Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek
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Meantime England has a new King & Queen, but in 1937 it was Mary, the Queen Mother, who discreetly used her immense popularity and prestige to win public sympathy and kindle warmth for her second son and his wife. But while George VI ripened as a ruler and Elizabeth every day became less "The Smiling Duchess" and more Queen of England, Mary remained still superbly The Queen. King of the Year, if any, was certainly Leopold III of the Belgians, dynamic maker of international treaties (TIME, Nov. 22 et ante), wise maker of Belgian cabinets, and a handsome, eligible young widower not to be overlooked by any lady of royal blood.
In statecraft few Europeans shone in 1937. In the struggle for mastery of Spain, no man, in Spain or out, could claim to have distinguished himself, much less to have won victory. In Germany statecraft & business came under the control of Four-Year Plan Economic Dictator
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, but he has not yet finished disposing of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. In the United Kingdom a new Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, won no laurels—although the middle-class policies for which he stands (like his predecessor Stanley Baldwin) made perceptible headway in Europe during 1937. In France, where Socialist Léon Blum was Man of 1936, new Premier Camille Chautemps carried forward his middle-class policy, "The Pause." In Russia Joseph Stalin helped his country to "come of age" with universal suffrage, but morally and politically he shrank in stature because he found it necessary to make a bloody routine of the execution of his oldest supporters.
Ranking certainly with any of these stood Getulio Vargas, President of the vast United States of Brazil,* who ruthlessly tightened up his dictatorship along lines which superficially resembled Fascism and remained typically Latin American.
In other fields there were greater figures than these.
In Sport the unquestioned Man of 1937 was John Donald Budge—the only man ever to win Wimbledon's three titles (men's singles, men's doubles, mixed doubles) and directly responsible for the Davis Cup returning to the U. S.
No less outstanding as Man of the Year in Science & Medicine was Dr. Thomas Parran Jr., Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service, whose significant accomplishment was to carry on against venereal disease the first U. S. drive comparable to those with which other human plagues have been worsted.
Foremost U. S. Books of the Year were certainly Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which sold 750,000 copies, and Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, which sold 308,000.
Cinema's box-office-tested Actor of the Year was Clark Gable, its Actress of the Year, Shirley Temple, but Deanna Durbin, 15, who rose to stardom in 1937, reputedly sang Universal Pictures out of impending bankruptcy as their Girl of the Year.