Man & Wife of the Year

Man of two years (1932 & 1934) was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but certainly he has not been Man of 1937. For 1937 is the first year since he became President of the U. S. that Franklin Roosevelt has not clearly been the dominant figure in U. S. public life: In his one big political battle of the year, over the Supreme Court, he was worsted. Had any one man been primarily responsible for that defeat, he would be a towering figure of politics, but in fact—while many figures, including Senators Wheeler of Montana, Borah of Idaho, Burke of Nebraska and Vice President Garner, contributed in one way and another—Franklin Roosevelt largely wrought his own defeat by antagonizing opinion in Congress and out.

Certainly if there is a U. S. Man of 1937 he is John Llewellyn Lewis who made his C.I.O. a primary force in the affairs of the nation, fought two great automobile strikes, unionized the greater part of the U. S. steel industry for the first time in history and in a twelvemonth built a labor organization the equal of the old A. F. of L. in size and power, its superior in leadership. The measure of his achievement is that his two runners-up were his two visa-vis : 1) Chairman Myron Charles Taylor who without a blow being struck negotiated for the unionization of great U. S. Steel Corp. and 2) President Tom Mercer Girdler of Republic Steel who battled John L. Lewis to the last ditch and largely prevented the complete unionization of the steel industry.

But there are good reasons why no U. S. citizen is the Man of 1937. In the last five months of the twelve the U. S. led, the world not forward toward prosperity but backward toward depression. However great was John L. Lewis' accomplishment, by year end he was in the position of every labor leader and every industrialist when business is receding: battening down hatches to ride out a storm.

Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson was Woman of 1936, but the Duke & Duchess of Windsor, with the assistance of Herr Hitler and Mr. Bedaux, eliminated themselves as completely as possible from an important place in the history of 1937. Their names would scarcely have been mentioned in print at year end, had not London's blatant Daily Express been filled by a story of how the Duchess sent a doll last week to the Miners' Federation of South Wales where King Edward VIII once popularized himself, declaring "Something must be done for Wales!" (TIME, Nov. 30, 1936, et seq.). The doll, instructed the Duchess, is not to be raffled off for charity but given to the child of an unemployed Welsh miner. "Will the little mother of this doll," wrote Last Year's Woman, "kindly name it Wallis?" During 1937 the $1,350,000 yacht Nahlin on which King Edward and Mrs. Simpson cruised was bought by King Carol of Rumania for his henna-haired Mme Magda Lupescu, who many a Rumanian feels is perennially That Woman of the Year.