dint of much scrimping, to stake young Chiang to
four years of military schooling in Japan. She died prosperous in
1921, thanks to her dutiful son, who bought her a fine funeral,
later built a Buddhist monastery in her memory. Greatest of all
was the reward of the village, to which the General has long sent
a gift of $40,000 Mex each month.

   When Student Chiang arrived in Tokyo, it was, as Moscow later
became, a centre of Chinese revolutionary activity. Thus when
Chiang Kai-shek returned to China he drifted gradually into the
military entourage of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, "Father of the Chinese
Republic." The young officer was about as close to Sun at the
time as Stalin was to Lenin -- a loyal subordinate but one of
many. From Moscow there arrived in Canton in 1924 the great
Propagandist Michael Borodin and the able Soviet General Galen.
These men in the closing years of Dr. Sun's life assisted and
directed his disciples, and the greatest of these in the military
sphere became General Chiang Kai-shek.

   Conqueror. When the revolutionary army of the Kuomintang
("National People's Party"), founded by Dr. Sun, sallied forth
under General Chiang from Canton, the capital of the weak Chinese
Republic was Peking in the north, but middle China was then
dominated by famed "Scholar War Lord" Marshal Wu Pei-fu. Ahead of
Chiang's army marched a horde of Borodin-coached Chinese,
preaching Communist-style propaganda in the name of the Kuo-
mintang. With him marched competent Soviet military advisers and
in his ammunition train he carried, beside cartridges, many
"silver bullets" with which he bought off local officials who
opposed him.

   Seen today, now that all this is known, the conquering advance
of General Chiang -- first 600 miles from Canton inland to Hankow
("The Chicago of China"); then 600 miles down the Yangtze River
to Shanghai ("The New York of China") and Nanking -- was not
primarily a great feat of arms. General Chiang had not yet
developed many of his great qualities. he was almost an out-&-out
puppet of the Soviet Union, but, as both Japan and Russia have
found to their cost, no Chinese ever fully sells himself or
China.

   Conqueror Chiang immediately made friends with the Chinese
businessmen of Shanghai, turned violently anti-Communist,
massacred some 3,500 unimportant Shanghai Reds, permitted
Propagandist Borodin and General Galen to "escape" to the Soviet
Union. He later made Communism a capital crime. General Chiang's
only son by his No. 1 wife, Chiang Ching-kuo, had by this time
moved to Moscow, busied himself denouncing his father from Soviet
platforms, became a Communist.

   Old Charlie's Daughters. Until recently any prominent Chinese
obliged to be much away from home usually had one or more
concubines (with the knowledge & consent of his wife), and
successful General Chiang at this time was no exception. The
swankier of the Conqueror's concubines found her social doings
recorded even in the British press of Shanghai, which referred to
her as "Mme Chiang."

   General Chiang was now master of South and Central China but
many Kuo-mintang politicians denounced him as a Fascist or worse.
With a characteristic gesture he resigned all his offices and
went to Japan. There Chiang, the shrewd, hard-headed, hard-
living, callous soldier who had made his way to power, proceeded
to court pretty, educated, high-minded Soong Mei-ling. Her
brother, Mr. T. V. Soong, today China's greatest financier,
informed General Chiang as courteously as possible that a husband
with concubines was scarcely acceptable as a suitor in the
Chinese Christian family of Soong. Mei-ling's father, famed "Old
Charlie" Soong, had made his fortune as a pioneer in printing and
selling Bibles to Chinese as fast as the missionaries created a
demand. Investing his profits at about 40% Chinese interest, he
died a merchant prince. Old Mrs. Soong had not forgotten that her
late husband had tumbled another of her daughters unceremoniously
into the arms of old Dr. Sun Yat-sen (who also had another wife
at the time) and that the marriage had been a master stroke for
the House of Soong.

   Venerable Mother Soong therefore told General Chiang that if
he would become a Christian he could marry her attractive,
Wellesley-graduated Mei-ling. The Conqueror replied that he would
not adopt a new religion merely to win a bride, but that if Miss
Soong would marry him he would agree to study Christianity, and
then do as he saw fit. No ordained Christian pastor could be
found who thought General Chiang free to marry Miss Soong, so a
lay Y.M.C.A. secretary united them in holy matrimony. From the
day General Chiang thus took his No. 2 wife, both his character
and his fortunes rapidly commenced to take on a certain grandeur.
Eventually he also became a Christian.

   Chiang Conquers All. The marriage of General Chiang was
important because it made him the post-mortem brother-in-law of
the Kuomintang's late sainted Sun; brother-in-law of Big Banker
T.V. Soong; and brother-in-law of Dr. H.H. Kung, famed descendant
of China's greatest sage Confucius, who also married a Soong
girl. Chiang returned to China to head the Kuomintang Government
at Nanking. He was soon styled the Generalissimo, and headed a
campaign to conquer northern China. In this war there was by
normal Chinese standards some fairly heavy fighting. Most
fortunate for the Generalissimo, however, was the assassination
at Mukden of the doughtiest fighter among China's War Lords, the
great Marshal Chang Tsolin, famed bibber of tiger's blood and
keeper of a harem of white women.

   The Marshal's son & heir, Chang Hsuehliang, "The Young
Marshal," blamed the Japanese for his father's somewhat
mysterious assassination, and allied himself with Chiang. Six
years ago the Japanese drove The Young Marshal out of Manchuria
and reorganized it as their puppet state Manchukuo, but the rest
of China had been brought under the flag of the Nanking
Government, that is, of Generalissimo Chiang.

   Progress. From then until this year's Japanese invasion the
material progress of Chiang's China has been phenomenal. He
called in Professor Edwin Walter Kemmerer of Princeton to give
China the plan for its first sound currency, and the first ever
accepted on a nation-wide basis. Roads and busses to run on them
were sent stabbing far into China from her ports, and the more
busses the fewer bandits. Flood control and famine-fighting
agencies which had functioned piecemeal in China were given co-
ordination. In a land which has existed for centuries in a state
of complete disorganization such elementary progress was
revolutionary. The armies or bandit hordes of Chinese Communists
who tried to harass Nanking from the hinterland were turned by
Generalissimo Chiang into an excuse for not fighting the
Japanese. He used them as a football coach uses a scrub team to
train the regular army of New China -- the first Chinese War
Machine, complete with European artillery, German military
advisers, U.S. and Italian war planes.

   New Life. In China no great moral stigma had commonly attached
to graft. It was the custom of nearly every official who could to
collect it. For the colossal purchases Chiang had to make, he
could not afford the normal luxury of graft. To find someone he
could trust to purchase war planes the Generalissimo turned at
last in desperation to his own wife. She it was who pored over
aircraft catalogs, dickered with hard-boiled white salesmen, and
is reputed to have had several Chinese officials of her Air
Ministry shot to reduce thieving.

   What Chinese officialdom needed, the Generalissimo & Mme
Chiang had decided, was a big dose of the castor oil of
Puritanism. The tablespoon with which they dished this out they
called the New Life Movement, and with every ounce of Nanking's
authority they dosed all China. Batch after batch of local mayors
and magistrates were ordered to Nanking, drilled and exhorted
there in the primary decencies -- to stop wiping noses on
sleeves, to stop taking bribes from litigants. They were warned
that he who did not practice the new Puritanism might expect
the worst -- and this was no empty threat.

   One unique wastrel against whom the new Life Movement
struggled in vain was Chiang Wei-kuo. He is the son of a Japanese
waitress & a Chinese official whom Generalissimo Chiang obliged
by adopting the lad as his own son. In vain Chiang Wei-kuo was
put under the direct control of Mme Chiang. She could do nothing
with him. He was sent to Germany, last year suddenly appeared in
London and forced the Chinese Delegation to the Coronation of
King George VI to get him in on it and on all the best parties.

   Despite non-success with Chiang Wei-kuo, the New Life Movement
otherwise was successfully enforced. The Geralissimo & Mme Chiang
had individuals whom they trusted planted unobtrusively in all
branches of the Government. These spies for Puritanism reported
direct, and in Nanking not a few errant officials' careers were
mysteriously broken.

   Kidnapping. Year ago the Generalissimo was suddenly kidnapped
and held prisoner at Sian. It was The Young Marshal Chang whose
troops seized Chiang Kai-shek. This kidnapping was promptly
hijacked by Chinese forces allied with the Communists. At Nanking
an extremely grave suspicion was abroad that Brother-in-Law T.V.
Soong, disappointed in an ambition to become Premier of China,
had put The Young Marshal, a "cured" ex-dope addict, up to
seizing the Generalissimo. What followed proved that Chiang had
remade China. It also gave the lie to generations of Chinese
history. Instead of rushing to seize Chiang's power Chinese
soldiers and officials from all parts of the country began a
bombardment of telegrams demanding the release, rescue or
ransoming of Chiang Kai-shek at any cost. It was the ultimate
testimony that after centuries the Chinese people had at last
found a Leader. It is too early to give credence to rumors that
Banker Soong was obliged to unsnarl the kidnapping mistake with
millions of dollars in bribes. The more popular, official version
is that The Young Marshal Chang and the Communists were "greatly
touched" by the contents of the Generalissimo's diary -- which
convinced them that he was not at heart pro-Japanese. At all
events the sequel to Sian was that Chiang's armies ceased to
fight the Reds, and joyfully returned from Moscow Son Chiang
Ching-kuo with a Russian Communist wife.

   "Welcome, my son!" cried the Generalissimo, then indicating
Mei-ling he added "and now you must meet your new mother."

   "That is not my mother," retorted Chiang Ching-kuo, "and
having paid my respects to you, father, I am going to my mother
and your wife!"

   "This week Red Son Chiang was probably still with his mother,
Miss Mao, but proverbially unreliable Chinese newspapers had him
suddenly appearing in Suiyuan at the head of 100,000 Soviet
Mongol troops.

   Long Pull. During 1937 the beginning of the Japanese invasion
found the Generalissimo then "the only man in China who did not
think it best to fight." In his shrewd head Chiang Kai-shek knew
better than anyone else that the New China was not yet ready to
use her War Machine; that to fight would be to incur the
catastrophic losses China has now suffered; that his Government
would inevitably be driven from Nanking; that the hand of the
Chinese Communists would be immensely strengthened -- unless
Japan's triumph should indeed be utter & complete. Knowing all
this, Chiang Kai-shek up to the last possible moment counseled,
as he had counseled for years, "any sacrifice should not be
regarded as too costly!" providing it averted war with Japan.

   The Generalissimo was overwhelmed and overruled by Chinese
public opinion. He was obliged to lead China to certain defeat.
Most amazing was the outward confidence of every public act and
word of the Man & Wife of the Year -- particularly the tone of
her cables from Nanking to the U.S. press. Until the evacuation
of Nanking, Mme Chiang was writing about how "my air force" was
going to bomb Tokyo, carefully sparing "the women and children."

   The spot to which Generalissimo & Mme Chiang have fled was a
military secret this week. Their job is now to wage against Japan
such guerilla warfare as General Sandino hurled from his
Nicaraguan mountains against the forces of Calvin Coolidge. To
such a resourceful man as Chiang the fight is not necessarily
hopeless. Japan is not the U.S. Her resources have already been
badly strained and it is conceivable that if the fight is
sufficiently long and costly, it may break her economically. Nor
is China Nicaragua. She is so large that any invader inevitably
has long lines open to attack, and so populous that her resources
of man power cannot soon be exhausted. Her greatest weakness has
always been in will power. If Chiang Kai-shek and Mei-ling can
maintain their will as China's will -- the same will which said
that "any sacrifice should not be regarded as too costly" --
Chinese prospects are good. China's prospects now as they have
been for 20 centuries are, however, only for the long pull.

   This week an Associated Press correspondent "somewhere in the
Yangtze Valley" with Generalissimo & Mme Chiang was permitted to
flash that influenza had bedded the Wife of the Year, quoted the
Man of the Year as saying: "Tell America to have complete
confidence in us. The tide of battle is turning and victory
eventually will be ours!"


WAR IN CHINA
Death and Conquest

   Of China's 4,480,992 square miles Japanese forces took:
      2,075 in the last week
      10,465 in the last month
      145,787 in the last year
      645,787 since 1931

   -- Some 100,000 Chinese troops deployed under orders to defend
Hangchow, 100 miles southwest of Shanghai, scattered in headlong
flight last week and that great city fell to the Japanese -- the
sixth Chinese provincial capital taken since the present war
began last July.

   -- Japan's new puppet Chinese Government at Peking paid
$116,000 to the Imperial Japanese Government last week, described
this as the first installment of $348,000 which Tokyo is
collecting as "indemnity" for the killing of some 200 Japanese by
Chinese at Tung-chow.

   -- On the same scale of indemnity Japan would owe the U.S.
$5,220 for the three men killed in the sinking of the Panay, but
the U.S. settled for an apology, promise of indemnity and
guarantee against future attack. No Japanese newspaper printed
the text of the apology, and the divine Emperor Hirohito -- who
did not feel that politeness required him to reply to President
Roosevelt's personal protest -- opened the Imperial Diet with a
Speech from the Throne which omitted mention of the Panay. "We
feel greatly gratified to see relations between Japan and her
treaty powers growing in friendship and cordiality" read His
Imperial Majesty. "Our officers and men, winning every battle,
are enhancing their military prestige, both at home and abroad."

   -- Although the Chinese authorities had executed 240 Chinese
looters, Chinese mobs had destroyed $100,000,000 of Japanese
property in Tsingtao by last week when Japanese forces finally
crossed the Yellow River, besieged Tsinan, the capital of
Shantung.

   -- In Japan a schoolhouse at Nishimuro was packjammed with
villagers watching a film of Japanese troops advancing in China
when the building caught fire last week. Killed were 21 children
and 51 adults.

   -- At Shanghai veteran correspondents reported scenes of
"filth, disease, hunger and madness" among the 1,000,000 Chinese
refugees from battle areas. In a single theatre 14,000 have been
living like vermin for weeks. Biological processes continued:
among the 1,000,000 refugees a child was born every minute, there
was a death every three minutes, and twelve mothers died in
childbirth every hour.

   -- Dr. Sun Fo, son of China's late sainted Dr. Sun Yat-sen,
nephew by marriage to the Man & Wife of the Year, became last
week the first prominent Chinese Government official to attempt
to leave China since the Japanese captured Nanking. Boarding an
airplane at Hankow, Son Sun gave out that he was flying to Hong
Kong, would thence speed to Europe on a trip including Moscow.
Meanwhile Communist leaders in China were loudly demanding the
resignation of various prominent members of the Government which
has had to flee Nanking and disperse itself in various Chinese
cities. The Reds had not yet asked that the Man of the Year
resign, and presumably Son Sun wants to see Joseph Stalin about
China's crucial future.

   -- Japanese claimed to have destroyed 14 Soviet-built planes
in a Chinese airdrome last week but Tokyo and Moscow remained on
conciliatory diplomatic terms. Dictator Stalin renewed for one
year the agreement under which Japanese trawlers are permitted
for a fee to fish in Soviet waters.