1937

1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940

political events

New Moscow show trials begin January 23 as Josef Stalin purges the Communist Party and Soviet Army of alleged Trotskyites (see 1936). Grigori L. Pyatakov, 47, is executed January 31; Karl Bernardovich Radek, 52, condemned to serve 10 years in prison; Marshal Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevski, 44, convicted of treason by a military tribunal and executed June 12 along with seven other generals; hundreds of others are liquidated or sent to the gulag (labor camps) of Siberia and elsewhere. Fully 7,000 will be sent to the gulag, 35,000 others dismissed from the armed forces on suspicion of disloyalty.

Malaga falls to Gen. Franco February 8 as Spain's civil war continues, with more than 10,000 Germans and from 50,000 to 75,000 Italians supporting Franco (see 1936). He commands several thousand insurgents against the Republican Army, whose efforts enjoy the support of an International Brigade of Russians, Britons, other Europeans, and Americans. The insurgents advance with Italian aid, but the road from Madrid to Valencia remains intact. Loyalists defeat Italian troops March 18 at Brihuega, capturing large stores of equipment. Benito Mussolini began the year by concluding a "gentlemen's agreement" with Britain, each party agreeing to maintain the independence and integrity of Spain and respect each other's interests and rights in the Mediterranean; an Italian-Yugoslav treaty signed March 25 guarantees existing frontiers and maintenance of the status quo in the Adriatic.

German Junker and Heinkel bombers of the Nazi Condor Legion annihilate the defenseless Basque town of Guernica on the afternoon of April 26, dropping explosives and thousands of aluminum incendiary projectiles for more than 3 hours while Heinkel fighters strafe civilians who have fled into the fields. The incident produces outrage worldwide.

Congress amends the Neutrality Act of 1935 May 1 to stiffen the embargo against shipment of arms, ammunition, and implements of war to any nation at war, including civil war, and bar U.S. vessels from carrying such material (see 1939).

President Roosevelt sends Wisconsin-born Washington, D.C. lawyer Joseph E. (Edward) Davies as his ambassador to Moscow. Now 60, Davies attended the Versailles Peace Conference with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, divorced his wife 2 years ago to marry General Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and will urge amending U.S. Neutrality Acts to discourage European powers from starting a second world war.

Four German warships bombard Almeria May 31 in reprisal for a Loyalist air attack on the Deutschland. Gen. Mola dies in a plane crash June 3, Bilboa falls to the insurgents June 18 after weeks of heavy fighting and aerial bombing, Basque resistance collapses, and Gijon falls October 21 as Franco breaks resistance in the Asturias. The Spanish government moves from Valencia to Barcelona October 28. Franco announces a naval blockade of the entire Spanish coast November 28, but a Loyalist counter-offensive begins December 5, and Teruel falls to the Loyalists December 19.

Britain's Hawker Aircraft begins production of the single-seat Hurricane monoplane fighter plane. First flown 2 years ago, it is the first Royal Air Force plane able to exceed 300 miles per hour in level flight and can actually reach a speed of 330 miles per hour and an altitude of 36,000 feet (see 1940).

The Bren gun that goes into production in England is adapted from a Czech light machine gun made at Brno. Easy to clean, load, and operate, its barrel can be changed quickly when it overheats. The gun weighs 19 pounds, can fire 520 rounds per minute, and has an effective range of about 2,000 feet (see Sten gun, 1940).

Former British foreign secretary and 1925 Nobel Peace Prize winner Sir (Joseph) Austen Chamberlain dies at London March 16 at age 73. Parliament votes in March to double the annual salary of Britain's prime minister from £5,000 to £10,000 and to pay him a pension upon retirement. The lord chancellor has been receiving £5,000 with another £5,000 for acting as speaker of the House of Lords.

Britain's prime minister Stanley Baldwin retires May 28 at age 69 and is succeeded by his chancellor of the exchequer (Arthur) Neville Chamberlain, 58-year-old son of the late Austen Chamberlain, who attempts to appease Adolf Hitler, a policy whose many supporters include Edward F. L. (Frederick Lindley) Wood, 56, earl of Halifax, who served as viceroy to India from 1925 to 1929. Former Canadian prime minister Sir Robert Borden dies at Ottawa June 10 at age 82; former British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald at sea en route to South America November 8 at age 71.

France's premier Léon Blum resigns in June after a conservative majority in the Senate refuses to grant him the emergency-decree powers that he has sought to deal with the nation's financial problems; left-wingers have denounced him for refusing to intervene in the Spanish civil war, right-wingers for trying to establish state control over finance and private industry. Former premier Camille Chautemps heads a new modified Popular Front ministry that will continue until March of next year (see 1938).

Former Czech president Tomas Masaryk dies at Lány September 13 at age 86; former German general and erstwhile Hitler supporter Erich F. W. Ludendorff at Tutzing December 20 at age 72.

Italy joins the German-Japanese anti-Comintern pact November 6 and withdraws from the League of Nations December 11.

Former U.S. secretary of state Elihu Root dies at New York February 7 at age 91; former U.S. Navy admiral and fleet commander Henry D. Wiley at Palm Beach, Fla., May 20 at age 76; former U.S. diplomat Frank B. Kellogg at St. Paul, Minn., December 21 on the eve of his 81st birthday.

A Kurd assassinates Iraq's 47-year-old military dictator Gen. Bakr Sidqi at Mosul August 11 following conclusion of a nonaggression pact signed in July by Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian, and Afghan diplomats (see 1936). British diplomat Sir Percy Cox has died at Melchbourne, Bedfordshire, February 20 at age 72, having overseen the transition of Iraq from a provisional, largely military regime to a national government headed by the late Faisal I (see 1939).

Japanese forces invade China July 7 as the new prime minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye, 46, embarks on an undeclared war that will continue until 1945. A scion of the ancient Fujiwara family, Konoye is a onetime liberal who has come to favor increased armament and centralized government control. The Japanese attack Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing (Peking), the city falls to the Japanese July 28, and Tianjin (Tientsin) falls July 29 as Gen. Otozo Yamada, 55, directs the invading army. Kyoto-born military intelligence veteran Gen. Naruhiko Higashikuni, 49, has commanded the 5th infantry brigade since 1934 and is named chief of military aviation; a member of the royal family, he will head Japan's Home Defense Headquarters beginning in 1939. Chinese patriot Sun Yaxing, 26, sells his jewelry business and uses the proceeds to found the Chinese Youths National Salvation Association. Japanese authorities on Taiwan force the people there to celebrate the Imperial Army's victories; in the next 8 years they will draft 200,000 Taiwanese into the army, and 40,000 of them will die. The Japanese Army uses poison gas August 13 against Chinese troops at the outbreak of the Wasung-Shanghai campaign. It has earlier used gas more than 1,100 times in 14 provinces (see biological weapons [Unit 731], 1936). U.S. women and children living in Shanghai are evacuated August 15 while Japanese forces prepare to launch an attack on the city. Nationalists and communists join forces to repel the invaders, communist military leader Ye Ting is given command of the New 4th Army in October (now 40, he has spent 5 years in the Soviet Union and western Europe), but the Japanese take Shanghai November 8 and stage a victory parade down the city's main shopping street December 3; a Chinese assassination team led by Sun Yaxing throws a bomb that disrupts the parade, and Sun hides Browning automatics, Mauser machine pistols, and Mills hand grenades in the attic of his former jewelry store to prepare for future terrorist activities (but see 1938). The Japanese advance on Nanjing (Nanking), take that city by storm December 13, and take Hangzhou (Hangchow) December 24 (see 1938).

The Panay incident heightens tensions between Japan and the Western powers. Japanese bombers attack British and U.S. ships near Nanjing December 12 on orders from Col. Kingoro Hashimoto, 37, who commands Imperial Army troops in central China, but Washington accepts Japan's explanations, and events in Europe distract London and Washington from the aggression in China.

President Roosevelt proposes a reorganization of the U.S. judiciary February 7 and explains his idea to the public on radio March 9 in one of his "fireside chats." The "nine old men" on the Supreme Court have frustrated FDR by blocking so many New Deal initiatives that the president asks for a law that would empower him to appoint an additional justice for every current justice over the age of 70. FDR's Texas-born vice-president John Nance Garner opposes the "court-packing scheme," as do many other Democrats, and the proposal's only effect is to increase criticism of Roosevelt.

Dominican troops and police massacre Haitian workers living near their border in October as long-simmering enmities erupt into violence (see Trujillo, 1930). The economy of the Dominican Republic depends on Haitian labor; somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 are killed in a 36-hour bloodbath; the outside world pays little attention, but the atrocity creates a furor on the island. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull has said of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo that he "may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch." Trujillo will let a puppet president replace him next year. The new government will agree to pay $3.4 million in compensation to relatives of those killed, but only a fraction of this will actually be paid. The despotic Trujillo will be enriching himself to the tune of $200,000 per month by 1939, and he will return as president in 1943 (see 1954).

Brazil's president Getulio Vargas proclaims a new constitution November 10 after 7 years in office, closes the Congress, and begins nearly 15 years of a dictatorship he says is not fascist but will have all the hallmarks of fascism. Socialist newspaperman Alexandre Barbosa Lima, 40, opposed the Vargas coup in 1930 but will support him with nationalist fervor in his columns.

human rights, social justice

Germany's Buchenwald (Beech Forest) concentration camp opens July 16 on a plateau overlooking Weimar (see Dachau, 1933). The first inmates are mostly political prisoners of every religious belief, but most of the 238,980 inmates that will ultimately be sent to Buchenwald will be Jews, and 56,545 will die in the camp's gas chambers. The Flossenbürg concentration camp is established in Bavaria's Upper Palatinate, where it will become a major center of forced labor, with 30,000 to 40,000 worker prisoners housed in the main camp and 15 satellite camps. Beginning in 1942 it will serve also as a transit camp for Jews who are to be sent by train to camps in Poland.

Germany evicts Jews from trade and industry, orders them to wear yellow badges displaying the six-pointed "star of David," and bars them from all parks, places of entertainment, health resorts, and public institutions (see Nuremberg laws, 1935; Kristallnacht, 1938).

Romania forbids Jews to own land and bars them from the professions at year's end under legislation put through by the newly installed prime minister Octavian Goga, 56, who takes office despite the fact that his National Christian Party gained only 10 percent of the votes in the election.

The Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching founded 6 years ago by Jessie Daniel Ames begins naming sheriffs who permit unruly mobs to take away their prisoners, accusing the lawmen of contributing to the crime of lynching.

Spanish women observe the 27th International Women's Day March 8 by demonstrating against the rebel forces of Gen. Francisco Franco, who has obtained support from the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy.

U.S. authorities in the Philippines grant women there the right to vote on the same basis as men.

Britain liberalizes her divorce laws July 23, but a new Irish constitution takes effect December 29 with a provision banning divorce and denouncing the idea of working mothers.

A German court at Waldenberg rules November 29 that the state may take children away from mothers and fathers who refuse to teach them Nazi ideology.

Japanese troops rape and murder more than 20,000 Chinese women in their march into Nanjing (Nanking) beginning December 13, assaulting many of them in schools and nurseries. Fathers are forced to rape their daughters and sons their mothers while other family members watch. The Imperial Army authorizes the recruiting of "comfort-girl" battalions of Chinese and Korean girls and women, forced into sexual slavery to gratify the needs of its soldiers (see 1941; 1991). At least 200,000 noncombatants (the estimate by Japanese authorities; 300,000 by Chinese reports) are systematically executed over the course of 6 weeks at Nanjing, whose population numbered fewer than 650,000 before the approach of the Japanese. A secret message sent under the seal of Prince Asaka, uncle of Emperor Hirohito, has said, "Kill all captives," and Gen. Iwane Matsui has ordered the outrage, in which he and his lieutenant general Hisao Tani have personally participated; by early next year soldiers will have systematically raped thousands of women ranging in age from 7 to 70, used machine guns to kill an estimated 50,000 people trying to flee across the Yangzi (Yangtze), and competed to see who could kill most efficiently; this grisly atrocity ("the rape of Nanking"), combined with merciless bombing of the Chinese cities and use of germ warfare, rouses world opinion against Japan (see 1938). Japan's Ministry of Education will delete textbook references to the massacre for decades, and right-wing extremists will deny that it ever happened.

philanthropy

Oil baron-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller dies at Ormond Beach, Fla., May 23 at age 97, leaving an estate of just $26.4 million, most of it in U.S. Treasury notes (he has long since given away most of his vast fortune); social welfare worker Elizabeth S. Haldane dies at Auchterarder, Perth, December 24 at age 75, having persuaded the late Andrew Carnegie's United Kingdom Trust to rescue the financially troubled Sadler's Wells Theater and Ballet.

commerce

"I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," President Roosevelt says in his second inaugural address January 20. The inauguration date has been moved from March 4 under terms of the Twentieth Amendment.

General Motors recognizes the United Automobile Workers (UAW) as sole bargaining agent for workers in all GM plants February 11 (see 1936). GM takes the action to end the union's 44-day sit-down strike at Flint, but 4,470 other strikes idle plants nationwide, and most are sit-down strikes.

United States Steel Co. permits unionization of its workers March 2 to avoid a strike (see 1936). Myron C. Taylor spent $16 million 5 years ago in direct relief to workers as partial compensation for their reduced time and wages; he has been Big Steel's CEO since 1932 and now breaks with the nonunion policy established by the company after the Homestead Strike of 1892, signing a contract March 17 with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the CIO (see 1936). Benjamin F. Fairless of Carnegie-Illinois Steel signs the contract, as do the heads of four other United States Steel subsidiaries; it establishes a $5 daily minimum wage, a 40-hour week, paid vacations, seniority rights, and grievance procedures. Union organizers meet with resistance from "little steel" firms that include Bethlehem with 82,000 workers, Republic with 53,000, Youngstown Sheet and Tube with 27,000, and National, American Rolling Mills (Armco), and Inland with a combined total of some 38,000.

The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the principle of a minimum wage for women March 29; its 5-to-4 ruling in the case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish reverses some earlier decisions (see 1923), but Justices Butler, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Van Devanter dissent from Chief Justice Hughes's majority opinion. President Roosevelt has sent a special message to Congress February 5 proposing legislation that would "pack" the Supreme Court with six additional justices if the existing "nine old men" continued to frustrate New Deal efforts to lighten the economic burden on most Americans, but Justice Roberts has shifted his position and votes to uphold the Washington State law.

The Supreme Court upholds the National Labor Relations Act of 1934 in a series of 5-to-4 decisions beginning April 12 with NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel. The Court essentially ratifies what some right-wing critics call the New Deal's "welfare state" and initiates a centralism that will come to have bipartisan support.

Jones & Laughlin Steel workers walk off the job at Aliquippa, Pa., on the night of May 12. Company chairman Horace E. Lewis has delayed complying with the Supreme Court order of April 12 but has finally agreed to allow an election in 10 days or 2 weeks and to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) if a majority of workers vote for it, but the SWOC fears a trap and has called for a strike, which ends in 40 hours after Pennsylvania's governor George Earle shows support for the workers.

"Unionism, not Fordism," say thousands of flyers printed up by the UAW May 26 (see 1935). Local 174 head Walter P. Reuther asks the local's Women's Auxiliary to distribute the flyers to workers at the River Rouge plant, and he invites the media, clergymen, and local government officials to witness the event in hopes of averting violence, but Henry Ford has said, "We'll never recognize the United Auto Workers Union or any other union" (see 1932). Ford employs a "service department," headed by Harry H. Bennett, 45, whose 600 goons are armed with guns and blackjacks to bar union organizers, Reuther shows up in his Sunday suit with gold watch and chain along with three other organizers, they pose for news photographers on the overpass connecting the Ford plant with a streetcar stop, and one of Bennett's men says, "This is private property. Get the hell out of here!" Reuther and the other three are savagely beaten in what will be remembered as the "Battle of the Overpass." Bennett's men smash most of the journalists' cameras, but Detroit News photographer James Fitzgerald manages to escape with his camera, his pictures of the bruised and bleeding organizers appear not only in his paper but also in Time magazine, and much of the nation learns for the first time of Ford's brutal methods (see 1938).

The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the unemployment provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act May 24, ruling 7 to 2 in the case of Helvering v. Davis (Justices Butler and McReynolds dissent).

Republic Steel workers strike and picket, singing "Solidarity Forever" and "I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" (see 1915). Republic's Indiana-born $130,000-a-year boss Tom M. (Mercer) Girdler, 41, says he would rather go back to hoeing potatoes and cultivating his apple trees than give in to union organizers. On May 30 he has Chicago police attack the demonstrators; four are killed, three others mortally wounded, and 84 injured in the Memorial Day massacre as police fire on unarmed strikers and brutally assault wives and children. The CIO claims a membership of 3½ million by September with more than 500,000 in the United Steel Workers Union as other incidents of police repression accompanied by further deaths and injuries follow the violence at Republic Steel.

Longshoreman union leader Harry Bridges leads his Pacific Coast division out of International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) in June (see 1934); he reconstitutes it as the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Association (ILWU), affiliating it with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) (see Hawaiian sugar and pineapple workers, 1944).

The U.S. economic recovery that has progressed for 4 years falters beginning in midyear. Business activity suffers a sharp drop; Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average falls from its post-1929 high of 194.40.

The New York Federal Reserve Bank reduces its discount rate to 1 percent in August; it will remain at that level until January 1948.

"I am the law," says Jersey City, N.J., mayor Frank Hague when questioned in a legislative investigation as to his right to forbid picketing and distribution of labor circulars on the city's streets. Now 61, Hague has been mayor for 20 years and will remain mayor for another 10.

Amalgamated Clothing Workers president Sidney Hillman obtains a settlement with the Clothing Manufacturers Association and establishes a bargaining pattern that will be used throughout the industry (see 1918). Hillman has organized all but a handful of men's clothing workers (see Office of Production Management, 1941).

The Folklore of Capitalism by Laramie, Wyo.-born Yale Law School professor Thurman (Wesley) Arnold, 46, shows how antitrust laws have actually promoted the growth of industrial monopolies in the United States "by deflecting the attack on them into purely moral and ceremonial channels." Arnold will be appointed assistant U.S. attorney general next year and in the next 5 years will file more than 200 suits alleging conspiracies in restraint of trade.

Former secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon dies at Southampton, L.I., August 26 at age 82 (see art, 1938); former secretary of the treasury Ogden L. Mills dies of a coronary thrombosis at his New York home October 11 at age 53, having stoutly opposed New Deal policies.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman James M. Landis resigns and at age 38 becomes the youngest dean of the Harvard Law School in its history, replacing Roscoe Pound. He supports President Roosevelt's "court-packing" plan and is succeeded as SEC chairman by William O. Douglas, who will serve until 1939.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes November 24 at 113.69 but rebounds somewhat to close December 31 at 120.85, down from 179.90 at the end of 1936.

retail, trade

The Miller-Tydings Act passed by Congress August 17 allows manufacturers to fix resale prices of brand-name merchandise in states where legislatures have authorized price-fixing contracts. Designed to prevent predatory pricing and ruinous price wars, the new fair trade law has been devised as an exception to the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890 and permits a manufacturer to determine the minimum price at which his products may be sold at retail outlets.

Boston department-store magnate and social reformer Edward A. Filene dies of pneumonia at the American Hospital in Paris September 26 at age 77. His personal assistant Lillian Schoedler has driven him across Europe in her roadster, returns his ashes to Boston aboard the Ile de France, helps to scatter them in the Charles River, and inherits the Back Bay brownstone at 12 Otis Place that Filene acquired in 1920.

energy

Standard Oil of New Jersey drills the first offshore Louisiana oil wells.

Electrical engineer-inventor Elihu Thomson dies at his Swampscott, Mass., home March 13 at age 83.

Bonneville Dam is dedicated September 28 on the Columbia River in Oregon (see Boulder Dam, 1936). Before pressing a button that starts the first generator President Roosevelt says, "Truly, in the construction of this dam we have had our eyes on the future of the nation. Its cost will be returned to the people of the United States many times over in the improvement of navigation and transportation, the cheapening of electric power, and the distribution of this power to hundreds of small communities within a great radius." Henry Kaiser has masterminded construction of the new $51 million hydroelectric installation, which rises 197 feet, is 2,690 feet across, and will be completed in 1943 (see Kaiser, 1931; 1941).

Private utility companies file 18 lawsuits against the Tennessee Valley Authority November 15 and demand the TVA's dissolution (see 1936; congressional hearings, 1938).

transportation

Locks on the new Bonneville Dam will permit ships to ascend 188 miles up the Columbia River.

Soviet Russia opens the 80-mile Moscow-Volga Ship Canal to give Moscow access to the Volga (see Stalin Ship Canal, 1933).

Hong Kong's C. Y. Tung shipping line is founded by Chinese shipowner Chao-Yung Tung, 25, whose father-in-law has a monopoly on much of the Chinese coastal shipping trade and was himself made vice president last year of the Tianjin (Tientsin) Ship Owners Association. Tung has moved to Hong Kong at the outbreak of hostilities with Japan and will build a fleet rivaling those of the Greek ship owners Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos.

The container ship has its genesis as North Carolina trucker Malcom (Purcell) McLean hauls a load of cotton bales to Hoboken, N.J., and has to wait nearly a whole day before stevedores on the docks can get to his truck, remove every crate, put it in a sling, hoist it up, and then lower it into the hold of a freighter. This "break-bulk" method of shipping is slow, labor intensive, dangerous, and to McLean's mind rather stupid. Now 23, McLean is a farmer's son who began hauling empty tobacco barrels in an old trailer when still a teenager; he started a trucking company 3 years ago with two of his six siblings. By 1940 they will have 30 trucks, and by 1955 there will be more than 1,700, but no shipowner will listen to his idea (see 1955).

The French Line's 2-year-old S.S. Normandie is refitted with four-bladed propellers and crosses the Atlantic in 3 days, 22 hours, and 7 minutes, winning the Blue Riband from the S.S. Europa (but see 1942).

Former White Star Line chairman (Joseph) Bruce Ismay dies at London October 17 at age 74, having lived under a cloud since his escape from the sinking R.M.S. Titanic in 1912 (his obituary in the Times makes no mention of the Titanic).

Air Canada has its beginnings in Trans-Canada Air Lines, established by the parliament at Ottawa April 10 with Canadian National Railways president Samuel J. (James) Hungerford, 64, as its president. Its first scheduled route is between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, it will have a monopoly on Canada's domestic air transport until 1959, and it will grow to have a worldwide presence. Headquartered at Montreal, it will change its name to Air Canada January 1, 1965.

US Airways has its beginnings in a Washington, D.C.-based airmail service founded under the name All American Aviation by chemical company heir Richard du Pont, whose planes pick up mail "on the fly" in small Northeastern communities, using a system of hooks and ropes. The company will begin carrying passengers in 1949, rename itself Allegheny Airlines in 1953, and become USAir in 1979.

Germany retires her 9-year-old Graf Zeppelin after 144 ocean crossings that have carried more than 13,000 passengers. The 1-year-old Hindenburg carries 50 passengers in private cabins and 47 in crew, she moves noiselessly at 78 miles per hour, but she is filled with hydrogen gas that explodes on her arrival at Lakehurst, N.J., May 6, bursting into flames that kill 36 people, 13 of them passengers, a disaster that ends the brief era of transatlantic travel by rigid airship (see Pan Am, 1939). The Germans will send Hugo Eckener to America next year in an effort to buy safe helium gas, but the Americans will refuse to sell.

Amelia Earhart disappears July 2 on a Pacific flight from New Guinea to Howland Island (see 1928). Now 38, she has been attempting a round-the-world flight in a twin-engined Lockheed Electra with Frederick J. Noonan as her copilot. No trace of the plane will be found.

Soviet test pilot Valery P. Chkalov and three companions arrive at Vancouver June 20 in their ANT-25 monoplane, having flown nonstop over the North Pole from Moscow in 62 hours, 17 minutes (see 1936). They have covered 11,50 kilometers (5,400 miles) that included 3,100 miles over ice fields, they visit President Roosevelt at Washington, and return home from New York on the Normandie. His countrymen hail Chkalov as the "Russian Lindbergh" (see 1939).

Montreal inaugurates trolleybus service March 29, becoming the first Canadian city to have such buses. It had horsedrawn tramways from 1861 to 1894, an electric tramway beginning in 1892, gasoline-powered buses beginning in 1919 (see Métro, 1966).

The Golden Gate Bridge opens May 27 across San Francisco Bay to link San Francisco with Marin County. Painted a bright orange, the new 4,200-foot (1,280-meter) span has giant 780-foot towers to hold its mile-and-a-half-long main cables, each containing 27,000 pencil-thin wires. Engineer Joseph B. Strauss, now 67, has pushed through the project, a huge safety net that he has hung from the bridge has saved 19 construction workers from falling into the rough sea at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, but 12 men have been killed 1 week before the opening of the bridge that will remain the world's longest suspension bridge for 27 years (see Verrazano Bridge, 1964).

The Lincoln Tunnel between Manhattan and Weehawken, N.J., opens to traffic under the Hudson River December 22. More than 1,790,000 50¢ tolls will be collected in the 8,000-foot tunnel's first year of operation, a second tube will open in December 1940, and within 60 years the tunnel will be collecting some 20 million tolls per year.

General Motors introduces an automatic transmission for automobiles under the name Hydra-Matic Drive as optional equipment for 1938 Oldsmobiles. Similar transmissions have been used on London buses for 12 years and will be employed increasingly on U.S. passenger cars, first as optional equipment, then as standard.

Pierce-Arrow ceases production. The company will be sold at auction in May of next year.

Auburn Automobile Co. introduces the sleek Cord Model 812 with a forward-looking design, but Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg motorcars pass into history as E. L. Cord returns from his Surrey estate and sells his motorcar holdings. Cord moved to England to escape kidnap threats against his children.

Toyota Motor Co. is founded at Nagoya by Kiichiro Toyoda as an adjunct to the family's loom works. The Toyota Model AA sedan introduced in prototype 2 years ago by Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, whose Sakichi Toyoda received £100,000 from a Lancashire firm in 1929 for rights to produce his advanced loom in England. Toyoda used the money to develop a motorcar design and put his son Kiichiro in charge of the venture. An engineer sent by Kiichiro to the Packard works at Detroit as a tourist acquired enough information to set up an assembly line. Kiichiro's cousin Eiji, now 23, joined the company last year and works on a prototype of its first production model, a six-cylinder sedan with styling much like that of the Chrysler Airflow introduced early in 1934 (see 1950). Japan produces only 26,000 motorcars this year, Germany only 331,000 as those countries gear up for war production. The United States produces 4.8 million automobiles as the economic recession continues, depressing demand.

Mexico nationalizes her railroads in June.

technology

Nylon is patented by E. I. du Pont, whose chronically depressed chemist W. H. Carothers swallows cyanide in a Philadelphia hotel room April 29 at age 41, just 19 days after filing for the patent, which he has assigned to Du Pont (see 1935). The first completely man-made fiber, nylon is used for the first time in Dr. West's Miracle-Tuft toothbrushes, whose DuPont Prolon bristles are more sanitary than traditional hog bristles; nylon will find wide use not only in clothing but also as a substitute for canvas in sailboat sails, sisal in ships' hawsers, etc. (see stockings, 1940; Terylene-Dacron, 1941).

Germany's 74-year-old Bayer AG achieves advances in polyurethane chemistry (see 1936).

York, Pa.-born Bell Laboratories research mathematician George R. (Robert) Stibitz, 33, pioneers modern computer technology (see Bush's analog computer, 1930). He experiments in November with relays (metallic devices used to regulate telephone circuits). When an electric current is passed through a relay, it can assume either an open or closed position; wondering if relays can be used to perform simple mathematical functions, Stibitz borrows some from the Bell stockroom, takes them home, and assembles a simple computing system on his kitchen table, using the relays, a dry cell, flashlight bulbs, and metal strips cut from a tobacco can. Designating a lighted bulb to represent the binary digit 1 and an unlighted bulb the digit 0, he creates a device that can use binary mathematics to add and subtract decimals. His K (for Kitchen)-model computer does not impress his superiors but they will soon change their minds (see 1939).

science

Austrian-born Columbia University physicist Isidor (Isaac) Rabi, 39, uses the university's molecular-beam laboratory to discover a magnetic resonance method for observing the spectra of atoms and molecules in the radio-frequency range. Rabi's method will make it possible to deduce the mechanical and magnetic properties of atomic nuclei (see 1938).

Italian physicists Emilio (Gino) Segrè, 32, and Enrico Fermi produce the first laboratory-made element (see 1934). The two discovered "slow" neutrons 2 years ago and now bombard molybdenum with deuterons and neutrons to produce an element with the atomic number 43 that probably does not exist in nature but will be called technetium (see nuclear fission, 1938; McMillan, 1940).

Physicist Maurice Goldhaber at Cambridge University performs slow-neutron scattering studies that will prove essential to the development of the first nuclear reactors (see Goldhaber, 1934). He and James Chadwick have used their nuclear photoelectric effect discovery to disintegrate the nuclei of boron, lithium, and nitrogen; Goldhaber has shown that photographic emulsions can be useful in recording the tracks of particles formed in nuclear reactions (see byrillium, 1940).

Berlin-born physicist Erwin Wilhelm Müller, 26, invents a field emission microscope that enables scientists to photograph individual atoms. Müller will emigrate to America in 1951, become a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and invent a field ion microscope in 1956.

Soviet physicists Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm, 42, and Ilya Mikhaylovich Frank, 29, find the explanation for Cherenkov radiation (see 1934).

Wheaton, Ill.-born astronomer Grote Reber, 25, builds the world's first radio telescope in his backyard. He will be the world's only radio astronomer until 1945, mapping high-frequency sources (see Lovell, 1946).

German-born Sheffield University biochemist Hans (Adolf) Krebs, 37, demonstrates the existence of a cycle of chemical reactions that are involved in the breakdown of sugars, fats, and proteins into carbon dioxide, water, and energy-rich compounds (it will be called the citric acid cycle, or Krebs cycle).

Organic chemist Henry E. Armstrong dies at his native Lewisham, Kent, July 13 at age 89; zoologist Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, at Tring, Buckinghamshire, August 27 at age 69; biologist Richard von Hertwig at Munich October 3 at age 87; physicist Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, at Cambridge October 19 at age 66; plant physiologist Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose at Calcutta November 23 at age 78 (he was knighted in 1917).

medicine

Barcelona physician Josep Trueta y Raspall, 40, introduces a closed-plaster method of treating compound fractures, using principles developed by Lincoln, Neb., physician H. (Hiram) Winnett Orr, 60, to save fracture victims in the Spanish civil war and reduce the need for amputation.

Diabetics are treated successfully for the first time with zinc protamine insulin, which reduces the need for diet therapy (see 1924; 1942).

Pharmacologist Daniele Bovet of 1936 sulfanilamide fame discovers the first antihistamines. Bovet will also pioneer the use of curare—employed by South American tribes to poison arrows—as a muscle relaxant in surgery.

U.S. consumers demand that Congress regulate the drug industry after 107 people have died, many of them children, following treatment for sore throats and other ills with an elixir of the antibacterial drug sulfanilamide (see 1936). Responding to an apparent need for a liquid form of sulfanilamide, chief chemist and pharmacist Harold Cole Watkins of the 58-year-old Bristol, Tenn.-based S.E. Massengill Co. has mixed the drug with extract of raspberry and dissolved it in the highly toxic solvent diethylene glycol, known more commonly as antifreeze; 240 gallons of Elixir Sulfanalimide have gone out to pharmacies. The American Medical Association has received complaints from physicians who have seen patients in severe and unrelenting abdominal pain, urine cessation, nausea, vomiting, stupor, and convulsions. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) dispatches nearly all of its 239 investigators to track down any unused portions of the medicine. They eventually find 234 gallons and one pint of the 240-gallon total (the rest having been consumed), Massengill denies any responsibility (it has violated no existing law), but Watkins commits suicide and the company is charged on a misbranding technicality (see Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 1938).

The Neurotic Personality of Our Time by German-born U.S. psychoanalyst Karen Horney (née Danielson), 52, attacks Freudian anti-feminism. Horney blames the industrial civilization of America for the anxieties that plague modern men, women, and children.

The world's first blood bank opens March 15 at Chicago's Cook County Hospital under the direction of the hospital's Budapest-born director of therapeutics Bernard M. Fantus, 62, who has based the idea on blood depots set up for wounded soldiers in the Great War (see Vaughan, 1939; New York, 1940).

Sphygmomanometer inventor Scipione Riva-Rocci dies at Rapallo March 15 at age 73, having seen his instrument become the standard device for measuring blood pressure; psychiatrist Alfred Adler dies at Aberdeen, Scotland, May 28 at age 67; neurosurgeon-neurophysiologist Harvey W. Cushing at New Haven, Conn., October 7 at age 70, having found on a visit to Pavia in 1901 that Scipione Riva-Rocci's sphygmomanometer could reduce mortality from anesthesia, especially during intercranial surgery, and helped bring the instrument to worldwide attention; biologist George Nuttall dies at London December 16 at age 75.

religion

Albanian Muslims rebel in mid-May against the dictatorial rule of Zog I, who has issued a decree that forbids the veiling of women.

Gestapo officers arrest Lutheran pastor (Friedrich Gustav Emil) Martin Niemoeller, 45, at Berlin on charges of sedition and abuse of the pulpit. A U-boat commander in the Mediterranean during the Great War, Niemoeller was suspended from preaching 3 years ago but has continued to speak out against the Nazis and is now sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. "First they came for the communists," he will later write, "but I was not a communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the socialists and the trade unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

education

China's 26-year-old Tsinghua University and 18-year-old Nankai University relocate to Kunming in July after suffering damage from Japanese bombing attacks and join with Bejing (Peking) University to form the Southwest Associated University (Chang Sha Temporary University).

The Autonomous University of Puebla is founded in central Mexico.

Queens College is founded at Flushing, N.Y.

St. John's College is founded at Annapolis, Md., where former University of Virginia professor Stringfellow Barr, 40, and University of Chicago administrator Scott Buchanan, 42, take over the King William's School founded in 1696 and begin a Great Books program that revives the principles of a classical education. St. John's will open a Santa Fe, N.M., campus to supplement the one at Annapolis.

Pepperdine University has its beginnings in the Pepperdine College founded at Los Angeles with a gift from Western Auto Supply magnate George Pepperdine, who has amassed a fortune of $10 million (see transportation, 1909). Now 51, Pepperdine will lose his money and testify in 1950 that his personal assets are no more than $1.

communications, media

A digital revolution in communications begins with the discovery of pulse-code modulation (PCM) by English engineer Alec H. (Harley) Reeves, 35, while working at the Paris laboratory of International Telephone & Telegraph Co. (ITT). Based on Boolean algebra (see science, 1854), his system transforms voice signals into electronic pulses—ones and zeros—and sends them along standard telephone lines for reconstruction into analog signals at the receiving end. The signals can be transmitted in a continuous modulating wave over long distances with scarcely any interference or distortion, but although Reeves will obtain French patents next year, British patents in 1939, and U.S. patents in 1942, PCM will not be used in telephone transmission until 1962 following development of integrated circuits that make it practical.

The emergency three-digit telephone number 999 comes into use in Britain to summon police, fire-fighting, or ambulance aid. Britain's example will be followed by countries in Europe, the Far East, and South America (see New York, 1968).

Bell Telephone Laboratories introduces the Model 302 French phone designed by New York-born industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, 33, who has worked for Bell since 1930.

Wireless radio inventor (and Nobel physicist) Guglielmo Marconi dies at Rome July 20 at age 63.

Xerography has its beginnings in a discovery that will revolutionize duplication of papers in offices, schools, and libraries. Photostats are costly, carbon copies often blurred, and few can be made at one time, but Seattle-born New York pre-law student Chester (Floyd) Carlson, 31, has observed the demand for multiple copies of patent specifications and other documents while working in the patent department of a New York electronics firm, and he sees possibilities in a dry-copying process based on principles of photoconductivity and electrostatics. Taking a sulfur-coated zinc plate, he gives it an electrostatic charge by rubbing it with a handkerchief in the dark, places over it a transparent celluloid ruler, and then exposes the zinc plate to light for a few seconds, neutralizing the charge except where the markings of the ruler have blocked the light. Dusting lycopodium powder over the plate and blowing away the excess, Carlson is left with a perfect image of the ruler (see 1938).

Cardiff-born journalist Hugh (née Hubert) (Kinsman) Cudlipp, 24, becomes editor of the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror) and boosts circulation by printing photographs of topless women, a practice that other British tabloids will imitate.

The adventure strip "Prince Valiant" debuts February 13 in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Created and drawn for the King Features Syndicate by Hal Foster of "Tarzan" fame, the series based on Arthurian legends of knights in armor will run for more than 60 years, far outliving its creator.

William Randolph Hearst merges his evening New York Journal with his morning New York American to create the New York Journal-American, an afternoon paper (see 1895; 1966).

Newsweek magazine begins publication at New York to compete with Henry Luce's Time (see 1933). Real estate heir Vincent Astor, 42, and railroad heir W. Averell Harriman, 45, merge their news weekly Today with T. J. C. Martyn's 4-year-old News-Week, and bring in as editor former assistant secretary of state Raymond Moley, installing McGraw-Hill president Malcolm Muir as publisher (see 1961).

Look magazine begins publication at Des Moines to compete with Henry Luce's LIFE. Des Moines Register and Tribune publisher Gardner "Mike" Cowles Jr. launches the biweekly picture magazine that will continue until 1971. (His brother John, 38, moves to Minneapolis to manage the Minneapolis Star that he and Mike persuaded their Iowa banker-father to purchase last year.) Gardner will move Look to New York in 1941.

Marie Claire magazine begins publication at Paris under the direction industrialist Jean Prouvost, now 53. It will grow by the end of the century to have American and Japanese editions (Hearst Corp. will publish the U.S. edition) with some 15 million readers worldwide for its fashion and beauty articles.

Woman's Day appears in October as the A&P launches a 3¢ monthly women's service magazine for distribution in A&P stores. The food chain will sell the magazine to Fawcett Publications in 1958.

Former Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer dies at Syncote, Pa., October 22 at age 70, having retired in January.

literature

Nonfiction: Spanish Testament by Hungarian-born French journalist Arthur Koestler, 32, who fell into fascist hands at the fall of Malaga while covering the Spanish civil war for the London News Chronicle, was condemned to death as a spy and tortured, and gained release after British authorities brought pressure (an abridged version will appear under the title Dialogue with Death in 1942); Personality: A Psychological Intepretation by Indiana-born Harvard psychologist Gordon W. (Willard) Allport, 39; Structure of Social Action by Colorado-born Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, 34; Apes, Men, and Morons by anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton; Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge by All Souls Church, Oxford, historian A. L. (Alfred Leslie) Rowse, 33; As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (memoir) by Oliver St. John Gogarty, now 59, who was represented in James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses as Buck Mulligan; Four Hundred Million Customers by U.S. businessman Carl Crow, 54, is about the potential in trade with China.

Fiction: The Hobbit by Oxford philologist J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien, 45; The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, who examines the conditions of the unemployed in the north of England; The Snow Country (Yukiguni) by Yasunari Kawabata; Coming from the Fair by Norah Hoult; Mouchette (Nouvelle Histoire deMouchette) by Georges Bernanos; Mad Love (L'amour fou) by André Breton; Ferdydurke by Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, 33; Bread and Wine (Pane e vino) by Ignazio Silone; TheCitadel by A. J. Cronin; The Young Desire It by Australian novelist Seaforth Kenneth Mackenzie (originally Kenneth Mackenzie), 24; ToHave and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway; Of Miceand Men by John Steinbeck; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (who wrote it in 7 weeks in Haiti, where she studied voodoo practices on a Guggenheim grant); The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir by Wilmington, Del.-born Massachusetts novelist John P. (Phillips) Marquand, 43, who is best known for his Mr. Moto detective stories in the Saturday EveningPost, which serialized his new novel last year; The Education ofH*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n by Polish-born humorist sociologist Leonard Q. Ross (Leo Calvin Rosten), 29, who came to America as an infant and finds poignant humor in the efforts of New York immigrants to gain education in the city's free adult education classes; They Came Like Swallows by Illinois-born New Yorker magazine editor-novelist William (Keepers) Maxwell, 29; Remembering Laughter by Iowa-born novelist Wallace (Earle) Stegner, 28; Noon Wine by Katherine Ann Porter; The Anointed by Nebraska-born journalist-turned-novelist Clyde Brion Davis, 43; Daughters and Sons by Ivy Compton-Burnett; Coronation Summer by English novelist Angela (Margaret) Thirkell (née Mackail), 45, who will write more than 30 novels about the descendants of characters in Anthony Trollope's 19th-century "Barsetshire" novels; The Wind Changes by English journalist-novelist Olivia Manning, 26; Buckskin Brigades by Nebraska-born writer L. Ron (Lafayette Ronald) Hubbard, 26, who has been grinding out 100,000 words per month for the pulp fiction magazines and will continue to write under such names as Winchester Remington Colt, Elron, Tom Esterbrook, Michael Keith, René Lafayette, Ken Martin, and B. A. Northrup; Hamlet, Revenge! by Scottish scholar-novelist-mystery writer Michael Innes (John Innes Mackintosh Stewart), 31; Busman's Holiday by Dorothy Sayers; Murder in Hospital by English physician-novelist Josephine Bell (Doris Bell Ball, née Collier), 39, whose physician husband died 2 years ago. Her doctor-detective David Wintringham will appear in dozens of mysteries; Dark Frontier and Uncommon Danger by London advertising agency director-suspense novelist Eric Ambler, 28, whose second book is published in the United States as Background to Danger.

Science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft dies of intestinal cancer at his native Providence, R.I., March 13 at age 46; novelist Edith Wharton at St. Brice-sous-forêt, near Paris, August 11 at age 75; suspense novelist H. C. McNeile at Pulborough, Sussex, August 14 at age 48 (his friend Gerard Fairlie will carry on the Bulldog Drummond stories); humorist Don Marquis dies of complications from a stroke at Forest Hills, N.Y., December 29 at age 59.

Poetry: Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot includes "Chamber Music," "Pomes Penyeach," and "Ecce Puer;" The Cantos (V) by Ezra Pound; The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens; A Good Time Was Had by All by Stevie Smith.

Juvenile: And to Think That I Saw It on MulberryStreet by Springfield, Mass.-born New York writer-illustrator Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), 33, who attended Oxford after graduation from Dartmouth in 1925, went to work in 1927 for Judge magazine, and has been producing "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" drawings for Standard Oil Company's Flit brand insecticide. More than 40 publishers have rejected his book, which does not have a moral, but a friend at Vanguard Press has agreed to publish it and it enjoys moderate success; Choo Choo: The Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away by Newton Centre, Mass.-born writer-illustrator Virginia Lee Burton, 28; A Child's Story of the World from the Earliest Days to Our Own Time (five books) by Donald Culross Peattie; We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea by Arthur Ransome.

art

Painting: Guernica by Pablo Picasso, who has been commissioned to produce a mural for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. After 6 months of doing nothing, Picasso has worked in a 6-week burst of outraged energy to complete a cubist canvas nearly 26 feet long filled with bedlam and terror that expresses the painter's horror at the brutal aerial bombing of innocent villagers; Weeping Woman by Picasso; Revolution of the Viaducts by Paul Klee, who fled with his family to his native Bern in 1933, contracted measles in 1935, and has been suffering from the painful skin disease scleroderma; Still Life with Old Shoe by Joan Miró; Woman with a Mandolin by Georges Braque; The Pleasure Principle and Not to Be Reproduced (La Reproduction Interdite) by René Magritte; The Mountain by Balthus; Smelt Brook Falls by Marsden Hartley; Echo of a Scream by David Alfaro Siqueiros; Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky by Frida Kahlo. H. O. Tanner dies at Paris May 25 at age 77.

Sculpture: Stringed Figure #1 (wood) by Henry Moore; Tower of Mothers (bronze) by Käthe Kollwitz.

London's Tate Gallery opens a Duveen Gallery endowed by local art dealer Joseph Duveen, Baron Duveen of Milbank. Now 68, Duveen also presents a new gallery at the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon that have been on display since 1816 (see 1803). Notorious for his efforts to clean up old masters for sale to millionaires, Duveen has the marbles scoured clean with steel wool, carborundum, hammers, and copper chisels to lighten them and make them more pleasing to modern esthetics (Greeks will charge that the cleaning has damaged the works).

An exhibition of "degenerate art" opens at Munich.

photography

Agfacolor film in 35-millimeter cartridges is introduced by A. G. Fur Analin (Agfa) and by Ansco (see Kodachrome, 1935; 1936). The fastest film made is Eastman Kodak's black-and-white Super-X with a Weston rating of 32 (see Weston exposure meter, 1931; ASA ratings, 1947).

Popular Photography magazine begins publication at Chicago in May with photography enthusiast Bernard G. Davis as editor.

Photographs: Changing New York by Maine-born photographer Berenice Abbott, 39, records scenes of the city where she has taught at the New School for Social Research while photographing artistic and social circles (text by Elizabeth McCausland). Abbott returned to the United States in 1929 after studying sculpture at Paris, where she photographed well-known artists and writers.

Halftone inventor Frederic E. Ives dies at Philadelphia May 27 at age 81. His later inventions have included the halftone photogravure printing process, the photochromoscope (a color-photography process that employs three negatives), and contributions to the development of color cinematography.

theater, film

Theater: The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus 1/8 at Maxine Elliott's Theater, New York, with Orson Welles in a Federal Theater Project revival of the 1588 Christopher Marlowe play directed by Welles with incidental music by New York-born composer Paul (Frederick) Bowles, 26, 128 perfs. Project manager Hallie Flanagan comes under attack from right-wing congressmen; Rep. J. [John] Parnell Thomas (originally Feeney), 41, (R. N.J.) asks her in a hearing on Capitol Hill whether Christopher Marlowe was a communist; High Tor by Maxwell Anderson 1/9 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Burgess Meredith, Peggy Ashcroft, 171 perfs.; Behind Red Lights by Samuel Shipman 1/13 at New York's Mansfield Theater, with a 39-member cast that includes Richard Taber, 354 perfs.; The Masque of Kings by Maxwell Anderson 2/8 at New York's Shubert Theater with Dudley Digges, Henry Hull, Margo, 89 perfs.; Yes, My Darling Daughter by U.S. playwright Mark Reed 2/9 at The Playhouse, New York, with Peggy Conklin, Lucile Watson, 405 perfs.; Traveler Without Luggage (Le voyageur sans baggage) by Jean Anouilh 2/16 at the Théâtre de Mathurius, Paris; "Having Wonderful Time" by Austrian-born playwright Arthur Kober, 36, 2/20 at New York's Lyceum Theater, with Katherine Locke, Jules Garfield, Cornel Wilde, 132 perfs.; Power by Arthur Arent 2/23 at New York's Ritz Theater, with a cast that includes Jersey City-born actor Norman Lloyd, 22, in a Federal Theater Project production that creates controversy by favoring the new Tennessee Valley Authority over private utilities, 118 perfs. (the Living Newspaper production opens at Seattle's Metropolitan Theater 7/6 at a time when the municipally owned City Light Co. and the privately owned Puget Sound Power & Light are stringing power lines along the same streets, audiences pay 25¢ and 40¢ for tickets, the five scheduled performances sell out, but Hallie Flanagan draws fire for having spread what opponents call propaganda); The Ascent of F6 by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood 2/26 at London's Mercury Theatre, with Ransom William Devlin, Raf de la Torre, Norman Claridge, Peter Ashmore, 42 perfs.; The Defeat (Nederlaget) by Nordahl Grieg 3/25 at Oslo's National Theater (ostensibly about the Paris Commune of 1870, it has been inspired by the setbacks of Spain's Republican Army); Electra (Electre) by Jean Genet 5/13 at the Théâtre de l'Athenée, Paris; Room Service by John Murray and Allen Boretz 5/19 at New York's Cort Theater, with Sam Levine, Eddie Albert, Philip Loeb, Boston-born actress Betty Field, 19, 500 perfs.; The Revolt of the Beavers 5/20 at New York's Adelphi Theater in a production by the Children's Unit of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project (some attack it as "communist" propaganda); Susan and God by Rachel Crothers 10/7 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with Gertrude Lawrence, Paul McGrath, Vera Allen, Lowell, Mass.-born actress Nancy Kelly, 16, 288 perfs.; Golden Boy by Clifford Odets 11/23 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Luther Adler as the prizefighter-violinist Joe Bopnaparte, Jules Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Sanford Meisner, Roman Bohnen, Gary, Ind.-born Karl Malden (Mladen Sekulovich), 18, Elia Kazan, Morris Carnovsky, Cleveland-born actor Howard Da Silva (originally Silverblatt), 28, New York-born Martin Ritt, 23, directed by Harold Clurman, 250 perfs.; Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 11/23 at New York's Music Box Theater, with Philadelphia-born actor Broderick Crawford, 25, as Lennie, Will Geer as Slim, Claire Luce, scenic design by Donald Oenslager, 207 perfs. (director George S. Kaufman has polished Steinbeck's efforts to present his story on the stage while Steinbeck gathers material for his novel The Grapes of Wrath).

Playwright Samuel Shipman dies at his native New York February 9 at age 52; playwright-poet John Drinkwater of a heart attack at London March 25 at age 54; actor Frank Kingdon at Englewood, N.J., April 9 at age 81; actor William H. Gillette at Hartford, Conn., April 29 at age 83; playwright Sir James M. Barrie at London June 19 at age 77; theater manager Annie Horniman at Shere, Surrey, August 6 at age 76; actor Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson at St. Margaret's Bay, near Dover, November 6 at age 84; Mrs. Leslie Carter at Santa Monica, Calif., November 13 at age 75; Alma Tell at San Francisco December 29 at age 39.

Radio: The Guiding Light 1/25 on NBC stations features the Rev. John Rutledge (co-authored by soap-opera writer-actress Irna Phillips, now 35, who pioneered the genre in 1930 on Chicago's WGN, it will move to CBS radio in 1947, air on CBS until 1956, and go on TV in 1952 with Phillips still running the show); Our Gal Sunday by Chicago advertising agency writers Frank and Anne (Ashenhurst) Hummert 3/29: "the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England's richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthorpe—the story that asks the question, Can this girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?" (to 1959); The Road to Life by Irna Phillips 9/13 on CBS stations (by 1943 Phillips will have five serials on the air and be earning $250,000 per year, with six assistants to crank out daily continuity); Stella Dallas 10/25 on NBC's Red Network, with Anne Elstner in the title role that she will play for 18 years (to 1955).

The American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA) founded July 30 is an AFL affiliate representing radio performers; it will later become the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).

Films: Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy, Freddie Bartholomew; William Dieterle's The Life of Emile Zola with Paul Muni, Morris Carnovsky, now 29; Sidney Franklin's The Good Earth with Vienna-born actress Luise Rainer, 25, Paul Muni; Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion with Erich von Stroheim, Jean Gabin; Marcel Pagnol's Harvest with Gabriel Gabrio, Orane Demazis, Fernandel; Frank Capra's Lost Horizon with Ronald Colman, Sam Jaffe, Thomas Mitchell; Julien Duvivier's Pepe Le Moko with Jean Gabin; Gregory La Cava's Stage Door with Katharine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou, Celeron, N.Y.-born comedienne Lucille (Desirée) Ball, 26, Ginger Rogers; Mervyn LeRoy's They Won't Forget with Claude Rains, 17-year-old Idaho-born ingénue Lana Turner (Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner, renamed Lana by director LeRoy). Also: Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Chicago-born actor Ralph (Rexford) Bellamy, 33; Sam Wood's A Day at the Races with the Marx Brothers; William K. Howard's Fire Over England with Flora Robson (as Queen Elizabeth) and Laurence Olivier; Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night with Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur; John Ford's The Hurricane with New Orleans-born actress Dorothy Lamour (Dorothy Kaumeyer), 22, Jon Hall, Raymond Massey; Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow with Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi; Lloyd Bacon's Marked Woman with Lowell, Mass.-born actress Bette (originally Ruth Elizabeth) Davis, 29, Humphrey Bogart; John Cromwell's The Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, New York-born actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., 27; Basil Dean's The Show Goes On with Cyril Ritchard, Gracie Fields; William Wellman's A Star Is Born with Fredric March, Janet Gaynor; Norman Z. McLeod's Topper with New York-born actress Constance (Campbell) Bennett, 33 (Joan's sister), Cary Grant, Roland Young; Herbert Wilcox's Victoria the Great with Anna Neagle, now 33, Viennese-born actor Anton Walbrook (originally Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbrueck), 36; Monte Banks's We're Going to Be Rich with Gracie Fields, Victor McLaglen, Brian Donlevy; Pare Lorentz's documentary The River.

Director Richard Boleslawski dies suddenly at Los Angeles January 17 at age 47; actress Jean Harlow of uremic poisoning at Hollywood June 7 at age 26.

George B. Seitz's A Family Affair with Brooklyn, N.Y.-born actor Mickey Rooney (Joe Yule Jr.) as Andy Hardy, Lionel Barrymore as Judge James Hardy is the first of a series that will continue off and on for 21 years, with Lewis Stone as Judge Hardy, Fay Holden as Mrs. Hardy, and girlfriends who will include Ann Rutherford, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Esther Williams, Kathryn Grayson, and Donna Reed (now 17, Rooney called himself Mickey McGuire until stopped by cartoonist Fontaine Fox, who had copyrighted that name for his "Toonerville Trolley" comic strip, published since 1917).

Warner Brothers releases the first Bugs Bunny cartoon (see 1910; Disney, 1928). Porky's Hare Hunt features the voice of San Francisco-born announcer Melvin Jerome "Mel" Blanc, 29, who creates the voices of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and others who will include Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker, and Speedy Gonzales. It takes 125 people to make one 6½-minute cartoon, but audiences are delighted with Bugs Bunny's "What's up, Doc?" ( a line credited to animator Tex Avery) and "That's all, folks."

The Thalberg Memorial Award inaugurated by the 10-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honors the late M-G-M producer Irving Grant Thalberg (see 1936).

music

Hollywood musicals: Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance with Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, songs that include "They Can't Take That Away from Me," "They All Laughed," "Slap That Bass," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," and the title song; Henry Koster's One Hundred Men and a Girl with Deanna Durbin, Leopold Stokowski, Adolphe Menjou, score by Charles Previn.

Stage musicals: The Eternal Road 1/7 at New York's Manhattan Opera House with Sam Jaffe, 11-year-old Sidney Lumet, 8-year old Dick Van Patten, Lotte Lenya, music by Lenya's husband, Kurt Weill, based on Hebraic melodies learned from his cantor father, book by Franz Werfel, whose biblical drama is directed by Austrian-born Max Reinhardt (originally Goldmann), now 63 (Weill, a non-practicing Jew, has written the music outside Paris), 152 perfs. (the house sells out every performance, but set designer Norman Bel Geddes has removed 300 choice seats to make room for a larger stage and the show loses $7,000 per performance); Babes in Arms 4/14 at New York's Shubert Theater, with Ray Heatherton, Alfred Drake, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, songs that include "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Johnny One Note," "I Wish I Were in Love Again," "Where or When," 289 perfs.; The Cradle Will Rock 6/16 at New York's Venice Theater, with Howard Da Silva, Will Geer, Philadelphia-born singer-composer Marc Blitzstein, 32, a 28-piece orchestra, a 44-member chorus, music by Blitzstein to a simplistic book based on labor-management issues, direction by Orson Welles, production by John Houseman, songs that include "Croon Spoon," "Honolulu," "I'm Checkin' Home Now," "Nickel Under the Foot." The show has been sponsored by the Federal Theater Project, which has grown since its inception late in 1935 to have more than 11,000 workers and 22 producing centers, reaching an audience of 150,000 per week. Cradle was supposed to open at Maxine Elliott's Theater in West 38th Street, but the FTP sent word June 12 that budget cuts and a reorganization dictated a postponement (after 14,000 tickets had been sold), Welles and Houseman immediately quit to start the Mercury Theater, Archibald MacLeish has found a theatrical agent who has offered a vacant theater 21 blocks uptown for $100. The audience, cast, and crew make their way north to Seventh Avenue and 59th Street, lighting director Abe Feder sets up a spotlight, conductor Lehman Engel strikes up the orchestra, and because Actors Equity has barred them from singing on stage the singers perform from the audience, continuing for 108 sold-out performances before going on tour; I'd Rather Be Right 11/2 at New York's Alvin Theater, with George M. Cohan as President Roosevelt, book by George S. Kaufman, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, songs that include "Have You Met Miss Jones?" 290 perfs.; Pins and Needles 11/27 at New York's Labor Stage Theater, with a book by playwright Arthur Arent, Marc Blitzstein, Emanuel Eisenberg, Charles Friedman, and David Gregory, music and lyrics by Harold Rome, songs that include "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me," 1,108 perfs. (the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union [ILGWU] sponsors the production and no cast member receives more than $55 per week, nearly twice what Federal Theater Project actors earn); Hooray for What! 12/1 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with Ed Wynn, Jack Whiting, Vivian Vance, book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, 200 perfs.; Hide and Seek 12/6 at the London Hippodrome, with Cicely Courtneidge, Bobby Howes, songs by Vivian Ellis; Me and My Gal 12/16 at London's Victoria Palace Theatre, with comedian Lupino (originally Henry) Lane, now 45, as the Cockney from Lambeth who turns out to be 17th baron and 8th viscount of Hareford, book and lyrics by English playwright L. Arthur Rose, 50, and Douglas Furber, music by Noel Gay, now 39, songs that include "The Lambeth Walk," 1,646 perfs.; Between the Devil 12/22 at New York's Imperial Theater, with Jack Buchanan, Evelyn Laye, music by Arthur Schwartz, lyrics by Howard Dietz, songs that include "By Myself," 93 perfs.

Ballet: Les Patineurs (The Skaters) 2/16 at the Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, with English ballerina Margot Fonteyn (originally Margaret Hookham), 27, music by Meyerbeer, choreography by Frederick Ashton; Francesca da Rimini 7/15 at London's Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, with Lubov Tchernicheva, music by Tchaikovsky, choreography by David Lichine, 36.

Opera: Brazilian soprano Bidu Sayão makes her Metropolitan Opera debut in February singing the title role in the 1884 Massenet opera Manon (she will remain with the Met until April 1952); The Man Without a Country 5/12 at the Metropolitan Opera with St. Louis-born soprano Helen Traubel, 38, making her Met debut in the role of Mary Rutledge, music by conductor-composer Walter Damrosch, now 75; Lulu 6/2 at Zürich's Municipal Theater, with music by the late Alban Berg; Croatian soprano Zinka Milanov (née Kunc), 31, her Metropolitan Opera debut 12/17 singing the role of Leonora in the 1862 Verdi opera La Forza del Destino (she will be a Met regular until 1966).

First performances: Voice in the Wilderness (La Voix dans le desert) Symphonic Poem for Orchestra and 'Cello Obbligato by Ernest Bloch 1/21 at Los Angeles; Concertino by Walter Piston 6/20 in a CBS radio broadcast from New York; Variations for String Orchestra on a Theme by Frank Bridge by English composer Benjamin Britten, 23, in August at Salzburg. Britten has been a student of Bridge since age 12 and has had his own work performed since 1934; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor by the 19th-century German composer Robert Schumann (who wrote it in 1853) 11/26 at Berlin's Deutsches Opernhaus; Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich 11/21 at Leningrad. Many in the audience break into tears during the sorrowful third movement, critics hail the symphony as a model of Soviet music, and Shostakovich regains his ideological good standing (his friend and supporter Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky has been shot in June for having participated in a non-existent conspiracy, the NKVD has rounded up Tukhachevsky's friends for questioning, but Shostakovich discovers that his interrogator has been arrested and no one else is interested in his case); A Boy Was Born by Benjamin Britten 12/21 in a BBC broadcast.

Music Since 1900 by Russian-born U.S. musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, 43, is an encyclopedic history of classical music.

Composer George Gershwin dies of a brain tumor at Hollywood, Calif., July 11 at age 38; Albert Roussel at Royan, France, August 23 at age 68; Maurice Ravel at Paris December 28 at age 52.

The National Broadcasting Co. starts the NBC Symphony with Arturo Toscanini as conductor. Now 70, Toscanini has been replaced as conductor of the New York Philharmonic after 8 years but will conduct the NBC Symphony until his retirement in 1954.

Brooklyn, N.Y.-born publishing industry graphic artist, amateur violinist, and radio hobbyist Avery Fisher, 31, founds Philharmonic Radio Co. with a $354 investment to market improvements he has made in audio design. He rents a small loft in New York's West 21st Street, buys RCA Photophone amplifiers that are being used in movie theaters, adds Western Electric speakers, an FM tuner, and a turntable, and creates some of the world's first component systems. He will sell the company, found Fisher Radio, and by the early 1960s will account for 50 percent of U.S. high-fidelity component sales. Along with Herman Hosner Scott, Paul Klipsch, Frank McIntosh, and others, Fisher will break new ground in raising the quality of musical sound reproduction (see 1969).

Popular songs: "Y'a d'la Joie" ("There's Joy") by Paris songwriter Charles Trenet, 24 (Maurice Chevalier makes the song a hit, encouraging Trenet to become a solo performer); "Donkey Serenade" by Hollywood songwriter Robert Wright, 23, and his Brooklyn, N.Y.-born collaborator George Forrest (originally George Forrest Chichester, Jr.), 22; "Nice Work If You Can Get It" and "A Foggy Day in London Town" by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin (for the film A Damsel in Distress); "In the Still of the Night" and "Rosalie" by Cole Porter (for the film Rosalie); "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" by Irving Berlin (for the film On the Avenue); "That Old Feeling" by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Lew Brown (for the film Vogues of 1938); "Too Marvelous for Words" by Richard Whiting, lyrics by Johnny Mercer (for the film Ready, Willing, and Able); "Good Morning" by Sam Coslow (for the film Mountain Music); "Once in a While" by Michael Edwards, lyrics by Bud Green; "The Nearness of You" by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Ned Washington; "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place" by Russ Morgan, lyrics by Dick Howard and Bob Ellsworth; "The Joint Is Jumpin'" by Fats Waller, lyrics by Andy Razaf; "(Up) The Lazy River" by Hoagy Carmichael and Sidney Arodin; "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön (Means I Love You)" by Sholom Secunda from a 1933 Yiddish musical, English lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chapin; "September in the Rain" by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (for the Hollywood musical Stars Over Broadway); "Me and the Devil Blues" and "Hell Hound on My Trail" by Robert Johnson; "The Dipsy Doodle" by bandleader Larry Clinton; "Moon of Manakoora" by Alfred Newman, lyrics by Frank Loesser (for the film The Hurricane); "Sweet Leilani" by Harry Owen and "Blue Hawaii" by Leo Robin, lyrics by Ralph Rainger (for the film Waikiki Wedding); "Harbour Lights" by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams (Will Grosz).

The Andrews Sisters have their first big hit recording with "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön"; Patsy Montana records "Sweet Violence."

sports

War Admiral wins the Kentucky Derby and goes on to win the Triple Crown despite the challenge of Seabiscuit. London-born horse breeder Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 25, received the 600-acre Sagamore farm as a 21st birthday gift from his mother and has pitted War Admiral against Seabiscuit at Baltimore's Pimlico race track. The Bay Dancer son of Man o' War breaks the record for a mile and a half as he wins the Belmont Stakes (see 1938).

Joe Louis gains the world heavyweight title June 22 by knocking out James J. Braddock in the eighth round of a title bout at Chicago. Alabama-born Joseph Louis Barrow, 23, is the youngest fighter ever to win the championship and will hold it for exactly 12 years—longer than any other man; but while he will have grossed an estimated $4.23 million by the time he retires undefeated in 1949, the Brown Bomber will never be a millionaire.

Former bareknuckle heavyweight boxer Jake Kilrain dies at Quincy, Mass., December 22 at age 78.

Texas-born professional golfer (John) Byron Nelson, 25, wins the Masters Tournament to begin a series of victories that will not be equaled in this century. He turned pro in 1932, having begun as a caddie.

John Donald "Don" Budge, 22, (U.S.) defeats Freiherr (Baron) Gottfried von Cramm, 27, (Ger), to win in men's singles at Wimbledon, Dorothy Round wins in women's singles; Cramm receives a telephone call from Adolf Hitler just before the Davis Cup semi-finals at Wimbledon July 20, beats Budge in the first two games of their match, plays as if his life depended on it, but loses 6-8, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 8-6. Cram congratulates Budge and will be sent to a concentration camp next year for having had a homosexual relationship with a Jew; Budge wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Anita Lizana in women's singles.

The U.S. ocean yacht Ranger built and skippered by Harold S. Vanderbilt successfully defends the America's Cup against Britain's Endeavour II skippered by Sir Thomas Sopworth in the last America's Cup competition between J class boats (see 1958).

Modern Olympic Games founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin dies at Geneva September 2 at age 74.

The New York Yankees win the World Series, defeating the New York Giants 4 games to 1.

everyday life

Levi Strauss modifies its blue jeans, covering hip-pocket rivets with thread following complaints by schoolteachers that the rivets scratch desk seats (see 1873; 1964).

Spanish dress designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, 42, moves to Paris, where he will continue until 1965 to dazzle the fashion world with elegant dresses and suits. Forced to study dressmaking at age 10 when the death of his sea captain father obliged his mother to start sewing in order to support the family, he visited Paris 5 years later and by age 20 had opened his own establishment at San Sebastián. He has become Spain's leading couturier, but the civil war has ruined his business (see 1955).

Harper's Bazaar promotes columnist Diana Vreeland (née Dalziel), 37, to fashion editor. Born in Paris of a U.S. mother and Scottish father, banker's wife Vreeland came to New York in 1914, made her debut in 1922, and last year began writing a Bazaar column under the heading "Why Don't You?" with Depression-blind suggestions such as "Why don't you put all your dogs in bright yellow collars and leads like all the dogs in Paris?" and "Why don't you have a furry elk-hide trunk for the back of your car?" (see 1962).

Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduces the tear-illusion dress, designed with help from surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

French shoe designer Roger Vivier, 29, opens his first Paris shop and receives a commission from Elsa Schiaparelli to create a line for her collection. Vivier has studied sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, served an apprenticeship in a shoe factory owned by a relative, and began designing women's shoes earlier in the decade in a small workshop on the Place Vendôme.

Sperry Top-Siders have their beginnings in a rubber sole patented by Connecticut yachtsman Paul Sperry, 42, who will later say that he took his dog Prince for a walk in the winter of 1935, was impressed with the dog's ability to keep his footing on the frozen pavement, examined its paws, found a pattern of deep grooves, and reproduced it on a piece of crepe rubber, using a razor blade to cut a multi-directional pattern. Worn "topside" on slick boat decks, the canvas-topped sneakers have soles whose tiny, wavy cuts open when the foot is flexed and shed water when the cuts close tight. Within 2 years Sperry will have perfected rubber-soled ox-blood cowhide boat moccasins.

The Babee-Tenda infant chair invented by George B. Hansburg of 1919 pogo stick fame will not tip over. Now 50, Hansburg has devised the chair for his first granddaughter, Norma.

Harrah's bingo parlor opens October 30 at Reno, Nev., under the direction of California-born entrepreneur William F. (Fisk) Harrah, 26, who competes with the 6-year old Harolds Club. Its poor location forces the casino to close before the end of the year, but Harrah will relocate, reopen if July of next year, develop a reputation for fairness, and go on to open other gambling casinos.

crime

The United States joins the 15-year-old Vienna-based International Criminal Police Organization (later Interpol) but the Anschluss next year will effectively disband the organization and it will not be reconstituted until 1946 (see 1946).

The marijuana traffic act signed into law by President Roosevelt August 2 outlaws possession and sale of cannabis sativa.

architecture, real estate

The Palais de Chaillot is completed at Paris on a site formerly occupied by Trocadero Castle.

German architect Walter Gropius accepts an appointment at Harvard, where he will continue Bauhaus methods as professor of architecture (see 1911). In self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany since 1934, Gropius has been working with London architect Maxwell Fry to design the Village College residence in Cambridgeshire. He joins with Hungarian-born designer-photographer László Moholy-Nagy, 42, in organizing the New Bauhaus at Chicago that will be reorganized in 1939 as the Institute of Design and have a major impact on architecture. (Moholy-Nagy met with the Russian painter-designer-typographer El Lissitzky in Germany during the 1920s and has adapted some of his ideas to architecture.)

The dramatic country house Fallingwater is completed at Bear Run, Pa., to designs by Frank Lloyd Wright. Pittsburgh department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann purchased a 1,600-acre tract 72 miles from Pittsburgh in the Allegheny Mountains some years ago for use as a weekend recreation site by executives and employees. The WPA has cut a road through the mountains, and Kaufmann has decided to take advantage of it by building a permanent vacation home for himself and his wife, Liliane; their son has been a Taliesin apprentice, and Wright has produced plans for the horizontally-arranged house in less than 3 hours after a long study of the site. Wright also designs a house for Stanford University education professor Paul Hanna, who will later donate it to the university.

The U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) created by Congress September 1 in the Wagner-Steagall Act promises to provide financial assistance (grants and long-term loans) to the states in an effort to remedy the nation's housing shortage (and to provide work in the construction trades) (see Fannie Mae, 1938). Mayor La Guardia obtains agreements for USHA-financed projects in New York's Red Hook, Queensbridge, and Corlears Hook.

Chicago authorities name former social worker Elizabeth Wood, 38, to head the city's new Housing Authority, which she will run until political pressures force her to resign in 1954. As "Chicago's largest landlord," Wood will develop the philosophy that housing works best when residents are mixed by race, economic class, and family size, and rather than high-rise developments she will favor small, dispersed projects where building heights are limited to the distance that a mother in a window can be heard when calling to a child in a playground below (see Jacobs, 1961).

New York's Harlem River Houses open at 151st Street and the Harlem River Drive, where seven four- to five-story red-brick buildings have been built as the city's first federally-financed and federally-constructed public housing. Graced with trees and spacious plazas, the projects have been erected following 1935 Harlem riots demanding decent low-cost housing; rents are low, and the carefully screened tenants are provided with a nursery, a health clinic, and social rooms.

environment

Canada's Parliament establishes Prince Edward Island National Park along nearly 25 miles of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; covering an area of about seven square miles, it has white sand beaches and includes Rustico Island, home to great blue heron and other birds.

Congress sets aside Cape Hatteras National Seashore as the first such U.S. seashore (see 1962).

agriculture

Drought ends in the United States, but stem rust attacks the wheat crop as it did in 1935 (see 1941).

Allis-Chalmers improves its rubber-tired tractor and sells a lightweight combination tractor and combine for $1,000 (the competition charges that much for a tractor or combine alone) (see 1935). Sales of the new equipment propel Allis to third place in the U.S. farm-equipment industry.

U.S. spinach growers erect a statue to the comic-strip sailor Popeye, who is credited with having boosted consumption of the vegetable since the strip debuted in 1929 (seeNew Yorker cartoon, 1928).

nutrition

Vitamin K is produced in crystalline form (see 1935).

Two German biochemists discover that a diphosphate ester of thiamine (vitamin B₁) functions as the coenzyme cocarboxylase, without which pyruvic acid accumulates in bodily tissues, and produce the toxic effects that quickly bring on the symptoms of beriberi (see 1936). Swiss and U.S. producers make synthetic thiamine (vitamin B₁) at $450 per pound, but further research will soon reduce the price to a few cents per pound (see enrichment proposal, 1938).

food and drink

Britain gets her first frozen foods as Wisbech Produce Canners Ltd. introduces frozen asparagus in May at 2s 3d per pack, strawberries in June at 1s 2d per eight-ounce pack, garden peas in July at 9d per six-oz. pack, and sliced green beans in August at 1s 2d per six-oz. pack. Wisbech's S. W. Smedley has developed his own freezing process after studying American techniques on a visit to the United States, but Britain has only 3,000 home refrigerators as compared with more than 2 million in the United States (see 1938).

Home freezers become commercially important for the first time in the United States as frozen food sales increase, but relatively few Americans have anything more advanced than an icebox. Icemen continue regular deliveries.

General Mills introduces Kix corn puff cereal.

Ford Motor Company scientists trying to develop a synthetic wool fiber produce soy protein "analogs" that will be used as substitutes for bacon and other animal protein foods (see Boyer, 1933). They spin a textile filament from soybean protein and create a vegetable protein that can be flavored to taste much like any animal protein food (see 1949).

The noncaloric artificial sweetener sodium cyclamate discovered by Connecticut-born University of Illinois chemistry doctoral candidate Michael Sveda, 25, is 30 times sweeter than sugar with none of the bitter aftertaste of the saccharin discovered in 1879. Having brushed his lips without washing his hands after doing some lab work, Sveda noticed that his fingers had a sweet taste, and when he tasted the chemicals in the various beakers in front of him he isolated the compound that he will refine and patent (see 1950).

Spam is introduced by George A. Hormel Co., whose salty, fatty, ground pork-shoulder-and-ham product will become the world's largest selling canned meat (see 1943). Jay C. Hormel, son of the founder, created the product to use up surplus pork shoulder, mixing it with ham, salt, sugar, and sodium nitrite and calling it spiced ham; competitors brought out similar products, Hormel saw that it needed a distinctive brand name, and actor Kenneth Daigneau, brother of a Hormel executive, won a contest last year (prize: $100) by coming up with the name.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner goes on sale nationwide in yellow boxes (soon changed to blue); National Dairy Products has adopted the idea of one of its St. Louis salesmen to combine grated American cheese with Tenderoni Macaroni. The product is advertised on the Kraft Music Hall radio show as "A meal for four in 9 minutes for an everyday price of 19 cents." (Many stores sell it for as little as 10 cents.)

Ragú Spaghetti Sauce has its beginnings in a spicy tomato-and-cheese sauce put up in mason jars at New York and distributed to friends and neighbors by Italian-born pasta, wine, and cheese importer Giovanni Cantisano, 51, and his wife, Assunta. They will soon sell the sauce to local stores under the name Ragu, Italian for sauce (see 1946).

Pepperidge Farm Bread is introduced by Connecticut entrepreneur Margaret "Maggie" Rudkin (née Fogarty), 40, who has never baked bread before (her mother never even boiled an egg) but whose physician has told her that the asthmatic condition of her youngest son, Mark, required that he be sent to Arizona. An early believer in the importance of B vitamins, she has decided, instead, to build up the boy's health with good whole-wheat bread. The red-haired, green-eyed Mrs. Rudkin soon has to hire a truck to deliver her bread to New York, and by September of next year she will be baking 4,000 loaves per week to meet demand from steady customers in Maryland and Florida (see 1947).

Krispy Kreme doughnuts are introduced July 13 at Winston-Salem, N.C., by entrepreneur Vernon (Carver) Rudolph, 22, who opens a shop with $25 selling glazed doughnuts made from a secret recipe that his uncle has purchased from onetime Louisiana steamboat cook Joe LeBeau. Rudolph will gradually add stores in neighboring states, some of them through franchisees, and by the time he dies in 1973 there will be about 50 Krispy Kreme doughnut shops.

U.S. Army captain Paul B. Logan works out the formula for a heat-resistant high-energy chocolate ration consisting of three four-ounce bars made of chocolate, sugar, powdered skim milk, cocoa butter, vanillin, and oat flour, with added thiamine (vitamin B₁). Hershey Chocolate produces 90,000 test ration bars for the army, which next year will rename the Logan Bar Ration D (for Daily) (see 1942).

Rootbeer pioneer Charles E. Hires dies at Haverford, Pa., July 31 at age 83.

The A&P begins opening supermarkets, as do other major U.S. food chains. Three or four smaller stores are closed down for every A&P supermarket opened (see 1929; King Kullen, 1930; Big Bear, 1932).

The supermarket shopping cart introduced at Oklahoma City June 4 begins a revolution in food buying. Standard Food Markets and Humpty Dumpty Stores owner Sylvan N. Goldman, 38, has created the cart to enable customers to buy more than can fit in the wicker baskets they carry; he has taken some folding chairs, put them on wheels, raised the seats to accommodate a lower shopping basket, placed a second basket on the seat, and used the chair back as a handle. Four U.S. companies will develop the shopping cart into a computer-designed chromed-steel cart that can be nested in a small area.

restaurants

Howard Johnson restaurants become a franchised operation as restaurateur Johnson hits upon the idea of franchising after having found it impossible to obtain bank financing for restaurants (see 1936). Johnson locates property that he leases to a Cambridge, Mass., widow who invests first $5,000 and then another $25,000; he constructs a building, hires employees, charges a small fee for the franchise but takes no part of the profits, retains exclusive rights to supply food, including 28 flavors of ice cream, menus, table mats, and other items, and starts a chain of franchised orange-roofed restaurants whose design and operation he will rigidly control (see 1952).

population

Contraception receives virtually unqualified endorsement from an American Medical Association committee on birth control (see 1940).

The first state contraceptive clinic opens March 15 at Raleigh, N.C. The State Board of Health introduces a program for indigent married women in its regular maternity and child health service.

Puerto Rico adopts a law legalizing contraception and sterilization under the direction of a eugenics board. Procter & Gamble heir Clarence Gamble has promoted the legislation, and although it will be repealed in 1960 some 35 percent of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age will have been sterilized by 1965, two-thirds of them in their 20s (see 1989).

Islam's Grand Mufti issues a fatwa permitting Muslims to take any measure to avoid conception to which both man and woman agree.

Britain's Birkett Committee on Abortion reports, "Many mothers seem not to understand that self-induced abortion is illegal (see 1867). They assumed it was legal before the third month, and only outside the law when procured by another person." Working-class women, especially, adhere to the view that life is not present until the fetus "quickens"; they take pills not to abort but rather to "bring on the period."

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University discover that natural estrogen and natural progesterone both can suppress the release of an egg from the ovary of a laboratory rabbit.

1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940

Anthropology

Franz Weidenreich [b. Edenkoben, Germany, June 7, 1873, d. New York City, July 11, 1948] discovers the first skull of Peking man. See also 1929 Anthropology.

Grote Reber [b. Wheaton, Illinois, December 22, 1911, d. Tasmania, December 20, 2002] builds in his backyard the first intentional radio telescope, a 9.4-m (31-ft) diameter dish, which he begins to receive signals from space in 1938. See also 1931 Tools; 1946 Astronomy.

Dutch-American astronomer Peter Van de Kamp [b. Piet Van de Kamp, Kampen, Netherlands, December 26, 1901, d. 1995] initiates a 20-year search of 54 nearby stars in an attempt to find stars with planetary systems, but his claims of success (notably Barnard's star, identified as having a giant planet in 1963) are largely refuted by other astronomers. See also 1995 Astronomy.

Hans Adolf Krebs discovers (but does not work out completely) the citric-acid cycle, usually called the Krebs cycle, which is the cycle of oxidation and energy production of all food in living cells. In the cycle, which involves changes in several compounds, carbon-carbon bonds in food molecules are broken. The carbon is expelled as carbon dioxide. The energy that held the carbon atoms together is released and stored in adenosine triphosphate (ATP). See also 1929 Biology; 1953 Biology.

William Rose establishes that only ten of the approximately twenty amino acids found in proteins are essential for rats. Later he will find that only eight of these are essential for humans. See also 1935 Biology.

English plant pathologist Frederick Charles Bawden [b. North Tawton, England, August 18, 1908, d. 1972] and coworkers discover that the tobacco mosaic virus contains ribonucleic acid (RNA). See also 1936 Biology; 1955 Biology.

Biochemist Conrad Arnold Elvehjem [b. McFarland, Wisconsin, May 27, 1901, d. Madison, Wisconsin, July 27, 1962] discovers nicotinic acid, or niacin, a B vitamin sometimes termed vitamin B₃. See also 1935 Biology; 1938 Chemistry.

Albert Francis Blakeslee [b. Geneseo, New York, November 9, 1874, d. Northampton, Massachusetts, November 16, 1954] discovers that the alkaloid colchicine, derived from the autumn crocus, produces mutations in plants by allowing chromosomes to double without the cell dividing. See also 1926 Biology.

Albert Szent-Györgyi of Hungary wins the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his study of vitamin C and respiration. See also 1930 Chemistry.

William Astbury is the first to use X-ray diffraction to study a nucleic acid. See also 1934 Biology; 1953 Biology.

Sir Walter Haworth of England and Paul Karrer of Switzerland win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Haworth for his work on carbohydrates and vitamin C and Karrer for his work on carotenoids, flavins, and vitamins. See also 1934 Chemistry; 1931 Biology.

American law student Chester Carlson [b. Seattle, Washington, February 8, 1906, d. New York, September 19, 1968] invents xerography, the first method of copying to be based on properties of selenium. His first efforts are extremely crude, however, and many years of development lie ahead before he has a commercial product. See also 1780 Communication; 1947 Communication.

Alec Harley Reeves [b. Redhill, Surrey, England, March 10, 1902, d. October 13, 1971] in England describes a transmission system in which analog sound is transformed into electrical pulses by a sampling process. The receiver transforms these pulses back into an analog sound signal. This is the basic method used in CD recordings. See also 1979 Communication.

John Vincent Atanasoff [b. Hamilton, New York, October 4, 1903, d. New Market, Maryland, June 15, 1955] conceives of the first electronic computer, a machine for solving systems of linear equations. See also 1936 Computers; 1939 Computers.

Mathematician Georges Stibitz [b. York, Pennsylvania, April 30, 1904, d. Hanover, New Hampshire, January 31, 1995], while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, develops the first binary circuit, a combination of batteries, lights, and wires based on Boolean algebra that can add two binary numbers. He calls the device "model K" or "Kitchen adder" because he built it in his kitchen. This circuit becomes instrumental in the development of subsequent electromechanical computers at Bell Labs. See also 1936 Computers; 1938 Computers. (See essay.)

A.V. Kazakov explains the origin and distribution of beds of phosphate rock as a result of ocean currents, with the rock being deposited where cold currents upwell. Such places encourage vast populations of living things whose remains and fecal pellets are the source of the phosphorus in the rock. See also 1820 Food & agriculture.

Brothers Russel H. [b. Washington, DC, April 24, 1898, d. July 28, 1959] and Sigurd Fergus Varian [b. Syracuse, New York, May 4, 1901, d. October 18, 1961] develop the klystron, a vacuum tube capable of generating microwaves that will be used in radar transmitters. See also 1921 Electronics; 1939 Electronics.

The Miracle Mixer, soon renamed the Waring Blendor (with an "o") after bandleader Fred Waring -- Frederick J. Ossius, inventor of the mixer, was the brother-in-law of Waring's publicity director -- is introduced at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago, Illinois. The Blendor is sold primarily to bars to make frozen daiquiris and not extensively promoted for home use until 1947.

Dutch engineer Norman de Bruyne [b. Chile, November 8, 1904, d. March 7, 1997] develops the composite plastic Gordon-Aerolite, which consists of high-grade flax fiber bonded together with phenolic resin. Although the material is not a commercial success, it paves the way for fiberglass. See also 1942 Materials.

Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov [b. Milolyub, Russia, September 14, 1891, d. Moscow, March 20, 1983] proves that every sufficiently large even integer is the sum of four primes, the closest result to that time to Goldbach's conjecture that every even integer greater than two is the sum of two primes. See also 1742 Mathematics; 1955 Mathematics.

Italian pharmacologist Daniele Bovet, working at the Pasteur Institute in France, develops the first antihistamine. See also 1957 Medicine & health.

A virus disease in a woman in the West Nile region of Uganda is found to be new to science, although related to several types of encephalitis. The disease, later christened West Nile virus, will spread throughout Africa and Eurasia, primarily in infected birds and through mosquitoes (humans, who become ill and sometimes die from the disease do not transmit it). See also 1999 Medicine & health.

Italian doctors Ugo Cerletti [b. Conegliano, Italy, September 12, 1877, d. July 27, 1963] and Lucio Bini [b. Rome, September 18, 1908, d. 1964] develop the first form of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), often known as "shock treatment," for treating schizophrenia. See also 1929 Medicine & health.

South African-American microbiologist Max Theiler [b. Pretoria, South Africa, January 30, 1899, d. New Haven, Connecticut, August 11, 1972] introduces a vaccine against yellow fever. See also 1951 Medicine & health.

Carl Anderson, Seth Neddermeyer, Edward Stevenson, and Jabez Curry Street [b. Opelika, Alabama, May 5, 1906, d. November 7, 1989] discover what comes to be called the mu meson (now known as the muon) in cosmic radiation. It is a subatomic particle with mass in between that of the proton and electron (later measured at 207 times the mass of the electron). The muon is widely assumed -- for most of the next ten years -- to be the exchange particle predicted by Hideki Yukawa in 1935 (although its only resemblance to the Yukawa particle is a similar mass). The Yukawa particle (now called the pion) will be observed in 1947. See also 1935 Physics; 1947 Physics.

Russian physicists Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm [b. Vladivostok, Russia, July 8, 1895, d. Moscow, April 12, 1971] and Ilya M. Frank [b. St. Petersburg (Leningrad, Soviet Union), October 23, 1908, d. Russia, June 22, 1990] develop a theoretical explanation of Cherenkov radiation, the electromagnetic radiation caused when electrons accelerate. See also 1934 Physics; 1958 Physics.

Italian-American physicist Emilio Segrè [b. Tivoli, Italy, February 1, 1905, d. Lafayette, California, April 22, 1989] produces technetium (Tc), the first artificial element.

Russian physicist Peter Leonidovich Kapitza [b. Kronstadt, Russia, July 8,1894, d. May 8, 1984] discovers superfluidity in helium 2. At 2.2 K (-456°F) helium becomes superfluid, having a viscosity about one thousandth that of the least viscous gas at room temperature. The term superfluidity will be coined by Peter Kapitza to describe this in 1941. See also 1930 Physics; 1938 Physics.

H. A. Kramers introduces the charge conjugation operation in November and declares that particle interactions are invariant under it. In the charge conjugation operation, positive charges are replaced by negative ones and vice versa. See also 1957 Physics.

Isidor Rabi and Polykarp Kusch [b. Blankenburg, Germany, January 26, 1911, d. Dallas, Texas, March 20, 1993] develop the magnetic resonance method for studying the atomic nucleus. See also 1971 Medicine & health.

Clinton Davisson of the United States and George Paget Thomson of England win the Nobel Prize for physics for their discovery of electron diffraction by crystals. See also 1927 Physics.

Frank Whittle and A.A. Griffith build the first working jet engine in England; the same year, Hans Pabst von Ohain [b. 1911, d. 1998] and Max Adolf Müller develop independently a similar engine. See also 1939 Transportation.

The first rocket tests are performed at the Baltic research station at Peenemünde. One of the leaders of the team is Wernher von Braun; Walter R. Dornberger [b. Germany, September 6, 1895, d. January 1, 1980] organizes the construction efforts that lead to the V-2 rocket. See also 1936 Transportation; 1938 Transportation.

The Zeppelin Hindenburg burns in a hydrogen fire while trying to land in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The crash, which kills 36 of the 97 aboard, is captured on film, and a live radio broadcast of the disaster is recorded. The sight and sound is so horrifying that the crash effectively ends rigid airship development, although the United States continues to make nonrigid airships, called blimps, for coastal patrol. See also 1900 Transportation.

Drama and Theater

• Maxwell Anderson: High Tor. One of Anderson's best and most successful plays, winning him his second New York Drama Critics Circle Award, is a dramatic fantasy in which a man who resists selling his mountain property along the Hudson to developers spends the night there and is visited by the ghosts of Dutch mariners, including the spirit of the Dutch captain's daughter, with whom he falls in love. Anderson also produces The Star Wagon, which imagines a married couple transported back in time to their youth to reaffirm their love.
• Stephen Vincent Benét: The Headless Horseman. An adaptation of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," this is the first of Benét's two one-act folk operas. It would be followed by The Devil and Daniel Webster (1939).
• Rachel Crothers: Susan and God. Crothers's final play records the religious conversion of a vain, selfish woman.
• Paul Green: Johnny Johnson. An antiwar fantasy with music by Kurt Weill (1900-1950) in his first American musical, the play depicts a pacifist in World War I who sprays the Allied High Command with laughing gas, is sent to a mental asylum, and organizes the patients into a League of World Republicans. In the same year The Lost Colony, the first and most successful of the playwright's symphonic outdoor dramas, is presented with a cast of 150 on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, where it would continue to be staged annually.
• Sidney Howard: The Ghost of Yankee Doodle. Howard's final play is set "eighteen months after the next world war" has begun and deals with the impact of war propaganda on a number of characters.
• George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart: I'd Rather Be Right. The first drama to depict an incumbent president in a lead role, this musical satire on the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration features George M. Cohan in his last dramatic role as FDR (a man the actor detested) surrounded by almost all of the important political figures of the day.
• Arthur Kober (1900-1975): Having a Wonderful Time. The Ukrainian-born playwright's only successful drama is this comedy of contemporary Jewish American life set in a Berkshires summer camp. Kober would adapt the play into the musical Wish You Were Here in 1952.
• John Howard Lawson: Marching Song. The controversial radical playwright's final drama pits strikers against strikebreakers in the final production by the Theatre Union, a group formed in 1932 to mount dramas of social significance.
• Archibald MacLeish: The Fall of the City. MacLeish's attack on totalitarianism takes the form of the first American play in verse written for the radio. It is performed on April 11 by Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith.
• Clifford Odets: Golden Boy. After a screenwriting foray in Hollywood, Odets returns to Broadway with this drama of an Italian slum dweller who abandons the violin for a prizefighting career. It is one of the playwright's least explicitly political dramas but his most popular. It would be revised in 1964 as an all-black musical starring Sammy Davis Jr.
• Harold Rome (1908-1993): Pins and Needles. Rome had written his first Broadway score for this propagandistic union revue produced by the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, which features a cast entirely made up of rank and file union members. For a time the revue would hold the record for the longest run for a Broadway musical (1,108 performances). Musical numbers such as "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance" and "It's Better with a Union Man" indicate the play's earnestness.
• Irwin Shaw: Siege. Shaw's Spanish Civil War drama tells the story of a group of Loyalists trapped in a surrounded redoubt.
• John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men. Having written his 1937 novel "as a play," Steinbeck quickly adapts it for the stage. It wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
• Edmund Wilson: This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches. Wilson's three experimental dramas--The Crime in the Whistler Room, A Winter in Beech Street, and Beppo and Beth--are satiric portraits of American life. Critics generally complain that the art of the dramatist is lacking in these intelligent but talky exercises in social criticism.

Fiction

• Stephen Vincent Benét: "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Benét's short story about a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil and is defended by Daniel Webster is published in the Saturday Evening Post. The author would adapt it in 1939 into a folk opera with music by Douglas Moore.
• James M. Cain: Serenade. Cain's third novel continues his hard-boiled style in a tragic story about a famous opera singer.
• James T. Farrell: Can All This Grandeur Perish? and Other Stories. Farrell's story collection echoes the naturalistic themes of his novels in various of slice-of-life looks at modern urban life. Several similar collections would follow, including $1,000 a Week (1942), To Whom It May Concern (1944), When Boyhood Dreams Come True (1946), and The Life Adventurous (1947).
• Daniel Fuchs: Low Company. In the final volume of a trilogy that includes Summer in Williamsburg (1934) and Homage to Blenholt (1936), Fuchs completes the documentation of his boyhood Jewish community in Brooklyn with the story of gambler Moe Karby. Disappointed by his books' commercial failure, Fuchs then turned to screenwriting. His series was rediscovered in 1961 when reissued as a single volume; Fuchs was belatedly recognized as a significant chronicler of modern urban life.
• Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991): And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Under the pseudonym "Dr. Seuss," Geisel publishes his first illustrated children's book, composed as a nonsense poem set to the rhythm of the ship's engine to amuse himself on his return from Europe in 1936. The fantasy of a boy on his way home from school is considered by many his best work. His other children's stories of the decade are The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1938), The Seven Lady Godivas (1939), and The King's Stilts (1939).
• Caroline Gordon: None Shall Look Back. Gordon's ambitious Civil War-era novel is modeled on Tolstoy's War and Peace, alternating family scenes with battle action and appearances by historical figures, most notably General Nathan Bedford Forrest, an embodiment of heroic values. The novel is criticized as an apology for the old Southern way of life, turning a blind eye to the injustices of slavery. Gordon also publishes The Garden of Adonis, which treats contemporary Southern life through the interrelationships of several families of varying social backgrounds.
• Ernest Hemingway: To Have and Have Not. Hemingway's only novel of the 1930s is the often cynically brutal story of Key West "conch" Harry Morgan, who is forced by economic necessity into illegal activities. His realization on the point of death that "One man alone ain't got... no chance" demonstrates Hemingway's increasing social concerns and his acknowledgment of the need for collective action, both derived from the writer's experiences in Spain. Reviewers, although impressed by some of the novel's passages and episodes, generally see in the novel signs of Hemingway's decline.
• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's masterpiece about the liberation of black woman Janie Crawford to a wider concept of her identity and engagement with the world through three marriages is widely considered the first black feminist novel of the twentieth century.
• Josephine W. Johnson: Jordanstown. Johnson's second novel looks as the effects of the Depression on a small Midwestern town where an idealistic journalist takes up the cause of the oppressed in editorials in the local newspaper. Johnson also publishes her only collection of poetry, Year's End.
• Younghill Kang: East Goes West. The sequel to The Grass Roof, the first book-length work in English by a Korean immigrant, treats Kang's experiences in America in a fictionalized autobiography that the author would regard as his finest work.
• Oliver LA Farge: The Enemy Gods. The era's recognized authority on Native American culture, the anthropologist and director of the National Association of Indian Affairs, continues his documentation of Navajo life in this novel concerning the cultural conflict experienced by a young Indian's difficult progress to manhood.
• Meyer Levin: The Old Bunch. Levin examines Jewish assimilation in the stories of a dozen second-generation Jews in Chicago, from their high school graduation in 1922 to 1934. Generally regarded as Levin's best novel, it has been described by critic Philip Rahv as "the classic American story of defeat and frustration."
• J. P. Marquand (1893-1960): The Late George Apley. Marquand wins the Pulitzer Prize for this "novel in the form of a memoir," detailing the life story of a member of an old Boston family, which expertly presents a portrait of an age, a class, and a locality. The author would collaborate with George S. Kaufman in a dramatization in 1944. Marquand was raised in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the locale of many of his works, and was a journalist and advertising copywriter. His previous works included The Unspeakable Gentleman (1922), The Black Congo (1925), and Warning Hill (1930).
• Edgar Lee Masters: The Tide of Time. A chronicle of an Illinois town from its founding in 1822. Readers acknowledge the book's epic ambitions but mainly resist it as overly heavy going and dull.
• William Maxwell: They Came Like Swallows. One of the most highly praised of the author's books, the novel dramatizes the impact of the Spanish influenza epidemic on a close-knit family.
• Elmer Rice: Imperial City. Rice offers a panoramic social view of New York City in this novel about the lives of a diverse group of city dwellers.
• Conrad Richter: The Sea of Grass. Richter's first novel deepens the genre of the western in a depiction of cattle ranching in the Southwest.
• Kenneth Roberts: Northwest Passage. In one of the most popular and acclaimed historical novels, Roberts chronicles the adventures of Major Robert Rogers and his rangers during the French and Indian War.
• Leo Rosten (1908-1997): The Education of H *Y*-M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Written under the pseudonym "Leonard Q. Ross," Rosten's most popular work is a collection of sketches, previously serialized in The New Yorker, about an immigrant's linguistic misadventures in an English-language night school for adults. Two sequels would follow: The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1959) and O *A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! (1976). Rosten is best remembered for The Joys of Yiddish (1968).
• Mari Sandoz: Slogum House. The Nebraska author's first novel looks at the darker side of the frontier ethic in a tale of a ruthless woman's drive for power. The book is banned by several Nebraska libraries.
• William Saroyan: Little Children. In this volume of short stories about children or childish adults, reviewers note a more subdued writer with his characteristic bluster diminished.
• Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966): "In Dreams Begin Responsibility." Schwartz's short story appears in the inaugural issue of the reconstituted Partisan Review and is immediately hailed as a masterpiece. It would provide the title for the writer's first volume of poetry, prose, and a dramatic work in 1938.
• Upton Sinclair: The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America. Sinclair provides a fictionalized portrait of Henry Ford and his company as seen from the perspective of three generations of Ford's laborers. The United Auto Workers distributes 200,000 copies to union members.
• Wallace Stegner (1909-1993): Remembering Laughter. Prompted by a writing contest sponsored by the publisher Little, Brown, Stegner attempted his first work of fiction, a realistic tale of a triangular relationship on an Iowa farm. It is selected as the best from thirteen hundred entries. Born in Iowa and educated in Utah, Stegner would gain recognition as one of the major modern chroniclers of the American West.
• John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men. In Steinbeck's short novel the dreams of two itinerant laborers, George and Lennie, about a place of their own collapses when the simple-minded Lennie accidentally breaks the neck of another man's wife. Steinbeck weaves social themes around concepts of evolutionary biology and the survival of the fittest.
• Waters Turpin (1910-1968): These Low Grounds. Turpin's first novel traces the lives of four generations of a black family living on the eastern shore of Maryland and earns him the title of "the progenitor of the Afro-American saga" and thus the forerunner of Alex Haley's method in Roots (1976). Turpin's mother had been the cook of writer Edna Ferber, who became his literary mentor. His other novels are O Canaan! (1939) and The Rootless (1957).
• Jerome Weidman (1913-1998): I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Written a chapter a night in thirty days while Weidman attended school, this first novel by the New York writer takes an unflattering look at the fortunes of unscrupulous Harry Bogen in New York's garment district. A sequel, What's in It for Me? would follow in 1938.
• Edith Wharton: Ghosts. This supernatural story collection is issued posthumously, with a preface in which Wharton discusses the writing of ghost stories and worries that the "ghost instinct" is being destroyed by the wireless and the cinema, "enemies of the imagination," in the writer's view.
• William Carlos Williams: White Mule. The first novel of a trilogy concerns the adjustment of an immigrant family, based on the author's in-laws, to life in America. Subsequent volumes are In the Money (1940) and The Build-Up (1952).

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Walter Blair (1900-1992): Native American Humor, 1800-1900. Blair, who taught at the University of Chicago, becomes one of the first academics to study American humor, and this work remains one of the authoritative books in the field. It would be revised in 1960. His other works include Horse Sense in American Humor (1942) and Davy Crockett: Truth and Legend (1955).
• Sterling Brown: The Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama. Brown's two critical volumes are generally regarded as the foundation texts for the study of African American literary history. As scholar Darwin T. Turner observed, "All trails led, at some point, to Sterling Brown" who "wrote the Bible for the study of Afro-American literature."
• Edgar Lee Masters: Whitman. Masters's critical biography attempts to deal with both the poet's private, emotional life and his wider cultural significance.
• Yvor Winters: Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry. The critic demonstrates what is wrong with modern poetry with what poet Hayden Carruth would later call his "magnificent wrath," able to prove that "our favorite poets are idiots, and in the process show us just why we like them so much."

Nonfiction

• Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962): My War with the United States. The first adult book by the Austrian émigré writer-illustrator and future creator of the children's classic Madeline (1939) is a humorous depiction of his service with the American army during World War I.
• Kenneth Burke: Attitudes Toward History. The philosopher supplies a psychological interpretation of historical events and figures in this two-volume study.
• Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971): You Have Seen Their Faces. This first of four volumes of photo-essays looks at Southern sharecroppers. Subsequent volumes are North to the Danube (1939) about Czechoslovakia, Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (1941), and Russia at War (1942). Bourke-White was one of the best-known photographers of the era.
• Robert P. Tristram Coffin: The Kennebec. The Maine poet and essayist initiates the Rivers of America series, which would be followed by volumes by Struther Burt (1882-1954; Powder River, 1938) and Carl Carmer (1893-1976; The Hudson, 1939).
• John Gould Fletcher: Life Is My Song. The leader of the Agrarians, a group of writers that includes Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren who promoted the values of the agrarian South over twentieth-century industrialism, offers his autobiographical account of his involvement with the imagist poets before the war.
• Claude McKay: A Long Way from Home. One of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance provides his autobiographical reflections on his native Jamaica, life in Harlem, and his travels abroad, emphasizing the dominant theme of his books: the search for a viable cultural identity for a black in a white-dominated society.
• Elliot Paul (1891-1958): The Life and Death of a Spanish Town. The expatriate journalist documents the impact of the Spanish Civil War on a community in the Balearic islands. It is considered at the time one of the best treatments of the Spanish conflict. Paul's most popular work is his memoir, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942).
• S. J. Perelman: Strictly from Hunger. The writer's second book but the first of his mature work is a collection of deft sketches and reflections that had previously appeared in The New Yorker and other periodicals.
• Eleanor Roosevelt: This Is My Story. The First Lady's autobiography covers the years from her childhood to the Democratic convention of 1924 and her husband's election as governor of New York. Candid about herself, Roosevelt is discreet on the details of her marriage.
• Odell Shepard (1884-1967): Pedlar's Progress. This biography of Bronson Alcott, the father of writer Louisa May Alcott and one of the foremost Transcendentalists, wins the Pulitzer Prize and is praised for resurrecting the reputation of an important American figure and for skillfully capturing his era. A professor of English at Trinity College from 1917 to 1946, Shepard edited the works of Thoreau, Alcott, and Longfellow, produced college literature textbooks, and cowrote with his son Willard two historical novels, Holdfast Gaines (1946) and Jenkins' Ear (1951).
• Harold Stearns: America: A Reappraisal. After an extended residence abroad, cultural critic Stearns returns to the United States and supplies this generally favorable assessment of the changes he found.
• Gertrude Stein: Everybody's Autobiography. In a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein reflects on her six-month lecture tour of America in 1934-1935.
• James Thurber: Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. The humorist takes satirical aim at inspirational books, popular psychology, intellectual critics, and the art of autobiography in this collection, most of which had previously appeared in The New Yorker.

Poetry

• R. P. Blackmur: From Jordan's Delight. The literary critic's first volume of poetry is a collection of meticulously crafted lyrics with a coastal Maine setting.
• Louise Bogan: The Sleeping Fury. The poet's third collection solidifies her reputation as one of the major voices of the era that rejects the experimentation of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and others and embraces traditional poetic forms, echoing writers such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan.
• Richard Eberhart: Reading the Spirit. Eberhart's second collection contains his best-known poem, "The Groundhog," whose themes of life and death, man and nature, mind and body would recur throughout the poet's career.
• Robert Hillyer: A Letter to Robert Frost and Others. Witty letters in heroic couplets to figures such as Robert Frost, Harvard professor Charles Townsend Copeland, Bernard De Voto, and Queen Nefertiti.
• Robinson Jeffers: Such Counsels You Gave Me, and Other Poems. The long narrative title poem is a modern adaptation of the Scottish ballad "Edward, Edward," concerning the collapse of a family in which the son poisons his father and must reject the incestuous passion of his mother. According to one reviewer, Jeffers "evokes a sense of personal tragedy against a background of universal terror."
• Edgar Lee Masters: The New World. This long epic poem presents the history of America before Columbus to the end of the Great War. Displaying a shift in style from the condensed portraiture of Spoon River Anthology, the author heaps scorn on the materialism that he sees dissolving American freedom and morality in a long-winded and often ponderous work.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conversation at Midnight. In a departure from her characteristic lyricism, Millay attempts a narrative poem of ideas, recording the after-dinner conversation of seven men from diverse backgrounds on a number of topics. Critics are divided. Some read it as a "remarkable poetic indictment of modern life," while others find it prosy and pretentious.
• May Sarton (1912-1995): Encounter in April. The writer's first collection of lyrics is well received. As one reviewer rhapsodized, the poems are "the fragile, brittle, irridescent work of a New England girl for whom the cruder passions are refined into the fleeting shadows of angel wings." Sarton was born in Belgium and came to the United States at the age of four. In addition to her poetry, she would write a number of novels and several volumes of autobiographical reflections.
• Wallace Stevens: The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems. The poet's defense against charges that his work ignores social concerns takes the form of variations on the theme of the poet's transformative role of the imagination as the prime explicator of thought and feeling. As he writes in the title poem, "They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'" The work is crucial in Stevens's canon, articulating his concept of the poet's responsibility while renewing his faith in the power of his art.
• Allen Tate: Selected Poems. Tate's collection includes what most agree is his finest poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead."

Publications and Events

• Allen TateNew Challenge. A reconstituted version of Challenge (1934) debuts, with Dorothy West and Martin Minus as coeditors and Richard Wright as associate editor. The inaugural and only issue features Wright's influential manifesto, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," and Ralph Ellison's first published piece, a review of Waters Turpin's These Low Grounds (1937). The short story "Hymie Bull," which Ellison wrote for the magazine, launches his fiction career.

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	19th century - 20th century - 21st century
Decades:	1900s  1910s  1920s  - 1930s -  1940s  1950s  1960s
Years:	1934 1935 1936 - 1937 - 1938 1939 1940

1937 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 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

Contents:
Events of 1937 -  Jan. . Feb. . March . April -  May . June . July  .  Aug. -  Sept. . Oct. . Nov. .  Dec. -  Undated . Ongoing Births Deaths Nobel prizes Ship events See also -  Notes -  External links

Events of 1937

January

January 19: Howard Hughes sets record.

• January 1 – Anastasio Somoza García becomes President of Nicaragua.
• January 3 – The first science fiction convention is held in Leeds, England.
• January 11 – The first issue of LOOK Magazine goes on sale in the United States.
• January 19 – Howard Hughes sets a new record by flying from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.
• January 20 – Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes swears in Franklin D. Roosevelt for a second term. This is the first time Inauguration Day in the United States occurs on that date, on which it has occurred ever since; the change is due to the ratification in 1933 of the 20th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
• January 23 – In Moscow, 17 leading Communists go on trial, accused of participating in a plot led by Leon Trotsky to overthrow Joseph Stalin's regime and assassinate its leaders.
• January 26 – Michigan celebrates its Centennial Anniversary of statehood.
• January 31
  • The Ohio River floods.
  • The Soviet Union executes 31 people for alleged Trotskyism.

February

• February 5 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court of the United States.
• February 8 – Spanish Civil War: Falangist troops take Málaga.
• February 8-February 27 – Spanish Civil War – Battle of Jarama: Nationalist and government troops fight to a stalemate.
• February 11 – A sit-down strike ends when General Motors recognizes the United Automobile Workers Union.
• February 16 – Wallace H. Carothers receives a patent for nylon.
• February 19
  • Airliner VH-UHH (Stinson) goes down over Lamington National Park, bound for Sydney, killing 5 people.
  • During a public ceremony at the Viceregal Palace (the former Imperial residence) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, two Eritrean nationalists attempt to kill viceroy Rodolfo Graziani with a number of grenades. The Italian security guard fire into the crowd of Ethiopian onlookers, and over the passing weeks indiscriminately slaughter native Ethiopians in reprisal..
• February 21
  • The first successful flying car, Waldo Waterman's Aerobile, makes its initial flight.
  • The League of Nations Non-Intervention Committee bans foreign nationals from fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

March

• March – The first issue of the comic book Detective Comics is published in the United States. Twenty-seven issues later, Detective Comics introduces Batman. The comic goes on to become the longest continually-published comic magazine in American history; it is still published as of 2009.
• March 10 – The Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge of Pope Pius XI is published in Nazi Germany.
• March 15 – Howard Phillips Lovecraft science fiction writer dies.
• March 17 – The Atherton Report (private investigator Edwin Atherton's report detailing vice and police corruption in San Francisco) is released.
• March 18
  • In the worst school disaster in American history in terms of lives lost, the New London School in New London, Texas suffers a catastrophic natural gas explosion, killing in excess of 295 students and teachers.
  • Mother Frances Hospital opens 1 day later in Tyler, Texas in response to the New London School explosion.
• March 26
  • In Crystal City, Texas, spinach growers erect a statue of the cartoon character Popeye.
  • William Henry Hastie becomes the first African-American appointed to a federal judgeship .

April

• April 1 – Aden becomes a British crown colony.
• April 9 – The Kamikaze arrives at Croydon Airport in London; it is the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly to Europe.
• April 12 – NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the National Labor Relations Act is constitutional.
• April 17 – The animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series, featuring the debut of Daffy Duck, is released.
• April 20 – A cinefilm fire in an elementary school in Kilingi-Nõmme, Estonia kills 17 students and injures 50.
• April 26 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain is bombed. In his report of the Falangist attack on Guernica, British journalist George Steer reports finding German bomb casings, connecting Luftwaffe planes with the attack.

May

• May – The Dáil Éireann passes the Executive Authority (Consequential Provisions) Act, 1937, which retrospectively abolishes the office of Governor-General of the Irish Free State; the abolition is retrospectively dated to December 1936.
• May – 7 million unemployed in the USA.
• May 1 – A general strike occurs in Paris, France.
• May 6 – In the United States, the German airship Hindenburg bursts into flame when mooring to a mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
• May 7 – Spanish Civil War: The German Condor Legion Fighter Group, equipped with Heinkel He 51 biplanes, arrives in Spain to assist Francisco Franco's forces.
• May 12 – The coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth takes place at Westminster Abbey, London.
• May 21
  • A Soviet station becomes the first scientific research settlement to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean.
  • As one of the reprisals for the attempted assassination of Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, a detachment of Italian troops massacres the entire community of Debre Libanos, killing 297 monks and 23 laymen.
• May 27 – In California, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushes a button in Washington, D.C., signaling the start of vehicle traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge.
• May 28 – Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
• May 30 – Spanish ship Ciudad de Barcelona is torpedoed in the fight against "Republicans" and "Nationalists".

June

• June 3 – Wallis Simpson marries the former Edward VIII of the United Kingdom.
• June 8
  • The first total solar eclipse to exceed 7 minutes of totality in over 800 years, is visible in the Pacific and Peru.
  • Carl Orff's Carmina Burana premieres in Frankfurt, Germany.
• June 14 – Pennsylvania becomes the first (and only) of the United States to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday.
• June 21 – The coalition government of Léon Blum resigns in France.
• June/July – The Dáil Éireann debates and passes the draft new constitution of Éire, to be called Bunreacht na hÉireann. The new constitution is then submitted for public approval by plebiscite.

July

• July 1
  • The Gestapo arrests priest Martin Niemöller.
  • In a referendum the people of the Irish Free State accept the new Constitution by 685,105 votes to 527,945.
• July 2
  • Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappear after taking off from New Guinea during Earhart's attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
  • A guard takes his place at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Washington, DC; continuous guard has been maintained there ever since.
• July 5 – The highest recorded temperature in Canada, at Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan, is 45°C.
• July 7 – Sino-Japanese War – Battle of Lugou Bridge (aka Marco Polo Bridge Incident): Japanese forces invade China (often seen as the beginning of World War II in Asia).
• July 20 – The Geibeltbad Pirna is opened in Dresden, Germany.
• July 21 – Eamon de Valera is elected president of Éire (Ireland).
• July 22 – New Deal: The United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
• July 24 – Alabama drops rape charges against the so-called Scottsboro Boys.
• July 28 – The IRA attempts a bombing assassination against King George VI in Belfast.

August

• August 5 – The Soviet Union commences one of the largest campaigns of the Great Purge, to "eliminate anti-Soviet elements". Within the following year, at least 724,000 people are killed on order of the troikas, many of them chosen for shooting by their ethnicity.
• August 6 – Spanish Civil War: Falangist artillery bombards Madrid.
• August 26 – Sino-Japanese War: Japanese aircraft attack the car carrying the ambassador of Great Britain during a raid on Shanghai.

September

• September 2 – The Great Hong Kong Typhoon of 1937 kills an estimated 11,000 persons.
• September 5 – Spanish Civil War: The city of Llanes falls to the Falangists.
• September 7 – CBS broadcasts a two-and-a-half hour memorial concert nationwide on radio in memory of George Gershwin, live from the Hollywood Bowl. Many celebrities appear, including Oscar Levant, Fred Astaire, Otto Klemperer, Lily Pons, and members of the original cast of Porgy and Bess. The concert is recorded and released complete years later in what is excellent sound for its time, on CD. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is the featured orchestra.
• September 21 – George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. of London publishes the first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.
• September 25 – Sino-Japanese War – Battle of Pingxingguan: The Communist Chinese National Revolutionary Army defeats the Japanese.
• September 26 – Street and Smith Publications launches a half-hour radio program , The Shadow, with Orson Welles in the title role.
• September 27 – The last Bali tiger dies.

October

• October 1
  • The Marijuana Tax Act becomes law in the United States.
  • U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Hugo Black, in a nationwide radio broadcast, refutes allegations of past involvement in the Ku Klux Klan.
• October 3 – Japanese troops advance toward Nanking.
• October 5 – Roosevelt gives his famous Quarantine Speech in Chicago.
• October 13 – Germany, in a note to Brussels, guarantees the inviolability and integrity of Belgium so long as the latter abstains from military action against Germany.
• October 15 – Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not is first published.
• October 21
  • The whole Spanish northern seaboard falls into the Falangists' hands.
  • Roberto Ortiz is elected president of Argentina.
• October 27 – Spanish Civil War: Republican forces in Gijon, Spain, set fire to petrol reserves before they retreat before the advancing Falangists.

November

• November 5
  • Spanish Civil War – 35,000 Republican supporters are massacred in Piedrafita de Babia, near León.
  • World War II: In the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting and states his plans for acquiring "living space" for the German people.
• November 6 – Italy joins the Anti-Comintern Pact.
• November 9 – Japanese troops take Shanghai.
• November 10 – Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas announces the Estado Novo (New State), thence becoming dictator of Brazil until 1945.
• November 11 – The Kogushi sulfur mine collapse, in western Gunma, Japan, kills at least 245 people.

December

• December 4 – The Dandy, the world's longest running comic strip, is first published.
• December 11 – Italy withdraws from the League of Nations.
• December 12
  • Panay incident: Japanese bombers sink the American gunboat Panay
  • Mae West makes a risque guest appearance on the NBC Chase and Sanborn Hour that eventually results in her being banned from radio.
• December 13 – The Battle of Nanjing ends and the Nanjing Massacre begins. Japanese troops slaughter over 300,000 civilians and prisoners over 3 months.
• December 16 – The original production of the musical Me and My Girl opens at the West End Victoria Palace Theatre. A later revival of this musical would win an award.
• December 21 – Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated cartoon with sound, opens and becomes a smash hit.
• December 25 – At the age of 70, legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini conducts the NBC Symphony Orchestra on radio for the first time, beginning his successful 17-year tenure with that orchestra. This first concert consists of music by Vivaldi (at a time when he was still seldom played), Mozart, and Brahms. Millions tune in to listen, including U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
• December 29 – The new Irish constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, comes into force. The Irish Free State becomes Éire. Eamon de Valera becomes the first Taoiseach (prime minister) of the new state. A Presidential Commission (made up the Irish Chief Justice, the Speaker of Dáil Éireann and the President of the High Court) assumes the powers of the new presidency of Ireland pending the election of the first president in June 1938.

Undated

• The new Irish constitution bans divorce.
• The National House Builders Registration Council (now the NHBC) is formed in the United Kingdom.
• Jimmie Angel lands his plane on top of Devil's Mountain; however, the plane gets damaged and he has to trek through the rainforest for help.
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is published.
• Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti is the first to document a transorbital approach to the brain, which becomes the basis for the controversial medical procedure of transorbital lobotomy.
• Japan occupies Beijing.
• Soviet industry produces about 4 times as much as it had in 1928.

Ongoing

• Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
• Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)
• Harlem Renaissance (1920-1940).[1]
• Great Depression (1929-1940)[2]

Births

1937 in other calendars

Gregorian calendar	1937 MCMXXXVII
Ab urbe condita	2690
Armenian calendar	1386 ԹՎ ՌՅՁԶ
Bahá'í calendar	93 – 94
Berber calendar	2887
Buddhist calendar	2481
Burmese calendar	1299
Byzantine calendar	7445 – 7446
Chinese calendar	丙子年十一月十九日 (4573/4633-11-19) — to — 丁丑年十一月廿九日 (4574/4634-11-29)
Coptic calendar	1653 – 1654
Ethiopian calendar	1929 – 1930
Hebrew calendar	5697 – 5698
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1992 – 1993
- Shaka Samvat	1859 – 1860
- Kali Yuga	5038 – 5039
Holocene calendar	11937
Iranian calendar	1315 – 1316
Islamic calendar	1355 – 1356
Japanese calendar	Shōwa 12 (昭和12年)
Korean calendar	4270
Thai solar calendar	2480
v • d • e

January-February

• January 1 – Anne Aubrey, British actress
• January 4 – Dyan Cannon, American actress
• January 6 – Paolo Conte, Italian singer, Pianist and Composer
• January 6 – Underwood Dudley, American mathematician
• January 8 – Shirley Bassey, Welsh singer
• January 13 – George Reisman, American economist
• January 14 – Ken Higgs, English cricketer
• January 15 – Margaret O'Brien, American actress
• January 18 – John Hume, Northern Irish politician, Nobel Peace Prize laureate
• January 18 – Yukio Endo, Japanese gymnast
• January 21 – Prince Max, Duke in Bavaria, heir to the Bavarian Royal House
• January 22 – Joseph Wambaugh, American author
• January 27 – John Ogdon, English pianist (d. 1989)
• January 29 – James F.Simpson, Australian Educator
• January 30 – Vanessa Redgrave, English actress
• January 30 – Boris Spassky, Russian chess player
• January 31 – Suzanne Pleshette, American actress (d. 2008)
• January 31 – Philip Glass, American composer
• February 1 – Garrett Morris, American comedian
• February 1 – Don Everly, American rock 'n' roll musician
• February 2 – Tom Smothers, American musician and comedian
• February 2 – Magic Sam, American musician (d. 1969)
• February 2 – Remak Ramsay, American actor
• February 3 – Billy Meier, Swiss Prophet
• February 8 – Manfred Krug, German actor and singer
• February 9 – Robert "Bilbo" Walker Jr., American blues guitarist
• February 10 – Roberta Flack, American soul singer
• February 11 – Bill Lawry, Australian cricketer
• February 12 – Charles Dumas, American athlete
• February 20 – George Leonardos, Greek journalist and author
• February 20 – Robert Huber, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• February 20 – Roger Penske, American race car driver
• February 20 – Nancy Wilson, American singer and actress
• February 21 – King Harald V of Norway
• February 25 – Tom Courtenay, English actor

March-April

• March 2 – Abdelaziz Bouteflika, President of Algeria
• March 4 – Graham Dowling, New Zealand cricketer
• March 4 – Leslie Gelb, American president of the Council on Foreign Relations
• March 4 – Yuri Senkevich, Russian cosmonaut (d. 2003)
• March 4 – Barney Wilen, French jazz saxophonist (d. 1996)
• March 6 – Valentina Tereshkova, Russian cosmonaut, first woman in space
• March 8 – Juvénal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda (d. 1994)
• March 20 – Jerry Reed, American country musician (d. 2008)
• March 22 – Armin Hary, German athlete
• March 23 – Craig Breedlove, American race car driver
• March 27 – Thomas Aquinas Daly, American painter
• March 30 – Warren Beatty, American actor and director
• April 5 – Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State
• April 6 – Merle Haggard, American country musician
• April 6 – Billy Dee Williams, American actor
• April 7 – Louise Faulkner, missing Australian woman
• April 10 – Bella Akhmadulina, Russian poet
• April 16 – Joseph Whipp, American actor
• April 18 – Jan Kaplický, British architect of Czech origin
• April 22 – Jack Nicholson, American actor
• April 24 – Rafi' Daham Al-Tikriti, director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service
• April 27 – Robin Eames, Northern Irish clergyman
• April 27 – Sandy Dennis, American actress (d. 1992)
• April 28 – Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq (d. 2006)
• April 29 – Jill Paton Walsh, English novelist

May-June

• May 1 – Una Stubbs, British actress
• May 3 – Frankie Valli, American musician
• May 3 – Hans Cieslarczyk, German football player
• May 4 – Ron Carter, American jazz musician
• May 6 – Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, American boxer
• May 8 – Thomas Pynchon, American writer
• May 8 – Carlos Gaviria Díaz, Colombian justice and politician
• May 12 – George Carlin, American comedian (d. 2008)
• May 13 – Roch Carrier, Canadian writer
• May 13 – Roger Zelazny, American writer (d. 1995)
• May 13 – Trevor Baylis, English inventor
• May 15 – Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State
• May 15 – Trini Lopez, American musician
• May 16 – Yvonne Craig, American actress
• May 17 – Hazel R. O'Leary, U.S. Secretary of Energy
• May 18 – Jacques Santer, Luxembourg politician, President of the European Council
• May 21 – Sofiko Chiaureli, Georgian actress (d. 2008)
• June 1 – Morgan Freeman, American actor
• June 3 – Solomon P. Ortiz, U.S. Congressman from Texas
• June 4 – Gorilla Monsoon, American professional wrestler and announcer (d. 1999)
• June 7 – Neeme Järvi, Estonian conductor
• June 8 – Toni Harper, American child singer
• June 9 – Harald Rosenthal, German biologist
• June 10 – Luciana Paluzzi, Italian actress
• June 11 – Robin Warren, Australian pathologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• June 15 – Waylon Jennings, American country singer (d. 2002)
• June 15 – Alan Thornett, British Trotskyist activist
• June 16 – Charmian May, British actress (d. 2002)
• June 18 – Wray Carlton, American football player
• June 18 – Vitali Zholobov, Russian cosmonaut
• June 23 – Martti Ahtisaari, President of Finland
• June 25 – Keizo Obuchi, Prime Minister of Japan (d. 2000)
• June 26 – Robert Coleman Richardson, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• June 28 – Ron Luciano, American baseball umpire and writer (d. 1995)

July-August

• July 4 – Sonja Haraldsen, Queen of Norway and wife to King Harald V of Norway
• July 6 – Vladimir Ashkenazy, Russian pianist
• July 6 – Ned Beatty, American actor
• July 7 – Tung Chee-Hwa, Hong Kong administrator
• July 9 – David Hockney, English-born artist
• July 12 – Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of France
• July 12 – Bill Cosby, American actor and comedian
• July 14 – Yoshiro Mori, Japanese politician
• July 18 – Roald Hoffmann, Polish-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• July 18 – Hunter S. Thompson, American author and journalist (d. 2005)
• July 20 – Ken Ogata, Japanese actor (d. 2008)
• July 27 – Don Galloway, American actor (d. 2009)
• July 27 – Anna Dawson, British actress
• July 29 – Daniel McFadden, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
• August 2 – Coenraad Bron, Dutch Computer Scientist
• August 4 – David Bedford, American musician
• August 5 – Herb Brooks, American hockey coach (d. 2003)
• August 6 – Barbara Windsor, English actress
• August 8 – Dustin Hoffman, American actor
• August 16 – David Anderson, Canadian politician
• August 18 – Willie Rushton, English comedian and cartoonist (d. 1996)
• August 18 – Jean Alingué Bawoyeu, Chadian politician and former Prime Minister
• August 20 – Jim Bowen, English stand-up comedian and TV personality
• August 21 – Donald Dewar, First Minister of Scotland (d. 2000)
• August 21 – Robert Stone, American novelist
• August 21 – Chuck Traynor, American pornographer (d. 2002)
• August 29 – James Florio, Governor of New Jersey
• August 30 – Bruce McLaren, Founder of McLaren Racing
• August 31 – Bobby Parker, American blues musician/guitarist

September-October

• September 4 – Dawn Fraser, Australian swimmer
• September 4 – Mikk Mikiver, Estonian actor and director (d. 2006)
• September 6 – Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada (Keith Gordon Ham), Hare Krishna guru
• September 7 – Cüneyt Arkın, Turkish film actor
• September 11 – Paola Ruffo di Calabria, Queen of the Belgians
• September 15 – Robert Lucas, Jr., American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
• September 15 – Fernando de la Rúa, President of Argentina
• September 16 – Keith Bosley, British broadcaster (retired), poet and translator
• September 17 – Ilarion Ionescu-Galati Romanian conductor
• September 19 – Abner Haynes, American football player
• September 28 – Rod Roddy, American television announcer (d. 2003)
• October 2 – Johnnie Cochran, American attorney (d. 2005)
• October 5 – Barry Switzer, American football coach
• October 10 – Bobby Charlton, English footballer
• October 17 – Paxton Whitehead, English actor
• October 28 – Lenny Wilkens, American basketball player and coach

November-December

• November 1 – "Whisperin" Bill Anderson, American country music singer-songwriter and game show host
• November 2 – Earl Carroll, American lead vocalist for The Cadillacs
• November 4 – Michael Wilson, Canadian politician and diplomat
• November 6 – Joe Warfield, American actor
• November 8 – Paul Mackintosh Foot, British journalist
• November 11 – Stephen Lewis, Canadian politician and diplomat
• November 17 – Peter Cook, English comedian and writer (d. 1995)
• November 26 – Boris Yegorov, Russian cosmonaut
• December 1 – Chuck Low, American actor
• December 3 – Bobby Allison, American race car driver
• December 8 – Michael Bowen, American artist (d. 2009)
• December 8 – James MacArthur, American actor
• December 8 – Arne Næss Jr., Norwegian mountaineer and businessman (d. 2004)
• December 9 – Darwin Joston, American actor (d. 1998)
• December 11 – Jim Harrison, American writer
• December 15 – Donald Goines, American novelist (d. 1973)
• December 17 – Kerry Packer, Australian businessman (d. 2005)
• December 21 – Jane Fonda, American actress and social activist
• December 26 – Gnassingbe Eyadema, President of Togo (d. 2005)
• December 28 – Ratan Tata, Indian industrialist
• December 29 – Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, President of the Maldives
• December 30 – Gordon Banks, English footballer
• December 30 – John Hartford, American musician and composer (d. 2001)
• December 30 – Jim Marshall, American football player
• December 30 – Noel Paul Stookey, American singer (Peter, Paul and Mary)
• December 31 – Avram Hershko, Israeli biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• December 31 – Anthony Hopkins, Welsh actor
• unknown date – Mengistu Haile Mariam, President of Ethiopia

Deaths

January – June

• January 2 – Ross Alexander, American actor (b. 1907)
• January 6 – André Besette, Canadian religious leader (b. 1845)
• January 23 – Marie Prevost, Canadian actress (b. 1898)
• February 5 – Lou Andreas-Salome, Russian-born writer (b. 1861)
• February 7 – Elihu Root, American statesman and diplomat, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1845)
• February 11 – Walter Burley Griffin, American architect and town planner (b. 1876)
• February 27 – Charles Donnelly, Irish poet (b. 1915)
• March 9 – Paul Elmer More, American critic and essayist (b. 1864)
• March 11 – Joseph S. Cullinan, American oil industrialist, founder of Texaco (b. 1860)
• March 12 – Charles-Marie Widor, French organist and composer (b. 1840)
• March 15 – H. P. Lovecraft, American writer (b. 1890)
• March 17 – Austen Chamberlain, English statesman, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1863)
• March 20 – Harry Vardon, English golf professional (b. 1870)
• March 22 – Alfred Dyke Acland, British military officer (b. 1858)
• March 29 – Karol Szymanowski, Polish composer (b. 1882)
• April 19 – William Martin Conway, British art critic and mountaineer (b. 1856)
• April 21 – Saima Harmaja, Finnish poet (b. 1913)
• April 25 – Michał Drzymała, Polish rebel (b. 1857)
• April 27 – Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist writer and politician (b. 1891)
• May 4 – Noel Rosa, Brazilian songwriter (b. 1910)
• May 17 – Guilląme Sebastian Furrét, Portuguese dramatist and social agitator (b. 1863)
• May 23 – John D. Rockefeller, American industrialist and philanthropist (b. 1839)
• May 28 – Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist (b. 1870)
• June 7 – Jean Harlow, American film actress (b. 1911)
• June 10 – Robert Laird Borden, eighth Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1854)
• June 19 – J. M. Barrie, Scottish novelist and dramatist (b. 1860)

July – December

• July 9 – Oliver Law, American labor organizer and Army officer (killed in battle) (b. 1899)
• July 11 – George Gershwin, American composer (b. 1898)
• July 20 – Guglielmo Marconi, Italian-born inventor (b. 1874)
• July 21 – Louis Vierne, French composer (b. 1870)
• August 11 – Edith Wharton, American writer (b. 1862)
• September 2 – Pierre de Coubertin, French founder of the modern Olympic Games (b. 1863)
• September 26 – Bessie Smith, African-American singer (b. 1894)
• September 29 – Ray Ewry, American athlete (b. 1873)
• October 16 – Jean de Brunhoff, French writer (b. 1899)
• October 19 – Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, New Zealand physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (b. 1871)
• October 26 – Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, Polish general (b. 1867)
• November 6 – Johnston Forbes-Robertson, British stage actor (b. 1853)
• November 9 – Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1866)
• November 17 – Jack Worrall, Australian cricketer and coach (b. 1860)
• November 23 – Jagdish Chandra Bose, Indian physicist (b. 1858)
• November 23 – George Albert Boulenger, Belgian naturalist (b. 1858)
• December 9 – Gustaf Dalén, Swedish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1869)
• December 20 – Erich Ludendorff, German general (b. 1865)
• December 21 – Frank B. Kellogg, United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1856)
• December 25 – Newton D. Baker, United States Secretary of War (b. 1871)
• December 28 – Maurice Ravel, French composer (Bolero) (b. 1875)

Nobel prizes

• Physics – Clinton Joseph Davisson, George Paget Thomson
• Chemistry – Walter Haworth, Paul Karrer
• Physiology or Medicine – Albert von Szent-Györgyi Nagyrapolt
• Literature – Roger Martin du Gard
• Peace – Robert Cecil

Ship events

• List of ship launches in 1937
• List of ship commissionings in 1937

Other events

• In 1937 the HC Ambrì-Piotta was founded

• The Vibora Luviminda trades union's sugar plantation strike on Maui island, Hawaii

See also

• 20th century

Notes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: 1937

External links

• The 1930s Timeline: 1937 — from American Studies Programs at The University of Virginia

Table of contents

Contents 1 Events of 1937 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 – June 3.2 July – December 4 Nobel prizes 5 Ship events 6 Other events 7 See also 8 Notes 9 External links 10 Table of contents

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)