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                                                                                January 5, 1942

Man of the Year:Franklin Delano Roosevelt



     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 for
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 lead --
Chiang Kai-shek.

     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, 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
pre-war 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 War 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
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. 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 nation . . . 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 Kai-shek, 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 pre-eminence. 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
rendez-vous with destiny." Now there could be no mistaking the
fact. He was the man of 1941 because the country he leads stands
for the hopes of the world.