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"vital minimum," but they had advanced far beyond the paper armies of two years ago. "Certo it is," said one Italian laborer last week, between talk of a football lottery and the price of bread, "that war is no nearer this year than it was last, and maybe—I say it with the smallest of maybes—it is farther away." In many ways, 1952 might be called the Year of the Generals. The entrenched ones, like Stalin and Franco and Mao and Tito, held their familiar sway. Others came to power; in coups d'etat (Egypt's Naguib and Cuba's Batista), or in honest elections (Greece's Papagos and in the U.S., Eisenhower). The generals held the headlines; so much so that, to the hurried reader, the manner of a nation's defense too often seemed more important than who and what was being defended. The rise of the generals reflected a felt need for decisiveness and a longing, often unstated, for something to put one's faith in. In such a time, the Man of the Year had to be one who could restore lost faith to a troubled people, and to serve (perhaps longer than generals can) as custodian of that faith.
In 1952, such a symbol of faith was not a man at all, but a woman: a shy, dedicated, determined 26-year-old who came to the throne of Great Britain in February.
Magical Power. It was not the fact of her being Queen that made Elizabeth II the Woman of 1952. That year had no more respect for the governance of kings than for the government of politicians.
It saw one king, Egypt's fat and frolicsome Farouk, bundled unceremoniously off his throne without a single subject to raise his hand in protest. It saw another, King Paul of Greece, resoundingly rebuked at the polls fof daring to oppose his people in their choice of a new Prime Minister.
1952 also saw the well-meaning but ineffectual Shah of Iran hissed by his subjects and hamstrung by the wizened old weeper Mossadegh, who had done his best (or well-intended worst) to bring the whole world to a standstill in 1951. It saw Elizabeth herself succeed to a throne long since shorn of its last vestige of political power, to reign over a Commonwealth whose only union was in tradition and assent.
What, then, was Elizabeth's significance? It was no more—and no less—than the significance of a fresh young blossom on roots that had weathered many a season of wintry doubt. The British, as weary and discouraged as the rest of the world in 1952, saw in their new young Queen a reminder of a great past when they had carved out empires under Elizabeth I and Victoria, and dared to hope that she might be an omen of a great future. Her dramatic flight from a vacation in Kenya at George VI's death to take her place at the head of the royal family beside the Queen Mother and revered Queen Mary gave the British spirit a lift even in the midst of their bereavement.
It mattered not that India, which once had bowed to Victoria as Empress, would merely nod to Elizabeth as its "first citizen"; that many of her black subjects in Africa were screaming "Death to all white men" in a riot of restless revolt; that many of her white subjects on the same continent were talking openly of a South African republic under Prime Minister Daniel Malan.