(3 of 7)
In Art, in Music, in Religion and in Science, 1936 was barren of a Man or Woman of the Year. Typical was Mme Curie-Joliot, daughter of the late great discoverer of radium, who became in 1936 one of the first three women ever to reach French Cabinet rank. Not one of these proved an outstanding success and Mme Curie-Joliot, disgusted with what she saw of politics, soon resigned. No Einstein Theory shot meteoric across Science's sky, no deathless melody, canvas or sculpture won world acclaim.
In Sport the white Man of the Year was Lou ("Iron Man'') Gehrig who continued his string of consecutive baseball games played with the New York Yankees to 1,808 in eleven years, making 49 home runs in 1936, helping win another World Series and being again voted "most valuable player in the American League." Black Man of the Year was Sprinter Jesse Owens. His Olympic record—championships in three individual events, one team event—has been equaled only by red-skinned Jim Thorpe in 1912 and stamps him Sport's Man of the Year.
In her way as unique as Sprinter Owens, Writer Margaret Mitchell uncorked in 1936 the first first-novel ever to sell a million copies in six months, Gone With The Wind (TIME, July 6). Animal of the Year was the Baby Giant Panda whose mistress calls her Su-lin (see p. 25).
In about the same 1936 class was President Arthur Sherman of Covered Wagon Co., biggest auto trailerman of the first Auto-Trailer Year.
In the Theatre there was only Eugene O'Neill with his 1936 Nobel Prize for work done in other years; in the Cinema only such as Robert Taylor with his 1936 profile. In Medicine there was in 1936 the Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service, Dr. Thomas Parran Jr., the great syphilologist who this year got syphilis on the radio for the first time.
The service of Dr. Parran in proving to 123,000,000 citizens of the U. S. that about 12,000,000 of them are gonorrheics, about 6,000,000 syphilitics and that they had all better do something about it promptly, was indeed a Service of the Year.
But none of these faintly approached or in any degree diminished Mrs. Simpson as Woman of the Year, the figure for whom 1936 will be especially remembered. She was first in the news; first in the heart of Edward VIII (who during most of 1936 was first in British hearts); first in that historic British crisis—moral, emotional, political, religious—which aroused all civilization.
Archbishops' Aftermath. It was chiefly the Church of England which was damaged, in the very fibre of English Christian morality, by the open scandal of King Edward and Mrs. Simpson. Yet there were outcries in the largest London newspapers last week against kicking the Duke of Windsor and his presumptive Duchess now that they are down. The Archbishop of Canterbury who is Primate of All England last week evinced regret that he had had to do so. The Archbishop of York, who is Primate of England, made his attack in the form of a pastoral letter. It was not so much an attack on the Duke of Windsor as an attack on every man who might do as Edward VIII had done.