1934

1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940

political events

France verges on civil war following the suicide at Chamonix January 3 of Russian-born promoter Serge Alexandre Stavisky, 47, who has been accused of issuing fraudulent bonds against the security of the municipal pawnshop at Bayonne, evidently engaged in other dubious speculations, and been protected from legal action by corrupt ministers and deputies. A high official in the public prosecutor's office at Paris is found murdered; allegations are made that he was killed to protect some well-known government leaders; Premier Camille Chautemps, 50, is accused of complicity and resigns after just 2 months in office; and communists join with fascist and royalist groups in saying that the scandal demonstrates the corruption and inefficiency of the democratic government. Gen. Jean-Baptiste Marchand dies at Paris January 12 at age 70. The city has serious riots February 6, 7, and 9, and a general strike ensues. The republic is saved only by the establishment of a coalition government headed by officials untouched by the Stavisky affair. Minister of war Marshal Henri Pétain frees 1.2 billion francs to complete the first part of the Maginot Line begun in 1929 with reinforced concrete pillboxes, anti-tank emplacements, barbed wire, and miles of subterranean connecting roads and rail lines that will enable troops to be moved quickly from their barracks in one fortification to another. Each of the 50-odd large blockhouses is to be well stocked with everything needed to support life underground (but see 1940).

The king of the Belgians Albert I dies February 17 in a mountain-climbing accident at age 58 after a 25-year reign; he is succeeded by his 32-year-old son, who will reign until 1950 as Leopold III.

Austria's chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss issues a decree in February dissolving all political parties except for his own Fatherland Front (see 1933). He antagonizes Vienna's working class by ordering police raids on socialist headquarters and a bombardment of the 2,000-unit socialist apartment complex, the Karl Marx Hof, which cost $4 million to build and is destroyed by Heimwehr artillery February 13 while its occupants return fire with machine guns. Austrian Nazis seize the Vienna radio station July 25, force the staff to broadcast a report that Chancellor Dollfuss has resigned, enter the chancellory, and shoot Dollfuss dead. Italy and Yugoslavia concentrate troops on the frontier; Berlin disavows any connection with the coup attempt. The Austrian government orders a roundup of all Nazis (see 1938).

Bulgarian fascists stage a coup May 19, seizing power with help from Boris I, who has reigned since 1918 (see 1923; 1943).

A Nazi blood purge June 30 kills at least 77 Party members alleged to have plotted against Adolf Hitler (by some accounts the dead number hundreds, even thousands). Many of the brown-shirted radicals gathered at the Hanselbauer Hotel outside Munich are homosexual thugs whose leaders harbor socialistic views that have alarmed the industrialists who provide Hitler with his financial support; Nazi storm troopers raid the lakeside resort at Wiesse and eliminate men accused of disloyalty by Halle-born Gestapo deputy chief Reinhard Heydrich, 30, and Heinrich Himmler. Victims include primarily the Sturm Abteilungen (SA) leader Ernst Röhm, now 46, who has reorganized the SA and antagonized regular army generals by training it into a professional army of more than 3 million men that far outnumbers the regular army. His critics have denounced Röhm with charges that he had left-wing leanings and wanted to replace Hitler, Röhm refuses Hitler's offer to let him commit suicide, whereupon Hitler supervises the mass liquidation of men who include also the 42-year-old Gregor Strasser and his supporters, who have been killed along with those of Röhm (news of the purge is suppressed until July 13, when Hitler gives a speech in which he refers to the "Night of the Long Knives," a phrase taken from a popular Nazi song). Hitler replaces Strasser as head of the Reich Organization with Robert Ley. Getting rid of his rivals establishes the supremacy of Hitler's elite corps, soon to be called the Schutzstaffel (SS) (see Himmler, 1935).

Power and Earth (Macht und Erde) by Karl Haushofer implies that a dynamic Germany has the natural right to grasp all of Eurasia and dominate the oceanic countries. Now 67, Haushofer has known Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess since their imprisonment in 1923. Based in part on a misinterpretation of the late Friedrich Ratzel's 1901 essay "Liebensraum" and in part on British political geographer Halfor John Mackinder's 1904 paper "The Geographical Pivot of History," Haushofer's theories of geopolitics will help shape Hitler's demands for lebensraum (living space). Rudolf Hess meets with Haushofer and a Japanese official at Haushofer's house in Munich (see Saar Basin, 1935).

Germany's president von Hindenburg dies August 2 at age 87. Adolf Hitler that afternoon has the army pledge personal allegiance to him rather than to the country, and a plebiscite August 19 gives Hitler 88 percent of the votes needed to assume the presidency. Hitler retains the title der führer. Former German general Alexander von Kluck dies at Berlin October 19 at age 88. Wounded in March 1915, he retired in 1916.

German housewife Gertrude Schlotz-Klinke, 32, is appointed Reichsfrauenführer (National Women's Leader) and made head of the Nazi Women's Group. The mother of six, she will eventually have two more husbands and bear five more children (see 1945).

The Soviet Union joins the League of Nations September 18.

Yugoslavia's Aleksandr I arrives at Marseilles October 9 and is assassinated at age 45 along with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, 72. The assassin is a Macedonian terrorist working with right-wing Croatians (the Ustase) headed by Bosnian-born fascist Ante Pavelic, 45, who are headquartered in Hungary (see 1941); the League of Nations averts war between Yugoslavia and Hungary, and Aleksandr is succeeded after a 13-year reign by his 11-year-old son, who will reign until 1945 as Peter II, initially with Aleksandr's cousin Prince Paul as regent.

French colonial administrator Marshal Louis-H.-G. Lyautey dies at Thorey April 21 at age 79, having established the protectorate over Morocco; former French president Raymond Poincaré dies at Paris October 15 at age 74.

Turkey's Mustafa Kemal issues orders November 25 that all Turks must assume surnames by January 1. His own, he says, will be Atatürk, meaning "Father of the Turks."

Josef Stalin's close collaborator Sergeo Mironovich Kirov is assassinated at Leningrad December 1 at age 46. His murder reveals the strength and desperation of the opposition to Stalin within the Communist Party, and Stalin orders a Great Purge of suspected Trotskyites (see 1929); trials begin under the direction of deputy prosecutor Andrei Yanuaryevich Vishinsky, 50, who gained a reputation for aggressive tactics last year when he charged some British engineers with trying to wreck Soviet hydroelectric construction (the Metro-Vickers trial). Many of the Party's most prominent older leaders will be convicted of treason in the spectacular trials that follow the incident at Leningrad (see 1936).

India's All-India Congress Socialist Party is founded.

The Tydings-McDuffie Act signed into law by President Roosevelt March 24 provides for Philippine independence to take effect July 4, 1946, after a 10-year transitional period of Commonwealth government (see Wood-Forbes Mission, 1921). The Philippine Senate has previously rejected a similar act but gives its approval in May to the new one, which puts most internal matters in the hands of Filipinos while reserving monetary matters, foreign affairs, and defense to U.S. jurisdiction while the Philippines remain U.S. territory; Filipinos elect delegates to a constitutional government July 10 (see 1935).

Japanese admiral Koshaku Togo Heihachiro of 1905 Tsushima Strait fame dies at Tokyo May 30 at age 86. Admiral Keisuke Okada, 66, becomes prime minister and tries to moderate extremist right-wing military influences in the government (but see 1936).

Chinese communist forces under Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) leave Jiangxi (Kiangsi) in October with Nationalist Guomindang (Kuomintang, or KMT) armies in pursuit. In the Long March that will last until October of next year, Mao's forces will be on the move for 268 days out of 368; they will travel 6,000 miles to Yan-an (Yunnan), crossing 18 mountain ranges and six major rivers; but 68,000 of Mao's 90,000 men will be lost in continual rear-guard actions against Guomindang troops (see 1931; 1937).

Indonesian nationalist leader Omar Said Tjokroaminoto dies at Jogjakarta December 17 at age 52, having tutored the now more radical leader Achmad Sukarno, 33 (see 1945).

Paraguayan forces under the command of Gen. José Estigarribia renew their drive against the Bolivian post of Ballivián January 9, ending a 3-week truce in the continuing Chaco War (see 1933). The heaviest fighting of the war goes on from March to July, and Ballivián falls November 17 (see 1935).

Nicaraguan National Guard Gen. Antonio Somoza, 38, invites guerrilla leader Gen. Augusto Cesar Sandino to a meeting in February. Having fought the U.S. occupation force from 1927 until its withdrawal in 1933, Sandino is killed in cold blood (see 1936).

Mexico amends her constitution to extend the term of the presidency to 6 years, the minister of war and marine Gen. Lázaro Cardenas, 39, is elected president July 2; he promises to "revive the revolutionary activity of the masses" (see PRI, 1929). Although he has been chosen by strongman Plutarco Calles, he regards Calles as too conservative and will force him into exile next year.

President Roosevelt removes U.S. Marines from Haiti in August after 19 years of occupation in which they have undertaken public works programs (health clinics, roads, sewage systems) but have excluded all but mulattoes from public office and antagonized most of the population by subjecting them to racist treatment. The United States will retain direct fiscal control until 1941 and indirect control until 1947.

A congressional committee investigates reports that former U.S. Marine Corps commandant Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler has been involved in efforts to organize an American fascist organization (see bonus marchers, 1932).

Gerard Vultee designs a V-1 attack bomber that will be purchased by Brazil, China, Turkey, and the USSR, but Vultee and his young wife, Sylvia, will be killed in late January 1938 when their Stinson crashes into an Arizona peak during a snow squall (see transportation, 1930).

North American Aviation begins production of a military training plane designed by Wheeling, W. Va.-born pilot-turned-engineer James H. (Howard) "Dutch" Kindelberger, 39, who was chief draftsman for Glenn L. Martin and as chief engineer for Douglas Aircraft led the team that designed the DC-1 and DC-2 (see politics [Mustang], 1940).

The U.S. Army orders six instrument trainers from the 5-year-old Binghamton, N.Y., firm Link Aeronautical Corp. following a series of highly publicized accidents by pilots flying mail planes. Inventor Edwin A. Link has modified his device to make it an instructional tool for instrument flying. Foreign orders come in from Japan, the Soviet Union, and other countries (permission from the State Department is required for such sales), and Link next year will establish Link Aviation Devices Inc. at Binghamton to manufacture his instrument trainers (see 1941; Air Force, 1935).

A semiautomatic rifle patented by Canadian-born inventor John C. (Cantius) Garand, 46, at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts fires a clip of eight .276-caliber rounds, weighs just over nine pounds, is simply constructed and easy to maintain, and will be adopted by the U.S. Army in 1936, when it will be modified to take .30-caliber ammunition, named the M1, and put into mass production to replace the bolt-action Springfield repeater used since 1903. The world's first standard-issue autoloading infantry rifle, the M1 uses propellant gases to operate its autoloading mechanism; it will remain the standard until 1957, and more than 5 million will be manufactured (see 1941).

Italian and Ethiopian troops clash at Ualual December 5 on the frontier between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia (see 1896; Tripartite Pact, 1906). Gen. Rodolfo Graziani, 52, has been appointed governor of Somaliland, Benito Mussolini will use the incident at Ualual as an excuse to invade Ethiopia next year, and Gen. Graziani will spearhead the attack from the south (see 1935).

human rights, social justice

SS chief Heinrich Himmler is appointed head of German concentration camps July 13. He will have villagers build the camps in which they are to be incarcerated.

"The message of woman's emancipation is a message discovered solely by the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped with the same spirit," says Adolf Hitler in a speech at Nuremberg September 8. "When our opponents imply that we in Germany have instituted a tyrannical regimentation of women, I can only confess that without the endurance and really loving devotion of woman to the Movement, I could never have led the Party to victory."

Cuba gives women the right to vote on the same basis as men.

The Wheeler-Howard Act (Indian Reorganization Act) adopted by Congress June 18 curtails future allotment to individuals of tribal lands that have been owned on a communal basis and provides for the return of surplus lands to the tribes rather than to homesteaders (see Meriam Report, 1928). In an effort to reduce federal control of Native American affairs, it authorizes funding of a revolving credit program for tribal land purchases, educational assistance, and assistance of tribal organization, and encourages written constitutions and charters empowering the tribes to manage their internal affairs.

Washington, D.C.-born Howard University law professor Charles Hamilton Houston addresses the annual conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Now 38, Houston went from Amherst to Harvard Law School, served as an officer in France during the Great War, saw racism and segregation there and in America after his return, conducted a survey in the South 7 years ago, visited 17 cities from Savannah to New Orleans, and found only 487 black lawyers below the Mason-Dixon Line (in some states the ratio of white lawyers to black was more than 200,000 to one). He opposes the voluntary segregation favored by W. E. B. Du Bois, saying that if "the Negro is to make any further progress" against "private prejudice and public administration" he "must unite with the poor white." He recommends to the NAACP board in October that it concentrate its legal efforts on ending discrimination in education, demonstrate the inequalities that exist, provide clear evidence of teacher-salary differentials, and begin efforts to overturn the Supreme Court's Plessy decision of 1896. The board appoints him special counsel (see 1935).

Former Mississippi governor Theodore G. Bilbo wins election to the U.S. Senate with promises to "raise more hell than Huey Long." Now 57, Bilbo will support most New Deal measures but grow increasingly strident in his racism, advocating resettlement of U.S. blacks in Africa; denouncing a federal anti-lynching law; blasting a Washington, D.C., law that permits racial intermarriage by saying that children born to mixed couples will be a "motley melee of miscegenated mongrels"; and vilifying communists, labor unions, "dagoes," and "kikes."

commerce

President Roosevelt tells Congress January 4 that costs of the national economic recovery program will reach $10.5 billion by June 20, 1935.

The U.S. Treasury stabilizes the price of gold in January at $35 per ounce, a price that will hold for 40 years. The price has risen progressively since late October 1933 from its long-maintained level of $20.67 per ounce.

The Export-Import Bank of Washington created February 12 with $11 million in capital helps to finance and facilitate exports and imports of commodities; $10 million has come from the Reconstruction Finance Corp. (RFC) created in 1932.

The Civil Works Emergency Relief Act passed by Congress February 15 appropriates another $950 million for the continuation of civil works programs and direct relief aid.

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald refuses February 22 to see 500 Scottish hunger marchers who have trudged from Glasgow to London.

U.S. Relief Administrator Harry L. Hopkins reports April 13 that 4.7 million families are on relief.

The Johnson Debt Default Act passed by Congress April 13 forbids additional loans to any country in default of debt payments to the United States.

The United States joins the International Labor Organization (ILO) started in 1919.

Congress creates a National Railroad Adjustment Board to guarantee railway workers the right to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing (see 1926).

The Corporate Bankruptcy Act adopted by Congress June 7 allows corporations to reorganize if they can obtain support from two-thirds of their creditors.

A National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) created June 19 by a joint resolution of Congress replaces the National Labor Board established under the NRA last year (see Labor Relations Act, 1935). Paris-born Philadelphia lawyer Francis (Beverley) Biddle, 48, campaigned against his fellow Republican Herbert Hoover 2 years ago and President Roosevelt rewards him for his political support, making him chairman of the NLRB, but Biddle will return to his practice next year (see energy [TVA], 1938).

Secretary of State Cordell Hull persuades Congress that the high tariffs of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act have contributed to world depression and should be replaced by mutual tariff relaxation. The Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act passed by Congress June 12 gives the president power to negotiate trade pacts without advice or consent of the Senate, and the first such pact is signed August 24 with Cuba under terms of what is called a "Good Neighbor Policy" (see politics, 1933). Reciprocal tariff-cutting agreements with 18 foreign nations in the next 4 years will bring an increase in world trade.

The Federal Credit Union Act signed into law by President Roosevelt June 26 provides for government regulation of credit unions. A Federal Savings & Loan Association is created June 27, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) makes its first payment (to an East Peoria, Ill., woman) July 3.

A summertime wave of strikes takes U.S. workers off the job and includes the nation's first general strike, called at San Francisco July 16 to show sympathy for a strike of 12,000 International Longshoremen's Association stevedores led in part by Australian-born U.S. organizer Harry Bridges, 32, of the left-wing "Albion Hall" group. Gov. Frank F. Merriam, 68, calls out the state militia to control the situation, but the strikes succeed in ending the shape-up system under which corrupt pier bosses have decided who shall and shall not get jobs. The ILA wins the right to have union-controlled hiring halls (see Bridges, 1937).

Minneapolis police shoot striking truck drivers July 20 in what will be remembered as "Bloody Friday." The city has been a non-union town. Local 574 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters tested its strength in February with a strike against coal-yard operators; it carefully prepared its members for a larger strike against trucking companies, and it struck for union recognition May 15. The strike was settled May 25 with a small wage increase, trucking companies agreed to recognize the Teamsters, but when they tried to scrap the agreement the Teamsters struck again July 16 with roving picket squads. Sympathy strikes have shut down some businesses, farmers in the surrounding area have provided food for the union's commissary, and support for the Teamsters increases after the police have killed four strikers and wounded more than 55. Minnesota's governor calls in the National Guard, but the strikers fight the guardsmen and by year's end Minneapolis is a union town.

The American Liberty League formed in August opposes New Deal economic measures; a bipartisan group, its members include the du Ponts, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., and William Knudsen of General Motors, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward, stockbroker E. F. Hutton, and politicians such as Democrats Alfred E. Smith and John Jakob Raskob.

The largest strike in U.S. history begins September 4 (the day after Labor Day) as 500,000 textile workers in 20 states walk off the job, demanding higher wages and union recognition (see 1933). Wages that were low to begin with have fallen even lower, many mills in Massachusetts and elsewhere have been forced to close, and those that remain open have imposed "stretch-outs," forcing workers who once operated six or eight machines to operate as many as 20. Flying squads of union organizers fan out in automobile caravans half a mile long through Georgia and South Carolina, urging other "lintheads" to join the strike, which becomes violent only after millowners such as Spencer Love of Burlington Mills bring in police, strike breakers, and the National Guard. Seven rioting strikers are shot dead and 20 left wounded at Honea Path, S.C., September 6; three are killed in Rhode Island, and the governor of Georgia declares martial law, carting strikers off to a camp that was used to hold German prisoners of war in 1918. President Roosevelt appoints a committee to investigate the situation September 20, but the committee's report guarantees nothing, not even the right to organize; hunger has eroded the power of the workers, they see that the owners can easily replace them with machines or with unemployed people eager for jobs, and they return to work on orders from union secretary Francis Gorman at Washington, D.C. Strikers lose not only their jobs but also their company-owned homes, and in many cases are blackballed for life from working in the cotton and rayon mills.

Demagogic welfare schemes proliferate. Royal Oak, Mich., radio priest Father Charles Coughlin organizes a National Union for Social Justice based on radical inflation (see religion, 1926). Sen. Huey P. Long (D. La.) presents his Share Our Wealth Program, an "every man a king" wealth redistribution scheme. Elected governor in 1928, Long raised taxes on oil companies and cotton barons to finance his programs, which paved thousands of miles of dirt roads, built bridges, and distributed textbooks to schoolchildren. He insists that the New Deal is not doing enough to alleviate distress, but while sharecroppers and textile workers admire him there is widespread fear that Long is a potential Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini.

Long Beach, Calif., physician Francis E. (Everett) Townsend, 67, urges an Old Age Revolving Pension Plan to be financed by a 2 percent transaction tax. The Townsend Plan is to assure $200 per month for every unemployed American over age 60; some 5 million older Americans will join Townsend clubs to support the plan.

Upton Sinclair campaigns as Democratic candidate for governor of California on an End Poverty in California (EPIC) Plan, but President Roosevelt refuses to support a man who is now widely viewed as a crackpot and is easily defeated.

Massachusetts Democratic Party boss James Michael Curley wins election as governor at age 59; the large, costly public works programs that he will undertake in the next 2 years will be compared to those of Huey Long.

The British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF) is created in an effort to centralize the nation's industries in order to negotiate both with the government and with rival foreign cartels and companies on issues of pricing, quotas, tariffs, and the like (see 1949).

The Swiss Parliament enacts a Bank Secrecy Law to protect the accounts of Jews in Nazi Germany. Numbered accounts have four- or five-digit numbers that depositors write out in script, the number in script becomes the depositor's signature, only two or three senior bank officials know the name of the depositor, and while Swiss law says that banks may not furnish information about such accounts even to Swiss tax authorities (tax evasion is not a criminal offense in Switzerland) and while numbered accounts will be used to safeguard the fortunes of U.S. racketeers, communist espionage agents, and Latin American and Oriental dictators, the Swiss banks will insist on background knowledge of depositors and cooperate with police or authorized investigators in cases of criminal fraud and forgery.

Security Analysis by London-born New York investor Benjamin Graham (originally Grossbaum), 40, and his Columbia University colleague David J. Dodd, 39, pioneers modern security analysis; it creates the first rational basis for evaluating stock and bonds and will remain the standard text for more than 55 years and have sales of more than 100,000 copies. Emphasizing the importance of a stock's book value (the physical assets of the company issuing the stock) the book aims in part to revive investing in the moribund equities market.

Speculator Jesse L. Livermore files for bankruptcy in March (see 1929). His lawyer tells a congressional investigating committee that Livermore has been bankrupt four times but has always repaid his creditors 100 cents on the dollar (see 1940).

A Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) created by Congress June 6 limits bank credit for speculators and polices the securities industry. Boston-born Wall Street speculator (and erstwhile bootlegger) Joseph P. Kennedy is appointed in July to head the new commission despite opposition from New Dealers and from leading newspapers. Now 45 and the father of nine, Kennedy will hold the post for 431 days before being named to head the U.S. Maritime Commission. He asks Yale's Minnesota-born Sterling Professor of Law William O. (Orville) Douglas, 35, for a memorandum on the abuses of corporate reorganization and ways they can be remedied; Douglas produces an eight-volume report and will be appointed to the SEC in 1936 (see 1937; Williams Act, 1968).

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 104.04, up from 99.90 at the end of 1933.

transportation

A Soviet test pilot flies the 40-ton plane Maksim Gorki in June. Designed by aeronautical engineer Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev, 45, the huge craft has six engines on its wings and two more atop its fuselage, but it will collide with another plane next year, killing 35 people.

Delta Air Lines resumes operations after a 4-year hiatus (see 1929). Forced to abandon service when it lost its mail routes in 1930, it has remained alive while founder C. E. Woolman returned to crop dusting, and he now wins an airmail route between Fort Worth, Texas, and Charleston, S.C.; crop-dusting revenues will continue to exceed those from mail or passenger service through the 1930s, but Woolman will move Delta's headquarters to Atlanta in 1941, acquire some DC-3s, and gradually add additional routes (see 1953).

President Roosevelt cancels all airmail contracts February 9 following a Senate investigation into alleged monopolistic practices. Postmaster General Walter F. Brown has given contracts only to companies he considered financially sound and securely established (see Airmail Act of 1930), but Braniff Airways founder Thomas E. Braniff has organized the Independent Air Transport Operators' Association and provided evidence before the Senate's Black Committee, which has held hearings on air transport.

American Airlines is created in April by a reorganization of the 4-year-old American Airways Co. E. L. Cord loses control of the company, whose directors elect Minerva, Texas-born executive C. R. (Cyrus Rowlett) Smith, 35, president October 25. In the next 5 years he will consolidate American's tangle of routes into a smooth network and standardize its miscellaneous collection of aircraft (see DC-3, 1936).

Northwest Airlines is incorporated April 16 (see 1926). Originally a mail carrier between Chicago and Minneapolis, it has expanded city-by-city since 1928 to provide service through the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington State (see 1945).

Continental Air Lines has its beginnings in the Southwest division of Varney Air Transport founded by former Varney president and former United Airlines director Louis H. Mueller, 38, who flies mail between El Paso and Pueblo, Calif. Continental will become a major domestic passenger carrier (see Six, 1936).

New Zealand aviatrix Jean (Gardner) Batten, 24, flies a Gypsy Moth more than 10,500 miles from England to Darwin, Australia, in May, beats Amy Johnson's 1930 speed by nearly 5 days, and becomes the first woman to complete the return trip. Batten abandoned a promising musical career in England 5 years ago, sold her piano, and studied for a pilot's license that she obtained in 1930. Next year she will fly across the South Atlantic to Argentina.

The Air Mail Act of 1934 (Black-McKellar Act) signed into law by FDR June 12 reintroduces the system of competitive bidding for airmail contracts but requires a separation of aircraft manufacturing and air transport companies. Congress orders a breakup of the United Aircraft and Transportation Corp. created early in 1929; United Airlines becomes independent, as do the newly incorporated Seattle-based Boeing Airplane Co. (see 1916) and Connecticut-based United Aircraft, which will become United Technologies in 1975 (see politics [Boeing B-17], 1935).

The Chrysler Airflow introduced by Chrysler Motors January 22 has a streamlined design based on aircraft principles that incorporate the world's first curved one-piece windshield; the car contains many innovative advances, but only 11,292 will be sold and by 1937 Chrysler will abandon the radical design as a costly miscalculation of public acceptance. Chrysler also introduces overdrive.

The Citroën Seven introduced by André Citroën is a low-slung, front-wheel-drive car that will be popular for more than 20 years, but Citroën goes bankrupt and loses control of the company that bears his name (it will be sold in 1936 to Michelin Tire Co.).

Adolf Hitler breaks ground September 25 for an extension of the Autobahn that opened in 1921. He has earlier opposed the limited-access road as elitist but by May 1935 it will extend 37 miles from Frankfurt to Darnstadt.

Greyhound cuts fares between New York and Chicago to as little as $8 in a rate war with competing bus lines (regular fare is $16) (see 1929). The company operates 1,800 33-passenger nickel-plated buses in 43 states; buys the buses from General Motors for $10,000 on a cost-plus contract; pays its drivers $175 per month plus a mileage rate; and grosses $30 million.

The City of Salina goes into service between Kansas City and Salina, Kansas, to begin a new era of streamlined passenger trains on U.S. railroads. The new Union Pacific train has air-conditioned Pullman cars of aluminum alloy.

A new Burlington Zephyr train goes into service between Chicago and Denver, using diesel engines that begin the end of steam power on U.S. railroads (see 1924). The first diesel-powered passenger train, the stainless steel streamliner has a top speed of 112.5 miles per hour and averages 77.6 miles per hour on a 1,017-mile nonstop run between the two cities May 26. Technical issues have prevented the use of stainless steel in large structures, but Edward G. Budd's chief engineer Col. Earl J. W. Ragsdale has devised a "Shotweld" method of controlled-resistance welding that makes it possible to join the elements of the alloy without diminishing its strength. Budd built the first stainless steel airplane 3 years ago, and the sharp contraction of the automobile industry has encouraged him to look for new markets (see 1935; Budd, 1916). By December 1941 Budd will have sold nearly 500 lightweight railroad passenger cars (seeCalifornia Zephyr, 1949).

The Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad adopts the Chessie trademark of a sleeping cat to symbolize its smooth roadbed. The C&O has grown to serve Washington, D.C., Richmond, White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and other Midwestern cities.

Electrical engineer and trolley-car pioneer Frank J. Sprague dies at New York October 25 at age 77.

The Chinese ship Weitung burns January 21 on the Yangzi (Yangtze) River; 216 lives are lost.

The Cunard Line that began in 1839 as the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co. becomes the Cunard-White Star Line May 10 by merging with the White Star Line, which it acquired in 1927. Cunard will drop the White Star name in 1957 (seeQueen Mary, 1936).

The S.S. Morro Castle catches fire off Asbury Park, N.J., September 8; the crew cannot put out the flames, the ship sinks, and 134 lives are lost (see Merchant Marine Academy, 1943).

The S.S. Bremen that went into service in July 1919 sets a new transatlantic speed record November 2, arriving at the Ambrose Channel from Cherbourg in 4 days, 14 hours, 27 minutes.

technology

The pH meter invented by Illinois-born California Institute of Technology chemist Arnold O. (Orville) Beckman, 34, to measure the sourness of lemons provides laboratories with a quick and simple way to measure acidity and alkalinity that can speed up or slow chemical reactions in industrial production. Contained in a walnut box 12 inches high, eight inches deep, and nine inches high, his device measures electric current flowing into a glass electrode immersed in a chemical solution. Beckman will start National Technical Laboratories at Fullerton, Calif., next year to manufacture and sell the meters, and the company will grow to employ some 10,000 people producing more than $2 billion worth of instruments and supplies per year (see spectrophotometer, 1939).

Industrial chemist Arthur D. Little dies of a heart attack at Northeast Harbor, Me., August 1 at age 72, having said, "Research serves to make building stones out of stumbling blocks." The 49-year-old firm that bears his name will continue into the next century, becoming one of the largest U.S. industrial research laboratories and also an international consulting firm with more than 2,500 employees specializing in manufacturing, marketing, energy, information technology, and environmental issues; mechanical engineer Frederick A. Halsey dies of heart disease at New York October 20 at age 75, having seen his compensation plan widely adopted for guaranteeing every worker a wage based on his or her past performance.

science

French physicist Irene Joliot-Curie, 38, and her husband, Frederic, 34, bombard aluminum with alpha particles that are emitted as positively charged helium nuclei from polonium and produce artificial radiation for the first time, turning the aluminum into a radioactive form of phosphorus (see 1904; Cockcroft, 1932). Their work inspires physicist Enrico Fermi to find another way to produce artificial radiation: now 33, he takes neutrons obtained from radioactive beryllium, reduces their speed by passing them through parrafin, and uses them to bombard uranium, producing emissions of radioactive transuranium elements (see 1938; Becquerel, 1896; Fermi, 1926; Segrè, 1937).

Physicist James Chadwick at Cambridge University and his Austrian-born colleague Maurice Goldhaber, 23, bombard a nucleus with high-energy X-rays or gamma rays and discover that they disintegrate the nucleus (see 1932). This nuclear photoelectric effect will lead to the realization that the neutron is heavier than the proton (see Goldhaber, 1937).

Chemist Fritz Haber dies at Basel January 29 at age 65; Marie Curie of pernicious anemia at Sancellemoz, France, July 4 at age 66. Albert Einstein says of her that she was "of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted."

Chemist Jean F. Piccard and his wife make the first successful balloon ascension into the stratosphere October 23, taking off from Dearborn, Mich., reaching a height of 57,579 feet, and collecting data concerning cosmic rays (see 1932). Piccard's twin brother Auguste has previously ascended more than 16 kilometers into the air.

medicine

The Dionne quintuplets born May 28 at Callander, Ontario, are the world's first five infants on record to be born at one delivery and survive. Elzire Dionne, 24, who already has six children, is delivered of five girls by her physician Allen R. Dafoe, 51; the infants Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile, Marie, and Annette average two pounds 11 ounces each and become the center of worldwide attention.

The virus responsible for influenza A is isolated by Indiana-born microbiologist Thomas Francis Jr., 34, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (see 1933; Goodpasture, 1931). Francis will move to New York University Medical School in 1938 and isolate the virus responsible for influenza B in 1940, developing a polyvalent vaccine effective against both strains.

Pathologist William H. Welch dies at Baltimore April 30 at age 84; Nobel histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal at Madrid October 17 at age 82.

religion

The Worldwide Church of God has its beginnings in the Radio Church of God founded by Pasadena, Calif., advertising man-turned-radio evangelist Herbert W. Armstrong, 37, who goes on the air January 7 adjuring listeners to observe the sabbath on Saturday, celebrate Passover but not Christmas or Easter, and follow kosher dietary laws. Rejecting the Trinity, regarding Anglo-Saxons as lineal descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel, calling Christmas and Easter pagan holidays, and predicting that the apocalypse will begin in 1936 (he will later postpone the year to 1943, then to 1972, then indefinitely), Armstrong will attract a wide following with his radio program The World Tomorrow and his magazine Plain Truth will enjoy a large circulation. His 4-year-old son Garner Ted, now 4, will take over both in the 1950s (see 1978).

communications, media

German Navy Signals Research chief Rudolf Kuhnold conducts the first practical radar tests March 20 at Kiel Harbor. He has developed a 700-watt transmitter working on a frequency of 600 megacycles plus a receiver and disk reflectors, succeeds in receiving echoes from signals bounced off the battleship Hesse anchored 600 yards away, and in October picks up echoes from a ship seven miles away in a demonstration before high-ranking naval officers at Pelzerhaken near Lübeck. Signals are also received accidentally from a seaplane flying through the beam (the first detection of aircraft by radar), and the Reichstag appropriates 70,000 Reichsmarks ($57,500) to develop Kuhnold's idea (see Hertz, 1887). The Naval Research Laboratory at Washington, D.C., creates the first modern radar system in December, basing it on the telomobiloskop collision-prevention device for ships patented in 1904 by German engineer Christian Hülsmeyer (see Watson-Watt, 1935).

Danzig-born German engineer S. (Semi) Joseph Begun, 29, pioneers magnetic recording with the first tape recorder for broadcasting (see Blattnerphone, 1929). He will emigrate to America next year and in 1938 will join Brush Development Co. of Cleveland, where he will continue his work (see plastic tape, 1935).

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created by Congress June 10 supervises the U.S. telephone, telegraph, and radio industries. Radio stations receive licenses; licensees and license-applicants must show that they serve, or intend to serve, the "public interest, convenience, and necessity," but licenses will, in fact, be granted and renewed almost automatically over the next 25 years.

France bans advertising on government radio stations.

The Mutual Broadcasting Network is created by an amalgamation of Chicago's WGN, Detroit's WXYZ (whose Lone Ranger is the network's chief early-evening attraction), and New York's WOR.

Canadian radio station operator Roy Thomson pays $5,800 for Ontario's Timmins Press, acquiring his first newspaper (see 1931). Now 40, Thomson will make the weekly a daily beginning next year, acquire 27 additional Canadian newspapers plus six U.S. papers, start other radio stations in partnership with other newspapermen, and become a major player in North American media (see 1953).

French newspaper publisher and perfume maker François Coty dies at Louveciennes July 25 at age 60, having lost much of his wealth.

"Terry and the Pirates" by Ohio-born comic-strip cartoonist Milton A. (Arthur) Caniff, 27, establishes an adult adventure story line with an Oriental setting and reflects such current events as the Japanese invasion of China. The Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate strip will employ explicit sexiness to attract a wide following.

"Li'l Abner" by New Haven, Conn.-born comic-strip cartoonist Al Capp (Alfred Gerald Caplin), 35, is set in the fictitious hamlet of Dogpatch, Ky. Capp has been ghost-drawing "Joe Palooka" for Ham Fisher, whose eyesight has begun to fail owing to diabetes; the new strip will soon be syndicated to hundreds of papers.

"Flash Gordon" by New Rochelle, N.Y.-born King Features comic-strip cartoonist Alex (Alexander Gillespie) Raymond, 24, is a world-of-tomorrow adventure strip that competes with the popular 25th-century strip "Buck Rogers."

Comic-strip pioneer Winsor McCay of "Little Nemo" fame dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., July 26 at age 62.

The first double-crostic puzzle appears in the weekly Saturday Review of Literature. Onetime Brooklyn, N.Y., schoolteacher Elizabeth Kingsley (née Seelman), 63, has created the variation on crossword puzzles, which she will continue devising for the next 17 years.

Challenge magazine begins publication at New York under the direction of Boston-born Harlem writer Dorothy West, 27, who visited the Soviet Union with poet Langston Hughes and 19 other black Americans in 1932 and remained for a year. The quarterly is intended to be a showcase for younger black writers who hope to rekindle the vitality of the Harlem Renaissance, but it will survive only until 1937.

The Partisan Review begins publication at New York to give intellectuals a new literary magazine. Initially an organ of the communist John Reed Society, its founders include New York-born English instructor William Phillips, 26, and Ukrainian-born critic Philip Rahv (originally Ivan Greenberg), 26, who emigrated to America at age 14 and has been writing for New Masses, Nation, New Republic, and New Leader. The quarterly will quickly become the leading U.S. magazine of its kind, introducing writers such as James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Bernard Malamud, Wallace Stevens, and Lionel Trilling as well as European authors and poets past and present; it will be revived in 1937 to promote the cause of literary modernism in combination with anti-Stalin Marxism, and although its circulation will never be higher than 15,000 it will be influential.

Weekly Illustrated magazine begins publication at London under the direction of former Münchener Illustrierte Presse publisher Stefan Lorant, who has left Nazi Germany (see LIFE, 1936; Picture Post, 1938).

literature

Nonfiction: Patterns of Culture by New York-born Columbia University social anthropologist Ruth (Fulton) Benedict, 47, breaks new ground. Benedict studied anthropology for the first time at age 32, enrolled at Columbia 2 years later to study under Franz Boas, and will replace Boas as head of the department upon his retirement in 1936 (see 1928; 1946); A System of Logistic by Akron, Ohio-born Harvard philosopher W. V. (Willard Van Orman) Quine, 26; Logische Syntax der Sprache by philosopher Rudolf Carnap, who moved to Prague in 1931 and will relocate next year to Chicago; The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung) by Viennese philosopher Karl (Raimund) Popper, 32, who will teach in New Zealand from 1937 to 1945, when he will move to London; Western Civilization in the Near East (Die Europaeisirung des Orients) by Prague-born German historian Hans Kohn, 43, who was Middle East correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung from 1925 until last year and now becomes a professor at Smith College, where he will remain until 1941; The Robber Barons: the Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author Matthew Josephson, 35, who 6 years ago published an authoritative biography of Emile Zola; The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy: 1847-1849 by English journalist-historian A. J. P. (Alan John Pervicale) Taylor, 28; Leaves and Stones (Blätter und Steine) (essays) by Ernst Jünger; Lectures on Philosophy (Leçons de philosophie) by French philosopher and religious writer Simone Weil, 25, who works on farms and in factories to gain direct experience with working-class life when she is not teaching philosophy; The Perfect Salesman by humorist Stephen Leacock.

Fiction: Seven Gothic Tales by Danish novelist Isak Dinesen (Karen Dinesen, Baroness Blixen), 49, who married her cousin Bror Blixen in 1914 (although it was his twin brother whom she really loved), lived with him until 1921 on the British East African coffee plantation her parents purchased for them, contracted a virulent case of syphilis from him, underwent a long and embarrassing course of treatment, had a passionate affair with English hunter Denys Finch Hatton, whose plane crashed, and was forced to leave Africa after her plantation went bankrupt. Home again now in Denmark and divorced, she has written her book in English; The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset includes her novels The Axe, The Snakepit, In the Wilderness, and The Son Avenger; And Quiet Flows the Don (Tikhii Don) by Mikhail Sholokhov, now 29, whose work about the Don Cossacks during the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution was serialized in Novyi Mir from 1928 to 1932 and will have sequels; I, Claudius by Robert Graves, whose Claudius the God and His Wife Messaline is also published; Burmese Days by George Orwell; Weymouth Sands by John Cowper Powys; The Bachelors (Les Celibataires) by Henri de Montherlant; Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose central character Dick Diver is modeled on former émigré Gerald Murphy, 46, a dilettante painter of some talent who returned to New York in 1932 to take over management of his late father's Mark Cross luggage and haberdashery shop but who lives chiefly on the inheritance of his wife, Sara, whose millionaire father, Frank B. Wiborg, died in 1930 (she has posed in the nude for Pablo Picasso); Appointment in Samarra by Pennsylvania-born New Yorker magazine writer John (Henry) O'Hara, 29; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan by Chicago novelist James T. (Thomas) Farrell, 30, whose Young Lonigan appeared in 1932 and whose Judgment Day will appear next year to complete the depiction of a deteriorating Chicago and a brash, aimless blue-collar Chicagoan; Summer in Williamsburg by Brooklyn, N.Y., novelist Daniel Fuchs, 25; Call It Sleep by New York novelist Henry Roth, 28; The Ways of White Folks (stories) by Langston Hughes; I Can Get It for You Wholesale by New York novelist Jerome Weidman, 22, whose comic novel is about the garment district; Such Is My Beloved by Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan, 31; Seven Poor Men of Sydney and The Salzburg Tales by Australian novelist Christina Stead, 32; The Materassi Sisters (Sorelle Materassi) by Italian novelist Aldo Palezzeschi (Aldo Giurlani), 49; A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh; Goodbye, Mr. Chips (novella) by James Hilton; Holy Deadlock by A. P. Herbert who attacks the anomalies of Britain's divorce laws; Long Remember by Iowa-born novelist MacKinlay Kantor, 30, who takes his title from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of 1863; Daring Young Man (stories) by California-born short story writer William Saroyan, 26, whose lead story is "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze"; The Postman Always Rings Twice by Annapolis, Md.-born novelist James M. (Mallahan) Cain, 42; Lust for Life by California-born novelist Irving Stone, 32, is a fictionalized life of painter Vincent van Gogh; Jonah's Gourd Vine by Florida-born New York novelist Zora Hurston (née Neale), 43, who went through Barnard College on a scholarship, studied under anthropologist Franz Boas, and has worked as a secretary to novelist Fannie Hurst; Private Worlds by English novelist Phyllis Bottome, 50; What Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse; A Man Lay Dead by New Zealand-born mystery novelist Ngaio Marsh, 35, whose hero is Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard; The Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals by Dorothy L. Sayers; Fer-de-lance by Indiana-born detective novelist Rex (Todhunter) Stout, 48, who retired to France 7 years ago with $400,000 gained by selling an Educational Thrift System to bankers (the deposit program was designed for children). The Depression has affected him along with so many others but his overweight detective Nero Wolfe will more than replenish his fortunes; Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, whose new Hercule Poirot novel is published in the United States as Murder on the Calais Coach; The Trail of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer; The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett.

Author-diplomat Brand Whitlock dies at Cannes May 24 at age 65.

Poetry: The Cantos (IV) by Ezra Pound; Variations on a Time Theme by Edwin Muir; The Master's Hammer (Le Marteau sans mâitre) by French poet René Char, 21; The Public Rose (La Rose publique) by Paul Eluard; The Unknown Friends (Les Amis inconnus) by Jules Supervielle; Poèmes by French-Canadian poet Alain Grandbois, 34; Wine From These Grapes by Edna St. Vincent Millay; On the Contrary by Oregon-born New York poet Phyllis McGinley, 29.

Juvenile: Mary Poppins by Australian-born English author P. (Pamela) Travers (originally Helen Lyndon Goff), 34, whose wonder-working English governess will appear in a series of books; Florian, the Emperor's Stallion by Felix Salten, whose Lipizzaner horse is reduced to pulling a cab after the Great War.

art

Painting: The Bullfight, The Female Swimmer, and Nude Asleep in a Landscape by Pablo Picasso; Homage to Mack Sennett by René Magritte; The Guitar Lesson by Balthus, whose scandalous work will rarely be displayed; William Tell by Salvador Dali; Abraham Rydberg (watercolor of a clipper ship) by Lyonel Feininger; A Circus Master by Walt Kuhn; Lord, Heal the Child, Homestead, Ploughing It Under, and Going Home by Thomas Hart Benton.

Muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros return to Mexico following the election of Gen. Cárdenas to the presidency. Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes) is completed after 30 years of work with painting and sculpture galleries, a museum of popular arts, a theater, and a concert hall. Murals by Rivera, Orozco, and other Mexican artists decorate its lobbies.

photography

Fuji Film is founded in January to make movie film; it will grow to dominate Japan's still-film market and compete with Eastman Kodak worldwide.

German authorities arrest photographer August Sander's son Erich for anti-Nazi activities, find Sander's pictures objectionable because they conflict with the idealized image of heroic racial purity, order his publisher to destroy all the printing blocks for his book Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit), order all copies of the book to be seized, and ransack his house. Now 57, Sander has to give up portrait work and confine himself to landscapes, industrial architecture, and nature studies in order to earn a living.

The first photograph to be transmitted by radio appears October 18 in the London Daily Mail, having been sent from Melbourne.

theater, film

Theater: Thunderstorm by Chinese playwright Cao Yu (Tsao Yu [Wan Jia-bao, or Wan Chia-pao]), 24, who adopts a style similar to that of Greek tragedy and awes Beijing (Peking) audiences with the disruptive powers abroad in the world, but critics perceive his play as an attack on the tyranny of the traditional family system; Days Without End by Eugene O'Neill 1/18 at Henry Miller's Theater, New York, with Earle Larimore, Stanley Ridges, Ilka Chase, 57 perfs.; Dodsworth by Sidney Howard (who has adapted the 1929 Sinclair Lewis novel) 2/24 at New York's Shubert Theater, with Walter Huston, Fay Bainter, Harlan Briggs, Leonore Harris, sets by Jo Mielzner, 147 perfs.; Yellow Jack by Sidney Howard and Paul de Kruif 3/6 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Pennsylvania-born actor James (Maitland) Stewart, 25, Havana-born actor Millard Mitchell, 28, Russian-born actor Sam Levene, 28, Indiana-born actor Myron McCormick, 26, Robert Keith in a play about the conquest of yellow fever, 79 perfs.; The Infernal Machine (La Machine infernale) by Jean Cocteau 4/10 at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées, Paris; Touch Wood by C. L. Anthony (Dorothy Smith) 5/16 at London's Theatre Royal Haymarket, with Flora Robson, Stafford Hilliard, Jack Lambert, 213 perfs.; Merrily We Roll Along by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart 9/9 at New York's Music Box Theater, with Kenneth MacKenna, Jessie Royce Landis, Mary Philips, 155 perfs.; The Distaff Side by John Van Druten 9/25 at New York's Booth Theater, with Mildred Natwick, 26, English actress Sybil Thorndike, 51, English actress Estelle Winwood (née Goodwin), 51, 177 perfs.; Small Miracle by Corona, Queens-born playwright-screenwriter Norman Krasna, 24, 9/26 at New York's John Golden Theater, with Ilka Chase, Los Angeles-born Allan Hale, 16, Myron McCormick, staged by George Abbott, 117 perfs.; The Farmer Takes a Wife by Frank B. Elser and Marc Connelly (from the Walter D. Edmonds novel Rome Haul) 10/30 at New York's 46th Street Theater, with Grand Island, Neb.-born actor Henry Fonda, 29, Margaret Hamilton, June Walker, scenic design by Donald Oenslager, 104 perfs.; The Children's Hour by New Orleans-born playwright Lillian Hellman, 29, 11/20 at Maxine Elliott's Theater, New York, with Colorado-born ingénue Eugenia Rawls, 21, Robert Keith. Hellman's lover Dashiell Hammett has suggested the story, which hints at a lesbian relationship, 691 perfs. (set designer Aline Bernstein [née Frankau], now 52, ended her affair with novelist Thomas Wolfe several years ago but will figure in the person of Esther Jack in his posthumous 1939 novel The Web and the Rock); Rain from Heaven by S. N. Behrman 11/24 at New York's Golden Theater, with Jane Cowl protests Nazi treatment of German Jews, 99 perfs.; Professor Mamlock by Friedrich Wolf 12/8 at Zürich's Schauspielhaus; No One Knows Him (Non si sa come) by Luigi Pirandello 12/19 at Rome's Teatro Argentina; Accent on Youth by New York playwright Samson Raphaelson, 40, 12/25 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with Constance Cummings, 229 perfs.; The Hangman (Bödeln) by Pär Lagerkvist 12/28 at Stockholm's Rossa Theater; Yerma by Federico García Lorca 12/29 at Madrid's Teatro Español.

Actor-theater manager Sir Gerald du Maurier dies at his native London April 11 at age 61; actor Max Pallenberg is killed in an airplane crash at Karlsbad June 26 at age 56 while en route to a theatrical appearance (he left Germany last year because his wife, an operetta star, was Jewish); playwright Sir Arthur Wing Pinero dies following surgery at London November 23 at age 79.

Radio: Lux Radio Theatre 10/14 on NBC. Cecil B. DeMille will be host of the weekly drama show beginning next year, and it will move to CBS in mid-July of next year (to 6/7/1955); The Aldrich Family 10/17 on NBC with Ezra Stone as Henry Aldrich (to 1953).

British National Film Co. is founded at Ellstree by English flour miller's son J. Arthur Rank, 46, who by 1941 will control the Odeon Circuit with its 142 sumptuous theaters plus the Gaumont theater chain founded in the 1890s. Rank has been making religious films for use in Methodist Sunday School classes, his company will produce its first commercial film next year, he will set up a company in partnership with Charles M. Woolf to distribute Universal Pictures product in Britain, and British National Film will grow to have studios at Denham, Pinewood Studios, and Shepherd's (see 1946).

Bombay Talkies is founded by Indian film actress Devika Rani, 26, and her filmmaker husband Himanshu Rai. A grandniece of the Nobel poet-novelist Rabindranath Tagore and the daughter of an eminent surgeon, Rani met her husband while studying architecture, design, and textiles at London. He hired her as a costume and set consultant, they were married in 1929, and she made her film debut 4 years ago playing opposite Rai in Karma, the first Indian film released in English and the first to have a kissing scene. She will continue to head the studio after Rai's death in 1940 but will retire to Bangalore in 1945 after marrying artist Svetoslav Roerich.

The 12-year-old Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA), establishes a production code in response to demands by Roman Catholic bishops that it clean up its films by self-regulation or face a boycott. Denis Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia has said, "Nothing is left for us except the boycott." Box office revenues have plummeted, partly because some 11 million Roman Catholics have taken a pledge not to see movies (but also because the Depression has left so many people unable to afford even modest ticket prices). Administered by former newspaperman Joseph I. Breen (whose views are tainted by anti-Semitism), the Hays Office will enforce prohibitions—no exposure of female breasts, no suggestion of cohabitation or seduction, no unconventional kissing, no use of drugs, and the like, insisting that scripts and even posters be submitted for its inspection—but audiences will boo when they see the MPPDA seal of approval on the screen. Nation magazine will state: "The censors have spent all their time protecting children against adult movies. They might better protect adults against childish movies," and the British trade paper Film Weekly will call Breen "the Hitler of Hollywood."

Shirley Temple makes her first full-length film at age 6 and follows Hamilton McFadden's Stand Up and Cheer (in which she steals the show by singing "Baby Take a Bow") with Alexander Hall's Little Miss Marker and David Butler's Bright Eyes (in which she sings "The Good Ship Lollypop"). Born at Santa Monica and now all dimples and curly hair, Temple will go on to star in half a dozen other Hollywood films in the next 4 years.

Other films: Jean Vigo's L'Atalante with Jean Dasté; Frank Capra's It Happened One Night with Clark Gable, now 33, Claudette Colbert (who has found little work on Depression-struck Broadway and been discovered by producer Benjamin P. Schulberg); Norman Z. McLeod's It's a Gift with W. C. Fields; John Ford's The Lost Patrol with Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff; Robert Flaherty's documentary Man of Aran; W. S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man with William Powell, Myrna Loy; Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century with John Barrymore, Carole Lombard. Also: George Nicholls Jr.'s Anne of Green Gables with New York-born actress Anne Shirley (originally Dawn Evelyeen Paris), 16, as Anne Shirley; Gus Meins and Charles R. Rogers's Babes in Toyland with Laurel and Hardy; Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi; Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert, Warren William; Rowland V. Lee's The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat, 29, Austrian-born actress Elissa Landi (Elisabeth-Marie-Christine Kühner), 29; Mitchell Leisen's Death Takes a Holiday with Fredric March; John Ford's Judge Priest with Will Rogers; Frank Borzage's Little Man, What Now? with Norfolk, Va.-born actress Margaret Sullavan (originally Margaret Brooke), 23, Douglass Montgomery; Richard Wallace's The Little Minister with Katharine Hepburn; Maurice Elvey's Love, Life, and Laughter with Gracie Fields; William A. Seiter's The Richest Girl in the World with Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea, and Fay Wray in a story based on the early life of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (who is not, in fact, nearly so rich as tobacco heiress Doris Duke but is far more extravagant); Cedric Gibbons and Jack Conway's Tarzan and His Mate with Johnny Weissmuller, Irish-born actress Maureen O'Sullivan, 23; Victor Fleming's Treasure Island with Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper; Jack Conway's Viva Villa! with Wallace Beery, Leo Carrillo; Gregory LaCava's What Every Woman Knows with Helen Hayes, English-born actor Brian (DeLacy) Aherne, 32.

Actor-director Lowell Sherman dies of pneumonia at Hollywood December 28 at age 59.

music

Hollywood musicals: Ray Enright's Dames with Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, choreography by Busby Berkeley, music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin, songs that include, "I Only Have Eyes for You," "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips and a Twinkle in Your Father's Eye"; Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, choreography Hermes Pan, music from the Broadway musical (whose title has been changed to conform to the new Hays Office code); Elliott Nugent's She Loves Me Not with Bing Crosby, Miriam Hopkins, New Orleans-born singer Kitty Carlisle (originally Catherine Holzman), 20, music by Ralph Rainger, lyrics by Leo Robin, songs that include "Love in Bloom"; Basil Dean's Sing as We Go with Gracie Fields, John Loder.

Stage musicals: The New Ziegfeld Follies 1/4 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with Fanny Brice, Jane Froman, Vilma and Buddy Ebsen, Eugene and Willie Howard, Mill Valley, Calif.-born ingénue Eve Arden (originally Eunice Quedens), 21, Jean Carson, in a production staged by Ziegfeld's widow, Billie Burke, music by Vernon Duke and others, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg and others, songs that include "I Like the Looks of You" by Billy Hill, 182 perfs.; Mr. Whittington 2/1 at London's Hippodrome, with London-born film star Elsie Randolph, now 30, Jack Buchanan, music by Jack Waller and Joseph Tunbridge, 298 perfs.; Conversation Piece 2/16 at His Majesty's Theatre, London, with Noël Coward, Louis Hayward, George Sanders, book, music, and lyrics by Coward, songs that include "I'll Follow My Secret Heart," 177 perfs.; Life Begins at 8:40 8/27 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with comedian Bert Lahr, dancer Ray Bolger, 30, Irish-born actor Brian Donlevy, 31, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and E. Y. Harburg, songs that include "You're a Builder Upper," "Let's Take a Walk Around the Block," 237 perfs.; Yes, Madam? 9/27 at London's Hippodrome, with Bobby Hawes, music by Jack Waller and Joseph Tunbridge, lyrics by R. P. Weston and Bert Lee, 302 perfs.; Anything Goes 11/21 at New York's Alvin Theater, with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, Victor Moore, Mary Philips, book by Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, New York-born playwright Howard Lindsay, 45, and Findlay, Ohio-born playwright author Russel Crouse, 41, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, songs that include "The Gypsy in Me," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," "Blow, Gabriel, Blow," "All Through the Night," and the title song, 420 perfs.; Thumbs Up 12/27 at New York's St. James Theater, with Bobby Clark, Ray Dooley, Sheila Barrett, scenic design by Staten Islander Raoul Pène Du Bois, 22, book by Alan Baxter, songs that include "Autumn in New York" by Vernon Duke, "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart" by James Hanley, 156 perfs.

The Grade Organisation founded by Ukrainian-born London dancer Lew Grade (originally Winogradsky), 28, and his brother Leslie will book entertainers such as Jack Benny, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, and Mario Lanza into the London Palladium. Grade became the world's champion Charleston dancer 8 years ago; he will make his firm Britain's leading show-business agency (see Associated Television, 1955).

Opera: Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District 1/22 at Leningrad's Maly Opera House, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Pravda runs a headline that reads "Muddle Instead of Music" and denounces the work, calling it "a deliberate and ugly flood of confusing sound . . . a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking, and clashes"; another critic calls it "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric, tuneless, and leftist." Shostakovich is declared an enemy of the people and will spend the next 2 years in abject fear, sleeping in the hallway outside his apartment so that his young family will not be disturbed if the NKVD should take him away; Merry Mount 2/10 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with music by Howard Hanson; Four Saints in Three Acts 2/20 at New York's 44th Street Theater (after opening at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum), with music by Kansas-born composer Virgil (Garnett) Thomson, 37, sets and costumes by Florine Stettheimer, libretto by Gertrude Stein, whose opera is not about saints, is not presented in three acts, but adds to the fame of Gertrude Stein with such bewildering lines as "Pigeons in the grass, alas." Lotte Lehmann makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 12/31 at age 46 singing the role of Sieglinde opposite tenor Lauritz Melchior in the 1870 Wagner opera Die Walküre; Marjorie (Florence) Lawrence sings the role of Brünnhilde in her own debut at the Met.

The Glyndebourne Festival Opera has its first season 54 miles south of London on the 640-acre estate of Audrey and John Christie. The London Philharmonic provides music for the June to August performances in the Christies' 800-seat opera house.

Ballet: English ballerina Margot Fonteyn (Margaret Hookham), 15, makes her debut dancing in the Nutcracker Suite at London's Vic-Wells Ballet; Soviet ballerina Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova, 24, makes her debut with the Kirov Ballet.

The School of American Ballet is founded at New York by Boston-born Filene's department store heir Lincoln Kirstein, 27, an aesthete who has persuaded George Balanchine to come to America. Charter members of the new American Ballet Company include San Diego-born, Italian-trained ballerina Gisella Caccialanza, 19 (see New York City Ballet, 1946).

The Berkshire Music Festival has its first season, using the 210-acre Tappan family estate "Tanglewood," outside Lenox, Mass., whose grounds can accommodate up to 14,000 concertgoers. The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) will take over the Festival in 1936 under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky, a disastrous rainstorm will halt a concert August 12, 1937, and the BSO will erect a 6,000-seat "Shed" with fine acoustics in 1938.

First performances: Sacred Music (Avodath Hakodesh), a Sabbath Morning Service for Baritone Cantor, Chorus, and Orchestra by Ernest Bloch 1/12 at Turin (radio broadcast); Symphony—1933 by Roy Harris 1/26 at Boston's Symphony Hall; The Enchanted Deer (Cantata Profane) by Béla Bartók 5/25 at London in a performance by the BBC Wireless Chorus and BBC Symphony; Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after the Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 7 by G. F. Handel by Arnold Schoenberg 9/26 at Prague (Schoenberg has been in the United States since October of last year); Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for Piano and Orchestra by Sergei Rachmaninoff 11/7 at Baltimore in a concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Composer Sir Edward Elgar dies at Worcester February 23 at age 76; Gustav Holst at London May 25 at age 59; Frederick Delius at Grez-sur-Loing June 10 at age 71.

Popular songs: "The Beer Barrel Polka" ("Skoda Lasky") by Czech songwriters Jaromir Vejvoda, Wiadimir A. Timm, and Vasek Zeman (English lyrics by Lew Brown will appear in 1939); "What a Difference a Day Makes" ("Cuando vuelva a tu lado") by Spanish composer Marcia Greves, English lyrics by Stanley Adams; "Miss Otis Regrets" by Noël Coward, who has written it for Bricktop (see 1925); "June in January" by Ralph Rainger, lyrics by Leo Robin; "Blue Moon" by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart; "Stars Fell on Alabama" by Frank Perkins, lyrics by Mitchell Parish; "Moonglow" by Barstow, Calif.-born composer Will Hudson, 26, and Irving Mills, lyrics by Long Island City, N.Y.-born writer Eddie De Lange, 30; "The Very Thought of You" by Ray Noble; "For All We Know" by J. Fred Coots, lyrics by Sam M. Lewis; "Love Thy Neighbor" by Harry Revel, lyrics by Mack Gordon; "Deep Purple" by Peter DeRose, lyrics by Mitchell Parish; "Little Man You've Had a Busy Day" by Mabel Wayne, lyrics by Maurice Sigler and Al Hoffman; "The Object of My Affection" by Arkansas-born vocalist-songwriters Truman "Pinky" Tomlin, 25, Coy Poe, and band leader Jimmie (James W.) Grier, 36; "Hands Across the Table" by French composer Jean Delettre, English lyrics by Mitchell Parish; "Alla en el Rancho Grande" by Mexican composer Sylvano R. Ramos, lyrics by Bartley Costello; "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" by Bob Nolan; "Carry Me Back to the Lone Prairie" by Carson Robinson; "You and the Night and the Music" by Arthur Schwartz, lyrics by Howard Dietz (for the film Revenge with Music); "With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming" by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel (for the film Shoot the Works); "You Oughta Be in Pictures" by Kansas City-born composer Dana Suesse, 22, lyrics by Edward Heyman; "On the Good Ship Lollipop" by Richard Whiting, lyrics by Sidney Clare (for the film Bright Eyes); "Isle of Capri" by Will Grosz, lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy; "Winter Wonderland" by Felix Bernard, lyrics by Dick Smith.

Le Jazz Hot by French critic Hugues Panassié, 22, is the first book of jazz criticism.

Paris-born violinist and jazz improviser Stéphane Grappelli, 26, joins with gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, now 24, two other guitarists, and a bass to form the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The group will continue until 1939, making records that will be prized by jazz lovers.

Cairo singer Umm Kulthum Ibrahim makes her broadcast debut on the newly founded Egyptian Radio (see 1926). Now 30, she has cultivated an Egyptian-Arab style of song, made numerous recordings, and beginning in 1937 will broadcast monthly live concerts that will reach audiences throughout the Middle East for nearly 40 years.

Newport News, Va.-born jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, 16, lands a job with the Chick Webb Orchestra and begins a notable career after winning first prize in an amateur contest November 21 at Harlem's Apollo Theater singing two songs in the style of Connee Boswell (see 1939).

The Hammond organ patented by Chicago clock maker Laurens Hammond, 39, is the world's first pipeless organ. The 275-pound instrument has a two-manual console with pedal clavier and power cabinet but no reeds, pipes, or vibrating parts; it costs less than 1¢ per hour to operate and will lead to a whole generation of electrically-amplified instruments.

sports

The first U.S. rope tow for skiers goes into operation January 28 at Woodstock, Vt. Local innkeeper Robert Royce and his wife, Betty, have sketched a tow installed 2 years ago at Shawbridge, Que., and had a mechanic devise the tow, splicing 2,500 feet of 7/8-inch manila rope into a loop that he has placed on pulleys and passed around a wheel attached to a Model A Ford engine. As many as five skiers at a time can use the tow to move 900 feet up a hill.

The Masters golf tournament inaugurated in April for professionals at Georgia's 2-year-old Augusta National Golf Club course is initially by invitation only; the 72-hole Masters will be one of golf's annual classics, along with the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) contests.

British golfer (Thomas) Henry Cotton, 27, wins the British Open, ending a decade of victories by U.S. golfers. Cotton will win it again in 1937 and 1948.

Omaha-born prizefighter Maximilian Adelbert "Max" Baer, 25, knocks out Primo Carnera June 14 in the 11th round of a title bout at Long Island City and wins the world heavyweight championship that he will hold for exactly 1 year.

Kansas-born middle-distance runner Glenn Cunningham, 25, runs the mile in 4:06.7, setting a record that will stand for 3 years. Cunningham's older brother Floyd died when Glenn was 7 in a schoolhouse fire that left Glenn so badly burned he was not expected ever to walk, but he has overcome his handicap.

Fred Perry wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Dorothy Round, 24, in women's singles; Perry wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Helen Jacobs in women's singles.

Baseball manager John McGraw dies at New Rochelle, N.Y., February 25 at age 60.

Mobile, Ala.-born pitcher Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige, 28, breaks Dizzy Dean's 30-game winning streak as he strikes out 17 men and allows no runs in a Hollywood All Stars game while Dean strikes out 15 and lets one run score. Paige starts 29 games in 29 days, and his team wins 104 out of 105 games as he continues to pitch for the Bismarck, S.Dak., team for which he pitched 31 games last year and won 27. Paige will pitch in the Negro National League for the Crawford Giants of Pittsburgh, Homestead Grays of Baltimore, and Kansas City Monarchs, clinching the Negro World Series title for the Monarchs in 1942 and pitching 64 scoreless innings for the team in 1946 (see 1948).

The St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series, defeating the Detroit Tigers 4 games to 3 after winning the pennant on the last day of the season. The Tigers have won the American League pennant after jumping from fifth place with help from Bronx, N.Y.-born player Hank Greenberg, 23, who has hit two home runs on Rosh Hashanah (September 10) to beat the Red Sox 2 to 1, ended the regular season with a .339 batting average, but spent Yom Kippur in a synagogue (the Tigers lost). The first Jewish superstar, Greenberg stands six foot three and weighs 210.

The U.S. ocean yacht Rainbow defeats Britain's Endeavour 4 to 2 to retain the America's Cup.

Italy defeats Czechoslovakia 2 to 1 in overtime to win the World Cup football (soccer) competition at Rome's Stadio Torino.

everyday life

The Spingold Trophy for contract bridge donated by Chicago-born New York journalist-turned-Columbia Pictures publicist Nathan B. Spingold, 48, will be awarded to Challenge Knockout Teams (Spingold Master Knockout Teams beginning in 1938) that have competed since 1930 for the Asbury Park Trophy.

The board game Sorry introduced by Parker Brothers of Salem, Mass., frustrates players under age 8 who cannot bear to have their pieces sent back by rivals. Based in part on pahcheesi, the game will remain popular into the next century (see Monopoly, 1935).

Lego toy blocks for children are introduced at Billund, Denmark, where local carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, 41, has turned his shop over to making wooden blocks that fit together and started a company that he calls Automatic Binding Blocks. He has held a competition among his employees to select a new name for the company and won it himself with a contraction of the Danish leg godt, meaning "play well." Christiansen has been making stepladders and ironing boards as well as toys, but economic conditions had depressed sales; he will start using plastic for some of his blocks in 1947, and Lego will become the largest such firm outside America, providing the basis of a great European fortune (see 1958).

U.S. men's underwear sales slump after moviegoers see Clark Gable remove his shirt in the film It Happened One Night to reveal that he wears no undershirt. Sales of men's caps have declined because of their association with hoodlums in gangster movies.

The Washeteria that opens April 18 at Fort Worth, Texas, is the first launderette. Proprietor J. F. Cantrell has installed four washing machines and charges by the hour.

Scranton, Pa.-born New York milliner Sally Victor (née Josephs), 29, opens her own salon, catering to socialites and entertainers with custom-made hats (customers soon include Irene Dunne, Helen Hayes, and Merle Oberon). A millinery buyer for Macy's until she married millinary wholesaler Sergiu Victor in 1927, Victor will popularize the baby bonnet, Flemish sailor hat, and pompadour hat before starting a ready-to-wear line in 1951.

Former Lachasse designer Digby Morton, now 27, opens a London fashion house under his own name, having transformed the classic Donegal tweed suit into high fashion through intricate cutting and carefully planned placing of seams that give it a more more feminine line (see 1928). London-born designer (Edwin) Hardy Amies, 25, succeeds Morton at Lachasse; a former school teacher at Antibes, he will take a geometrical approach to the tailored suit, using the fabric selvage around the body instead of downward, and will eventually gain prominence under his own name (see 1946). The house of Digby Morton will continue until 1957.

Outboard motor inventor Ole Evinrude dies at Milwaukee July 12 at age 57.

crime

Clyde Barrow, 24, and Bonnie Parker die in a hail of bullets May 23 on a road 50 miles east of Shreveport, La., after a 2-year career in which they have casually killed 12 people in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa. Their most successful robbery netted them no more than $3,800, and the father of one of their gang members has told police where to watch for them. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, sheriff's deputy Ted C. Hinton, and four other sheriff's deputies have set up an ambush, Bonnie and Clyde drive into the trap at 85 miles per hour, the lawmen riddle them with 50 bullets, and they die holding a Thompson submachine gun and a sawed-off shotgun, respectively.

The National Firearms Act approved by Congress June 26 imposes an annual license tax of $200 on firearms dealers and requires that they register or be subject to fine and imprisonment. The new law makes it a federal crime to possess a machine gun or sawed-off shotgun, weapons used widely by mobsters during Prohibition; it forbids dealers to sell automatic weapons that may fall into criminal hands (see Supreme Court case, 1937).

The federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay opens July 1. The Department of Justice took over the island from the U.S. Army last year and has renovated the former military prison, installing metal detectors, chain-link fences, and barbed wire to make it even more secure, and incorrigible criminals from Leavenworth and other federal penitentiaries are transferred to the punishment facility under heavy guard (see 1909). Before the Bureau of Prisons abandons it in 1963, "the Rock" will house America's most notorious U.S. criminals, including Al Capone, George (Machine-gun) Kelly, and Robert Stroud.

John Dillinger, 32, leaves Chicago's air-cooled Essaness Biograph Theater July 22 after seeing Manhattan Melodrama with two female friends, one of them a brothel owner who has betrayed him to the Bureau of Investigation to keep from being deported to her native Romania for moral turpitude. Federal agents shoot Dillinger dead ending a brief career in which he has killed one person and robbed banks in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin, but rumors will persist that they shot the wrong man.

New York police arrest German-born furrier Bruno Richard Hauptmann, 35, September 20 for possession of ransom money paid to recover Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. in 1932. Hauptmann says he received the gold certificates from a former partner in the fur business and denies any connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping (see 1936).

Charles A. "Pretty Boy" Floyd's car breaks down near East Liverpool, Ohio, October 28 and he is killed at age 30 by a sharpshooter in a gun battle with federal agents who fill him with 14 bullets (see 1932). Like Bonny and Clyde, John Dillinger, and others he had become a folk hero to many Depression-beleaguered Americans, and he receives the largest funeral in Oklahoma's history.

architecture, real estate

San Francisco's Coit Tower is completed to designs by Arthur Brown Jr. Murals by WPA artists will decorate its interior, and it will be the city's tallest structure for years to come.

The Haags Gemeentemuseum is completed at The Hague to designs by Hendrik Berlage.

Architect Cass Gilbert dies at Brockenhurst, England, May 17 at age 75; Hendrik Berlage at The Hague August 12 at age 78.

environment

An earthquake on the Bihar-Nepal border January 15 kills at least 10,700.

A Field Guide to the Birds Including All Species Found in North America: A Bird Book on a New Plan by Jamestown, N.Y.-born Boston painter-ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson, 26, takes up where John James Audubon left off (see 1843). Grouping birds not by species but rather by their resemblance to one another, Peterson provides rich descriptions in clear, succinct prose and uses simplified drawings that make it easier to identify birds quickly. The first edition of his book is sold out within 2 weeks (at least four publishers rejected the project; Houghton Mifflin has printed only 2,000 copies; but it then publishes Peterson's The Junior Book of Birds). Peterson gives up his teaching job at Brookline, Mass., and joins the staff of the Audubon Society at New York (see 1941).

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is created by act of Congress for full development. Established for protection and administration in 1930, the park along the North Carolina-Tennessee border embraces 515,226 acres in the highest mountain range east of the Mississippi.

Western ranchers begin 2 decades of wholesale slaughter of wild horses to clear the disintegrating ranges. The horse meat fetches 5¢ to 6¢ per pound (it is sold for human food, dog food, and chicken feed); the government pays a bounty to encourage the horse hunters; and by 1952 the wild horse population will be 33,000 down from 2 million in 1900.

agriculture

A Farm Mortgage Financing Act passed by Congress January 31 creates a Federal Farm Mortgage Corporation to help farmers whose mortgages are being foreclosed (see 1931). Dust storms will soon bankrupt more farmers.

A Crop Loan Act passed February 23 authorizes loans to farmers to tide them over until harvest time.

Dust storms in May blow some 300 million tons of Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and Oklahoma topsoil into the Atlantic. At least 50 million acres lose all their topsoil, another 50 million are almost ruined, and 200 million are seriously damaged (see Soil Conservation Act, 1935). The western dust storms are an aftermath of imprudent plowing during the Great War, when farmers planted virgin lands in wheat to cash in on high grain prices. "Okies" and "Arkies" from the Dustbowl begin a trek to California that will relocate 350,000 farmers within the next 5 years.

The Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act passed June 28 allows mortgage foreclosures to be postponed for 5 years (but see 1935).

The Taylor Grazing Act passed June 28 sets up a program to control grazing and prevent erosion of western grasslands (see Stockraising Homestead Act, 1916). Ranchers have lobbied for passage of legislation that would halt damage to public lands, the new law allows them to lease public land at an annual fee to graze their herds, it effectively closes the public domain to homesteading, but in some cases it takes a full square mile to support a single head, and lessees must maintain fences, wells, pumps, stock ponds, and remote roads, pick up trash, assist law enforcement, provide aid to travelers, and share the land with recreationists.

The Department of Agriculture orders the slaughter of cattle, paying farmers and ranchers $16 per cow and $1 per calf to reduce oversupply and lower demand for feed grains.

Microbiologist-pathologist Theobald Smith dies at New York December 10 at age 75, having helped to develop ways to combat Texas cattle fever, vaccines against hog cholera, and other scientific and medical advances.

The modern poultry industry has its beginnings at Gainesville, Georgia, where Jesse Dixon Jewell, 32, buys chickens and eggs from local farmers and sells them in Atlanta. Jewell's father died in 1909, when he was 7; his mother kept her family alive by running a small feed store, which the young man took over when he came of age, but the Depression, along with a tornado that nearly destroyed Gainesville, has forced him to seek ways to supplement his income. Farmers lack the capital needed for modern poultry production; few can even afford feed, but Jewell finds a feed company willing to sell on consignment, persuades a local bank to loan him enough money to buy day-old chicks, places the chicks with farmers, and supplies the feed required to raise the birds to market weight (2.84 pounds on average). The system works, everybody concerned makes money, the consumer is able to buy chicken at a lower price, and the lower price spurs demand; Americans consume 50 million chickens, but they still pay more for poultry than for red met (see 1954; 1965).

Drought reduces the U.S. corn crop by nearly a billion bushels, and the average yield per acre falls to 15.7 bushels, down from 22.8 last year (wheat yields average 11.8 bushels per acre).

U.S. soybean acreage increases to 1 million (see 1923; 1944). A new expeller process for extracting oil from soybeans improves on the traditional hydraulic process, which is not only costly in time and labor but removes only 75 percent of the available oil in the bean. The expeller process removes up to 80 percent and produces a product of more uniform quality (see 1936).

The Midwestern drought obliges New York merchants to import from abroad the wheat needed to supply East Coast flour mills; Paris merchants are unable to obtain enough U.S. grain and will increase their orders for Argentinian wheat and corn, import soft wheat and corn from Romania, and import barley from Iran and North Africa.

Mexico's agrarian revolution advances under President Cardenas, who will resume distribution of the land to the pueblos and work also to build the power of organized labor.

Nazi Germany starts the Erzengungsschlacht program to expand domestic food production. By 1937 the country will be producing 90 percent of the food it consumes.

British potato farmers blame a "slimming" craze for a drop-off in sales.

nutrition

A "Milk in Schools" scheme improves nutrition among British schoolchildren by supplying one-third pint of milk each day to nearly half of all elementary school pupils (who pay little or nothing; see 1906; 1931).

English chemist Walter (Norman) Haworth, 51, coins the term ascorbic acid for vitamin C (see 1933). He has conducted basic studies of sugars and devised the modern ring form of representing sugar molecules.

U.S. food-buying patterns begin shifting to larger consumption of red meats (especially beef and pork), fruits, green vegetables, and dairy products as industrial earnings start to improve.

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is described for the first time. The condition affects some adults but more particularly infants who lack enzymes needed to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine; it may cause mental retardation if not quickly diagnosed and remedied by putting the infant on a diet low in phenylalanine.

Hungarian biochemist Paul Gyorgy, 40, at Cambridge University discovers pyridoxine (vitamin B₆)—a coenzyme which cures dermatitis in rats. It will be synthesized in 1939.

Pet Milk Co. introduces the first evaporated milk products fortified with vitamin D, using the irradiation process (see Steenbock, 1927; Borden, 1933). It is the first company to do so.

food and drink

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is produced commercially for the first time in the United States, which has depended until now on the flavor enhancer Ajinimoto imported from Japan (see 1908; 1947).

Morton's Salt founder and president Joy Morton dies at his 419-acre rural estate outside Chicago May 9 at age 78. The son of the man who founded Arbor Day, Morton opened his arboretum to the public several years ago.

A new chilling process for meat cargoes improves on the process used in 1880 on the S.S. Strathleven.

Girl Scout cookies are introduced by some accounts at Philadelphia, where young women demonstrate their baking skills using ovens on display in the appliance showrooms of the Philadelphia Gas Works. By other accounts, Girl Scouts baked cookies beginning in the 1920s for fund-raising programs at the suggestion of Bucharest-born New York publicist Bella Spewack (née Cohen), but the national organization that was founded in 1912 will later say the tradition began in 1934, when Scouts at Philadelphia produced shortbread and sugar cookies to raise money for Camp Indian Run, a summer retreat about 50 miles west of the city. The Scouts sell the cookies for 23¢ per one-pound box, net 1¢ per box to benefit local troops.

Beer baron August Anheuser Busch of Anheuser-Busch commits suicide at his Grant's Farm estate outside St. Louis February 13 at age 68. He has been suffering intense pain from heart disease, edema, and gout.

Pepsi-Cola is acquired by Walter Mack, who will promote Pepsi's 12-ounce bottle to challenge Coca-Cola (see 1933; 1939).

Royal Crown Cola is introduced by Nehi Corp. (see Diet-Rite, 1962).

Seagram's 7 Crown is introduced by Distillers Corp.-Seagram, which will make it the top-selling U.S. whiskey brand (see 1933; 1947).

Monarch Wine Co. is founded at Brooklyn, N.Y., to produce sacramental wines for use on religious occasions in place of homemade wines. Monarch will lease the name Manischewitz to gain acceptance for the strong, aromatic wine it presses from native American vitis labrusca grapes (see Manischewitz 1888); it will bottle wines under 17 other labels as it grows to become the largest U.S. producer of fruit wines (including blackberry, cherry, elderberry, and loganberry). Producing more champagne than America imports from France, Monarch's winery will grow to cover four city blocks, and Manischewitz wines will become popular with gentiles as well as Jews.

Chicago candy maker Frank C. Mars dies of a heart attack and kidney disease at Baltimore April 8 at age 50, leaving Mars Candy Co. to his second wife, Ethel, his daughter by his second marriage, and his son Forrest E., whom he banished 2 years ago to England (see 3 Musketeers, 1932; M&Ms, 1941).

Mechanical refrigeration pioneer Carl von Linde dies at Munich November 16 at age 92.

restaurants

Carvel's frozen custard stand opens at Hartsdale, N.Y., where a trailer used by Greek-born vendor Thomas A. Carvel (originally Thomas Andreas Carvelas), 27, to transport ice cream between county fairs has broken down. Carvel has opened his first store out of the back of his truck and then borrowed $15 from his fiancée, Agnes, for the wherewithal to start an enterprise that will grow to have 21 soft ice cream stores by 1950 (see Dairy Queen, 1938).

population

Western Australian nationalists at Kalgoorlie stage a 3-day riot in January to protest an influx of immigrants from southern Europe.

Birth Control: Its Use and Misuse by Illinois-born New York journalist Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, 37, states that America could avoid 8,000 maternal deaths per year by legalizing abortion, at least until adequate contraceptives are made available. Condoms are now made of latex, making them more comfortable than earlier rubber ones.

Scientists isolate the female sex hormone progesterone, secreted naturally after the monthly release of an egg from a woman's ovaries (see estrogen, 1929). It causes the lining of the uterus to firm and thicken, inhibits some of the effects of estrogen, prevents the release of a second egg (thus preventing more than one pregnancy per month), and, if a fertilized egg does not adhere to the thickened uterine wall, stimulates the shedding of endometrial tissue to produce menstrual bleeding (see Marker, 1943).

"Woman has her battlefield," declaims Adolf Hitler in an address to women at Nuremberg September 14. "With each child that she brings to the nation, she fights her fight for the nation."

1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940

Anthropology

Patterns of Culture by Ruth Fulton Benedict [b. New York City, 1887, d. New York City, 1948] is a classic of comparative anthropology that is based on her work with the Zuni and Hopi in the American Southwest.

Glass for the 5-m (200-in.) reflecting lens for the Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar Observatory is poured on December 2; a test and backup disk had been poured starting on March 25, a process taking 15 days just to fill the mold, followed by many days of controlled cooling. The Hale, when finished, will be the most effective telescope on Earth for more than 50 years. See also 1917 Astronomy; 1936 Astronomy. (See essay.)

Walter Baade [b. Schröttinghausen, Germany, March 24, 1893, d. Göttingen, Germany, June 25, 1960] and Fritz Zwicky discover that novas found in any galaxy are comparable in brightness, and that they differ from supernovas. They propose that neutron stars are formed during supernova eruptions, confirmed in 1968 when a neutron star is located in the debris of the July 4, 1054 supernova. See also 1968 Astronomy.

Dutch-American astronomer Bart Jan Bok [b. Hoorn, Netherlands, April 28, 1906, d. Tucson, Arizona, August 5, 1983] shows that stellar associations (groups of hundreds of stars that are all relatively near each other) are young systems.

Astrophysicist Walter Grotrian [b. Aachen, Germany, 1890, d. 1954] discovers zodiacal dust (the cause of zodiacal light) by studying the spectrum of the solar corona. The dust is an extension of the solar corona beyond Earth's orbit that reflects sunlight, which produces a faint illumination (zodiacal light) that can sometimes be seen shortly before sunrise or soon after sunset.

Adolf Butenandt obtains the first preparation of progesterone, a female sex hormone, in pure form. See also 1931 Biology; 1939 Chemistry.

John Bernal takes the first X-ray diffraction photograph of a protein crystal, pepsin. See also 1930 Materials; 1937 Biology.

György von Hevesy uses a radioactive isotope of phosphorus to study phosphorus metabolism in plants. See also 1934 Physics; 1943 Chemistry.

Walter Norman Haworth [b. Chorley, England, March 19, 1883, d. Birmingham, England, March 19, 1950] is among the first to synthesize vitamin C. See also 1933 Biology.

Arnold O. Beckman [b. Cullom, Illinois, April 10, 1900] develops the pH meter, the first instrument that accurately measures the amount of acidity or alkalinity in a solution using electronic means. See also 1909 Chemistry.

Harold Urey of the United States wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of heavy hydrogen. See also 1931 Chemistry.

William Beebe and Otis Barton set a depth record by diving to 1001 m (3038 ft) below the ocean's surface in a tethered sphere called a bathysphere. See also 1930 Earth science; 1948 Transportation.

Russian ecologist Georgii Frantsevich Gause [b. 1910] is the first to state the principle that two similar species cannot occupy similar ecological niches for long periods of time (known as Gause's principle).

Cambridge engineer Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor [b. London, March 7, 1886, d. June 27, 1975] explains that the ductility of metals comes from dislocations called line defects in the crystal structure of the metals. See also 1941 Materials.

Joseph Switzer [d. 1973] and Robert Switzer [b. 1914, d. 1997] invent the first fluorescent paint, which glows when illuminated by ultraviolet light, for use in Joseph's amateur magic act. Later they also develop colors that fluoresce in daylight, forming the Day-Glo Color Corporation in the 1940s to manufacture and market the paints and dyes. See also 1875 Materials; 1948 Materials.

Aleksander Osipovich Gelfand [b. 1906, d. 1968] and Theodor Schneider [b. 1911, d. 1988] show that an irrational power of an algebraic number (other than 0 or 1) is transcendental (not the solution of any algebraic equation), a feat that David Hilbert had predicted would come long after the proof of Fermat's "last theorem." Hilbert was, for once, wrong. See also 1900 Mathematics; 1936 Mathematics.

George Minot, William Murphy, and George H. Whipple of the United States win the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for the discovery and development of liver treatment for anemia. See also 1926 Medicine & health; 1925 Medicine & health.

The team of French physicist Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie develop the first artificial radioactive elements, a radioactive form of phosphorus formed by bombarding aluminum with alpha particles and radioactive nitrogen produced in the same way from boron. See also 1934 Biology.

In January Louis de Broglie introduces the general term antiparticle to describe the partner to a subatomic particle, a partner indicated by the second solution to the Dirac equation. For example, the positron, identical to the electron except for charge, is the antiparticle of the electron, so its other name is antielectron. Wolfgang Pauli and Victor Frederick Weisskopf [b. Vienna, Austria, September 19, 1908, d. Newton, Massachusetts, April 21, 2002], independently of de Broglie, also demonstrate that subatomic particles must have antiparticles (not very many particles were known at this time, and the demonstration is largely overlooked). See also 1931 Physics; 1955 Physics.

Marcus Laurence Oliphant, Australian physicist [b. Adelaide, Australia, October 8, 1901, d. Canberra, Australia, July 14, 2000], working with Ernest Rutherford, creates samples of tritium, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen, by bombarding heavy water (deuterium) with deuterons (particles composed of a single proton and a single neutron). Tritium contains two neutrons and one proton. The new form of hydrogen is recognized by Luis Alvarez. See also 1931 Chemistry.

Enrico Fermi suggests that slow, or thermal, neutrons can be used to split atoms. See also 1938 Physics.

Pavel Cherenkov [b. Voronezh, Russia, July 15, 1904, d. January 6, 1990] discovers that when a particle traveling close to the speed of light passes through a liquid or transparent solid, it emits light. This phenomenon occurs when the velocity of the particle is greater than that of light in the medium. This is known as the Cherenkov effect. See also 1937 Astronomy.

Hans Bethe and Rudolph Peierls [b. Berlin, June 5, 1907, d. Oxford, England, September 19, 1995] show that the probability of interaction of neutrinos with matter is extremely small. See also 1933 Physics; 1965 Astronomy. (See biography.)

James Chadwick and Austrian-American physicist Maurice Goldhaber [b. Lemberg, Austria, April 18, 1911] measure the mass of a neutron and find it to be greater than the mass of a proton plus an electron, which suggests (incorrectly) that neutrons are truly elementary particles. See also 1932 Physics.

Two physicists at the University of Cologne, H. Frenzel and H. Schultes, discover sonoluminescence: They observe a characteristic glow in water when it is irradiated with sound waves. There is little interest in the phenomenon until the 1990s. See also 1933 Physics.

Wernher von Braun and his staff in Germany successfully launch their first rocket powered by alcohol and liquid oxygen, the A2 series. It achieves a height of 2.4 km (1.5 mi). See also 1932 Transportation; 1936 Transportation.

The first streamlined car to be offered to the public, the Chrysler Airflow, designed by Carl Breer, is introduced. Despite its rounded profile and fenders, it is not a commercial success. See also 1935 Transportation.

Drama and Theater

• Maxwell Anderson: Valley Forge. Supposedly shamed into an American theme by his critics, Anderson fails to bring alive the struggle of George Washington and the American army during the Revolution, and the play manages only fifty-eight performances.
• S. N. Behrman: Rain from Heaven. The playwright tackles current events in this drama about a love affair between an English aristocrat and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. Behrman's characteristic witty brilliance is lacking, replaced by a preachy high-mindedness.
• Marc Connelly: The Farmer Takes a Wife. Cowritten with Frank B. Elser, this comedy, based on Walter B. Edmonds's novel Rome Haul (1929), is Connelly's last successful play, noteworthy for launching actor Henry Fonda's career.
• T. S. Eliot: The Rock. Eliot's initial attempt at poetic drama is this pageant play written on behalf of the Anglican diocese of London, which dramatizes the history of Christianity.
• Paul Green: Roll, Sweet Chariot. This "symphonic play of the Negro people" dramatizes the downfall of the black shantytown Potter's Field.
• Lillian Hellman (1905-1984): The Children's Hour. The playwright's first production creates a sensation due to its subject of two private school teachers falsely accused of lesbianism. The play establishes Hellman as a major dramatic talent, and the controversy over its failure to win the Pulitzer Prize helps prompt the creation of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
• Sidney Howard and Paul de Kruif: Yellow Jack. Howard teams with bacteriologist and popularizer of science de Kruif to create this documentary drama on the conquering of yellow fever. It would be made into a film in 1938.
• Sidney Howard and Sinclair Lewis: Dodsworth. This successful adaptation of Lewis's 1929 novel owes much to the performance of Walter Huston in the title role, reprised in the 1936 film version.
• John Howard Lawson: The Pure of Heart and Gentlewoman. Opening on Broadway within three days of each other, both plays have a strong social message. In the first, a small-town girl comes to New York and falls in love with a gunman; in the second, a rich woman tries to resolve her materialism with her sympathy for the poor.
• Eugene O'Neill: Days Without End. The failure of the playwright's "modern miracle play," in which a divided character (played by two different actors) is redeemed by religious faith, contributes to O'Neill's retirement from the Broadway stage for twelve years, until the opening of The Iceman Cometh in 1946.
• Cole Porter (1891-1964): Anything Goes. Described as the "quintessential musical comedy of the thirties," the smash hit features one of Porter's greatest scores, with standards such as the title song, "I Get a Kick out of You," and "You're the Top." The story, written by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), about a group of shipwrecked passengers, had to be changed during rehearsals when a cruise liner burned, killing 125.
• Gertrude Stein: Four Saints in Three Acts. The opera with music by Virgil Thomson actually comprises four acts and tells the story of as many as sixteen saints, including Saint Theresa and her male alter ego. It is first performed with an all-black cast, and the libretto features two of Stein's most famous lines: "Pigeons on the grass alas" and "When this you see remember me."
• John Wexley: They Shall Not Die. Wexley dramatizes the 1931 court case in Scottsboro, Alabama, in which nine black youths were charged with raping two white schoolgirls.

Fiction

• Conrad Aiken: Among the Lost People. Aiken's story collection includes "Mr. Arcularis," which the author would adapt as a play published in 1957, about a lonely man's liberating mental journey while physically confined to an operating table.
• James M. Cain (1892-1977): The Postman Always Rings Twice. The forty-two-year-old former journalist's first novel is his most enduring achievement, establishing his reputation as a master of hard-boiled realism. The novel about a drifter who conspires with his lover to murder her husband, the owner of a roadside sandwich stand, has been filmed three times and adapted as an opera.
• Robert Cantwell: The Land of Plenty. Cantwell's second novel is a powerful proletarian social drama concerning the impact of a strike at a Pacific Northwest lumber mill.
• Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973): Mary Peters. Chase's novel describes the life of a Maine ship captain's daughter. Chase, who was raised in Maine and taught at Smith College, was one of the leading regional writers of the period. Her other books include Mary Christmas (1926), Uplands (1927), Gay Highway (1933), and Silas Crockett (1935).
• James Gould Cozzens: Castaway. In a departure into moral fantasy, Cozzens offers a "semi-symbolic, semi-allegorical fictional demonstration that the principle of living adds up to self-killing." The story tells of the plight of the sole survivor of a destroyed New York City, living amid the bounty of a great department store. The novel illustrates Cozzens's conviction regarding the necessity of social order.
• Edward Dahlberg: Those Who Perish. Dahlberg's third novel is one of the earliest to treat the impact of Nazism on American Jews. It was inspired when Dahlberg was beaten up by uniformed Nazis in a Berlin bar.
• James T. Farrell: The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. The second volume of the Studs Lonigan trilogy follows the Chicago youth's career from 1917 to 1919 as a gang member and street tough, isolated in a debilitating life that results from what the author diagnoses as the falsity of the American dream. Farrell also publishes Calico Shoes, and Other Stories, vignettes of South Side Chicago street scenes that parallel the setting and themes of his novel.
• William Faulkner: Doctor Martino, and Other Stories. Faulkner's story collection includes "Fox Hunt," "Smoke," "Mountain Victory," and "Honor."
• Jessie Redmon Fauset: Comedy, American Style. Fauset's final novel is generally considered her most direct statement on the impact of racial discrimination. Her female protagonist, Olivia Carey, hates being black, and her futile desire to be white threatens to destroy her, while her husband and son are redeemed by embracing their black heritage.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald's fourth and final novel to be published during his lifetime is his most ambitious, an attempt to summarize the collapse of American values through the deterioration of expatriate psychiatrist Dick Diver, who marries his troubled patient, Nicole. Although praised by some as Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the novel mainly provokes disappointment and accusations that Fitzgerald is simply repeating himself. In 1938, convinced that the true beginning of the novel was buried in its middle, Fitzgerald would reorganize the book chronologically in a revised version, published in 1951.
• Daniel Fuchs (1909-1993): Summer in Williamsburg. The first in a trilogy of realistic novels by the New York writer portraying life in the Jewish section of Brooklyn. It would be followed by Homage to Blenholt (1936) and Low Company (1937).
• Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998): What Mad Pursuit. Gellhorn's first novel follows the adventures of three women who, after graduating from college, undertake a restless search for fulfillment amid fashionable and bohemian society in the United States and Europe. Gellhorn would become a war correspondent for Collier's from 1938 to 1945, meeting Hemingway while covering the Spanish Civil War and marrying him in 1940.
• Caroline Gordon: Aleck Maury, Sportsman. Gordon's novel about a retired Southern classics professor who devotes himself to his outdoor passions prompts comparison with Ernest Hemingway's hunting and fishing descriptions. Additional episodes involving Aleck Maury would be included in Gordon's 1945 story collection, The Forest of the South.
• Langston Hughes: The Ways of White Folks. Hughes's first story collection deals with race relations from what at the time was considered a unique African American perspective.
• Zora Neale Hurston: Jonah's Gourd Vine. Hurston's first novel concerns a black preacher who is unable to stay faithful to his wife. It features elements from the author's fieldwork in black oral tradition and folklore.
• Josephine W. Johnson (1910-1990): Now in November. This realistic first novel by the Missouri-born writer about a Midwestern farm family contending with drought, debt, and madness prompts comparisons with Willa Cather's books and would win the 1935 Pulitzer Prize.
• MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977): Long Remember. Until Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1974), Kantor's first major novel is considered the best fictionalized account of the Battle of Gettysburg. Kantor was an Iowa-born newspaperman whose first novel, Diversey, about the Chicago underworld, appeared in 1928.
• Sinclair Lewis: Work of Art. Reviewers detect a less angry author in this account of the travails of a hotel manager driven to create the perfect inn.
• Victoria Lincoln (1904-1981): February Hill. The popular novelist and short story writer's best-known work is this novel about family life set in her hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts. It would be adapted for the stage by George Abbott as The Primrose Path (1939).
• John Joseph Mathews: Sundown. One of the first Native American novels is a largely autobiographical work on the struggles of assimilation by a mixed-blood protagonist.
• William Maxwell (1908-2000): Bright Center of Heaven. Maxwell's first novel concerns a group of people living in a Wisconsin farm boardinghouse. The book helps land him a position at The New Yorker in 1936, where he would work, mainly as a fiction editor, until 1976.
• Caroline Miller (1903-1992): Lamb in His Bosum. The first of the Georgia author's two published novels (the other is Lebanon, 1944) is a realistic historical novel set in antebellum Georgia; it wins the Pulitzer Prize.
• Henry Miller (1891-1980): Tropic of Cancer. Miller's first book, published in France, proves to be his most famous, a fictionalized autobiographical account of Miller's Paris days, emphasizing the seamier side of bohemian life. Its frank depiction of sex causes the book to be banned in the United States until 1961. Subsequent installments of Miller's autobiographical reflections published in the 1930s are Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939).
• John O'Hara (1905-1970): Appointment in Samarra. O'Hara's first novel is based on the social conflict between Irish Catholics and the Protestant elite in his Pennsylvania hometown. A bestseller, the book shocks readers by its frank depiction of sexuality and social manners. O'Hara, a successful journalist who worked for Newsweek, Time, and The New Yorker, was able to devote his time to fiction because of the book's success.
• Katherine Anne Porter: Hacienda. First published in the Virginia Quarterly in 1932, Porter's long story reflects her experiences on the set of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico.
• Henry Roth (1906-1995): Call It Sleep. Roth's stream-of-consciousness novel about the boyhood of a New York City Jew is likened to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man "but with a wider scope, a richer emotion, a deeper realism," according to critic Alfred Hayes. After going through two printings (four thousand copies), the book would disappear from view until being reissued in the 1960s and then hailed as a neglected masterpiece, ranked by Irving Howe as "one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American." Roth would not publish another novel until Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994).
• Damon Runyon: Blue Plate Specials. Runyon's second collection of Broadway tales includes "Little Miss Marker," described as Runyon's "most representative story" with its blend of sentiment and biting satire.
• William Saroyan (1908-1981): The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories. Saroyan's first publication marks his initial success as a short story writer (in 1939 he would direct his energies toward playwriting and in 1943 toward novels). The title story, which wins the 1934 O. Henry Award, concerns an unemployed writer struggling to find work in the midst of the Depression. Born in Fresno, California, and raised in an orphanage, Saroyan left school at the age of twelve to work as a telegraph messenger.
• Tess Slesinger (1905-1945): The Unpossessed. The author's only novel concerns the contemporary New York intellectual scene. Reviewer John Chamberlain calls it "quite simply and dogmatically the best novel of contemporary New York City that we have read." It would be followed by her only short story collection, Time: The Present (1935). Slesinger worked in Hollywood during the late 1930s as a screenwriter.
• Irving Stone (1903-1989): Lust for Life. The California writer produces the first of his popular fictionalized biographies, treating the life of painter Vincent van Gogh.
• Rex Stout (1886-1975): Fer-de-Lance. The Indiana-born writer introduces the cerebral, corpulent crime-solver Nero Wolfe, who rarely leaves his house, relegating the fieldwork to his employee, Archie Goodwin. Stout would go on to produce nearly eighty Wolfe mysteries, which have sold more than sixty million copies.
• Ruth Suckow: The Folks. Hailed as the "great Midwestern novel," the book documents life in a small Iowa town.
• B. Traven (c. 1890-1969): Death Ship. The secretive, elusive writer's first book, published in Germany in 1926, concerns an American sailor who is trapped on a doomed ship to be sunk for its insurance money. It is believed that the author was born Berick Traven Torsvan in Chicago and lived in Germany and Mexico from the 1920s to his death.
• Nathanael West: A Cool Million. West's Candide-like picaresque satire is a bitter attack on the Horatio Alger myth of American success, told through the successive "dismantling" of the protagonist, Lemuel Pitkin.
• Stark Young (1881-1963): So Red the Rose. The Mississippi-born writer's most acclaimed novel deals with life in Mississippi before and during the Civil War. It is praised by novelist Ellen Glasgow as "the best and most completely realized novel of the Deep South in the Civil War that has yet been written." Young was the drama critic for the New Republic during the 1920s; his drama criticism was collected in The Flower in Drama (1923).

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Malcolm Cowley: Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas. Cowley analyzes the postwar literary scene organized by autobiographical reflections on his own upbringing, war service, and acquaintance in Paris and New York with virtually all of the significant writers of the period. The book establishes Cowley's critical reputation and is one of the most important literary-historical accounts of the 1920s.
• T. S. Eliot: After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, Eliot defines the tradition in modern English literature and discusses the effect on a writer who is not brought up in an "environment of a central and living tradition."
• John Avery Lomax (1872-1948) and Alan Lomax (1915-2002): American Ballads and Folk Songs. Father-and-son folk musicologists collect nearly three hundred examples of indigenous American music, the largest such collection up to its time.
• Lewis Mumford: Technics and Civilization. The first of the four-volume Renewal of Life series--the author's major scholarly work and one of the classic texts in urban studies--traces urban development from the tenth century. Subsequent volumes studying the relationship between civilization and city life are The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), and The Conduct of Life (1951).
• Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading. In an elaboration of his 1931 essay "How to Read," Pound offers practical suggestions for literary appreciation as well as lists of worthy writers and works. Pound also publishes Make It New, a defense of contemporary writing and its imperatives based on Pound's reviews and literary essays written over the previous twenty years.
• Edith Wharton: A Backward Glance. The writer's autobiography includes observations about social life in New York, London, and Paris during the 1870s and 1880s, her relationship with Henry James and other writers, and statements about her artistic processes.

Nonfiction

• Robert Benchley: From Bed to Worse; or, Comforting Thoughts About the Bison. Benchley's miscellaneous collection features a darker, more biting tone than his previous volumes and includes two extended parodies, "How Seamus Coomora Met the Banshee," poking fun at Yeatsian folklore, and "Love Among the Thinkers," sending up prominent intellectual ideas of the day.
• Ruth Benedict (1887-1948): Patterns of Culture. This groundbreaking comparative study by the Columbia anthropologist describing cultural patterns of three different primitive peoples--the Zuni of New Mexico, the Dobu of Melanesia, and the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island--shows how custom and tradition influence behavior. It would be followed by Race, Science, and Politics (1940).
• John Dewey: Art as Experience and A Common Faith. The first work is an aesthetic treatise intended "to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience." The second is an expression of the philosopher's nonsectarian faith.
• John Dos Passos: In All Countries. Dos Passos provides accounts of his travels in Russia, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, including reflections on the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the 1932 presidential conventions.
• Douglas Southall Freeman (1886-1953): R. E. Lee. The result of nearly twenty years of research, the first two volumes of Freeman's monumental four-volume biography are published. The concluding volumes would follow in 1935 and receive the Pulitzer Prize. Freeman's partisanship on behalf of his subject is a limitation, but the biography remains the most comprehensive study available. Freeman was the editor of Richmond's News Leader and a broadcaster.
• James Weldon Johnson: Negro Americans, What Now? The author's lectures delivered at Fisk University consider the future for African Americans in the United States, calling for integration.
• Matthew Josephson (1899-1978): The Robber Barons. Regarded as a classic and Josephson's best-known book, this is an analysis of American industrialists such as Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller.
• Ring Lardner: First and Last. This posthumously published collection gathers the author's initial sports page columns as well as his most recent writings for The New Yorker.
• H. L. Mencken: Treatise on Right and Wrong. In a companion to Treatise on the Gods (1930), Mencken provides a study of ethical ideas.
• Gertrude Stein: Portraits and Prayers. Stein supplies experimental verbal portraits of members of her artistic circle, written since 1909.
• E. B. White: Every Day Is Saturday. A collection of the writer's "Notes and Comment" columns in The New Yorker, reflecting politics, fashion, and cultural trends since 1928.

Poetry

• James Agee (1909-1955): Permit Me Voyage. Agee's first publication is a collection of lyrics, sonnets, and a narrative poem, "Ann Garner." Selected for the Yale Younger Poets series, Agee is greeted by reviewers as a writer to watch.
• Conrad Aiken: Landscape West of Eden. A long, philosophical meditation on the soul's search for meaning.
• Paul Engle (1908-1991): American Song. The Iowan poet's first collection prompts comparisons with Walt Whitman in its exuberant energy and affirmation of American experience. The title poem wins the 1933 Century of Progress Prize sponsored by Poetry.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: Wine from These Grapes. Millay's collection includes "In the Grave No Flower" and the sonnet sequence "Epitaph for the Race of Man," which though conceived as a "heartfelt tribute to the magnificence of man," predicts the eventual extinction of mankind.
• George Oppen (1908-1984): Discrete Series. One of the leaders of the objectivist school of poetry issues his first collection. He would abandon writing for politics as a Communist Party organizer and would not issue another volume until 1962.
• Edwin Arlington Robinson: Amaranth. Robinson's blank-verse narrative poem looks at a group of individuals who chose the wrong lifework, ignoring their artistic passions to focus on the practical.
• Jesse Stuart (1907-1984): Man with a Bull-Tongued Plow. Stuart's first publication, a sonnet sequence about his native Kentucky mountain community, brings the regionalist writer national attention. The work wins the Jeannette Sewal Davis Prize from Poetry magazine.
• William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems, 1921-1931. Some of the poet's greatest works are collected in this edition issued by the Objectivist Press with a preface by Wallace Stevens, who calls his friend the "Diogenes of modern poetry."
• Audrey Wurdemann (1911-1960): Bright Ambush. The Seattle-born Wurdemann becomes the youngest poet ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize for her second collection, following The House of Silk (1926). The poems are graceful lyrics celebrating nature. She would publish three subsequent collections during the decade: The Seven Sins (1935), Splendour in the Grass (1936), and a sonnet sequence, Testament of Love (1938).

Publications and Events

• Audrey Wurdemann (1911-1960)Challenge. Dorothy West (1907-1998) creates this literary quarterly (New Challenge in 1937) as an outlet for the best black literature of the time, including that of Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston. It was criticized by Richard Wright and others for ignoring younger writers and for being nonpolitical.
• Audrey Wurdemann (1911-1960)Partisan Review. Beginning as a quarterly in support of the Communist Party under the editorship of Philip Rahv, in 1938 it would be reconstituted as an independent publication with an emphasis on literary, intellectual, and cultural topics, publishing the first work of Delmore Schwartz (an editor) and Saul Bellow, as well as avant-garde literature and criticism by writers such as Dwight MacDonald and Lionel Trilling.

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	19th century - 20th century - 21st century
Decades:	1900s  1910s  1920s  - 1930s -  1940s  1950s  1960s
Years:	1931 1932 1933 - 1934 - 1935 1936 1937

1934 by topic:

Subject:      Archaeology - Architecture - Art

Aviation - Film - Literature (Poetry) Meteorology - Music (Country) Rail transport - Radio - Science

Sports - Television

Countries:   Australia - Canada - Ecuador - India Ireland - Malaysia - New Zealand - Norway - Singapore - South Africa Soviet Union -UK - United States - Zimbabwe

Leaders:    Sovereign states - State leaders

Religious leaders - Law

Categories: Births - Deaths - Works - Introductions

Establishments - Disestablishments - Awards v • d • e

Year 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display full 1934 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

Contents:
Events of 1934 -  Jan. . Feb. . March . April -  May . June . July  .  Aug. -  Sept. . Oct. . Nov. .  Dec. -  Undated . Ongoing . Births Deaths Nobel Prizes See also -  Notes -  External links

Events of 1934

January

January 1: Alcatraz becomes a prison

• January 1
  • Alcatraz becomes a prison.
  • Nazi Germany passes the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring."
• January 7 – The first Flash Gordon comic strip is published.
• January 10 – Marinus van der Lubbe is executed in Germany.
• January 13 – The Candidate of Science degree is established in the USSR.
• January 20 – FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD., the pioneer of Fujifilm, is established
• January 24
  • The new Constitution of Estonia enters into force.
  • Einstein visits the White House.
• January 26
  • The Apollo Theater opens in Harlem, New York City.
  • The 10 year German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact is signed by Germany and the Second Polish Republic.

February

Jan. 7: first Flash Gordon comic

• February 6 – February 6, 1934 French political crisis: The French far right leagues rally in front of the Palais Bourbon, in an attempted coup against the Third Republic.
• February 9 – Gaston Doumergue forms a new government in France.
• February 12 – The Export-Import Bank is incorporated.
• February 12 to February 16 – Austrian Civil War
• February 16 – Commission of Government sworn in as form of direct rule for the Dominion of Newfoundland.
• February 22 – Frank Capra's It Happened One Night , starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, is released. It becomes a smash hit and the first of Capra's great screen classics. It becomes the first film to win all 5 of the major Academy Awards – Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Gable and Colbert receive their only Oscars for this film.
• February 23 – Léopold III becomes King of Belgium.

March

• March 1 – Manchuria becomes Manchukuo, following an invasion by the Japanese.
• March 3
  • John Dillinger escapes from jail in Crown Point, Indiana, using a wooden pistol.
  • Erich Franke invents the wire bearing (today wire race bearing) and files a patent application.
• March 8 – Prince Sigvard of Sweden loses his titles because of his marriage.
• March 12 -Konstantin Päts and general Johan Laidoner stage a coup in Estonia, and ban all political parties.
• March 13 – John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and their gang rob the First National Bank in Mason City, Iowa.
• March 20 – All the police forces in Germany come under the command of Heinrich Himmler.
  • The Great Hakodate fire kills at least 2,166 people in southern Hokkaido, Japan.
• March 24 – The Philippine Commonwealth becomes established allowing for more self-government from the United States.

April

• April 1 – Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker kill 2 young highway patrolmen near Grapevine, Texas.
• April 6 – Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats are awarded the Gothenburg Prize for Poetry.
• April 12 – U.S. publication of the novel Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• April 12 – The worlds largest ever recorded surface wind speed of 231 miles per hour was recorded on the summit of Mt. Washington NH.
• April 14 – Black Sunday: Twenty of the worst dust storms within the Dust Bowl occur.
• April 19 – Surgeon R.K. Wilson allegedly photographs the Loch Ness Monster.
• April 22 – John Dillinger and two others shoot their way out of an FBI ambush in northern Wisconsin.
• April 28 – FA Cup: Manchester City beat Portsmouth 2 – 1 at Wembley Stadium

May

May 11: dust storm in Great Plains

• May 5 – The first Three Stooges short, Woman Haters, is released.
• May 7 – The Pearl of Lao Tzu, 24 x 14 cm, is found in a giant clam off Palawan, Philippines.
• May 11 – Dust Bowl: A strong 2-day dust storm removes massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst dust storms of the Dust Bowl.
• May 15
  • The United States Department of Justice offers a $25,000 reward for John Dillinger.
  • Kārlis Ulmanis establishes an authoritarian government in Latvia.
• May 23 – A team of police officers, led by Texas Ranger Cordell Walker, ambush bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow near their hide-out in Black Lake, Louisiana, killing them both.
• May 24
  • Tomáš Masaryk is re-elected president of Czechoslovakia.
  • The 5-day "Battle of Toledo" occurs during the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio.
• May 28 – Near Callander, Ontario, the Dionne quintuplets are born to Oliva and Elzire Dionne, becoming the first quintuplets to survive infancy.
• May 29 – May 31 – The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church meets in Barmen, Germany to write the Barmen Declaration.

June

• June 6 – New Deal: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Securities Exchange Act into law, establishing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
• June 9 – The animated short The Wise Little Hen, directed by Bert Gillett for the Silly Symphonies series, and featuring the debut of Donald Duck, is released.
• June 10 – Italy beats Czechoslovakia 2-1 after extra time to win the 1934 World Cup.
• June 12 – Political parties are banned in Bulgaria.
• June 14 – Max Baer defeats champion Primo Carnera for the world heavyweight boxing title.
• June 18 – The Indian Reorganization Act is enacted.
• June 27 – The Emir of Yemen and ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia conclude a peace treaty.
• June 30
  • The Nazi SA camp Oranienburg becomes a national camp, taken over by the SS.
  • Night of the Long Knives: Nazis purge the SA.

July

• July 1
  • The world famous Brookfield Zoo opens in Brookfield, Illinois.
  • The Hays Office censorship code for motion pictures goes into full effect in the United States.
• July 10 – German Social Democrat and author Erich Mühsam is killed in Oranienburg concentration camp.
• July 17 – The North Dakota Supreme Court declares Lieutenant Governor Ole H. Olson the legitimate governor and tells William Langer to resign. Langer proceeds to declare North Dakota independent. He revokes the declaration after the Supreme Court justices meet him.
• July 22 – Outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre, "Public Enemy No. 1" John Dillinger is mortally wounded by FBI agents.
• July 25 – Austrian Nazis assassinate chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss during a failed coup attempt.

August

• August 2 – Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany, becoming head of state as well as Chancellor.
• August 8 – The Wehrmacht swears a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler.
• August 13 – The comic strip Lil' Abner is first published.
• August 19 – The first All-American Soap Box Derby is held in Dayton, Ohio.
• August 19 – In a referendum, 90% of the German population approves of Hitler's assumption of presidential powers as Führer and Reichskanzler.
• August 25 – Anti-union vigilantes seize the town of McGuffey, Ohio, during the Hardin County onion pickers strike.

September

• September 8 – Off the New Jersey coast, a fire aboard the passenger liner Morro Castle kills 134 people.
• September 19
  • The Soviet Union joins the League of Nations.
  • Bruno Richard Hauptmann is arrested in connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping case.
• September 21 – A typhoon in Honshū, Japan kills 3,036 people, and destroys the temple, schools, and other buildings in Osaka.
• September 22 – A gas explosion at Gresford Colliery in Wrexham, north-east Wales' kills 266 miners and rescuers, in one of the worst tragedies in Welsh mining history.
• September 28
  • Afghanistan joins the League of Nations.
  • A trial for the custody of young Gloria Vanderbilt begins; it lasts seven weeks and ends with a compromise.
• September 29 – Stanley Matthews makes his England debut, beginning a record 23-year international career.

October

• October 2 – A tornado in Osaka and Kyoto kills 1,660, injures 5,400, and destroys the rice harvest.
• October 5 – Miners rebel in Asturias, Spain (see Asturian miners' strike of 1934).
• October 6 – Catalonian separatists rebel in Spain.
• October 9 – King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou are assassinated during the king's state visit in Marseilles.
• October 16 – The Long March of the Chinese Communists begins.
• October 22 – Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd is shot and killed by FBI agents near East Liverpool, Ohio.

November

• November 13 – The Italian government decrees that teachers must use a military or party uniform in a class.
• November 21
  • The MCC makes an ultimately controversial decision to alter the lbw rule so a batsman can be lbw to a ball pitching outside off stump. The change is later blamed for many problems developing during the 1950s, primarily negative bowling outside leg stump to a field of short-leg fieldsmen.
  • Cole Porter's musical Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman, premieres in New York City.
• November 23 – An Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission in the Ogaden discovers an Italian garrison at Walwal, which lays well within Ethiopian territory. This encounter leads to the Abyssinia Crisis.
• November 26 – Universal Pictures releases the first film version of Fannie Hurst's novel, Imitation of Life, starring Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers. It gives Beavers, usually featured in small roles as a maid, her best screen role, and features the largest supporting role played by a black person in a Hollywood film up till then. Its storyline is extremely daring for a 1934 film – part of it revolves around a young mulatto girl rejecting her mother and trying to "pass for white". It is the first Hollywood film to seriously deal with this subject. The 1936 film version of Show Boat, also from Universal, will deal with a similar storyline.
• November 27 – A running gun battle between FBI agents and bank robber Baby Face Nelson results in the death of one FBI agent and the mortal wounding of special agent Sam Cowley, who is still able to mortally wound Nelson.

December

• December 1 –
  • In the Soviet Union, Politburo member Sergei Kirov is shot and killed at the Communist Party headquarters in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolaev (it is widely thought that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered this murder).
  • In Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas is inaugurated as President of that country.
• December 5 – Abyssinia Crisis: Ethiopian and Italian troops exchange gunfire. Reported casualties for the Ethiopians are 150, and for the Italians 50.
• December 18 – A low-key fascist conference is held in Moreaux.
• December 24 – Actor Lionel Barrymore begins what will become an annual tradition of the Golden Age of Radio – playing the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in dramatizations of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Barrymore continues playing Scrooge on radio until shortly before his death in 1954. He will also make a 78-RPM record album of the classic story, which will later be released on LP.
• December 26 – An American Airlines aircraft crashes in the Adirondack Mountains.
• December 27 – Persia becomes Iran.
• December 29 – Japan renounces the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930.

Undated

• The sonoluminescence effect is discovered.
• The GPU becomes the NKVD.
• Abidjan becomes the capital of the French colony of Côte d'Ivoire.
• The U.S. Marines leave Haiti.
• US Congress makes the Philippines a self-governing commonwealth and schedules independence for 1944. Sugar imports are reduced and immigration is limited to 50 Filipino people per year.

Ongoing

• Rise of the Nazi Party

Births

1934 in other calendars

Gregorian calendar	1934 MCMXXXIV
Ab urbe condita	2687
Armenian calendar	1383 ԹՎ ՌՅՁԳ
Bahá'í calendar	90 – 91
Berber calendar	2884
Buddhist calendar	2478
Burmese calendar	1296
Byzantine calendar	7442 – 7443
Chinese calendar	癸酉年十一月十六日 (4570/4630-11-16) — to — 甲戌年十一月廿五日 (4571/4631-11-25)
Coptic calendar	1650 – 1651
Ethiopian calendar	1926 – 1927
Hebrew calendar	5694 – 5695
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1989 – 1990
- Shaka Samvat	1856 – 1857
- Kali Yuga	5035 – 5036
Holocene calendar	11934
Iranian calendar	1312 – 1313
Islamic calendar	1352 – 1353
Japanese calendar	Shōwa 9 (昭和9年)
Korean calendar	4267
Thai solar calendar	2477
v • d • e

January-February

• January 7 – Charlie Jenkins, American runner
• January 9 – Bart Starr, American football player
• January 11 – Jean Chrétien, Prime Minister of Canada
• January 12 – Mick Sullivan, English rugby league footballer
• January 16 – Marilyn Horne, American mezzo-soprano
• January 18 – Raymond Briggs, British writer and illustrator
• January 20 – Tom Baker, British actor (Doctor Who)
• January 22 – Bill Bixby, American actor and director (The Courtship of Eddie's Father and The Incredible Hulk) (d. 1993)
• January 24 – Stanisław Grochowiak, Polish poet and dramatist (d. 1976)
• February 5 – Hank Aaron, African-American baseball player
• February 7 – Earl King, American musician (d. 2003)
• February 10 – Fleur Adcock, New Zealand poet
• February 11
  • Tina Louise, American actress (Gilligan's Island)
  • Mary Quant, British fashion designer
  • John Surtees, British race car driver
• February 12
  • Anne Krueger, American economist
  • Bill Russell, African-American basketball player
• February 13 – George Segal, American actor (The Hot Rock)
• February 14
  • Michel Corboz, Swiss conductor
  • Florence Henderson, American actress (The Brady Bunch)
• February 15 – Niklaus Wirth, Swiss computer scientist
• February 17
  • Alan Bates, British actor (d. 2003)
  • Barry Humphries, Australian actor and comedian
• February 20 – Bobby Unser, American race car driver
• February 21 – Rue McClanahan, American actress
• February 22
  • Sparky Anderson, American baseball manager
  • Van Williams, American actor (The Green Hornet)
• February 24
  • Bettino Craxi, Prime Minister of Italy (d. 2000)
  • Renata Scotto, Italian soprano
• February 27
  • Vincent Fourcade, French-born interior designer and socialite (d. 1992)
  • Ralph Nader, American consumer activist and presidential candidate

March-April

• March 1
  • Jean-Michel Folon, Belgian sculptor (d. 2005)
  • Joan Hackett, American actress (d. 1983)
• March 4
  • Mario Davidovsky, Argentinian composer
  • John Duffey, American bluegrass musician (d. 1996)
  • Anne Haney, American actress (d. 2001)
  • Barbara McNair, African-American singer and actress (d. 2007)
  • Janez Strnad, Slovenian physicist
• March 5 – Daniel Kahneman, Israeli economist, Nobel Prize laureate
• March 7
  • Franklin Clarke, American football player
  • Willard Scott, American television weather reporter (Today Show)
• March 9
  • Yuri Gagarin, Russian cosmonaut, first man in space (d. 1968)
  • Del Close, American actor, improviser, writer, and teacher (d. 1999)
• March 11 – Sam Donaldson, American reporter (ABC News)
• March 13 – Barry Hughart, American author
• March 14
  • Eleanor Bron, British actress
  • Paul Rader, General of The Salvation Army
• March 16 – Richard Layard, Baron Layard, British economist
• March 16 – Ray Hnatyshyn, Governor-General of Canada (d. 2002)
• March 20 – Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco, California
• March 22
  • Orrin Hatch, U.S. Senator from Utah
  • Larry Martyn, British comedy actor (Are You Being Served?) (d. 1994)
• March 23 – Mark Rydell, American actor and director
• March 25 – Gloria Steinem, American feminist
• March 26 – Alan Arkin, American actor
• March 31
  • Richard Chamberlain, American actor (Dr. Kildare)
  • Shirley Jones, American singer and actress (The Partridge Family)
  • Carlo Rubbia, Italian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• April 1
  • Rod Kanehl, American baseball player (d. 2004)
  • Vladimir Posner, Russian journalist
• April 2
  • Paul Joseph Cohen, American mathematician
  • Brian Glover, British actor and wrestler (d. 1997)
• April 3 – Jane Goodall, British zoologist
• April 5 – Roman Herzog, former President of Germany
• April 6 – Enrique Álvarez Félix, Mexican actor (d. 1996)
• April 9 – Bill Birch, New Zealand politician
• April 11 – Mark Strand, Canadian-born American poet
• April 24
  • Shirley MacLaine, American actress
  • Jayakanthan, Tamil writer
• April 25 – Peter McParland, Irish footballer
• April 29 – Otis Rush, American musician

May-June

• May 3 – Henry Cooper, British boxer
• May 9 – Alan Bennett, British actor and writer
• May 13 – Leon Wagner, American baseball player (d. 2004)
• May 14 – Siân Phillips, Welsh actress
• May 15 – George Roper, British comedian (d. 2003)
• May 19 – Jim Lehrer, American television journalist (MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour)
• May 21 – Bengt I. Samuelsson, Swedish biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• May 22 – Peter Nero, American pianist
• May 23 – Robert Moog, American inventor of the synthesizer
• May 24 – Barry Rose, British choir director and organist
• May 27 – Harlan Ellison, American writer
• May 28 – Dionne quintuplets, Canadian quintuplets
• May 30 – Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut
• June 3 – Rolland D. McCune, American theologian
• June 5 – Bill Moyers, American journalist
• June 6 – King Albert II of Belgium
• June 16 – Eileen Atkins, British actress
• June 16 – William Forsyth Sharpe, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
• June 25 – Beatriz Sheridan, Mexican actress and director (d. 2006)
• June 26 – Jeremy Wolfenden, British journalist (d. 1965)
• June 28 – Carl Levin, United States Senator
• June 30 – Harry Blackstone Jr., American magician (d. 1997)

July-August

• July 1
  • Jean Marsh, British actress
  • Sydney Pollack, American film director (d. 2008)
• July 10 – Jerry Nelson, American puppeteer
• July 11 – Giorgio Armani, Italian fashion designer
• July 12 – Van Cliburn, American pianist
• July 13
  • Wole Soyinka, Nigerian writer, Nobel Prize laureate
  • Aleksei Yeliseyev, Russian cosmonaut
• July 14 – John Tyndall, British politician (d. 2005)
• July 15 – Harrison Birtwistle, British composer
• July 25 – Luang Por Sumedho, Theravada Buddhist representative in the West
• July 30 – Bud Selig, American Major League Baseball commissioner
• August 2 – Valery Bykovsky, Russian cosmonaut and prostitute
• August 3 – Jonas Savimbi, Angolan political and rebel leader (d. 2002)
• August 4 – Dallas Green, American baseball manager and executive
• August 5 – Wendell Berry, American novelist, essayist, poet
• August 6 – Billy Boston, Welsh rugby league footballer
• August 15 – Nino Ferrer, French singer (d. 1998)
• August 18 – Vincent Bugliosi, American prosecutor and author (Helter Skelter)
• August 18 – Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rican Major League Baseball player (d. 1972)
• August 19 – Renée Richards, American transsexual physician and tennis player
• August 22 – Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army general
• August 23
  • Sonny Jurgensen, American football player
  • Barbara Eden, American actress (I Dream of Jeannie)
• August 25 – Eddie Ilarde, Filipino broadcaster and politician
• August 26 – Tom Heinsohn, American baseketball player, coach, and broadcaster
• August 30 – Anatoli Solonitsyn, Russian actor (d. 1982)

September-October

• September 2 – Dominic Chianese, American actor
• September 2 – Grady Nutt, American humorist (d. 1982)
• September 4 – Clive Granger, Welsh-born economist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2009)
• September 7 – Little Milton, American musician
• September 8 – Peter Maxwell Davies, English composer
• September 10 – Charles Kuralt, American journalist (On The Road) (d. 1997)
• September 15 – Fred Nile, Australian Christian politician
• September 16 – Elgin Baylor, American basketball player and executive
• September 17 – Binoy Majumdar, Indian Hungryalist Poet.
• September 17 – Maureen Connolly, American tennis player (d. 1969)
• September 19 – Brian Epstein, English manager of the Beatles (d. 1967)
• September 20 – Sophia Loren, Italian actress
• September 21 – Leonard Cohen, Canadian poet, novelist and singer/songwriter
• September 22 – Lute Olson, American basketball coach
• September 23 – Ahmad Shah Khan, Crown Prince of Afghanistan
• September 24 – Tommy Anderson, Scottish footballer
• September 27 – Wilford Brimley, American diabetic actor
• September 28 – Brigitte Bardot, French actress, sex symbol of the 1950s and 60's, and animal rights activist
• September 30 – Anna Kashfi, Welsh actress
• October 1 – Chuck Hiller, baseball player (d. 2004)
• October 1 – Shakeb Jalali Urdu poet (d. 1966)
• October 2 – Earl Wilson, baseball player (d. 2005)
• October 4 – Sam Huff, American football player
• October 9 – Jill Ker Conway, Australian-born author
• October 13 – Nana Mouskouri, Greek singer
• October 17 – Rico Rodriguez, Jamaican trombonist
• October 18 – Chuck Swindoll, American evangelist
• October 20 – Michael Dunn, a.k.a. Gary Neil Miller, dwarf American actor and singer (The Wild Wild West) (d. 1973)
• October 30 – Frans Brüggen, Dutch flutist, recorder player, and conductor

November-December

• November 1 – Umberto Agnelli, Swiss-born automobile executive (d. 2004)
• November 6 – Barton Myers, American/Canadian architect
• November 9 – Carl Sagan, American astronomer and television host (Cosmos) (d. 1996)
• November 11 – Jim Perry, American game show host ($ale of the Century)
• November 12 – Charles Manson, American cult leader and criminal
• November 13 – John Gowans, General of The Salvation Army
• November 24 – Alfred Schnittke, Volga German composer (d. 1998)
• November 27 – Ammo Baba, Assyrian soccer legend
• December 2 – Andre Rodgers, American baseball player (d. 2004)
• December 3 – Viktor Gorbatko, Russian cosmonaut
• December 4 – Wink Martindale, American game show host and disc jockey (Tic Tac Dough)
• December 5 – Joan Didion, American writer
• December 6 – Nick Bockwinkel, American professional wrestler
• December 9
  • Judi Dench, British actress
  • Junior Wells, American harmonica player (d. 1998)
• December 10 – Howard Martin Temin, American geneticist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1994)
• December 18 – Boris Volynov, Russian cosmonaut
• December 19
  • Aki Aleong, Trinidad and Tobago actor
  • Al Kaline, American baseball player
  • Rudi Carrell, Dutch singer and entertainer (d. 2006)
  • Pratibha Patil, President of India
• December 27 – Larissa Latynina, Russian gymnast
• December 28
  • Maggie Smith, British actress
  • Yujiro Ishihara, Japanese actor (d. 1987)
• December 30
  • Joseph P. Hoar, U.S. Marine commander
  • John Norris Bahcall, American astrophysicist (d. 2005)
  • Del Shannon, American singer (Runaway) (d. 1990)
• Unknown Birth dates
  • Paul Avery, American journalist (d. 2000)

Deaths

January – March

• January 6 – Herbert Chapman, English football manager (b. 1878)
• January 10 – Marinus van der Lubbe, Dutch communist accused of setting fire to the Reichstag (executed) (b. 1909)
• January 29 – Fritz Haber, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1868)
• February 13 – József Pusztai slovene writer, poet, journalist in Hungary (b. 1864)
• February 17 – King Albert I of Belgium (b. 1875)
• February 23 – Edward Elgar, English composer (Pomp and Circumstance) (b. 1857)
• March 15 – Davidson Black, Canadian-born paleoanthropologist (b.1884)
• March 20 – Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont, Dutch Queen and regent (b.1858)
• March 29 – Otto Hermann Kahn, German-born philanthropist (b. 1867)

April – June

• May 23
  • Clyde Barrow, American outlaw (shot) (b. 1910)
  • Bonnie Parker, American outlaw (shot) (b. 1910)
• May 25 – Gustav Holst, English composer (The Planets) (b. 1874)
• May 30 – Togo Heihachiro, Japanese admiral (b. 1848)
• June 10 – Frederick Delius, English composer (b. 1862)
• June 11 – Lev Vygotsky, Russian developmental psychologist (b. 1896)
• June 20 – Andrew Jackson Zilker, American philanthropist (b. 1858)
• June 30 – Kurt von Schleicher, Chancellor of Germany (b. 1882)

July – September

• July 4 – Marie Curie, Polish-born scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and physics (b. 1867)
• July 8 – Benjamin Baillaud, French astronomer (b. 1848)
• July 13 – Kate Sheppard , New Zealand Women's suffrage for voting (b. 1848)
• July 22 – John Dillinger, American criminal (b. 1903)
• July 25
  • François Coty, French perfume manufacturer (b. 1874)
  • Englebert Dolfuss, Chancellor of Austria (assassinated) (b. 1892)
• July 25 – Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist (b. 1889)
• July 26 – Winsor McCay, American comic creator and animator (b. 1871)
• July 27 – Hubert Lyautey, Marshal of France (b. 1854)
• July 28 – Marie Dressler, Canadian actress (b. 1868)
• August 2 – Paul von Hindenburg, German general and politician (b. 1847)
• August 17 – Charlotte Gilman, noted American poet and playwright (b. 1860)
• September 2 – Alcide Nunez, American musician (b. 1884)
• September 2 – Russ Columbo, American actor (b. 1908)

October – December

• October 15 – Raymond Poincaré, French President (b. 1860)
• October 17 – Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish histologist and neuroscientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1852)
• November 2 – Edmond James de Rothschild, French philanthropist (b. 1845)
• November 16 – Alice Liddell, English schoolgirl, inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (b. 1852)
• November 22 – Harry Steppe, American vaudeville performer (b. 1888)
• November 30 – Hélène Boucher, French aviatrix (b. 1908)
• December 1 – Sergei Kirov, Soviet politician (b. 1886)
• December 6 – Duke Charles Michael of Mecklenburg, head of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (b. 1863)

Nobel prizes

• Physics – awarded to Anabel King
• Chemistry – Harold Clayton Urey
• Physiology or Medicine – George Hoyt Whipple, George Richards Minot, William Parry Murphy
• Literature – Luigi Pirandello
• Peace – Arthur Henderson

Notes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: 1934

External links

• The 1930s Timeline: 1934 — from American Studies Programs at The University of Virginia

Table of Contents

Contents 1 Events of 1934 1.1 January 1.2 February 1.3 March 1.4 April 1.5 May 1.6 June 1.7 July 1.8 August 1.9 September 1.10 October 1.11 November 1.12 December 1.13 Undated 1.14 Ongoing 2 Births 2.1 January-February 2.2 March-April 2.3 May-June 2.4 July-August 2.5 September-October 2.6 November-December 3 Deaths 3.1 January – March 3.2 April – June 3.3 July – September 3.4 October – December 4 Nobel prizes 5 Notes 6 External links 7 Table of Contents

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