Man-of-the-Year

To which of his fellows might the discerning U. S. citizen point as Man of the Year?

Civic loyalty would automatically turn the citizen toward Washington and the White House, where 1929 saw Herbert Clark Hoover installed. But the First Citizen is obviously in a class by himself and really, psychologically, belongs to the year of his election.

For heroism plus skill, 1929 was undoubtedly Richard Evelyn Byrd's in the popular mind, just as 1927 was Charles Augustus Lindbergh's. Through their Congress the citizens paid acknowledgment by raising Byrd from Commander to Rear-Admiral, an act unprecedented since Robert Edwin Peary discovered the North Pole./- But air-minded citizens might dispute Admiral Byrd's preeminence by bringing in Pilot Bernt Balchen, who actually flew the Byrd ship to the South Pole, or by pointing to Endurance Flyers Dale ("Red") Jackson and Forest O'Brien who kept the St. Louis Robin aloft longer than any living thing has ever flown (420 hr. 21 min. 30 sec.).

Undoubtedly there may be historians who will find the name of Frank Billings Kellogg brightest in 1929, for it was the year in which 57 nations signed the world-peace treaty with his name on it. But researchers and analysts could show that Mr. Kellogg did not originate the outlawing-war idea ; that a comparatively obscure lay figure named Salmon Oliver Levinson, Chicago lawyer, was invited to the White House the day the signatures were affixed in recognition of certain conversations he had had years prior with Senator Borah of Idaho and others.

An enormous body of citizens might turn to Alexander Legge, prime "new patriot" of the Hoover era, the man selected to cope with the country's most pressing politico-economic problem as chairman of the Federal Farm Board. But Chairman Legge only began his task in 1929.

Contemplating education as an important field, many a citizen might hail the feat of Robert Maynard Hutchins, who became president of one of the country's hugest universities at the age of 30.

All these and many another were Men of the Year, but the discerning citizen would pause long before putting any of them ahead of the man, apparently the one man, who could and did perform the year's largest politico-economic job for the world's leading nations. Economics underlies war. War leaves economic tangles which must be straightened out before society can proceed in peace. The man who spent four months as foreman of the high financial wrecking crew which was the Second Reparations Conference, was Owen D. Young of Van Hornesville, N. Y.

Last January when European powers, President Coolidge not objecting, asked Mr. Young and John Pierpont Morgan to come to Paris, Mr. Young was reluctant to accept. He knew and his countrymen were beginning to know how large a part of the so-called Dawes Plan had been his handiwork in 1924. There was no patriotic compulsion to go and do some more hard work, especially since it then looked as though no amount of work could bring success. When he did accept and reached Paris, it became apparent that the other nations' delegates could agree on him alone for chairman.

One delegate died of overwork in those five months. Never in his life did Mr. Young have to subject himself to such severe physical discipline as then to keep going. He got away from Paris for exactly one week-end--and got back to find weeks of work virtually undone. The other delegates were at each other's throats. It took him three days to restore harmony. On three other occasions the conference was actually declared dead--but he revived it. For besides the stupendous detail and the baffling interplay of economic facts and factors, he had to cope with his foreign colleagues' temperaments. This called for rigid self-discipline of another, subtler kind. When Germany's bristling Herr Schacht came to get his ear privately after a day's sessions he had to convince himself and Herr Schacht that he was treating him exactly as though French Delegate Moreau were present. When M. Moreau came, similar convictions were necessary. In his preservation of the confidence of all the parties, in his resuscitation of their confidence in each other, lay Chairman Young's greatest right to have his name applied to the Reparations plan which was finally adopted. From the Orient, where such things are most highly appreciated came Chairman Young's highest praise, when Delegate Keingo Mori of Japan said: "I could not have conceived, unless I had seen it, of an American having such patience."

When, looking five years older, Owen D, Young returned to the U. S., he was as weary as he was modest in asking New York City not to give him a public reception. Also, he was in a hurry to get back to his private life. His son Charles was getting married next day in Cleveland.* He was due after that at Elihu Root's college, Hamilton, to receive an honorary degree. From there he wanted to go and rest at Van Hornesville, which is still his home town in a very real sense. He was born there the day the late great Theodore Roosevelt was having his 16th birthday party, Oct. 27, 1874. Everyone there still calls him "Owen." He has kept Van Hornesville growing up with him, not by taking it in hand the way Henry Ford or a Rockefeller might do, but by getting his neighbors to join him in improvements. He has not expanded his home farm to gobble up the town, but stopped at 700 acres. When the little red schoolhouse was rebuilt along Colonial lines as suggested by him, he put on overalls, helped gather fieldstone, and swung a pick, besides paying all bills. He wanted this school to be a model of city and country advantages for rural education. When they put up a plaque with the names of the builders and what each had done, he paired his name with the village patriarch's:

ABRAM. TILYOU AND OWEN.D.YOUNG Rocking Chair Consultants

The activities of a Man-of-the-Year are bound to be manifold. Being board chairman of General Electric Co. and Radio Corp. might not keep some men very busy, but it keeps Owen D. Young busy because of another quality which made him internationally invaluable at Paris: his sensitiveness to, his prescience of the Future. Never a technician, he is nonetheless obsessed with the idea that some day it may be possible to write a message on a pad at one's desk or bedside and have it instantaneously transmitted to the addressee anywhere on earth. No trained artist, he has been stirred, by Radio Corp.'s development from a communications business into an amusement business, to ponder the potentialities of radio as the basis of a new national art form, especially for a new generation unhampered by old art forms. Never a moralist, he has said: "In no other profession [besides Business], not excepting the ministry and the law, is the need for wide information, broad sympathies and directed imagination so great." Always that kind of a business man, he has foreseen the necessity of national communications monopoly, wires and wireless, government-controlled if not government-owned, to meet world competition.

It was this last foresight which took him last month to Washington, D. C., and, by a quirk of human affairs, to the borderland of another phase of the future. The Senators who asked him to come and tell about Radio Corp.'s plan for selling its communications business to International Telephone & Telegraph Co., were far less interested in his business ideas than in the effect which those ideas, publicly expressed, might have upon Owen D. Young's chances of becoming the Democratic party's candidate for President of the U. S. in 1932 or 1936. No man of Mr. Young's acumen could have failed to sense the undercurrents of that hearing, with Senators Wheeler of Montana and Dill of Washington trying to embarrass him and Senators Tydings of Maryland and Hawes of Missouri trying to protect him. Perceiving the situation Mr. Young insisted on talking economics, nor did he hesitate to startle the Senators--and many of his conservative business acquaintances--with his frankness, notably his opinion that investment value is a fairer base than replacement value upon which to scale the profits of such public utilities as radio companies.

His visit with the Senate was not Mr. Young's only visit in Washington last month. As deputy chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank he has given far more time to stabilizing the U. S. financial structure than to Europe's. It was in this capacity that President Hoover asked him to go down for two of the post-stock-crash Confidence Conferences. Mr. Young went, of course. He has never refused Herbert Hoover anything except, in 1928, his vote. He would hate to refuse Herbert Hoover anything and Mr. Hoover knows it. Regardless of what the Democrats do to make or unmake Mr. Young as presidential timber, it is unlikely that President Hoover needs to worry. He is probably the last Republican, as a person and as a type, that Democrat Young would choose to run against. The same is true in the case of Dwight Whitney Morrow, his onetime colleague on the General Electric board of directors, with whom Mr. Young has already received a headline nomination for 1936 (TIME, Dec. 30). It is also true, however, that no man has ever refused the official nomination.

/-The elevation of Cary Travers Grayson from Commander to Rear-Admiral in 1916 was at the special request of President Wilson, to give his personal physician appropriate rank. *A second son, John, was killed in a motor accident in 1926. The daughter, Josephine, was graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1928. Philip, third son, is a sophomore at St. Lawrence College. Richard, youngest son, is in primary school.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.