(See front cover & pictures, pp. 14 & 15)
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 (see p. 28).
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 (see p. 34).
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 Heavyweight 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 Clippers winging the Pacific to Manila (TIME, Dec. 2, 9).
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 (see p. 18). 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 Kaishek, entered his most excruciating morass of dilemmas.