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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 (see p. 41), 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 prewar 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 Ward 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.