Man of Peace

The Southern Cross used to be one of the biggest privately owned yachts in the world. Sleek, white and splendidly appointed inside, as long as a destroyer and a lot wider, she used to carry a crew of 315. Last week the Southern Cross was tied up tight to a pier in Veracruz. Her owner, Axel Leonard Wenner-Gren, No. 1 tycoon of Sweden, had given it to the Government of Mexico. If he had not done so, the Mexican Government might have taken it anyway. Quite clearly, Mexico did not want Axel Wenner-Gren to make personal use of the Southern Cross.

It was bewildering. Was not Mexico at war with Germany? And had not Germany been charged with the brutal sinking of the Athenia, back in 1939's fateful September? And had not Owner Axel Wenner-Gren providentially happened along in the Southern Cross and picked up 399 of the Athenia's survivors? He had.

What a Book! People said the most dreadful, the most ridiculous things about Axel Wenner-Gren. They said he was "the most mysterious man in the Western Hemisphere." They said he was "one of the most fantastic figures in the world." They said he was "the richest man on the face of the earth." "What a book he'll make some day," a newspaperman sighed and someone else added: "Yes, preferably by Aldous Huxley."

Few people ever saw in Axel Wenner-Gren what he claims to see in himself. One of the kinder things people have said was that he was an able but harmless fellow afflicted by delusions of grandeur. Others, with more calumny, have said that he was the Axis super-agent for the Western Hemisphere, told off to: 1) soften up Latin America for the Axis; 2) harden it up against North America.

The mild-mannered tycoon explained that all this was ludicrously false. Even before Mexico got his yacht, he had stopped using it--because "if I took it out people would say I was fueling U-boats."

Dove in Hornets' Nest. Axel Wenner-Gren was not used to such treatment. He was used to being treated as a king--the industrial king he is--not as a criminal. And he was a king who had won his crown. Born to a Swedish export dealer 61 years ago, Axel went to the U.S., worked in a New Jersey factory for 15-c- an hour, returned to Sweden, got a start in vacuum cleaners, spread out to refrigerators, timber, wood pulp, steel, munitions, airplanes. He married a girl he met on shipboard a girl from the U.S. wheat belt who was deemed a beauty. From 1935 on, he poked into the hornets' nest of European power politics. He was for peace. He thought that big men, powerful men like himself should save the peace. By his own account he trotted back & forth between Goering and Chamberlain, doing all he could for peace in our time. When the German-Soviet Pact was announced, Wenner-Gren knew the jig was up. Three days before the war's outbreak he sailed in the Southern Cross. After the Athenia rescue he sailed to his island in the Bahamas.

Cuzco's Doctor. Last year Axel Wenner-Gren sailed the Southern Cross to Peru, where he was received as a king. He financed an archeological expedition, gave Peru a million-acre public park, named for the donor, who felt warmly in his heart that Peru would not soon forget the name of Wenner-Gren. He was proud as a peacock when the University of Cuzco gave him an honorary doctorate, and the soft-footed servants who now minister to him and his wife in Mexico have been trained to call him "Doctor."

While he was in Peru, an invitation reached him to visit Mexico. In Mexico's capital, the country's big people flocked around him. He was given a gold key to the city. He fell in with John Ambrose Hastings, a onetime New York State Senator, who was also cutting a wide swath in Mexico. Personable Mr. Hastings, who somehow came to be known to Mexican bigwigs as a U.S. ex-Senator, was promoting a "hundred-million-dollar syndicate," purportedly backed by U.S. cash, to industrialize Mexico. And there was Axel Wenner-Gren with more money.

One man who contemplated all this with a bilious eye was George Messersmith, now U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. Messersmith had spent a long time in Germany and had known about Axel Wenner-Gren in the prewar years. Another non-admirer, in Washington, was Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, whom Wenner-Gren had once mysteriously dogged all the way to Italy and Germany. As time went on, the suspicions of the State Department deepened. Suddenly, in January, the Department swung its club and Axel Wenner-Gren found himself on the blacklist of persons with whom the U.S. would have no further dealings. Great Britain followed suit.

Now he was ostracized instead of lionized in Mexico City. He could not understand it. He wished someone from the U.S. State Department would drop around and explain it. He seemed to think that the Department had cracked down on him because it resented him as an industrial interloper in Latin America--an assumption that was plausible enough as far as it went.

Axel Wenner-Gren has not the manner of a geopolitical Machiavelli. Tall, slender, white-haired, blue-eyed and bronzed, he has an air of frankness and modesty.

"I am a decided friend of the U.S.," he said, "and I can get along with Latins. I could have organized the production of things the U.S. needs. It's a darn shame."

Axel Wenner-Gren also said: "If there should happen to be a stalemate and a negotiated peace, I might be of great use. I have a good standing in Germany."

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