1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930
German war minister Otto Gessler resigns under pressure in January over a financial scandal involving the Reichswehr (Army), which he has allowed to increase in size despite the limits imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Former British general Douglas Haig, earl Haig of Bemersyde, dies at London January 29 at age 66; former prime minister Herbert H. Asquith, 1st earl of Oxford and Asquith, in his country house at Sutton Courtenay February 15 at age 75; former Irish Nationalist Party leader William O'Brien at London February 25 at age 75.
A protocol prohibiting use "of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of bacteriological methods of warfare" goes into effect February 8. It was opened for signature at Geneva in mid-June 1925.
Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party wins only 2.6 percent of the vote for seats in the Reichstag and is considered a fringe party after the May elections (seeMein Kampf, 1925). Many regard Hitler as a comic figure with an absurd moustache who makes shrill speeches excoriating the bourgeois "decadence" of the Weimar Republic, but he has responded to pressure from industrialists who include Friedrich Flick, Emile Kirdorf, Gustav Krupp, Fritz Thyssen, and Albert Voegler, moved the party away from its former anti-capitalist views, and begins to gain support from academics, army officers, businessmen, and landowners with his attacks on Germany's "internal enemies" (see 1930).
German high school student Artur Axmann, 15, joins the Hitler Youth, a group open to young people aged 10 to 18 that the Nazi leader has started in what appears to be an outgrowth of the Wandervögel program begun a few years ago. Like the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in Britain and America, it focuses on camping, outdoor life, and public service, but it is designed to build support for the National Socialist Party. Axmann will win converts by organizing units of young workers modeled on early communist labor union organizations and achieve such success that by 1932 he will be called to Berlin to join the leadership of the Hitler Youth (see 1933).
The Kellogg-Briand Pact (Pact of Paris) signed August 27 by 63 world powers renounces war. Devised by U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, 72, and French foreign minister Aristide Briand, 66, the pact is implemented in September by the League of Nations.
The Albanian Republic proclaimed in 1924 becomes a kingdom under former prime minister Ahmed Bey Zogu, 33, who has changed his name to Scanderbeg II; he is crowned as Zog I to begin an 18-year reign, of which the last 7 will be spent in exile.
Former Italian general Armando Diaz dies at Rome February 29 at age 66, having served as minister of war from 1922 to 1924 in the first Fascist cabinet; five-time Italian prime minister Giovanni Giolitti dies at Cabour July 17 at age 85; former Italian general Luigi Cadorna at Bordighera December 21 at age 78. Former White Russian general Baron Petr N. Wrangel dies in exile at Brussels April 25 at age 49; former Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher at London October 22 at age 66.
Beijing (Peking) surrenders to Chiang Kai-shek, who last year renamed the city Beiping (Peiping, or northern peace). Nationalist Chinese forces arrest communist agitator Xiang Jianyu (Hsiang Kianyu) and execute her in May, gagging her to prevent her from making a final speech (see 1927). A bomb planted by Japanese extremists who want to instigate a Japanese occupation of Manchuria blows up a train in Manchuria June 4, mortally injuring warlord Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin) at age 54 (approximate). Chiang is elected president of China (see 1931).
Mexico's president Alvaro Obregon is assassinated while dining with friends at Mexico City July 17 at age 48. He has been elected to a second term July 1 despite an armed revolt, and a Roman Catholic (José de León Toral) who holds him responsible for religious persecutions has killed him during a victory celebration. Vice President Emilio Portes Gil, 36, becomes provisional president, but the country remains dominated by former president Plutarco Elias Calles, now 51, who will continue his control until 1935 (see PRI, 1929; Cardenas, 1934).
Former Argentine president Hipólito Irigoyen gains reelection by an overwhelming margin despite opposition from his erstwhile supporter, retiring president Marcelo de Alvear, who has served since 1922. Now 76, Irigoyen has become increasingly senile; the corruption and inertia of his administration will alienate many of his supporters, and they will join his conservative opposition (see 1930).
Bolivia and Paraguay go to war December 6 over the northern part of the Gran Chaco territory, whose oil fields make it attractive to both sides (see 1878). Paraguay appeals to the League of Nations; the Pan-American Conference that held its sixth meeting early in the year at Havana offers to mediate, but skirmishes will continue until April 4, 1930, when the two countries will reach a temporary truce agreement (see 1932).
Reformer Louis F. Post dies at Washington, D.C., January 10 at age 78, having blocked the deportation of many "radical" aliens.
U.S. voters elect former secretary of commerce Herbert C. Hoover president with 444 electoral votes to 87 for his Democratic opponent. An Irish Catholic, New York's Gov. Alfred E. Smith loses five states of the "Solid South" and obtains only 41 percent of the popular vote to Hoover's 58 percent.
The Meriam Report submitted to the secretary of the interior February 21 contains shocking revelations of despondency, disease, filth, and poverty on the U.S. Indian reservations created by the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, which had the unintended consequence of weakening tribal social structure. Congress authorized the survey 4 years ago in recognition of services to the country by Native Americans during the Great War; the report spurs demands for ameliorating conditions (see Wheeler-Howard Act, 1934).
Gov. Harry F. (Flood) Byrd of Virginia obtains passage of the South's first anti-lynching law. Now 41, Byrd was elected to office 3 years ago, becoming the state's youngest governor since Thomas Jefferson. He is a direct descendant of colonist William Byrd, a brother of explorer Richard E. Byrd, and a fiscal conservative with a progressive agenda for his state, although he will consistently oppose civil-rights reforms.
Alice Paul founds the World Party for Equal Rights for Women.
Benito Mussolini's Italy abolishes woman suffrage May 12 under a new law that restricts the franchise to men 21 and over who pay syndicate rates or taxes of 100 lire (see 1919). The law reduces the electorate from nearly 10 million to only 3 million and requires that voters approve or reject in toto the 400 candidates submitted by the Fascist Grand Council.
The Representation of the People Act approved by Parliament May 7 reduces the age of Britain's women voters from 30 to 21. English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst dies at London June 14 at age 69. Women gain the vote on the same basis as men under provisions of a July 2 act of Parliament (see 1918).
Ecuador and Guyana give women the right to vote on the same basis as men.
Crystal Eastman dies of nephritis at Erie, Pa., July 8 at age 47 after writing in the Nation magazine, "No self-respecting feminist would accept alimony. It would be her own confession that she could not take care of herself" (she has been married and divorced twice).
Josef Stalin launches the first Soviet Five-Year Plan in October; it will bring liquidation or exile to Siberia for millions of kulaks (rich peasants) who resist collectivization of agriculture (see 1932).
Explorer Roald Amundsen dies in the Arctic Ocean June 18 at age 55 while trying to rescue Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile, now 43, whose dirigible has crashed on the ice north-northeast of Spitsbergen with 25 men, 17 of whom are lost. Amundsen has been the first man to reach both the South Pole and, later, the North Pole.
Commander Richard E. Byrd, U.S. Navy, sails south in October with the largest and best-equipped Antarctic expedition ever mounted. Financed with $400,000 given by John D. Rockefeller Jr., Edsel Ford, and other rich Americans as well as by less affluent individuals, Byrd establishes Little America on the face of the Ross Ice Shelf, makes flights over the Antarctic continent, discovers a range of peaks, names them the Rockefeller Mountains, and finds hitherto unknown territory that he names Marie Byrd Land (see 1929).
France devalues the franc June 24 from 19.3¢ U.S. to 3.92¢ (see 1926). The disguised repudiation of the national debt wreaks havoc on France's rentier class.
New York's National City Bank goes into competition with the Morris Plan started in 1910, offering loans to employed borrowers on terms similar to those offered by Morris Plan banks.
California banker A. P. Giannini buys the Bank of America and consolidates it with his other bank holdings to create what will become the largest banking institution in the country (see 1906). He will rename his Bank of Italy November 3, 1930, calling it Bank of America.
"We in America today are nearer the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land," says presidential candidate Herbert C. Hoover. He hails "the American system of rugged individualism" October 22 in a speech at New York, but it will later turn out that his Democratic opponent Al Smith at Albany has since 1923 been secretly receiving cash and stocks totaling about $400,000 from Michigan-born New York lawyer and national Democratic Party fund raiser Thomas Lincoln Chadbourne, 57, to supplement his salary as governor. John Jakob Raskob, now 49, has left General Motors to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee and run Smith's campaign; Smith's defeat leaves both of Raskob and Smith out of jobs (see real estate [Empire State Building], 1931; politics [Liberty League], 1934).
New York Central lawyer (and two-term U.S. senator from New York) Chauncey M. Depew dies at New York April 5 at age 93 (he has once said, "I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise"); former IWW head William D. "Big Bill" Haywood dies at Moscow May 18 at age 59. He jumped bail and escaped to Russia in 1921 after being convicted of sedition and given a 20-year prison sentence; financier Thomas Fortune Ryan dies at New York November 23 at age 77, leaving an estate valued by some accounts at $130 million and by others at more than $200 million.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Averages closes December 31 at a new high of 300, up from 202.40 at the end of 1927 after a spectacular year in which Radio (RCA) stock has soared from 85 to 428 (although it has never paid a dividend), DuPont from 310 to 525, Montgomery Ward from 117 to 440, and Wright Aeronautic from 69 to 289. Corporations and investment trusts lend money to stockbrokers for speculative purposes, and much of the country is growing accustomed to installment buying of consumer goods (but see 1929).
Bergdorf Goodman moves into a new marble-clad building on New York's Fifth Avenue at 58th Street, opposite the Plaza Hotel that opened in 1907 (see Bergdorf, 1903). The new mansion-like structure combines seven- and nine-story buildings that contain various other retailers.
J. P. Morgan Co. takes over Marland Oil Co. from founder E. W. Marland, now 54, who has spent money recklessly, built a 55-room mansion at Ponca City, Okla., devoted his time to poker, polo, and socializing, and gave the New York banking house some stock in his company 5 years ago as security for a large loan (see 1911). In addition to its production capacity, Marland Oil has gas stations in every state and 17 foreign countries, but oil prices have dropped, Marland has been unwilling to retrench, and he loses virtually everything (see Conoco, 1929).
U.S. crude oil consumption reaches a rate of 7.62 barrels per capita while the rest of the world averages 0.19 barrel. The Oklahoma City Field's No. 1 Foster well that comes in December 28 creates a gusher that blows 5,000 barrels of oil in its first 24 hours; the Cities Service company that has drilled it has searched the county for 27 years and sunk 25 dry holes, but the new well will be dwarfed in 15 months (see 1930).
Incandescent bulb filament inventor Lewis Latimer dies at New York December 11 at age 80.
The Boulder Dam Project Act passed by Congress December 21 commits the federal government to participate in the production of hydroelectric power (see Kaiser, Bechtel, 1931).
Pilot Floyd Bennett rises from a sickbed and flies with Bernt Balchen to rescue of three transatlantic flyers—Capt. Hermann Koehl, Maj. James A. Fitzmaurice, and Baron von Huenefeld—whose Junkers plane, the Bremen, has landed on an island in Labrador. Bennett contracts pneumonia and dies at Quebec April 25 at age 37.
Australian pilot Charles E. Kingsford Smith, 31, lands the Southern Cross at Brisbane June 9, having come with three companions from Oakland, Calif., via Honolulu and Suva in the first trans-Pacific flight. Having served with the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War and, after being wounded, as an instructor for the Royal Air Force, Kingsford Smith founded his own airline; he is lionized as a national hero (see 1930).
Pilots Wilmer Stultz and Louis E. Gordon fly a multi-engine Fokker from Newfoundland to Burry Port, Wales, June 17 in 15 hours, 48 minutes, with Atchison, Kansas-born aviatrix Amelia Earhart, 29, who denies that she was ever at the controls but becomes the first woman ever to fly the Atlantic. The three are honored with a New York ticker-tape parade July 6. Earhart paid for her first flying lessons in 1920 by driving a sand and gravel truck, decided after 2½ hours of instruction that she wanted to buy her own aircraft, borrowed $2,000 from her mother to acquire a small, experimental plane, made her first solo flight in 1922, and soon thereafter set an altitude record of 14,000 feet (see 1932)
Newark Airport opens in September. The 68-acre, $1.75 million field will grow to cover 2,300 acres (see La Guardia, 1939).
Lockheed Vega co-designer John K. (Knudsen) Northrop, now 32, quits the small Burbank, Calif., company to start his own firm (see 1926). Gerard Vultee, 27, succeeds Northrop as chief engineer and will redesign the Lockheed Vega for speed; he will also design the Sirius for Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife, Ann (see 1927; Lockheed, 1929; American Airlines, 1930).
The German dirigible Graf Zeppelin arrives October 15 at Lakehurst, N.J., after covering 6,630 miles in 121 hours on her first commercial flight (see Eckener, 1924). The voyage from Friedrichshafen inaugurates transatlantic service by lighter-than-air craft (see 1937).
Panama Canal builder George W. Goethals dies at New York January 21 at age 69. New York's Goethals Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing open to connect Staten Island with New Jersey.
The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad's Moffat Tunnel eliminates bottlenecks in east-west traffic to speed freight and passenger trains through the Transcontinental Divide. Dedicated February 26 and named for engineer David Hallady Moffat, who died in 1911 at age 71, the $15.6 million tunnel is more than six miles long, making it the longest in North America, but it has cost the lives of 28 men in the 5 years of round-the-clock work required to build it (workers were paid $5.15 per 8-hour shift, and it was easy to find a replacement for anyone killed).
The Jones-White Merchant Marine Act passed by Congress May 22 gives private U.S. shipping interests federal subsidies to help them compete with foreign lines (see 1891; 1936).
The British steamship Vestris sinks in a gale off the Virginia coast November 12, killing 110.
Plymouth automobiles are introduced by Chrysler Motors to compete with Ford and Chevrolet. "Look at all three," says Walter Chrysler in advertisements featuring Plymouths with high compression engines and hydraulic brakes that are far superior to the cable-activated mechanical brakes found in other cars. Plymouth will be third in sales by 1931.
The DeSoto introduced by Chrysler is a medium-priced car that will remain in production until 1960.
A new 112-horsepower Chrysler Imperial "80" is advertised as "America's most powerful automobile."
Automaker James W. Packard dies at Cleveland March 20 at age 64.
Florida's Tamiami Trail opens in April to link Miami with Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast. Advertising man-philanthropist Barron G. Collier, now 55, has led the effort to reclaim the Everglades and build the 143-mile highway through the swamps; it has taken 11 years to build and cost more than $48,000 per mile (see environment [Everglades National Park], 1947).
The world's first highway cloverleaf is completed at Woodbridge, N.J. Patented in 1916 by U.S. inventor Arthur Hill, the cloverleaf saves space.
Mechanical engineer and Pratt & Whitney cofounder Amos Whitney dies at Portland, Maine, August 5 at age 95, having retired in 1920 before seeing his old company turned into an aircraft-engine manufacturer.
The Diels-Adler reaction worked out by German chemists Otto (Paul Herman) Diels, 52, and Kurt Adler, 26, provides the essential basis for chemical syntheses that will lead to the development of synthetic rubber, plastics, insectides, and other products.
A paper on crystallography by chemist Linus C. Pauling gives six principles on which to decide the structure of complicated crystals (see 1927). Physicist William H. Bragg at London objects that Pauling did not originate all of the principles. He spreads stories about Pauling's lack of professional ethics, and other critics will charge that Pauling makes a practice of using intuition to guess at what a structure might look like, not always having sufficient data to back it up, but Pauling's defenders argue that he has clarified the principles, codified them, and demonstrated their power and generality. Pauling also publishes a paper on orbital hybridization and resonance (see 1931).
Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, 39, proves that visible light changes wavelengths when scattered, thus adding to the particle theory of light. Raman will play a major role in founding higher science education in India.
Physicist Paul Dirac publishes a relativistic electron theory (see 1927). Taking into proper account Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, it shows that the electron must have a spin quantum number of ½ and a magnetic moment, but Dirac is unable to account for what appear to be extra solutions to his equations and finally realizes that something else must be involved (see Anderson's positron, 1932).
Nobel physicist Hendrik A. Lorentz dies at Haarlem in the Netherlands February 4 at age 74; Nobel chemist Theodore W. Richards at Cambridge, Mass., April 2 at age 60; Nobel physicist Wilhelm Wien at Munich August 30 at age 64.
The Basis of Sensation by English physiologists Edgar Douglas Adrian, 39, and Charles Scott Sherrington, 67, presents work that will enable physicians to understand disorders of the nervous system. Adrian has worked out the mechanism by which nerves carry messages to and from the brain.
Eli Lilly introduces Liver Extract No. 43 to treat pernicious anemia (see 1924; Cohn, 1926; Castle, 1929).
Nobel pathologist Johannes Fibiger dies of a massive heart attack at Copenhagen January 30 at age 60 soon after learning that he has colon cancer. Further research will raise doubts about his prize-winning work on gastric cancer but his diphtheria serum has saved countless lives and his work on cancer has given impetus to other research on that disease. Neurologist Sir David Ferrier dies at London March 19 at age 85; Rockefeller Institute bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi of yellow fever at Accra in British West Africa May 21 at age 51.
Penicillin proves to have antibacterial properties that will launch an "antibiotic" revolution in medicine. Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming at St. Mary's Hospital, London, has earlier found a weak antibiotic called lysozyme, he has been looking for a stronger one, and he notices September 3 that no bacteria have grown in the vicinity of some Penicillium notatum fungus that has accidentally fallen into a preparation of staphylococcus bacteria on Petri dishes he was about to sterilize for reuse. He finds a substance in the mold spores that prevents growth of the bacteria even when diluted 800 times, he renames his "mold juice" penicillin, but the antibacterial power of the fungus lasts only a few hours (see 1929; bacteriophages, 1917). Now 47, Fleming discovered "the dissolving enzyme" in 1922, he realizes the significance of his finding, but he lacks the chemical wherewithal to isolate and identify the active compound involved and cannot obtain enough of it to use on humans (see 1929).
The National Conference of Christians and Jews is founded to fight U.S. bigotry following the defeat of Catholic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith. No Roman Catholic will win election to the presidency until 1960.
A merger of Clarence Mackay's Commercial Cable-Postal Telegraph with International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) creates the world's first combined radio, cable, and telegraph service company. Mackay's father broke Western Union's telegraph monopoly in 1886. He inherited the J. W. Mackay communications empire in 1902, completed a transpacific cable in 1903, established wire communications with southern Europe via the Azores in 1907, put a cable into service between New York and Cuba in 1907 and from Miami to Cuba in 1920, and in 1923 completed a wire link to northern Europe via Ireland.
"Certain Topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory" by Swedish-born Bell Laboratories physicist Harry Nyquist, 39, establishes the principles of sampling signals on a continuous basis to convert them to digital signals. Nyquist's 1924 paper "Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed" addressed problems existing in telegraph systems, analyzing the relationship between the speed of a system and the number of signal values it used. To reproduce the original signal, he now shows, the sampling rate must be at least twice the highest frequency present in the sample (see Shannon, 1948).
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) is founded by Congress Cigar Co. advertising manager William S. Paley, 27, who has been receiving $50,000 per year from his father's firm and last year committed the company to an advertising contract of $50 per week with Philadelphia's 225-watt radio station WCAU while his father was away on vacation. Young Paley was criticized for making the contract but has seen sales of La Palina cigars soar in response to radio advertising; he sells some of his stock in Congress Cigar to raise upwards of $275,000, buys into financially ailing United Independent Broadcasters (which controls Columbia Phonograph), is elected president of the 22-station network September 26, and keeps CBS solvent by selling a 49 percent interest to Adolph Zukor's Paramount-Publix motion picture firm (broadcasting 16 hours per day over long-line telephone wires costs $1 million per year). He will move CBS to New York next year and make it a rival to David Sarnoff's NBC (see ABC, 1943).
General Electric station WGY, Schenectady, N.Y., broadcasts the first regularly scheduled television programs beginning May 11 (see 1927; BBC, 1936).
Motorola Inc. has its beginnings in the Galvin Manufacturing Co. founded in a brick garage in Chicago's Harrison Street by University of Illinois engineering school graduate Paul (Vincent) Galvin, 33, and his brother Joseph with $565 in capital to make "battery eliminators" that enable people to power their radios from standard AC household current (see car radio, 1929).
The Chatelaine magazine begins publication at Toronto in March. Started by the MacLean Publishing Co., it reports in December that it has a net paid circulation of more than 60,000 and that its sale of single copies is 10 times that of any other women's magazine published in Canada.
The Atlanta World begins publication as a 5¢ black daily.
Cartoonist Richard F. Outcault dies at Flushing, N.Y., September 25 at age 65; financial editor-publisher Clarence W. Barron at Battle Creek, Mich., October 2 at age 73; advertising agency founder J. Walter Thompson at New York October 16 at age 80.
Naples-born businessman Generoso Pope, 37, buys Il Progresso Italo-Americano, New York's leading Italian-language daily. Owner of the Colonial Sand and Gravel Co. that has been involved in tunnel excavations, Pope will buy the weekly Il Corriere d'America next year and use the papers to express support for Italy's Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who gave him a medal 2 years ago, gives him another this year, and will give him a third in 1930.
Oxford's Clarendon Press publishes the 10th and final volume of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles April 19 after 44 years of work, most of it by its late editor-in-chief, James A. H. Murray, who died in 1915 (see 1884). A 12-volume edition with a one-volume supplement will appear in 1933 under the title The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a two-volume Compact Edition of the 15,487-page work will be marketed with magnifying glass in 1971, and it will be further supplemented in 1972 and thereafter to provide authoritative information on English word origins, usages, and pronunciations (see 1989).
The Recordak system introduced by Eastman Kodak Co. permits copying of pictures and/or text on narrow rolls of film (microfilm) using continuous, automatic cameras that record documents (initially bank checks in transit) in greatly reduced size on 16-millimeter film. The process will soon be used to copy papers in business, education, and government, with 35-millmeter film used in addition to 16-millimeter, enabling libraries, government agencies, and commercial institutions to store huge amounts of information without paper (which is more subject to deterioration) and at great savings in space.
Nonfiction: Origins of the World War (two volumes) by historian Sidney B. Fay, who questions the widely-held belief that Germany was solely responsible for starting the Great War; Der logische Aufbau der Welt by German-born Viennese philosopher Rudolf Carnap, 37, whose work lays the basis of logical empiricism, dismissing most traditional metaphysics as a source of meaningless answers to nonexistent problems; American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossings by Ohio-born Northwestern University anthropology professor Melville (Jean) Herskovits, 33, advances the thesis that U.S. blacks constitute a homogeneous and culturally definable population group; Negro Makers of History and African Myths, Together with Proverbs by Carter G. Woodson, who 2 years ago established Negro History Week (later Black History Month, it will be observed in America every February); Coming of Age in Samoa by American Museum of Natural History anthropologist Margaret Mead, 26, is based on studies made while living with the natives. Mead's book on the development of social behavior among adolescents on the Pacific island stresses the impermanence of human values, but she has not learned the language and it will turn out that much of her information has been derived from what she heard from teenagers who told her what they thought she wanted to hear; Science and Ethics by English-born Indian geneticist J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson) Haldane, 36; The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) by Berlin critic Walter Benjamin, now 36, who wrote the work as a doctoral thesis, only to have it rejected by the University of Frankfurt; The Tide of Fortune (Sternstunden der Menschheit) by Stefan Zweig, whose five historical portraits in miniature gain him popularity for the first time; The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead; The New Russia by New York-born journalist Dorothy Thompson, 34, who marries novelist Sinclair Lewis; The Hunger Fighters by Paul de Kruif; Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey; The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw; English Humour by J. B. Priestley; Radiant Motherhood and Enduring Passion by Marie Stopes.
Fiction: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, who is dying of tuberculosis at Florence. His explicit account of the sexual relations between the wife of a crippled English peer and their lusty gamekeeper Mellors is privately printed in Italy because it has been denied publication in England (see 1959); The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, who calls herself "John" and whose novel about a lesbian attachment between a young girl and an older woman encounters censorship problems (the book is said to have no literary merit and is banned, despite testimonials from E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf); Orlando by Virginia Woolf; The Last Post by Ford Madox Ford; The Children by Edith Wharton; All the Conspirators by English novelist Christopher Isherwood, 24; Nadja by surrealist André Breton; Southern Mail (Courrier-Sud) by French aviator-novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 28; The Cockpit by Chicago-born novelist James Gould Cozzens, 25; Mr. Buttsworthy on Rampole Island by H. G. Wells; Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley; A Modern Comedy by John Galsworthy; The Childermass by Wyndham Lewis; Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kuu muhi) by Junichiro Tanizaki; Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé) by the late Marcel Proust is the last of his Remembrance of Things Past novels; Decline and Fall by English novelist Evelyn (Arthur St. John) Waugh, 25; Poor Women (stories) by Irish writer Norah Hoult, 30; The Shunned House by Providence, R.I.-born novelist H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft, 38, whose horror stories have been appearing in the magazine Weird Tales since 1916; She Walks in Beauty by Ohio-born New York novelist Dawn Powell, 30; Home to Harlem by Claude McKay; Nothing Is Sacred by Sioux City-born novelist Josephine Herbst, 36, who came to New York late in 1919 and early in 1920 began an adulterous affair with playwright Maxwell Anderson, then an editorial writer for the New York Globe (his wife will die in 1931, and he will marry two other women, but not Josie Herbst); My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew by Munich-born U.S. poet-novelist George Sylvester Viereck, 43, and Philadelphia-born New York Romance languages teacher Paul Eldridge, 40, who create a controversy by seeming to endorse free love; The Single Standard by Los Angeles-born former Hearst newspaper reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, 34; Meet the Tiger by Singapore-born British novelist Leslie Charteris (Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin), 21, whose debonair outlaw hero Simon Templar ("the Saint") will appear in many sequels; The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie.
Novelist Thomas Hardy dies at his home near Dorchester January 11 at age 87; Vicente Blasco Ibáñez at Menton, France, January 28 on the eve of his 61st birthday; Italo Svevo (Aron Hector Schmitz) of heart disease at Motta di Livenza September 13 at age 66 following an automobile accident in which he broke a femur; George Barr McCutcheon dies suddenly October 23 at age 52 while attending a luncheon of the Dutch Treat Club at New York's Hotel Martinique, having published some 40 works of fiction.
Poetry: The Tower by William Butler Yeats; The Testament of Beauty by Poet Laureate Robert Seymour Bridges, now 84; To My Mother by Siegfried Sassoon; Gypsy Ballads (Romancers guano) by Federico García Lorca, whose imaginary gypsies are based only in part on the real gypsies of Andalusia; Nine Experiments by English poet Stephen Spender, 19; John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benét; Mr. Pope and Other Poems by Kentucky-born poet Allen Tate, 28; The Seventh Hill by Robert Hillyer; The Cantos (II) by Ezra Pound; Buck in the Snow by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Poet Eleanor Wylie suffers a stroke in England and dies at New York December 16 at age 43.
Juvenile: The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne; Millions of Cats by New Ulm, Minn.-born author-illustrator Wanda (Hazel) Gág, 35; Kewpies and the Runaway Baby by Rose Cecil O'Neill; A Moon for Witches by Westborough, Mass.-born author Esther Forbes, 37.
Painting: Seated Odalisque by Henri Matisse; Still Life with Jug by Georges Braque; The Potato by Joan Miró; Wedding by Marc Chagall; Black Lilies by Max Beckmann; The False Mirror, The Lovers, and The Titanic Days by René Magritte; Girl on Sofa by Edvard Munch; The Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth; Nightwave by Georgia O'Keeffe; Conversation, Country Dance, Louisiana Rice Fields, and Crapshooters by Thomas Hart Benton; Baptism in Kansas by Kansas-born painter John Steuart Curry, 30; Sixth Avenue and Third Street by John Sloan. Water colorist-architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh dies of tongue cancer at London December 10 at age 60.
Sculpture: Jimmy Durante (wire) and Rearing Stallion (wire) by Philadelphia-born sculptor Alexander Calder, 30, whose "Le Cirque Calder," exhibited in 1926, consisted of small wire sculptures of animals and acrobats. Dadaist-surrealist Jean Arp suggested the word stabile to describe Calder's work; Mankind (Hoptonwood stone torso) by Eric Gill, now 46. Sculptor Albert Bartholomé dies at Paris October 31 at age 80.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art chartered in 1876 opens in a simulated Greek temple on a 10-acre site in Fairmount Park.
Photographs: Bricklayer and Pastry Chef by August Sander.
Theater: Marco Millions by Eugene O'Neill 1/9 at New York's Garrick Theater, with Alfred Lunt, Margalo Gilmore, Robert Barrat, Morris Carnovsky, Henry Travers, Mary Blair, Dudley Digges, Sanford Meisner, 92 perfs.; Cock Robin by Philip Barry and Elmer Rice 1/12 at New York's 48th Street Theater, with Moffat Johnston, Henry D. Southard, Muriel Kirkland, Beulah Bondi, 100 perfs.; The President (Der Präsident) by Georg Kaiser 1/28 at Frankurt am Main's Schauspielhaus; Strange Interlude by O'Neill 1/30 at New York's John Golden Theater, with Lynn Fontanne, Glenn Anders, Earle Larimore, Australian actress Judith (née Frances Margaret) Anderson, 29, and Tom Powers in a Freudian study of women with Elizabethan monologistic asides (the curtain rises at 5:30, descends at 7 for an 80-minute dinner interval, rises again at 8:20, and does not fall until after 11), 426 perfs.; The Silent House by John G. Brandon and George Pickett 2/7 at New York's Morosco Theater, with Luis Alberni, Alan Dinehart, Helen Chandler, 277 perfs.; Whispering Friends by George M. Cohan 2/20 at New York's Hudson Theater, with William Harrigan, Chester Morris, 112 perfs.; The Bachelor Father by Edward Childs Carpenter 2/28 at New York's Belasco Theater, with C. Aubrey Smith, June Walker, 263 perfs.; The Captain from Kopenick (Der Hauptmann von Köpenick) by German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, 31, 3/5 at Berlin's Deutsches Theater; The Phantom Lover (Oktobertag) by Georg Kaiser 3/13 at Hamburg's Kammerspiele; Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O'Neill 4/9 at California's Pasadena Playhouse; Diamond Lil by Mae West 4/9 at New York's Royale Theater, with West and a 32-member supporting cast, 176 perfs.; Bird in Hand by John Drinkwater 4/18 at London's Royalty Theatre, with Felix Aylmer, Charles Mansell, 366 perfs.; The Foundling (Der Findling) by Ernst Barlach 4/21 at Königsberg; Skidding by Utah-born playwright Aurania Rouverol, 42, 5/21 at New York's Bijou Theater, with Marguerite Churchill, Walter Abel, 448 perfs.; The Front Page by former Chicago Daily News staff writer Ben Hecht, 34, and former Hearst's International Magazine staff writer Charles MacArthur, 33, 8/14 at New York's Times Square Theater, with Lee Tracy, Osgood Perkins, Dorothy Stickney, 276 perfs. (MacArthur marries actress Helen Hayes 8/17); Machinal by Sophie Treadwell 9/7 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with Hamilton, Ontario-born actress Jean Adair, 55, Cadiz, Ohio-born actor (William) Clark Gable, 27, Zita Johann in a play based on last year's Snyder-Gray murder case, 91 perfs.; Elmer the Great by George M. Cohan and Ring Lardner 9/24 at New York's Lyceum Theater, with Walter Huston, 40 perfs.; Squaring the Circle (Kvadratura Kruga) by Soviet playwright Valentin Katayev, 31, 9/28 at the Moscow Art Theater, more than 800 perfs.; Topaze by French playwright Marcel Pagnol, 33, 10/9 at the Théâtre des Variétes, Paris; The Far-Off Hills by Esme Stuart Lennox Robinson 10/22 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre; Jealousy by Eugene Walter (who has adapted Louis Verneuil's play) 10/22 at Maxine Elliott's Theater, New York, with Fay Bainter, 136 perfs.; The Humiliation of the Father (Lepdrehumilig) by Paul Claudel 11/26 at Dresden's Schauspielhaus; Holiday by Philip Barry 11/26 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with Hope Williams, Donald Ogden Stewart (his acting debut), 229 perfs.; The Perfect Alibi by A. A. Milne 11/27 at New York's Charles Hopkins Theater, with Leo G. Carroll, Catherine Calhoun Doucet, 255 perfs.; Wings Over Europe by English playwrights Robert M. B. Nichols, 31, and Maurice Browne 12/12 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Grant Stewart, Mexico City-born actor Alexander Kirkland, 27, as physicist Francis Lightfoot, who has discovered the secret of an atomic bomb, 90 perfs.; Mima by David Belasco (who has adapted Ferenc Molnár's play The Red Mill) 12/12 at the Belasco Theater, with Sidney Blackmer, Alan Hale, Lenore Ulric, 180 perfs.; Brothers by San Francisco-born actor-playwright Herbert Ashton, 26, 12/25 at New York's 48th Street Theater, with Sydney, Australian-born actor Ashley Cooper, 47, New York-born actor Bert Lytell, 43, 255 perfs.
Dublin's Gate Theatre (Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe) is founded by Cork-born actor-scenic designer Micheál MacLiammóir, 28, and Hilton Edwards, who will move into their own building in 1930 as they thrive by presenting works by non-Irish playwrights about non-Irish life.
Playwright-lyricist Dorothy Donnelly dies at New York January 3 at age 48; playwright Avery Hopwood drowns while swimming at Juan-les-Pines, France, July 1 at age 46; Dame Ellen Terry dies at her home in Small Hythe, Kent, July 21 at age 80; playwright Hermann Sudermann at Berlin November 22 at age 71; playwright J. Hartley Manners at New York December 19 at age 58.
Radio: The Amos 'n' Andy Show 3/19 on Chicago's WMAQ, with white vaudeville actors Freeman Fisher Gosden, 28, and Charles J. Correll, 38, impersonating the black co-owners of the "Fresh-Air Taxicab Company of America" along with nearly all the other roles, including Kingfish, Lightnin', and Madame Queen. Sponsored by Lever Brothers, the daily 15-minute comedy show will air nationally on NBC beginning in August of next year and soon reach 40 million listeners, two-thirds of the available audience, as movie theaters interrupt their programs to let audiences hear the show that will air for a half hour weekly beginning in 1943 (see 1965); The National Farm and Home Hour 10/2 on NBC with Chicago-born announcer Everett Mitchell, 30, attracts rural family audiences (to 1960); The Voice of Firestone 12/3 on NBC with music (to 1955).
The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences that was founded last year presents its first Academy Awards at a banquet given for 250 people May 16 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Only pictures released since August 1, 1927, are eligible; winners include director Frank Borzage, actor Emil Jannings, actress Janet Gaynor, and (for best picture) William Wellman's Wings. William Cameron Menzies receives an award for art direction (his sets for The Dove and The Tempest have been outstanding). Dublin-born M-G-M art director Cedric Gibbons, 35, has designed the bronze statuette (92.5 percent tin). The statuette is 13.5 inches high, weighs 8.5 pounds, and initially has a 24-karat gold plating; it will be called an "Oscar," probably by movie columnist Sidney Skolsky, now a 22-year-old press agent.
United Artists president Joseph Schenck says August 21 that talkies are just a passing fad, but by next year virtually every U.S. film will be a talkie.
Screen star Norma Shearer, now 26, converts to Judaism and is married September 29 at Los Angeles to the diminutive (but brilliant) Hollywood producer Irving Grant Thalberg, 29. Shearer will have mental problems beginning in 1933, and Thalberg will die in 1936.
Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) is created in October through a merger of a Radio Corporation of America (RCA) division with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and the American Pathé production firm in a deal engineered by Joseph P. Kennedy (whose holdings include Film Booking Office) to secure a market for RCA Photophone, a process to put sound on film. RKO will become a major Hollywood film studio that for 25 years will supply product not only to its own RKO theaters but to other theaters as well (see Hughes, 1948).
Gainsborough Pictures, Ltd. is founded by Birmingham-born film producer Michael Balcon, 32, who takes the view that British films should be designed for a specific home market (see Cinematograph Films Act, 1927), instead of competing with Hollywood in the international market.
Films: King Vidor's The Crowd with Eleanor Boardman (silent); Josef von Sternberg's Docks of New York with George Bancroft and The Last Command with Emil Jannings; G. W. Pabst's The Joyless Street with Greta Garbo; Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc with Maria Falconetti; Victor Seastrom's The Wind with Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson. Also: Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou with Pierre Batcheff, Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, 24, and Buñuel; Charles Chaplin's The Circus with Chaplin; Juri Taritch's Czar Ivan the Terrible; Vsevlod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg; F. W. Murnau's The Four Devils with Janet Gaynor; F. Richard Jones's The Gaucho with Douglas Fairbanks; Joe May's Homecoming with Lars Hanson; George Fitzmaurice's Lilac Time with Gary Cooper, Colleen Moore; Frank Capra's Matinee Idol with Johnnie Walker, Bessie Love (silent); Fred Niblo's The Mysterious Lady with Greta Garbo; Henry Beaumont's Our Dancing Daughters with Joan Crawford, Alabama-born All-American football star Johnny Mack Brown, 24; Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot with Emil Jannings; Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson with Gloria Swanson, Walsh, Lionel Barrymore (a petite four foot eleven, Swanson rejected a $17,500-per-week contract offered by Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor 2 years ago and started her own production company with help from Boston banker Joseph Patrick Kennedy, 39, a frequent visitor to her 24-room Hollywood mansion, whose staff numbers 11); Frank Borzage's Street Angel with Janet Gaynor; King Vidor's Show People with Marion Davies, William Haines; Ted Wilde's Speedy with Harold Lloyd; Charles F. Reisner's Steamboat Bill, Jr. with Buster Keaton; W. (Woodbridge) S. Van Dyke's White Shadows in the South Seas with Raquel Torres, Monte Blue.
Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie has its premiere November 18 at New York's Colony Theater and introduces Mickey Mouse in the first animated cartoon with a sound track. Chicago-born Kansas City-raised animator Walter Elias Disney, 26, devised an innovative multiplane camera 5 years ago, placing each "cell" at a different level to produce a sense of depth and allow different elements in a scene to move independently of each other. Disney has made the film under license from J. R. Bray, who patented a flat cell system in 1910; he came up with the idea for "Mortimer Mouse" on a train trip from New York to Los Angeles but his wife, Lillian, 29, protested that "Mortimer" was too formal and suggested "Mickey" instead. Banker A. P. Giannini has financed Disney over the objections of his brother and son; Disney's Kansas City-born collaborator Ub Iwerks, 27, has turned Disney's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit into Mickey Mouse, bringing the character to life by producing 600 drawings per day, the mouse will be the basis of a vast entertainment and promotion empire; Disney will start a Silly Symphony series of black and white cartoon short subjects featuring Donald Duck, Pluto, and other cartoon characters, and they will rival Mickey Mouse in worldwide popularity (see 1931; 1938).
Hollywood musicals: Victor Fleming's The Awakening with Vilma Banky as Marie, Walter Byron, Louis Wolheim, and the song "Marie" by Irving Berlin.
Stage musicals: Rosalie 1/10 at New York's New Amsterdam Theater, with Marilyn Miller, Frank Morgan, Jack Donahue, music by George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and P. G. Wodehouse, book by Guy Bolton and William Anthony McGuire, 335 perfs.; The Three Musketeers 3/13 at New York's Lyric Theater, with Dennis King as D'Artagnan, Vivienne Segal, Reginald Owen as Cardinal Richelieu, Clarence Derwent as Louis XIII, book by William Anthony McGuire, music by Rudolph Friml, songs that include "March of the Musketeers," 318 perfs.; This Year of Grace 3/22 at the London Pavilion, with London-born singer Sonnie Hale (originally John Robert Hale-Morris), 25, Jessie Matthews (who has married Hale after his divorce from operetta star Evelyn Laye), Tilly Losch, Melville Cooper, book, music, and lyrics by Noël Coward, songs that include "A Room with a View," "World Weary," 316 perfs.; Present Arms 4/26 at New York's Mansfield Theater, with English-born performer Joyce Barbour, 27, Charles King, choreography by Busby Berkeley, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, songs that include "You Took Advantage of Me," 155 perfs.; Blackbirds of 1928 5/9 at the Liberty Theater, with Richmond, Va.-born dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, 39, songs that include "Digga Digga Do" and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" by Jimmy McHugh, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, 518 perfs.; George White's Scandals 7/2 at the Apollo Theater, with vaudevillian Harry Richman (originally Reichman), 33, Ann Pennington, Willie and Eugene Howard, music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by B. G. DeSylva and Lew Brown, 240 perfs.; Good Boy 9/15 at the Hammerstein Theater, with Eddie Buzzell, songs that include "I Wanna Be Loved by You" by Herbert Stothart, Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby (Bronx-born singer Helen Kane, 24, inserts some "boop-boop-a-doops," becomes known as the "boop-boop-a-doop" girl, and is booked into the Palace Theater to sing her specialty), 253 perfs.; The New Moon 9/10 at the Imperial Theater, with Robert Halliday, Evelyn Herbert, music by Sigmund Romberg, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and others, songs that include "One Kiss," "Lover, Come Back to Me," "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise," "Wanting You," "Stout-Hearted Men," 509 perfs.; Paris 10/8 at the Music Box Theater, with Irene Bordoni, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, now 36, and E. Ray Goetz, songs that include "Let's Fall in Love" with lyrics that begin, "Let's do it" 195 perfs.; Hold Everything 10/10 at the Broadhurst Theater, with Bert Lahr, Jack Whiting, Victor Moore, Ona Munson, book by B. G. DeSylva, music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by DeSylva and Lew Brown, songs that include "You're the Cream in My Coffee," 413 perfs.; Three Cheers 10/15 at the Globe Theater, with Patsy Kelly, Will Rogers, music by Raymond Hubbell, book by Anne Caldwell and R. H. Burnside, lyrics by Caldwell, 210 perfs.; Animal Crackers 10/23 at the 44th Street Theater, with the Four Marx Brothers, New York-born actress Margaret Dumont, 39, book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, music and lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, 191 perfs.; Treasure Girl 11/8 at the Alvin Theater, with Gertrude Lawrence, Clifton Webb, book by Vinent Lawrence, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, songs that include "I've Got a Crush on You," "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling," "Oh, So Nice," 68 perfs.; Whoopee! 12/4 at the New Amsterdam Theater, with Eddie Cantor, Russian-born dancer Tamara Geva, 22, book by William Anthony McGuire, music and lyrics by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, songs that include "Love Me or Leave Me," "Makin' Whoopee," 379 perfs.
Vaudevillian Eddie Foy Sr. dies on a farewell tour at Kansas City, Mo., February 16 at age 71; comedienne-songwriter Nora Bayes dies of cancer at Brooklyn March 19 at age 48; composer Leslie Stuart at Richmond, Surrey, March 27 at age 64; composer Howard Talbot at London September 12 at age 63.
Ballet: Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova, 18, completes her classical training and makes her debut with Leningrad's Mariinsky Ballet, beginning a spectacular 32-year career that will make her a worldwide favorite.
Opera: The Three-Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) 8/31 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, with Austrian-born actress-singer Lotte Lenya (Karoline Wilhelmine Blamauer Lenja), 27, as Jenny, music by her husband, Kurt Weill, libretto by Bertolt Brecht, who has transposed the Beggar's Opera of 1728 into the idiom of Germany's Weimar Republic. Tennessee-born soprano Grace Moore, 26, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut singing the role of Mimi in the 1896 Puccini opera La Bohème.
Composer Leos Janacek dies of pneumonia at Moravská (later Ostrava) August 12 at age 74.
First performances: Symphonic Piece by Maine-born Harvard music professor Walter (Hamor) Piston, 34, 3/6 at Boston's Symphony Hall. Piston graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1924 and has studied at Paris with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger; Variations for Orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg 12/2 at Berlin; America: An Epic Rhapsody in Three Parts for Orchestra by Ernest Bloch, text from poems by Walt Whitman 12/20 and 12/21 at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and San Francisco; An American in Paris by George Gershwin 12/13 at New York's Carnegie Hall with Gershwin at the piano, Walter Damrosch conducting.
The Interlochen Center for the Arts has its beginnings in the Interlochen Arts Camp founded in a wooded area on the shores of two lakes near Traverse City, Mich., by Kansas born violinist and music teacher Joseph E. Maddy, 36, who has been a member of the Minneapolis Symphony. Interlochen will continue into the 21st century, becoming the largest institution of its kind as it grows to attract students aged 8 to 18 from 50 states and more than foreign countries with programs in music, theater arts, dance, creative writing, and visual art.
Rudy Vallée forms his own band and opens at New York's Heigh-Ho Club with a megaphone to amplify his voice. The first "crooner," Hubert Prior Vallée, 27 (Yale '27) is a self-taught saxophonist who worked his way through a year at the University of Maine and 3 years at Yale with interruptions for musical engagements, sings the Maine "Stein Song," and makes his theme song "My Time Is Your Time."
Lawrence Welk, 24, starts a small band and launches a half-century career with broadcasts to rural South Dakota audiences from a Yankton radio station. The accordionist will call his music "Champagne Music" beginning in 1938 and write his own theme song "Bubbles in the Wine."
The Mills Brothers cut their first record to begin a career that will continue for more than half a century. The Piqua, Ohio-born singers include Herbert, 18; Harry, 16; Donald, 15; and John Jr.
Belgian-born French gypsy guitarist Django (originally Jean-Baptiste) Reinhardt, 18, burns his left hand severely in a caravan fire that leaves him with only two functioning fingers, but he has been playing professionally for 5 years and perseveres (see Quintet Hot Club, 1934).
Popular songs: "Puttin' On the Ritz" by Irving Berlin; "The Breeze and I" by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, lyrics by Al Stillman; "Sweet Sue—Just You" by Chicago-born composer Victor Young, 28, lyrics by Will J. Harris, 28; "Sweet Lorraine" by Rudy Vallée's piano player Cliff Burwell, 28, lyrics by Lithuanian-born writer Mitchell (originally Michael) Parish, 28; "I'll Get By" by New York-born composer Fred E. Ahlert, 36, lyrics by Roy Turk; "She's Funny That Way" by Neil Moret, lyrics by Billy Rose and New York-born writer E. Y. "Yip" Harburg (originally Isidore Hochburgh), 32, whose nickname is Yiddish for squirrel.
René LaCoste wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Helen Wills in women's singles; Henri Cochet wins in U.S. men's singles, Wills in women's.
Trinidadian cricketer Learie (Nicholas) Constantine, 26, so impresses the crowd at Lord's Cricket Ground, London, in June that spectators become aware for the first time of West Indian cricket's high standards. Constantine goes on to become the first West Indian player in England to achieve the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a single season.
The Olympic Games at Amsterdam attract 3,905 contestants from 46 countries. Uruguay wins the gold medal in football (soccer), repeating its 1924 triumph, and Finland's Paavo Nurmi wins his 10th, 11th, and 12th Olympic medals, but U.S. athletes again win the most medals in the first games to have track-and-field events for women and to use the symbolic torch. Oakland, Calif.-born swimmer Clarence Lindon "Buster" Crabbe, 18, wins the gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle and signs a Hollywood film contract; Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie, 16, has won her first Olympic gold medal in the winter games at St. Moritz.
U.S. Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller, 25, retires after having set 67 world records and won three Olympic gold medals for the U.S. swimming team. Weissmuller will have a Hollywood screen test in 1930 and make 19 films in 18 years portraying Tarzan, the jungle man created by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1914.
Spanish picadors and their horses get some protection from a law requiring that horses wear a mattress-like armor strapped over one side and under the belly and that picadors wear steel armor over their right legs.
Portugal outlaws the killing of bulls in the ring but permits bullfighting to continue without killing.
Jimmy Foxx joins Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics to begin a career in which he will break Babe Ruth's home run average (see 1920). The Athletics will trade James Emory Foxx, 20, to the Boston Red Sox in 1935; he will move to the Chicago Cubs in 1942 and will play his final season for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1945.
The New York Yankees win the World Series, defeating the St. Louis Cardinals 4 games to 0.
The Boston Garden opens November 17 in Causeway Street, having been lighted 3 nights earlier by President Coolidge from the White House with a ceremonial key made from nuggets of Yukon gold. Created by Tex Rickard of Madison Square Garden fame and built at a cost of $4 million, the new 14,890-seat arena will host boxing matches, basketball and hockey games, track meets, the circus, firemen's balls, and other events until September 29, 1995 (see FleetCenter, 1995).
Welcome Wagon International, Inc., has its beginnings at Memphis, Tenn., where advertising agency head Thomas W. Briggs introduces new residents to his clients by hiring agents to make personal calls.
The British fashion house Lachasse has its beginnings in the couture sportswear branch of a textile company; started by Fred Singleton, its chief designer until 1933 will be Dublin-born London Polytechnic graduate Digby Morton, 21, who asserts that British women will insist on French labels and whose first collection next year will feature Ardara tweeds, large herringbone wools, and unusual color combinations such as lime green and duck-egg blue with dark brown in diagonal stripes and checks (see 1934).
A national survey of fashion on U.S. college campuses shows that Harris tweed is the most popular fabric among men, but club men at Princeton favor blue blazers with brass buttons.
Troy, N.Y.-born Cluett, Peabody & Co. research director Sanford L. (Lockwood) Cluett, 54, patents a "Sanforizing" process for cotton that limits shrinkage to no more than 1 percent (see Arrow shirt, 1921). Inventor Cluett joined his uncles' firm in 1919 after obtaining a number of patents in various unrelated fields, neckband (collar detached) shirts have been going out of fashion, but shrinkage has wrinkled shirts with permanently attached collars. Cluett has studied the issue, found that cotton is stretched lengthwise while moving through the mills that spin and finish it, reasoned that a pushing counteraction in the manufacturing process might correct the problem, and devised a high-speed machine in which cloth passes over a contracting elastic felt blanket.
Textile executive Spencer Love's Burlington Mills introduces rayon dresses that become highly fashionable as artificial silk hosiery and other apparel gain popularity (see commerce, 1923). Estimated worldwide production of rayon has grown to nearly 266 million pounds valued at more than $81 million (see commerce, 1934).
Helena Rubinstein sells her enterprise for $3 million (see 1914). She will buy it back next year for $1.5 million and have a $60 million business by the time of her death at age 94 in 1965.
The Breuer chair designed by Hungarian-born architect Marcel Lajos Breuer, 26, is introduced by Vienna's Gebruder Thonet of 1876 bentwood chair fame.
The La-Z-Boy recliner created by Monroe, Mich., woodworker Edward Knabusch and his farmer cousin Edwin Shoemaker, 21, is an upholstered deckchair. They will introduce the Reclina-Rocker in 1961.
Former $1 watch promoter Robert H. Ingersoll dies at Denver September 4 at age 68 (his wife, Roberta, committed suicide in December 1926).
Fleer's Dubble Bubble brand bubble gum goes on sale December 26 in a test at Philadelphia. Frank H. Fleer Co. cost accountant Walter E. Diemer, 23, is no chemist but has been experimenting for more than a year and found a formula that is stretchier and less sticky than existing formulae. His product is colored pink because that was the only food coloring Diemer had on hand; he takes a five-pound batch to a local grocer, who sells out in one afternoon, and Dubble Bubble will have no competition until the late 1940s. Fleer will receive no royalties but will travel around the world marketing the gum and teaching salesmen how to blow bubbles.
American Tobacco Co. boss George Washington Hill promotes Lucky Strike cigarettes to women with the slogan "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" in an effort to persuade women that candy is fattening while smoking is not (see 1929; Chesterfield, 1926).
New York police arrest gangster Meyer Lansky on murder charges March 7 (see 1918), but the case is dropped and Lansky, now 25, obtains U.S. citizenship later in the year (see 1918; Las Vegas, 1946).
Gambler Arnold Rothstein receives a message at Lindy's Restaurant November 4 to come to Room 349 of New York's Park Central Hotel at 870 Seventh Avenue, between 55th and 56th streets, and is shot in the stomach when he arrives, probably because he has welshed on a bet, perhaps to fellow-gambler George C. McManus. He dies 2 days later at age 46 and his killer will not be found. He has been living with his wife, Carolyn, at 912 Fifth Avenue, and his death tempts his onetime bodyguard Jack "Legs" Diamond, a bootlegger, to attempt a takeover of Rothstein's crime syndicate (Diamond will be killed upstate in December 1931).
At least 1,565 Americans die from drinking bad liquor, hundreds are blinded, many are killed in bootlegger wars. Federal agents and Coast Guardsmen are making 75,000 arrests per year and enforcement of Prohibition laws costs U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars, but the laws are openly flouted.
The prefabricated Dymaxion House designed by Massachusetts-born architectural visionary R. (Richard) Buckminster Fuller, 33, has rooms hung from a central mast with outer walls of continuous glass (see 1945).
City planner Sir Ebenezer Howard dies at Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, May 1 at age 78, having had a worldwide influence with his proposal for "garden cities."
The planned community of Radburn, N.J., goes up with designs by Rochester, N.Y.-born architect and city planner Clarence S. Stein, 46, and his Lawrence, Kansas-born colleague Henry Wright, 51, whose aim is not to make the most economical use of land but the most economical use of people with details planned to protect residents from air pollution, the abrasive effects of noise, needless tensions, fears, and alienation. Economic factors will delay completion of the first modern "new town," but Stein and Wright will go on to design Chatham Village outside Pittsburgh, Sunnyside Gardens in Queens (N.Y), and Kitimat in British Columbia.
Air conditioning is installed in the House of Representatives at Washington, D.C., and will be installed next year in the Senate (see 1922; Rivoli Theater, 1925). The heat and humidity of the nation's capitol have made it almost uninhabitable in summer, and the advent of air conditioning will bring an increase in the city's population and longer sessions for Congress (see White House, Supreme Court, 1930).
Detroit's 47-story Greater Penobscot building is completed at the corner of Griswold and First streets.
The Beverly Wilshire Hotel is completed on Rodeo Drive at Beverly Hills, Calif.
London's Grosvenor House hotel opens in Park Line with 467 rooms on eight floors.
Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel opens December 11 to give the crown colony a luxury hostelry.
Bryce Canyon National Park created February 28 in southern Utah is about 50 miles from Zion National Park (see 1909). Authorized as a national monument in 1924 on land homesteaded by Ebenezer Bryce in 1875, the canyon has a rim whose elevation varies from 8,000 to 9,000 feet (2,440 to 2,740 meters), higher than Grand Canyon; the park embraces 36,010 acres of amphitheaters, pinnacles, spires, and walls created by natural erosion.
California's 2-year-old St. Francis (San Francisquito) Dam near Saugus gives way on the night of March 12, sending 12 billion gallons of water down the Santa Clarita Valley, ripping up trees, boulders, and concrete structures, washing thousands of acres of topsoil 60 miles downstream into the Pacific, leaving the land covered with up to 15 feet of mud, and killing perhaps 500 people (including many undocumented Mexican farm workers). William Mulholland, now 81, has designed the 200-foot high dam and assumes blame for the tragedy (he is found guilty in a lawsuit and resigns but will be exonerated more than 60 years hence when it is found that one end of his concrete structure was on a geological fault undetectable by existing methods); the slightly older Mulholland Dam in the Hollywood Hills is renamed the Hollywood Dam.
A Flood Control Act passed by Congress May 15 provides an estimated $325 million to be spent over the course of 10 years for levee work on the lower Mississippi (see 1927; 1933).
Scotts Turf Builder is the first fertilizer for home lawns (see Scotts Co., 1868). Home owners up to now have depended on farm fertilizers to improve their lawns, but the Marysville, Ohio, company has found a readily available nutrient source with a high nitrogen content.
A hurricane hits West Palm Beach, Fla., September 16 with winds so strong that they propel a surge from Lake Okeechobee across lands west of the lake, engulfing rural communities and drowning at least 1,836 people in 11 feet of water.
China has a crop shortfall; more than 3 million people will starve to death in the next 2 years as famine takes its toll.
Josef Stalin orders collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the first Five-Year Plan. Peasants burn crops, slaughter livestock, and hide grain from state collectors. Economist Nikolay D. Kondratev speaks out against total collectivization and loses his job at the Timiriazev Agricultural Academy where he has taught since 1920; he will be arrested in 1930, stand trial in 1931, and be sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment (see 1931; human rights, 1938).
Soviet scientists lead the world in plant breeding and genetic livestock development, largely as a result of biological research programs developed by Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, 41, to benefit socialist agriculture. Vavilov has studied plant genetics at Cambridge under the late English biologist William Bateson and since 1916 has been making expeditions to various parts of the world, collecting thousands of wheat specimens and varieties of wild plants (but see 1940).
Capsicums (peppers) contain nearly four times as much vitamin C (ascorbic acid) as lemons, says Hungarian-born biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi (von Nagyrapolt), 35, who isolates the antiscorbutic acid at the Cambridge, England, laboratory of Frederick Gowland Hopkins (see 1918; Lind, 1747; Hopkins, 1906; King, 1932).
Progresso Foods has its beginnings in a firm started at New Orleans by immigrant Giuseppe Uddo of Taormina to import virgin Sicilian olive oil. His company will grow to become a major producer of ready-to-eat soups, bread crumbs, tomato sauces, marinated artichoke hearts, and pignoli nuts as well as olive oil.
Kellogg introduces Rice Krispies and will advertise it in 1932 as being "So crisp, it crackles in cream." A gnome wearing a baker's hat will appear on the cereal box's side panel in 1933, two other such gnomes will be added in print ads a year or two later, but the "Snap! Crackle! Pop!" trio will not be on the box until about 1937. The new breakfast food is 10 percent sugar.
Daniel F. Gerber improves baby foods with better methods for straining peas and discovers from a market survey that a large market exists for such foods if they can be sold cheaply through grocery stores (see 1927). He offers six cans for $1 (less than half the price of baby foods sold at pharmacies) to customers who will send in coupons filled out with the names and addresses of their grocers (see 1929).
Peter Pan Peanut Butter is the first hydrogenated, homogenized peanut butter and the first to have national advertising (see 1904; Normann, 1901). The E. K. Pond division of Swift Packing Co. has licensed a "churning" process invented in 1922 by Alameda, Calif., food processor Joseph L. Rosefield to stabilize peanut butter by replacing a significant part of its natural peanut oil with hydrogenated peanut oil. The new brand takes its name from the 24-year-old James M. Barrie character (see Skippy, 1932; Jif, 1958).
Velveeta cheese is introduced by J. L. Kraft & Co. A cooking cheese loaf with a taste all its own, Velveeta was originally developed in 1915 by Phenix Cheese Co. chemist Elmer E. Eldredge. Kraft promotes Velveeta as a unique product that children will like (see Miracle Whip salad dressing, 1933; Cheez Whiz, 1953).
President Coolidge sets a protective tariff of 50 percent on genuine imported Swiss cheese. Wisconsin cheesmakers present the president with a 147-pound wheel of Green County Swiss cheese to show their appreciation.
President-elect Hoover is widely quoted as having promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage (a paraphrase of the remark reportedly made by France's Henri IV to the king of Savoy in 1606).
Sliced bread is introduced in late November at Battle Creek, Mich., where grocer Gustav Papendick has improved on a machine devised by Iowa-born inventor and salesman O. F. (Otto Frederick) Rohwedder, who has been inspired by the electric toaster to create the first commercial bread slicer (see Toastmaster, 1926). Rohwedder began work on the project in 1912, was told in 1915 that he had only a year to live, and made his first model in 1917. It was destroyed in a fire 6 years ago. A commercial bakery at Chillicothe, Mo., used his improved model in May, but Papendick has recognized the need to have the sliced loaves placed in cardboard trays to support them as they are wrapped. Unlike machines used at delicatessens to cut off one slice of meat at a time, Rohwedder's reciprocating knife-frame machine can slice an entire loaf in one operation. After a loaf is sliced it must be wrapped at once to keep the slices together, and many bakers, reluctant to invest in new equipment and labor, will wait to see whether sliced bread is more than a passing fad. Consumers are suspicious at first (sliced bread does grow stale faster) but will soon accept the product enthusiastically (see Wonder Bread, 1930). Housewives who slice their own bread may cut only a few slices in order to avoid waste, and their families may eat only what has been sliced; they are more likely to eat extra slices if the bread is already sliced. Bread slices from O. F. Rohwedder's machine, moreover, tend to be thinner than those cut at home, and having more slices per loaf will result in greater use of butter, margarine, cheese, jams, jellies, and peanut butter.
"I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it," reads E. B. White's caption to Carl Rose's New Yorker magazine cartoon December 8 showing a child refusing to eat broccoli. The vegetable has only recently been introduced from Italy by an enterprising grower in northern California's Santa Clara Valley.
Distillers Corp.-Seagram is founded in March by Samuel and Alan Bronfman, who last year acquired Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, founded in 1870 (see 1924). The Bronfmans are shipping liquor that winds up in the United States despite Prohibition laws; they will make Seagram the world's largest producer of alcoholic beverages (see 1933).
A Canadian immigration station opens in a shed at Pier 21 in Halifax, N.S., which will serve as Canada's Ellis Island until 1971, with three-fourths of arrivals coming from Europe. Within 70 years, only 20 percent of immigrants will be from Europe (half will be from Asia), and most will come by plane, but 20 percent of the nation's 30 million people will be descendants of people who came through the Halifax processing center.
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