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Rollin' Along. The republic, though, was in condition to survive McCarthy and McCarthyism. Though business pulses slowed a bit here & there, never had production been so high or prosperity so great. The American of 1953 was still living on top of the world, and, as the song says, just rollin' along. In this age of managers and machines, of complexities and coordinators, this was the achievement of many, not one (see BUSINESS).
It was also the 50th anniversary of man's first powered flight, and it was celebrated by two Americans, first Scott Crossfield, flying at 1,327 m.p.h., then the Air Force's Major "Chuck" Yeager, ripping through the substratosphere at more than 1,600 m.p.h., 2½ times the speed of sound. In sport, Casey Stengel of the New York Yankees became baseball's first manager to win five consecutive World Series championships. Native Dancer, a big grey horse with the legs of a champion and the inbred ham of a Barrymore. teamed with TV to make horse-racing fans out of millions who did not know a fetlock from a padlock. The year brought reminders of previous champions: Jim Jeffries died; so did Bill Tilden and Jim Thorpe. Handy Earl Sande, 54, and hard up for eating money, cinched on a saddle and tried for a comeback (but booted home only one winner). And in the biggest sweep since Bobby Jones's "grand slam" in 1930, Ben Hogan wrapped up the three big titles of golf, to become sport's Man of the Year.
It was also the year of 3-D, Cinema-Scope, Cinerama, big screen, stereophonic sound and other technical tricks designed to make Marilyn Monroe look 64 feet long (couchant) and intended to lure back, by sheer gigantism, the public that had been lost to 17-inch TV screens. This too was sometimes called progress.
The year's obituary list, not even counting Joe Stalin and Bob Taft, was forbiddingly distinguished: Eugene O'Neill, the greatest playwright the U.S. had produced; Welshman Dylan Thomas, the best young poet in the English language; Sergei Prokofiev, Russia's great composer; General Jonathan Wainwright, hero of Bataan; Mayor Ernst Reuter, hero of the cold-war battle of Berlin; Saudi Arabia's fabulous King Ibn Saud; Britain's redoubtable Queen Mary.
Empire Troubles. Asia, with its short-fused peace in Korea, its seemingly unwinnable war in Indo-China, and its tendency to fear a dying colonialism more than an expansive Communism, remained the hot battlefield of the cold war. Appropriately, it had not one Man of the Year but three—men diverse in almost every respect: Jawaharlal Nehru, the exasperating high priest of neutralism; Ramon Magsaysay, the young and dynamic, U.S.-loving man of action who became President of the Philippines; wrinkled old Syngman Rhee of Korea, the angry ally of the West. Syngman Rhee's intractability towards his allies, and his ruthless quelling of domestic rivals, led many to dismiss his great claim to distinction: without his half-century fight for liberty and his stouthearted hatred of Communism, there would have been no South Korea to save.