(HOST) Each December Time Magazine chooses a Person of the Year, the person or idea that for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year. Commentator Peter Gilbert takes a look at the last eighty years of world history through Times choices.
(GILBERT) Recently, I looked at the eighty winners named People of the Year since Charles Lindbergh was named Times first Man of the Year in 1927.
I was struck by how few women have been chosen. The first was Mrs. Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII abdicated. That was 1936. The next year the distinction went to Generalissimo and Mme Chiang Kai-Shek. It was Elizabeth II in 1952, American Women as a group in 1975, Corazon Aquino in 1986, and in 2005, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Bono. Its nice to see so-called Good Samaritans named, among mostly men whose influence was political and some times negative. (Adolf Hitler was Man of the Year in 1938.)
Interestingly, only 27 were not Americans.
A number of people were named twice: Stalin in 1939 and 42, Churchill in 1940 and 49, George Marshall in 1943 and 47, Eisenhower in 1944 and 59 (years that are further apart than any other double-winner), Truman in 1945 and 48, Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 67, Nixon in 1971 and Nixon and Kissinger in 72, Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and 85, Reagan in 1980 and Reagan and Yuri Andropov in 1983, Gorbachev in 1987 and 89, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Clinton and Kenneth Starr in 1998, and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Only Franklin Roosevelt was named three times in 1932, 34, and 41. If George W. Bush is named again this year, he would tie that record.
Some years groups of people were named, including The American Fighting Man in 1950, US Scientists in 1960, people Twenty-Five and Under in 1966, The American Soldier in 2003, and last year, perhaps the lamest choice in eighty years, You – Yes, you – because you control the Information Age.
A few years Time named not people but things: the Computer in 1982, and the Endangered Earth in 1988.
Some names I had to look up:
Owen D. Young in 1929? He was an American lawyer and diplomat who chaired a conference that reduced Germany’s World War I reparations. And Pierre Laval, Man of the Year in 1931? He was Premier of France, but later he became a notorious collaborator, was convicted of treason and executed in 1945.
The magazine’s choice doesn’t pretend to be an academic or objective study of the past. Rather it gives a good context in which to think about who or what in the last year has mattered most.
Peter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.