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Men of America. In 1941 over the world's measureless acres of misery the war lay like a burden too great to be carried, too great to be thrown off. The year 1940 had been the year of surrenders, but in 1941, from France to Poland, each day brought proof that the peace of surrender, balanced against the peace of death, left little choice between them.
The alternative to surrender or death was victory over the Axis. And one thing that 1941 made clear was that only the U.S. could make such a victory reasonably possible. Thus on the people of the U.S. as a whole and as individuals descended a great responsibility and a great opportunity to turn the tide of battle.
The plight of the world had of itself practically determined the claim of some American to be Man of 1941. Of the actual accomplishments of 1941 the most striking was the very real beginning made in turning the U.S. into the arsenal for all the democracies. Credit for that accomplishment belongs rather to U.S. businessmen than to SPAB or OPM or Lend-Lease Administration. The plants that were built, the planes and tanks which were actually turned out were planned and executed by businessmen.
If a businessman deserved to be Man of 1941, he might perhaps be Henry Ford, the oldtime enemy of war who in 1941 turned the processes of mass production which he himself fathered to the service of the nation, and became one of the great plane builders of the U.S. (see p. 56). But Ford is only one of many—a striking example because of his past pacifism—who have helped to turn U.S. ingenuity to a new weight in the balance of world affairs.
To people who believed that the size of the plant meant nothing unless a genuine national unity powered the turning wheels, another type of American was Man of the Year—Wendell Willkie, who in 1941 went to England as a defeated candidate and came back arguing for the Lend-Lease Bill; in tune with the year, he had gone on fighting as if he refused to admit that his defeat had taken place.
What Wendell Willkie contributed to the world in 1941 was epitomized by words he spoke last week: "Never has there existed such hope for mankind as there exists today. Never has there existed on the surface of this planet so many human beings who know what freedom is and who are determined that ... it shall endure. . . . During the last ten years the democratic peoples have learned in painful lessons what democracy . . . asks of us, and what we must deliver in the future if it is to survive. Out of this great knowledge and our great yearning, we can say with realistic confidence that we shall be able to build a new and more fruitful society of nations . . . strengthened by the common purposes of free peoples everywhere to make freedom live."