1935: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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A plebiscite conducted by the League of Nations January 13 shows that voters in the Saar Basin prefer reunion with the German Reich 9 to 1 over union with France or continuation of rule by the League, which has administered the region since 1919. The League returns the Saar to Germany March 1.
Adolf Hitler denounces Versailles Treaty clauses providing for German disarmament, Germany reestablishes military service in violation of the treaty, Hitler creates the Lüftwaffe to give Germany a military air capability (Reich minister for air forces is Reichstag president [and Gestapo founder] Hermann Goering), but Berlin signs an agreement with London June 18 promising not to expand the German Navy to a size larger than 35 percent of the Royal Navy.
U.S. Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long advises President Roosevelt in February to equip "your diplomatic and consular officers in Europe with gas masks . . . I am satisfied [Mussolini] is looking forward to the certainty of war and is preparing" (see 1933). Long describes Italy's Fascist regime a few months later as "deliberate, determined, obdurate, ruthless, and vicious."
The U.S. Army Air Corps has its beginnings in the General Headquarters Air Force established at Langley Field, Va., March 1 under the command of Nashville, Tenn.-born Brig. Gen. Frank Maxwell Andrews, 51. It is the first independent U.S. strategic air force. The B-17 bomber flown in prototype July 28 by Boeing Aircraft is the first four-engine, all-metal, low-wing monoplane; called the "Flying Fortress" by journalists, the 10-seat 299 is more than 79 feet long, has a wing span of nearly 104 feet, is powered by four 1,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines, has a maximum speed of 287 miles per hour at 25,000 feet, can reach a ceiling of 35,600 feet, and has a range of 2,000 miles with a 5,000-pound bomb load.
France's Flandin ministry falls in May following demands that it be given near-dictatorial powers to save the collapsing franc. Pierre Laval, 51, forms a new cabinet. Socialist groups merge November 3 and form a Popular Front with communists and radical socialists to counteract agitation by reactionaries, but the government orders political leagues dissolved December 28 (see 1936).
Former Polish head of state Jozef Pilsudski dies of liver cancer at Warsaw May 12 at age 67.
The Soviet Comintern founded in 1919 responds in June to the growth of fascism abroad. It approves communist participation in "Popular" front governments with other leftists or moderates (see 1943; International Brigades, 1936).
Britain's third Baldwin ministry begins June 7 as Stanley Baldwin, now 67, succeeds Ramsay MacDonald as head of the coalition cabinet. Former field marshal Julian H. G. Byng, Viscount Byng of Vimy, has died at Thorpe Hall, Essex, June 6 at age 72, having served as governor general of Canada from 1921 to 1926 and been appointed governor general of Australia in 1930.
Labour Party founder Arthur Henderson dies at London October 20 at age 72; former Royal Navy admiral John R. Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellico, of 1916 Battle of Jutland fame at Kensington, London, November 20 at age 75.
Czechoslovakia's first president Thomas Masaryk resigns December 14 after 17 years in office. Now 85, he is succeeded by his minister of foreign affairs Eduard Benes, 51 (see 1938).
Italian troops invade Ethiopia October 3 under the command of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, 64. He has opposed the operation but acts on orders from Benito Mussolini, who originally named Gen. Emilio De Bono, now 69, but quickly replaced De Bono as commander in chief with the more skillful Badoglio (see 1934). France has ceded part of French Somaliland to Italy and sold her shares in the Ethiopian Railway, but Mussolini has rejected further concessions offered by France and Britain in mid-August. Congress has adopted a joint resolution August 31 (the First Neutrality Act) empowering the president to declare an embargo on arms shipments to the belligerents and making it clear that U.S. citizens traveling on the ships of belligerents do so at their own risk (see 1936). Badoglio's troops seize the provincial capital Makale November 8, and the League of Nations imposes economic sanctions on Italy November 18. Sir Samuel (John Gurney) Hoare, 55, has been appointed foreign secretary June 7 but is forced to resign December 18 following denunciation of the so-called Hoare-Laval Plan, developed with French foreign minister Pierre Laval, for the partition of Ethiopia (see 1936).
Persia becomes Iran by order of Reza Shah Pahlevi, who has controlled the country since 1925, but the Persian Gulf remains the Persian Gulf.
Siam's consititutional monarch Phra Pokklao (Prajadhipok, or Rama VII) abdicates March 2 after a 10-year reign in which the Siamese have abolished absolute royal power (see 1932). Disgusted by what he sees as the rising power of the nation's military, he moves to England and is succeeded by his 10-year-old nephew, who is at school in Switzerland and will not be able to return home and assume his constitutional duties as Ananda Mahidol (Rama VIII) until 1946 (see 1938).
A Philippines constitution gains approval March 23 from President Roosevelt, who appoints Gen. Douglas MacArthur, now 55, governor of the Philippines (in large part because he fears that MacArthur may be nominated by the Republicans to challenge him in next year's presidential election). Philippines Senate president Manuel (Luis) Quezon (y Molina), 57, pushed for passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act last year and is elected president of the new Commonwealth September 17, he appoints Gen. MacArthur as his special adviser, and he sets about reorganizing the islands' military defenses. He also fights corruption and addresses the problems of dealing with landless peasants in the countryside and developing the large (and largely unsettled) southern island of Mindanao (see 1941).
Parliament passes a new Government of India Act that gives all provinces full representative and elective governments (see 1919; 1932). The product of three Round Table Conferences at London, the measure has been crafted largely by Sir Samuel Hoare, who has been secretary of state for India since 1931; it extends the franchise to 30 million Indians, and although the viceroy and his governors retain veto powers they will not use that option under terms of a "gentlemen's agreement" with top members of the Indian National Congress. The only areas "reserved" to appointed officials are defense, foreign affairs, and revenues (see 1942).
Sen. Huey P. Long (D. La.) begins a filibuster June 12 to block a bill that would give his political opponents at Baton Rouge lucrative New Deal jobs; he reads the Constitution and the plays of Shakespeare, throws in recipes for fried oysters and Roquefort dressing, and continues for 15½ hours. Long announces his candidacy for the presidency in August but is shot to death at Baton Rouge September 8 at age 42 by physician Carl Austin Weiss, who has determined to end the dictatorial ambitions of the Kingfish. Underworld boss Frank Costello has installed slot machines by the hundreds in New Orleans with approval from Long, who dies in the arms of Nazi sympathizer Gerald L. K. Smith.
Canadian voters oust the Conservative government that took power in 1930 and reinstate the Liberal Party leadership of W. L. Mackenzie King in October. Prime Minister Richard B. Bennett had proposed a New Deal-like program in January, but his abandonment of his earlier laissez-faire policies has alienated many members of his own party and failed to arouse much public enthusiasm. King will remain prime minister until he retires in 1948.
Bolivia and Paraguay sign an armistice in their Chaco War June 12 under pressure from the United States and five Latin neighbors (see 1934). Tin-mining mogul Simon I. Patiño officially supplied arms to both sides, but he unofficially provided the Bolivian Army with more than $250 million in aid, including 15 war planes. Although better armed and better trained, the Bolivians have lost 100,000 men, including those who were shot, died of fever or snakebite in the lowland swamps and jungles, deserted, or were wounded or captured. The League of Nations and Pan-American Union were unable to avert hostilities over the disputed Gran Chaco area, even though an antiwar treaty prepared by Argentine foreign minister Carlos Saavedra Lamas, now 56, was signed by 14 Latin American nations, the United States, and Italy between October 1933 and June 1934. Saavedra Lamas has organized a mediation committee with Brazilian, Chilean, Peruvian, Uruguayan, and U.S. representatives to resolve the issues. Returning Bolivian veterans charge traditional politicians and international oil companies with having led them into the war (see 1938).
Venezuela's president Juan Vicente Gómez dies at Maracay December 18 at age 78, ending a 27-year dictatorship that has seen his country become a major oil producer (see energy, 1922). The strongman has used Venezuela's oil wealth to build public works and make his army the best equipped in South America, he has acquired farms, businesses, and entire industries to make himself probably the richest man in South America. He has used agents, spies, and terrorist tactics to keep order, and his death leaves the country without any political leader who has had no ties to the Gómez regime. But Gen. Eleazar Lopez Contreras becomes provisional president and restores order.
Josef Stalin decrees that Soviet children above age 12 are subject to the same punitive laws that apply to adults—8 years in a labor camp for stealing corn or potatoes, for example, or 5 years for stealing cucumbers.
Iran's Reza Shah Pahlevi orders women to discard their veils as he moves to emancipate women despite opposition from Shiite clerics.
Mexican women organized the United Front for the Rights of Woman (Frente Unica Pro Derechos de La Mujer) to campaign for female suffrage (see 1946).
Civil-rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston arrives by train at New York July 11, registers at Harlem's 135th Street YMCA, and reports later in the morning to the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at 69 Fifth Avenue to begin work on overturning the Supreme Court's Plessy decision of 1896 (see 1934). "Education is preparation for the competition of life," he declares; if blacks are to compete successfully there must be equality in educational opportunity, and since the system of "separate but equal" is too costly for most states to maintain there must ultimately be an end to discrimination. He hears from his former student Thurgood Marshall, now 27, of a black Amherst graduate who wants to enter the University of Maryland Law School, petitions a district court to order that the university accept Donald Murray's application, wins approval from the district court, sees the order upheld in the court of appeals in November, but warns that the decision applies only to the state of Maryland (see Gaines, 1936).
The Nuremberg Laws enacted by the Nazi Party Congress meeting at Nuremberg September 15 deprive Jews of German citizenship, forbid intermarriage with Jews, and make intercourse between "Aryans" and Jews punishable by death to prevent "racial pollution." Crude and vicious anti-Semitic invective published since 1923 by Nazi gauleiter Julius Streicher in his paper Der Sturmer has led to passage of the laws. The basic definition of a Jew, published November 14, delineates the categories of mixed offspring, or mischlinge. The first degree includes anyone with two Jewish grandparents, the second degree anyone with one Jewish grandparent (see Torquemada, 1487; concentration camps, 1937).
Social reformer Jane Addams dies at Chicago May 21 at age 74.
Soviet physicist, mathematician, and space-travel pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky dies of cancer at Kaluga September 19 at age 78, having said, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever" (see Dornberger, 1932). Tsiolkovsky has proposed the use of liquid propellants to give rockets maximum speed and energy efficiency and 6 years ago introduced the idea of staged rocket launches, with component propulsion units that burn out and separate from the main rocket at various intervals following lift-off and during orbit.
Arctic explorer Adolphus W. Greely receives the Congressional Medal of Honor and dies at Washington, D.C., October 20 at age 91.
Polar explorers Lincoln Ellsworth and Hubert Wilkins make the first successful flight across the Antarctic continent November 22.
"We must quit this business of relief" and create 3½ million jobs for employables, says President Roosevelt January 7 in an address to a joint session of Congress.
Former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dies at Washington March 6, just 2 days short of his 94th birthday, leaving the bulk of his $260,000-plus estate to the U.S. Government—the largest unrestricted gift ever made to the American people; the money will lay idle for more than 20 years, not even collecting interest.
The Bank of Canada begins operations March 11 to regulate credit and currency for the Ministry of Finance. Founded by the Canadian Parliament at Ottawa last year, it serves as the government's fiscal agent and has sole authority to issue paper money.
An Emergency Relief Appropriation Act passed by Congress April 8 authorizes nearly $5 billion to provide "work relief and to increase employment by providing useful projects."
A Works Progress Administration (WPA) created by executive order May 6 is headed by Harry L. Hopkins. A National Youth Administration (NYA) created June 26 as a division of the WPA is to provide jobs for 4.2 million young people seeking work.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court rules May 27 in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. The "sick chicken" case involves some New York wholesale kosher slaughterhouse operators (called "market men"), who have been found guilty of violating the NIRA's "live poultry code" (promulgated under Section 3 of the NIRA), fined $5,000, and given 3-month jail sentences. The Court concedes that "extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies" but rules unanimously that by setting maximum hours and minimum wages the code violates not only the commerce clause in the Constitution but also the separation of powers clause, since Congress may not delegate legislative power to the president and give him "an unfettered discretion to make whatever laws he thinks may be needed or advisable for the rehabilitation and expansion of trade or industry." The ruling is a setback for organized labor, whose leaders have been pushing for a 30-hour week to ease unemployment, and it infuriates President Roosevelt, who says the high court is composed of "nine old men."
The Railway Pension Act of 1934 is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court rules June 27 in the case of Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railway Co., but Congress passes a Railway Retirement Act to replace the 1934 law. Railroads and their employees are each to contribute 3.5 percent of the first $300 earned each month to build a retirement fund.
The National Labor Relations Act (Wagner-Connery Act) passed by Congress July 5 creates a National Labor Relations Board and reasserts the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. The right was contained in section 7a of the NLRA code of 1933 that the Supreme Court has struck down, but although the new law bars employers from dismissing a worker simply for joining, or wanting to join, a union it will be weakened in years to come by court decisions, administrative rulings, and the growing willingness of employers to be ruthless (see Taft-Hartley Act, 1947).
The Social Security Act signed into law August 14 provides a system of old-age annuities and unemployment insurance benefits (see Canada, 1927). Drafted by Eastman Kodak treasurer Marion B. (Bayard) Folsom, 41, the act provides for state aid to be matched by federal aid of up to $15 per month for needy retirees over age 65, with employers and employees taxed equally to support the program by means of payroll deductions (railroad employees are covered separately under terms of the Railroad Retirement Act). The tax is to begin in 1937 at 1 percent and rise by steps to 3 percent in 1949; qualified employees are to be able to retire at age 65 beginning January 1, 1942, and receive payments of $10 to $15 per month for the rest of their lives. Title IV A of the act provides financial assistance to families with dependent children (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) and will be the law of the land until 1996, despite charges that it creates a permanent "underclass." President Roosevelt appoints former New Hampshire governor John G. (Gilbert) Winant, 47, chairman of the Social Security Board. The Social Security Act provides for a fund to help states pay allowances to workers who have lost their jobs. Beginning with 1936 payrolls, employers are to set aside for this purpose a 1 percent tax in the first year, 2 percent the second, and 3 percent the year after, with employees contributing half the amount set aside (see 1939).
Chicago entrepreneur John D. MacArthur, 38, buys the bankrupt Bankers Life & Casualty Corp. for $2,500.
President Roosevelt reports Internal Revenue Service figures for the year in a monopoly message: one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. corporations own 52 percent of all corporate assets reported and earn 50 percent of all corporate income. Less than 5 percent own 87 percent of all corporate assets, and less than 4 percent earn 87 percent of all net profits reported by all U.S. corporations.
The Banking Act signed into law August 23 reorganizes the Federal Reserve System created in 1913 and increases its authority. The new law establishes an open market committee to buy and sell government securities held by the Federal Reserve Banks and thus control the nation's money supply; it also regulates checking accounts and requires that banks contribute to the support of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that protects depositors from default or theft.
Fort Knox is established in Kentucky to serve as a repository for U.S. gold bullion. The army guards the gold and the government assures foreign bankers that they can redeem every $35 in U.S. paper currency for an ounce of gold from Treasury Department stores at Fort Knox (which do not approach those held for the accounts of various nations in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank at New York).
A Revenue Act passed by Congress August 30 seeks to achieve some diffusion of wealth. The law provides for inheritance and gift taxes; critics protest that the law means double taxation for recipients of stock dividends and clippers of bond coupons.
The United Automobile Workers (UAW) founded at Detroit August 26 finds a warm reception from employees who have had no job security, no grievance procedures, no protective equipment, no work standards, no overtime pay after 8 hours, no shift preferences, no paid holidays, and no real union representation (see 1932). Wheeling W. Va.-born organizer Walter P. (Philip) Reuther, 27, has been a Ford Motor Company foreman and has brought together several small locals; he forms Local 174 and makes himself president. The union receives a charter from the AFL and by next year will have 27,058 members (see 1936).
The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) is founded November 9 by dissidents within the American Federation of Labor who advocate industrial unionism but have been outvoted by craft union advocates at the AFL's November convention at Washington, D.C. The dissidents elect United Mine Workers (UMW) president John L. Lewis chairman and Scottish-born UMW vice president Philip Murray, 39, chairman of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (see 1936).
Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, 32, co-authors a plan for coping with Europe's high rate of unemployment.
Britain and Ireland conclude a cattle and coal agreement that enables the Irish to ship some of their meat surplus, but the disastrous Anglo-Irish tariff war will not end until February of next year when Dublin agrees to pay land annuities (see 1932; 1938).
Josef Stalin urges productivity increases in November and encourages individual initiative with extra pay for notable efficiency, giving official recognition to the Stakhanovite movement based on the achievement of coal miner Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov, 29. Working at a coal face in the Donets Basin the night of August 30, Stakhanov and his crew reportedly mined 102 tons of coal in a single shift of 5 hours 45 minutes—14 times the normal rate. Virtually illiterate, the stocky miner has used other members of the crew to shore up the shaft with timbers while he hewed the coal, departing from the previous time-consuming process of alternating between cutting coal and erecting timbers. But most workers live by the motto, "As long as the bosses pretend they are paying us a decent wage we will pretend that we are working"; productivity will remain low.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 144.13, up from 104.04 at the end of 1934.
The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) established by President Roosevelt's executive order May 11 will underwrite rural electric cooperatives and provide loans for transmission lines. Only 10 percent of 30 million U.S. rural residents have electrical service, but with help from the REA, 90 percent of U.S. farms will have electricity by 1950.
Title I of the Public Utility Act signed into law by President Roosevelt August 26 is the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which forces the breakup of the giant, unregulated monopolies that have controlled prices and territories (see 1932). Roosevelt has called the holding companies "evil" in his State-of-the-Union address, they have fought against regulation, but the Supreme Court will uphold the PUHCA in 1946 after continued opposition from the holding companies, whose numbers will drop from 216 in 1938 to just 18 by 1958, and the PUHCA will remain the overriding regulatory law until 1992.
The Federal Power Act signed into law by President Roosevelt gives the 15-year-old Federal Power Commission (FPC) authority to regulate interstate and wholesale transactions and transmission of electric power.
An estimated 6.5 million windmills have been produced in the United States in the past half century. Most are used to pump water or run sawmills, but some "wind generators" have produced small amounts of electricity.
President Roosevelt dedicates Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam) on the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border September 10 (see 1933). Completed 2 years ahead of schedule after 4 years of construction (engineer Frank Crowe receives a $350,000 bonus for pulling it off), the $175 million project contains 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete that has been set with cooling tubes to hasten a process that would otherwise have taken 125 years (concrete generates heat as it sets and then contracts). Some 5,000 workers have been employed in building the dam, which is 70 stories (726 feet) high, 1,244 feet long, 660 feet wide at its base, 45 feet thick at its crest; architect Gordon Kaufman has given it a modernistic art deco design, the monolithic structure will be renamed in 1947 to honor the president who authorized its construction, and although 145 men (96 by some accounts) have died from heat exhaustion and other causes while working on the project, no one has been buried in the concrete (see 1936).
The Connally Hot Oil Act approved by Congress February 16 regulates production of crude oil, penalizing excess production.
Texas drillers strike oil in the state's Permian Basin. Banker-rancher Clarence Scharbauer's family moved from New York to Midland in 1889. He has bought the Goldsmith Field to feed cattle, and by the end of the century it will have produced more than 900 million barrels of crude petroleum.
Britain's Anglo-Persian Co. of 1914 becomes the Anglo-Iranian Co. as Persia becomes Iran (see British Petroleum, 1954).
Oil magnate Edward L. Doheny dies at Los Angeles September 8 at age 79.
The French Line passenger ship S.S. Normandie arrives at New York June 3 after crossing from Southampton in a record 4 days, 11 hours, 42 minutes, averaging 29.6 knots per hour, beating the record set last year by the Rex, and winning the Hales Trophy. Built at a cost of $60 million, the sleek 79,280-ton luxury liner is 1,029 feet in length overall and 119 feet in width. The turboelectric engines driving her four propellers can move her at a speed of 32.1 knots, and she has an 80-foot swimming pool, 23 elevators, a 380-seat movie theater, and a dining room modeled after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The Normandie has seven classes of accommodations, berths for 1,975 passengers and 1,345 crew members; she is the first large ship to have been built according to the 1929 Convention for Safety at Life at Sea, with the forward end of her promenade deck designed to serve as a breakwater and permit her to maintain a high speed even in rough weather, but she will never turn a profit. After being viewed by 9,200 visitors, she leaves on her return voyage June 7, sets a new eastbound speed record June 10 by sailing 711 miles in 24 hours, averages 30.31 knots per hour, and reaches port in 4 days, 3 hours, 28 seconds (see 1937). R.M.S. Mauretania has become too costly to operate and goes to the scrap heap in July after 27 years on the transatlantic run, having made 269 round-trip crossings exclusive of her service as a troop transport and hospital ship during the Great War.
Greek entrepreneur Stavros S. Niarchos, 26, begins a shipping fleet that will rival the maritime empire of Aristotle Onassis (see 1930).
Former shipmaster John C. B. Jarvis of 1891 Jarvis winch fame dies at Bay Shore, N.Y., September 10 at age 78, having seen windjammers eclipsed by steamships; steam-turbine engineer Herbert T. Herr dies at Philadelphia December 19 at age 57.
The Lower Zambezi railroad bridge opens January 14 in Africa and will be the world's longest railroad bridge until December.
Newark's Pennsylvania Station opens March 23. Lawrence Grant White of McKim, Mead and White has designed it.
A railroad bridge designed by McKim, Mead and White opens to span the Cape Cod Canal of 1914 at Buzzards Bay, Mass.
Bridge engineer Gustav Lindenthal dies at Metuchen, N.Y., July 31 at age 85.
A hurricane strikes the Florida Keys September 2, derailing a train that has been sent to pick up more than 400 war-veteran rail workers and vacationers; a surge of water that rises 20 feet above the tracks crushes them all to death and completely wipes out the Florida East Coast Railroad line between Florida City and Key West that was repaired after the hurricane of 1926 (see overseas highway, 1938).
The Huey P. Long Bridge opens to traffic December 10 at Metairie, La. Designed by Ralph Modjeski, it is 4.35 miles in length, making it the world's longest railroad bridge.
General Motors begins a program of dieselizing U.S. railroad locomotives (see 1930; 1941).
Twin new stainless steel Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Zephyrs go into service on the Burlington Route (see 1934). The trains have a cruising speed of 90 miles per hour and cut 3½ hours off the 882-mile round trip between Chicago and the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Moscow's Metropol subway opens in May with 5½ miles of track that will grow to become a 105-mile system with more than 90 stations. The new Moskovskiy Metropoliten has stations modeled after the great U.S. railroad terminals with escalators, magnificent murals, and chandeliers.
Bell Aircraft Corp. is founded at Buffalo, N.Y., by Indiana-born aircraft designer Lawrence D. (Dale) Bell, 41, who went to work in 1912 as a mechanic for his brother Grover, quit a year later when Grover was killed in an airplane crash, but found aviation irresistible and went to work for Glenn L. Martin. He left Martin in 1928 to join Consolidated Aircraft, which has moved from Buffalo to California (see politics [Bell X-1A], 1947).
Aircraft designer Hugo Junkers dies at Gauting, near Munich, February 3 (his 76th birthday), having pioneered the monoplane and all-metal aircraft construction; pilot Wiley Post sets out on a pleasure trip to the Orient with his humorist friend Will Rogers, now 55. Their monoplane crashes near Point Barrow, Alaska, August 15, killing both men (see 1931); pilot Sir Charles Kingsford Smith passes over Calcutta November 8 with his navigator Thomas Pethyridge on a flight from London to Australia but disappears near Aye Island off Burma and is presumed lost.
The first official trans-Pacific airmail flight leaves San Francisco November 22; the China Clipper flying boat of Juan Trippe's Pan American Airways arrives November 29 at Manila after flying 8,210 miles with stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake, and Guam (see 1930). The new San Francisco-Manila route gives Pan Am a total of 40,000 miles versus 24,000 for Air France, 23,600 for Lufthansa, 21,000 for British Imperial, 11,700 for KLM, 10,500 for Soviet Russia's Aeroflot.
A 37-kilometer (14-mile) expressway opens between Frankfurt and Darmstadt May 19 in the first section of the limited-access Autobahn to be completed under the aegis of Germany's new Nazi regime (see 1933). By the time construction halts in December 1941 the Autobahn will extend for 3,860 kilometers (2,400 miles), with another 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) under construction, and although the road will have no speed limits in this century, its safety record will be excellent.
The world's first parking meter wins approval from Oklahoma City officials in May and is installed on the corner of First and Robinson streets (see 1932). The city installs 174 Dual Park-O-Meters in July, and it orders 300 more when their success is demonstrated (police officers have to explain that no jackpots can be expected by those who deposit coins). When somebody files suit with the claim that it is unlawful for the city to charge rent for parking space, the city counters that it is not renting space but merely collecting a fee to offset the cost of policing the streets. Meters of improved design will appear in streets of major world cities in the next few decades.
". . . And Sudden Death" by Indianapolis-born writer J. C. (Joseph Chamberlain) Furnas, 29, appears in the August issue of The Reader's Digest with alarming figures on automobile fatalities and the need for safer driving. The Digest sends proofs to 5,000 other publications and will ultimately issue 8 million reprints, making it perhaps the most widely circulated article ever written.
English racing driver Sir Malcolm Campbell, 50, drives his Bluebird at 276 miles per hour over sand at Daytona Beach, Fla.
The Motor Carrier Act passed by Congress August 9 places U.S. interstate bus and truck lines under control of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Automaker André Citroën dies at his native Paris July 3 at age 56, having introduced mass production into the European industry and contributed the funds that permitted Paris to light up the Arc de Triomphe and Place de la Concorde; automaker John North Willys dies at Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y., August 26 at age 61.
Polyethylene is developed by Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries, whose Alkali Division chemists 2 years ago found small specks of a white solid material when they opened their retort after an attempt to force a copolymerization between liquid ethylene and an aldehyde, using extremely high temperatures to link small molecules into long chains; the first true "plastic" ever made from the polymerization of ethylene, polyethylene will find wide use in packaging (see 1953; polyurethane, 1936).
Nylon is developed by E. I. du Pont chemist Wallace H. Carothers, now 39, whose synthetic polymide will replace silk, rayon, and jute in many applications (see Neoprene, 1931). Japan has been America's chief source of silk, U.S.-Japanese trade relations have deteriorated, and DuPont researchers have focused their efforts on finding a polymer that would replace the natural product. Carothers has combined adipic acid and hexa-methylenediamine to form long filaments of what he calls "polymer 66." Drawing the filaments out to a certain length aligns the polymer chains and pulls them to their full extent, making the filaments strong and durable while giving them many of the same characteristics found in silk and wool (see 1937).
Plexiglas is introduced under that brand name by the 26-year-old Philadelphia-based Rohm & Haas Co., whose clear, hard methyl methacrylic thermoplastic will be widely used in aircraft and other products. The company has expanded its product line from tanning chemicals to insecticides.
The Phillips head screw advertised for the first time in the November 7 issue of the trade magazine Iron Age by the American Screw Co. has been patented by Portland, Oregon, tool salesman Henry F. Phillips; it has a cross cut into its head. Phillips Screw Co. will trademark the name Phillips Screw in 1938 and license companies to manufacture screws and screwdrivers under that name. General Motors will use the screw in its Cadillac motorcars, and by 1945 the Phillips screw will be in almost universal use in America.
University of Chicago physicist Arthur Dempster discovers uranium 235 isotope, a fissile version of the atom (see 1940; Urey, 1931). Now 49, Dempster will work on developing a military use for the material (see mass spectrometer, 1918; Dunning, 1939).
Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, 28, at Osaka Imperial University proposes a new theory of nuclear forces and predicts the existence of mesons—particles with masses between those of the electron and proton. U.S. physicists will discover one type of meson among cosmic rays in 1937, confirming Yukawa's theory.
Mathematician Emmy Noether dies at Bryn Mawr, Pa., April 14 at age 53 following surgery for a uterine tumor; archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dies at Plainfield, N.J., May 11 at age 78; botanist-geneticist Hugo de Vries outside Amsterdam May 21 at age 87; paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn at Garrison, N.Y., November 6 at age 78; Nobel chemist Victor Grignard at Lyons December 13 at age 64.
Sulfa drug chemotherapy begins a new era in medicine that will revolutionize treatment of infectious diseases and reduce the hazards of peritonitis in abdominal surgery. German biochemist Gerhard (Johannes Paul) Domagk, 40, and his colleagues at I. G. Farbenindustrie at Elberfeld have injected 1,000 white mice with fatal doses of streptococci and then treated them with Prontosil, an azo dye that has turned out to have antibacterial properties (all the white mice recovered, and the same results have been obtained with rabbits). Patented in 1931 by Farbenfabriken Bayer, Prontosil will be developed into sulfanilamide (see 1936), which will be followed by other sulfonamides (see Ehrlich, 1909). In addition to treating certain forms of pneumonia, sulfa drugs will make gonorrhea much easier to treat: physicians have relied on prophylaxis, mercurial ointments, and antiseptics to combat the disease, whose symptoms often go undetected in women; the disease is therefore not treated before it has spread throughout the reproductive tract. Even with sulfa drugs, gonorrhea continues to account for much of the high rate of pelvic operations.
English medical researcher Leonard Colebrook, 52, uses the newly-discovered antibacterial drug Prontosil to treat a woman who is dying of puerperal fever; she recovers, and within the next 10 years puerperal fever will cease to be a serious problem. The sulfonamide drug is then used successfully to treat a woman who is dying of septicemia (blood poisoning) (see Dubos, 1939; penicillin, 1928; 1940; streptomycin, 1943).
Title 6 of the Social Security Act signed into law August 14 authorizes Congress to appropriate millions of dollars for public health departments and biomedical research. President Roosevelt appointed Maryland-born rural health administrator Thomas Parran Jr., now 42, to the committee that drafted the legislation. Parran has worked to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Columbia Broadcasting System executives censored the phrase syphilis control from a talk he gave on radio, but newspapers across the country made him a celebrity by reprinting his censored speech. FDR will appoint Parran surgeon general next year.
The alkaloid ergonovine proves an effective tool in obstetrics (see ergotamine, 1918). It is extracted from the ergot fungus Claviceps purpurea, and selective breeding will raise the alkaloid content of the fungus from 0.02 percent to 0.5 percent; the product will be marketed under the name Ergothetrine in Britain.
Indiana-born Rockefeller Institute biochemist Wendell M. (Meredith) Stanley, 31, demonstrates the proteinaceous nature of viruses, showing that they are not submicroscopic organisms as has been commonly believed.
Alcoholics Anonymous has its beginnings June 10 at New York, where Vermont-born recovering alcoholic William Griffith "Bill" Wilson, 39, watches his surgeon friend Robert H. "Bob" Smith take his last drink and works with Smith to share with other alcoholics the experience of shaking the disease. A onetime Wall Street stockbroker, Wilson and his wife, Lois (née Burnham), have been living with her family in their Clinton Street, Brooklyn, house since he became unemployable because of his drinking. He underwent the standard barbiturate-and-beladonna purge to cure him of his habit 6 months ago; met Smith in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel at Akron, Ohio, in early May; and has helped Smith overcome his addiction. Akron housewife Henrietta Buckler, 47, opens her home to two alcoholics, and Wilson invites alcoholics to the Burnham house in Clinton Street; he begins meetings with the statement, "My name is Bill W., and I'm an alcoholic" ("Bill W." will retain his anonymity until his death in 1971) (see 1941).
The first operation for a mental disorder raises hopes that surgery can cure such disorders. Attending the International Neurological Congress at London, Portuguese surgeon Antonio Egas Moniz, now 61, employs a technique he calls "prefrontal leucotomy" (lobotomy) to bore through the skull of a patient and cut connections between the prefrontal lobe and the thalamus, seat of human emotions (see cerebral angiography, 1927). Others will follow Egas Moniz's procedure, suicidal patients will take a new interest in life, hypochondriacs will stop worrying about themselves, and persecution-complex victims will forget the supposed machinations of imaginary conspirators, but the procedure is not without risks and unwanted side effects.
Hungarian psychiatrist Ladislaus Joseph von Meduna at Budapest treats schizophrenia by injecting camphor to induce convulsions (see Sakel, 1933; electroconvulsive therapy, 1938).
British inventor A. Edwin Stevens produces the first wearable electronic hearing aid and founds a company that he calls Amplivox to produce the 2½-pound device (see Zenith, 1943).
The International Radio Medical Center is founded at Rome by Sicilian surgeon Guido Guida, 37. It provides free medical advice to ships and isolated Mediterranean islands; beginning in 1952 it will provide such advice to aircraft crews as well.
Diabetes insulin therapy pioneer John J. R. Macleod dies at Aberdeen, Scotland, March 16 at age 58; Nobel physiologist Charles Richet at his native Paris December 4 at age 85.
Belfast has anti-Catholic riots in July. Northern Ireland expels Catholic families; Catholics in the Irish Free State retaliate.
Evangelist Billy Sunday dies at Chicago November 6 at age 72.
Scottish physicist Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, 43, of Britain's Government Radio Research Station begins setting up radar (radio detection and ranging) warning systems on the British Coast (see Kuhnold, 1934). Asked by the Air Ministry to assess the feasibility of a "death ray" that might be used to wipe out enemy pilots in their cockpits, Watson-Watt drafted a memo February 12 entitled "Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Methods." He has adapted experimental direction-finding techniques used to detect thunderstorms and devised a detection device which sends out a radio-pulse that is interrupted if it encounters a ship, plane, or other object; a portion of the energy is reflected back to the transmitting station, and since radio signals travel at the speed of light the distance of the object can be calculated by timing the journey, and its location can be pinpointed by measuring the angle and direction of incoming echoes. An experiment conducted February 26 has shown that aircraft on a pre-arranged course can be detected eight miles away, demonstrating the viability of Watson-Watt's idea, but although the British Chain Home installations can spot aircraft as far as 70 miles away they require antenna towers up to 300 feet tall (the longer the wavelength transmitted, the larger the antenna needed), and Watson-Watt uses wavelengths of roughly 50 centimeters that work best in daylight (see 1940).
France's Postes Télégraphs et Téléphones starts experimental television broadcasting April 26, using the apparatus invented by René Barthélemy of the Compagnie pour le Fabrication des Compteurs et Matérials d'Usines à Gaz. It employs a 60-line system with 25 frames per second to transmit pictures of the Exposition Universelle et Internationale at Brussels.
BBC stops using John L. Baird's 30-line television transmission system September 11 and switches to a fully electronic system (see 1932; 1936).
The Magnetophon produced by German General Electric Co. (AEG) at Berlin is the first tape recorder to use plastic tape (see Begun, 1934). Its tape speed is 30 inches per second, and although its performance is inferior to that of the 1929 Blattnerphone its operating cost is lower. AEG engineers will show their colleagues at Schenectady an improved dc-bias Magnetophon K2 model in 1937, but they will not be impressed (see 1940).
German inventor Willy Müller devises the world's first automatic telephone answering machine. His three-foot-tall instrument finds a market among Orthodox Jews whose strict observance prevents them from picking up a phone on the Sabbath (see Ansaphone, 1960).
Nobel physicist (and long-distance telephone pioneer) Michael I. Pupin dies at New York March 12 at age 76.
Iowa statistician George H. Gallup, 34, founds the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll) to gauge reader reaction to newspaper features. Des Moines Register and Tribune publisher Gardner "Mike" Cowles Jr., 32, has hired Gallup and launches him on his career as pollster (see 1936; Look, 1937).
Crowell-Collier launches This Week, a Sunday newspaper supplement that will be carried by scores of metropolitan papers (seeCollier's, 1919).
New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs dies at Chattanooga, Tenn., April 8 at age 77; Milwaukee Journal founder and editor Lucius W. Nieman suffers a stroke and dies at his hotel apartment October 1 at age 77, leaving an estate of $8 million (see Nieman Foundation, 1938). "You've got to have good editorial matter for a paper to get circulation," he has said, "and you've got to have good circulation to get advertising. Editorial matter is the heart of it all"; public relations pioneer Ivy Lee dies of a brain tumor at New York November 9 at age 57.
The French government sponsors publication of an Encyclopédie française to rival government-sponsored German, Italian, and Soviet encyclopedias. Historian Lucien Febvre has initiated the project; it will produce 21 volumes in the next 31 years.
Nonfiction: My Country and My People by Chinese scholar Lin Yutang, 40; North to the Orient by writer Ann Morrow Lindbergh, now 29, who married pilot Charles A. Lindbergh in 1929 and has joined him on many flights; The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry by Pasadena, Calif.-born Harvard English professor F. O. (Francis Otto) Matthiessen, 33; Strafford, 1593-1641 by English historian C. V. (Cicely Veronica) Wedgwood, 25; An Almanac for Moderns by Chicago-born naturalist-author Donald Culross Peattie, 37, who has combined scientific fact and poetic language in 365 brief essays; Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies by Margaret Mead is about three New Guinea tribes. Critics will later question Mead's good fortune in finding three tribes that illustrated the points she wanted to make about the cultural determination of sex roles.
Wade-Giles Chinese romanization pioneer H. A. Giles dies at Cambridge February 13 at age 89; Charlotte Perkins Gilman by her own hand at Pasadena, Calif., August 17 at age 75 (she had terminal cancer); the late Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche dies at Weimar November 8 at age 89, having secured all rights to his manuscripts after his death in 1900, edited them without understanding, forged letters, rewritten passages, and distorted her brother's views to fit her own anti-Semitic views; historian James H. Breasted dies at New York December 2 at age 70.
Fiction: Auto-da-fe (Die Blendung, or The Deception) by Bulgarian-born Swiss novelist-playwright Elias Canetti, 30, who will move to England in 1939 to escape anti-Semitism in Europe; It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis projects a fascist takeover of America, warning against complacency about the totalitarian governments that are tightening their grip on Japan and much of Europe; Wheel of Fortune (Le ambizoni sbagliate) by Alberto Moravia, whose second novel is ignored by reviewers under pressure from Fascist authorities; The Secret of the Old Wood (Il segreto del boco vecchio) by Dino Buzzati; Independent People (Sjálfstoett Fólk) by Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness (Halldór Guojónsson), 33; Historia universal de la infamia by Argentine writer-poet-critic Jorge Luis Borges, 36; Gyakko (Dokenohana) by Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai (Shoji Tsushima), 26; Before the Dawn (Yoake mae) by Shimasaki Toson is about the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s as reflected in a rural community; Confessions of Love (Ai No Kokuhaku) by Japanese novelist Chiyo Uno, 37, who defied tradition by refusing an arranged marriage (and subjection to a domineering mother-in-law), married a cousin at age 19, deserted him 5 years later, sold stories to magazines, married a writer, split with him in 1929, married a well-known Cubist painter, and is notorious for her Westernized profligacy; The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen; Holy Ireland by Norah Hoult; A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell; Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood; The Stars Look Down by A. J. Cronin; The Poacher by English novelist-short story writer H. E. (Herbert Ernest) Bates, 30; The African Queen by C. S. Forester; The Last Puritan by philosopher George Santayana; Tortilla Flat by California novelist John (Ernst) Steinbeck, 33, is about the Spanish-speaking "paisanos" of Monterey; Of Time and the River and From Death to Morning (stories) by Thomas Wolfe; Flowering Judas and Other Stories by Indian Creek, Texas-born writer Katherine Ann Porter, 45; Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather; The Asiatics by Wisconsin-born novelist Frederic Prokosch, 27, whose critically-acclaimed work will be translated into 17 languages; I Met a Gypsy and White Hell of Pity by Irish novelist Norah Lofts (née Robinson), 31; This Bed Thy Centre by English novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, 23; Regency Buck and Death in the Stocks by English novelist Georgette Heyer, 34; A Vein of Iron by Ellen Glasgow; The Scandal of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton; Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.
Novelist Henri Barbusse dies at Moscow August 30 at age 62.
Poetry: Monologue (Alleenspraak) by Afrikaans poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, 29; Poems by English poet William Empson, 29; Theory of Flight by New York poet Muriel Rukeyser, 21, includes her poem "The Trial," based on her reporting of the 1931 Scottsboro trial in Alabama for the Vassar Student Review; The Golden Chalice by Canadian poet Ralph B. (Barker) Gustafson, 24.
Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson dies at New York April 6 at age 65; poet-editor-painter A. E. (George William Russell) at Bournemouth, England, July 17 at age 68; Sir William Watson at Ditchling, Sussex, August 11 at age 77.
Juvenile: National Velvet by Enid Bagnold, whose book is illustrated by her daughter Laurian, 13; Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Painting: Minotauromachy by Pablo Picasso; Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden by Pierre Bonnard; The Dream (La Rève) by Henri Matisse; Portrait by René Magritte; Chorus Captain by Walt Kuhn; Rumble Seat by Norman Rockwell (cover for Saturday Evening Post, July 13). Max Liebermann dies at Berlin February 8 at age 87; Kazimir Malevich at Leningrad May 15 at age 57; Paul Signac of kidney disease at his native Paris August 15 at age 71; Childe Hassam at East Hampton, N.Y., August 27 at age 75; Charles Demuth of diabetes at his native Lancaster, Pa., October 23 at age 51.
The Frick Collection opens to the public at 1 East 71st Street in the 21-year-old Fifth Avenue mansion of the late steel magnate Henry Clay Frick following the death of his widow, Adelaide. Architect John Russell Pope has remodeled the house, which attracts 5,000 people in its first week to view its collections of bronzes, Chinese and French porcelains, Limoges enamels, and Renaissance and 18th-century French furniture, but more to see important paintings by such masters as Giovanni Bellini, Constable, Fragonard, Gainsborough, El Greco, Hals, Hogarth, the younger Holbein, Ingres, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Jan van Eyck, Vermeer, and Whistler (see 1977).
The WPA makes jobs for artists in a program to decorate post offices and other federal buildings.
Brooklyn-born graphic designer Paul Rand (originally Peretz Rosenbaum), 20, opens a tiny design study in East 38th Street, Manhattan. The son of an Orthodox Jewish grocer in East New York, Rand persuaded his father to put up a $25 entrance fee for night-school classes at Pratt Institute while he attended Harren High School in Manhattan, he has worked for an advertising agency designing packages and lettering for Squibb and other clients, and beginning next year will design pages for Apparel Arts magazine before being hired by its parent company Esquire-Coronet, where he will develop his own vision and graphic style.
Photograph: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange appears in the San Francisco News March 10, showing a gaunt woman from Oklahoma with her seven starving children (see 1931). Lange has stopped off at a migrant-labor camp, taken just six pictures, and failed to get the name of the woman (she will turn out to be Florence Thompson, 32), but the portrait is so moving that 25,000 pounds of food pour into the paper's offices to help relieve hunger among migrant workers.
The Associated Press (AP) begins sending news photographs over wires, using an analog process that converts different shades of black and grey into electronic signals that can be reconverted at the receiving end. Publisher Roy Howard has persuaded other publishers to join him in financing the new service, and the first AP wirephoto goes out to newspapers April 1.
The Bettmann Archive opens at New York with pictures by Leipzig-born refugee Otto L. (Ludwig) Bettmann, 32, who will fill up two basement rooms at 215 East 57th Street before moving in 1961 to 215 East 57th. Formerly curator of rare books in the Prussian State Art Library at Berlin, Bettmann received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Leipzig in 1927 but has fled Nazi persecution with little except two steamer trunks containing some 25,000 images, many on film negatives. He catalogues his collection, cross-indexing it for easy retrieval, and begins to expand it, obtaining many of his images for less than $1 each from the Library of Congress and receiving rental fees—initially $25 but later much more—for allowing publications, book publishers, and advertisers to use them. The archive will grow to have more than 5 million images, making it the world's largest collection of historical photographs and other illustrations (see 1981).
Eastman Kodak introduces Kodachrome for 16-millimeter movie cameras. Eastman has acquired production rights from New York concert violinist Leopold Godowsky Jr., 35, and his pianist co-inventor Leopold Damrosch Mannes, 35, who have devised a three-color dye-coupling process with help from a team of Eastman scientists. Godowsky and Mannes met as students in 1916 and have studied physics and chemistry at university while continuing their music careers; Godovsky married George Gershwin's sister Frances in 1931 and has been working with Mannes at Rochester since July 1931 (see 1936).
Theater: Waiting for Lefty by actor-playwright Clifford Odets, now 28, 1/5 at New York's Civic Repertory Theater on 14th Street, with Luther Adler, Sanford Meisner, 168 perfs.; The Old Maid by Zöe Akins (who has adapted the Edith Wharton novel) 1/7 at New York's Empire Theater, with Australian-born actress Judith (originally Frances Margaret) Anderson, 36, Helen Menken, 305 perfs.; The Petrified Forest by Robert Sherwood 1/7 at New York's Broadhurst Theater, with Humphrey Bogart, Leslie Howard, Peggy Conklin, 197 perfs.; Point Valaine by Noël Coward 1/16 at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater, with Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Broderick Crawford, 55 perfs.; Three Men on a Horse by George Abbott and John Cecil Holm 1/30 at New York's Playhouse Theater (to Fulton Theater 11/36), with Garson Kanin, Millard Mitchell, Sam Levene, Shirley Booth, 835 perfs.; Adrienne Ambrossat by Georg Kaiser 2/5 at Vienna's Theater in der Josefstadt; Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets 2/19 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Roman Bohnen, New York-born actor John Garfield (originally Jules Garfinkle), 21, directed by Harold Clurman, 209 perfs.; Till the Day I Die and Waiting for Lefty by Odets 3/26 at New York's Longacre Theater with a top price of $1.50 per seat in a production by the Group Theater founded 4 years ago, 136 perfs.; There Was a Prisoner (Y avait un presonnier) by Jean Anouilh 3/21 at the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris; Our Power and Our Glory (Var aere og var makt) by Nordahl Grieg 5/4 at Bergen's Den National Scene denounces the owners of Norway's merchant fleet who profited from the Great War; Night Must Fall by Welsh-born English playwright (George) Emlyn Williams, 29, 5/31 at London's Duchess Theatre, with Williams as Dan, May Whitty, Matthew Boulton, Angela Baddeley, 436 perfs.; Winterset by Maxwell Anderson 9/25 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Burgess Meredith, 26, Richard Bennett, Margo (Mexican-born actress Maria Marguerita Guadelupe Boldao y Castilla, 17) is based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, 195 perfs.; Dead End by Sidney Kingsley 10/28 at New York's Belasco Theater, with New York-born actor Joseph Downing, 32, Sheila Trent, 268 perfs.; Call It a Day by C. L. Anthony (Dodie Smith) 10/30 at London's Globe Theatre, with Fay Compton, 509 perfs.; Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot 11/1 at London's Duchess Theatre (it was performed in June of last year at Canterbury), with Robert Speaight in a play based on the death of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, at the hands of Henry II's knights in 1170, 113 perfs. (Eliot has seen a premier of his Sweeney Agonistes at Vassar and promised Hallie Flanagan a play about Becket); Tiger at the Gates (La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu) by Jean Giraudoux 11/21 at the Théâtre de l'Athenée, Paris; Boy Meets Girl by Bucharest-born playwright Bella Spewack (née Cohen) and her Russian-born husband, Samuel, both 36, 11/27 at New York's Cort Theater, with Jerome Cowan, Garson Kanin, Everett Sloane, 669 perfs.; Sweeney Agonistes by T. S. Eliot 12/10 at London's Westminster Theatre, with John Moody, Patrick Ross, Isobel Scaife, 15 perfs.
Former drama teacher-historian George Pierce Baker dies of pneumonia at New York January 6 at age 68; playwright Augustus Thomas of a heart attack at a Nyack, N.Y., golf club August 2 at age 77; Broadway theater tycoon Charles B. Dillingham of arteriosclerosis at New York's Astor Hotel August 30 at age 66; actress-manager Dame Margaret (Madge) Kendal at Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, September 14 at age 86; actor DeWolf Hopper at Kansas City, Mo., September 23 at age 77; playwright Langdon Mitchell at his native Philadelphia October 21 at age 73; actor-director Moffat Johnston at Norwalk, Conn., November 3 at age 49.
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate Joan Littlewood, 21, founds the Theatre Union, an experimental group, at Manchester. Director Littlewood will reorganize the Union in 1945 as the Theatre Workshop and open in 1953 at London's Theatre Royal with a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
Radio: Major Bowes Amateur Hour 3/24 on NBC with onetime U.S. intelligence officer Major Edward Bowes, 60, as emcee in a program that will continue until Bowes's death in June 1946. By mid-1936, he will be auditioning 500 to 700 amateur entertainers per week (out of some 10,000 weekly applicants), many of whom will wind up on New York City's relief rolls; The American Half Hour 4/6 on BBC with Manchester Guardian correspondent Alistair Cooke, 27; Fibber McGee and Molly 4/16 on NBC Blue Network stations with comedians Jim Jordan, 39, and his wife, Marian (née Driscoll) (to 1957); Lights Out 4/17 on NBC Red Network stations is a horror show created by NBC Chicago staff writer Wyllis Cooper, who will leave next year and turn the program over to Arch Oboler, now 36; Pepper Young's Family 6/29 on NBC (daytime) with Curtis Arnall in a soap opera written by New York-born playwright Elaine Carrington (née), 45 (to 1/16/1959); Backstage Wife 8/5 on Mutual Broadcasting stations (daytime) stars Vivian Fridell as Mary Noble in a soap opera (it will move to NBC in March of next year) created by Anne Ashenhurst and her husband, E. Frank Hummert (to 1/2/1959); Gang Busters 7/20 on NBC. Developed by Phillips H. Lord, the show will move to CBS early next year and continue for more than 20 years.
Films: Clarence Brown's Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo, Fredric March; James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein with English character actress Elsa Lanchester (Elizabeth Sullivan), 32, Boris Karloff; George Cukor's David Copperfield with British-born actor Freddie Bartholomew (Frederick Llewellyn), 11, W. C. Fields, Lionel Barrymore; John Ford's The Informer with Victor McLaglen; Henry Hathaway's Lives of a Bengal Lancer with Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone, C. (Charles) Aubrey Smith, 72; Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone; Sam Wood's A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers, Kitty Carlisle; Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap with Charles Laughton, Mary Boland, Charles Ruggles; Jack Conway's A Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allen, Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka; Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps with Robert Donat, 30, Madeleine Carroll (originally Marie Madeleine Bernadette O'Carroll), 29, Godfrey Tearle, 50; Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will extolling last year's Nuremberg rallies. Also: Clarence Brown's Ah, Wilderness with Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Aline MacMahon, Eric Lindon; William Keighley's "G"-Men with James Cagney; William Wyler's The Good Fairy with Margaret Sullavan, Herbert Marshall; Basil Dean's Look Up and Laugh with Gracie Fields; Abel Gance's Lucrèce Borgia with Edwige Feuillière (née Edwige Caroline Cunati), 27, who appears in a brief nude sequence and will go on to have a major career in Paris's legitimate theater; Clyde Bruckman's The Man on the Flying Trapeze with W. C. Fields; Richard Boleslawski's Les Misérables with Fredric March, Charles Laughton; Harold Young's The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard, Tasmanian-born actress Merle Oberon (Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson), 24; William Dieterle's The Story of Louis Pasteur with Paul Muni.
Twentieth Century-Fox is created by a merger of the 2-year-old Twentieth Century Pictures with the 20-year-old Fox Film Corp.
Air-conditioned movie theaters showing continuous films provide escape for Depression-beleaguered Americans, whose 15¢ tickets (5¢ at matinees) let them see double features, newsreels, cartoons, short subjects, travelogues, and coming attractions (exhibitors sometimes offer free dishes and machine-made glassware to attract patrons). Ushers with flashlights show patrons to their seats in ornate picture palaces.
"STICKS NIX HICK PIX" headlines Variety July 17. The 30-year-old show business newspaper reports that rural audiences reject motion pictures with bucolic stories and characters.
Marie Dressler dies of cancer at Santa Barbara, Calif., July 28 at age 65.
Hollywood musicals: Mark Sandrich's Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, choreography by Hermes Pan, Irving Berlin songs that include "Cheek to Cheek," "Isn't It a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain," "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails"; A. Edward Sutherland's Mississippi with Bing Crosby, W. C. Fields, Joan Bennett, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, songs that include "It's Easy to Remember but So Hard to Forget"; Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935 with Dick Powell, choreography by Busby Berkeley, music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin, songs that include "Lullaby of Broadway"; Roy Del Ruth's Folies Bergère with Maurice Chevalier, Ann Sothern, Merle Oberon.
Radio music: The Hour of Charm 1/3 on CBS with Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra (Ukrainian-born conductor-composer Philip Spitalny, 43, whose wife, Evelyn, performs solos on her "magic violin") (to 1948); Your Hit Parade 4/20 on NBC with the Lucky Strike Orchestra playing the week's top 15 tunes (to 4/24/1959; see television, 1950).
Stage musicals: Glamorous Night 5/2 at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with Mary Ellis, operatic contralto Olive Gilbert, Ivor Novello, book and lyrics by London-born actor and writer Christopher Hassall, 23, based on the exploits of the notorious Romanian adventuress Mme. Lupescu, music by Novello, songs that include "Fold Your Wings," 243 perfs.; At Home Abroad 9/19 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with Beatrice Lillie, Eleanor Powell, Ethel Waters, Eddie Foy Jr., Jean Carson, music by Arthur Schwartz, lyrics by Howard Dietz, songs that include "Hottentot Potentate," 198 perfs.; Jubilee 10/12 at New York's Imperial Theater, with Melville Cooper, Mary Boland, Montgomery Clift, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, songs that include "Begin the Beguine," "Just One of Those Things," 169 perfs.; Seeing Stars at London's Gaiety Theatre, with music by Broones/John, 236 perfs.; Twenty to One 11/12 at the London Coliseum, with music by Billy Mayerl, 383 perfs.; Jumbo 11/16 at the New York Hippodrome, with Jimmy Durante, a live elephant, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, songs that include "Little Girl Blue," "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," 233 perfs.; May Wine 12/5 at New York's St. James Theater, with Walter Slezak, book by Frank Mandel from a story by Erich Von Stroheim and Wallace Smith, music by Sigmund Romberg, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, 213 perfs.; George White's Scandals 12/24 at the New Amsterdam Theater, with Bert Lahr, Willie and Eugene Howard, Rudy Vallée, music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by Jack Yellen, 110 perfs.
Charles E. Mack of Moran and Mack vaudeville fame is killed January 11 at age 46 near Mesa, Ariz., when a car driven by his wife overturns en route to New York. His partner Moran is unhurt.
Opera: Norwegian soprano Kirsten (Malfrid) Flagstad, 40, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 2/2 singing the role of Siglinde in the 1870 Wagner opera Die Walküre and 4 days later sings the role of Isolde. She made her debut at Oslo in 1913 at age 15; Porgy and Bess 10/10 at New York's Alvin Theater, with Baltimore-born soprano Anne Wiggins Brown, 20, as Bess, Kentucky-born baritone (Robert) Todd Duncan, 32, as Porgy, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward (whose 1927 stage play Porgy has provided the libretto), songs that include "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" and "It Ain't Necessarily So," 124 perfs.; Italian soprano Licia Albanese, 22, makes her debut 12/10 at Parma; Brazilian soprano Bidu Sayão, 33, her New York debut 12/30 in a recital at Town Hall.
Soprano Marcella Sembrich dies at New York January 11 at age 76; composer Alban Berg at Vienna December 24 at age 50 of an infection caused by a bee sting at the base of his spine.
The Paris Philharmonic is founded by French conductor Charles Munch, 44.
Composer Paul Dukas dies at Paris May 17 at age 69.
Chicago music lovers flock to Highland Park for the first Ravinia Festival, held at the site of an amusement park started by the Chicago & Milwaukee Electric Railroad in 1904 to attract ridership. Train noises often drown out performers at the summer concerts, which will continue into the next century.
Benny Goodman opens at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles August 21 and is hailed as the King of Swing. Using arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, 36, to introduce a new "big band" jazz style, Chicago-born clarinetist-band leader Benjamin David Goodman, 26, starts a Let's Dance radio program of "swing" music, and begins a long career that will be helped by such sidemen as Lionel Hampton, 22, Gene Krupa, 26, and Teddy (Theodore Shaw) Wilson, 23 (see 1938).
Jazz music of black or Jewish origin is banned from German radio beginning in October.
Popular songs: "The Music Goes Round and Round" by Edward Farley and Michael Riley, lyrics by "Red" Hodgson; "(Lookie, Lookie, Lookie) Here Comes Cookie" by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel (for the film Love in Bloom); "About a Quarter to Nine" and "She's a Latin from Manhattan" by Al Dubin, lyrics by Harry Warren (for the film Go Into Your Dance); "The Lady in Red" by Alie Wrubel, lyrics by Mort Dixon, "I Won't Dance" by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II; "Stairway to the Stars" by violinist Matt Malneck and Frank Signorelli, lyrics by Mitchell Parish; "Goody Goody" by Matt Malneck and Johnny Mercer; "I'm in the Mood for Love" by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields; "A Little Bit Independent" by Joseph A. Boyle, lyrics by Edgar Leslie; "Moon Over Miami" by Joe Burke, lyrics by Edgar Leslie; "In a Sentimental Mood" by Duke Ellington; "Solitude" by Duke Ellington, lyrics by Eddie De Lange; "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" by Fred E. Ahlert, lyrics by Joe Young; "Red Sails in the Sunset" by Hugh Williams (Will Grosz), lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy; "Roll Along Prairie Moon" by Ted Fiorito, Harry McPherson, and Albert von Tilzer.
New Orleans-born jazz singer Connee (née Connie) Boswell becomes a soloist at age 27 after several years of performing with her sisters. She had polio as a child and must use a wheelchair; Arkansas-born singer Patsy Montana (Rubye Blevins), 20, records "I Wanna Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart" and becomes the first woman in country music to have a record that sells more than 1 million copies.
Band leader-songwriter Russ (originally Ruggiero) Columbo is fatally wounded at Hollywood, Calif., September 2 at age 26 when his boyhood friend Lansing V. Brown accidentally drops a lighted match on the percussion cap of a Civil War cap-and-ball pistol. The ball hits a table top and ricochets into Columbo's head above his left eye (Columbo's popularity has rivaled that of Bing Crosby); songwriter Roy Turk dies of pneumonia following surgery for cancer at Hollywood November 30 at age 43.
Bucknell defeats Miami 26 to 0 in the first Orange Bowl game played January 1 at Miami. Tulane beats Temple 20 to 14 in the first Sugar Bowl game played January 1 at New Orleans.
College football's Heisman Memorial Trophy is awarded for the first time by New York's Downtown Athletic Club, whose first athletic director is former University of Pennsylvania football coach John Heisman, now 58. He has started the Touchdown Club of New York to honor all college players who have scored on the gridiron, the first award winner chosen by sportswriters and sportscasters is University of Chicago halfback John J. "Jay" Berwanger, 21, and the trophy will be awarded annually after Heisman's death in October of next year to honor not only the recipient but also the man who introduced the center snap, the vocal "hike" as a signal for starting play, the hidden-ball play, the scoreboard listing downs and yardage, etc. Heisman has been a leader in the fight to legalize the forward pass and reduce games into quarters instead of halves. Ohio-born Yale junior Larry Kelley, 20, stunned Princeton last year with a 43-yard pass reception off a fake-punt play, enabling the Elis to win 7 to 0 and break the Tigers' 15-game winning streak; he leads Yale to a 7-to-1 record in the fall and next year will be the first to win the Heisman Trophy under that name.
James J. Braddock, 29, wins the world heavyweight title from Max Baer in an upset June 13 at Long Island City, N.Y. The New York-born boxer gains a 15-round decision over Baer.
Fred Perry wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Helen Wills Moody in women's singles; Wilmer Lawson Allison, 30, wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Helen Jacobs in women's singles.
The ocean-going yacht Stormy Weather wins the Trans-Atlantic and Fastnet races with a crew commanded by Rod Stephens (seeDorade, 1931). Designed by Sparkman & Stephens, she is 53 feet 11 inches in length overall, 12 feet six inches in the beam, draws seven feet 10 inches, and has a sail area of 1,322 square feet. The New York Yacht Club has been looking for boats to replace the "Thirties" created by Herreshoff and turns to Olin J. Stephens II and the Nevins Yard on City Island, which comes up with the 32-foot (48 feet four inches overall) Mustang. Priced at only $11,000 with heavy Philippine mahogany planking and a low, solid deck house, it is 10 feet seven inches in the beam, draws six feet six inches, and carries 990 square feet of sail (seeLightning, 1938).
Hot Springs, Va., golf caddy Samuel Jackson "Sammy" Snead, 22, becomes a professional golfer to begin an outstanding career.
Eddie Arcaro wins a race on a thoroughbred gelding named No More at Chicago's Washington Park to begin a 31-year career that will make him a legend in his own time. Cincinnati-born jockey George Edward Arcaro, 19, will be the top money winner six years, will twice bring home Triple Crown winners, and will generally pocket a flat 10 percent of the winnings.
Major league baseball has its first night game May 14 at Cincinnati's Crosley Field. A button pressed by President Roosevelt at Washington, D.C., turns on 363 lights of 1,000 kilowatts each that are mounted on eight giant towers to illuminate the field and begin a new era in "America's favorite pastime."
The Detroit Tigers win the World Series, defeating the Chicago Cubs 4 games to 2 with help from Hank Greenberg, who will continue with Detroit through 1941, rejoin the Tigers in 1945, and move to Pittsburgh for his final season in 1947.
Jockey brand briefs go on sale at Chicago's Marshall Field & Co. January 19, stocks of the new men's underpants are exhausted before noon despite a severe blizzard, and a U.S. patent on their construction principles is issued in August (see Cooper, 1919). Coopers, Inc. (formerly Cooper Underwear Co.) executive Arthur Kneibler saw a postcard last year showing a man on the French Riviera wearing a swimsuit that extended only from the waist to the upper thigh, was struck with the idea that an undergarment might be designed like an athletic supporter (commonly called a "jock strap"), and later this year refines his invention to give it a Y-front opening—fabric panels designed to provide a buttonless fly. Individually packaged in cellophane and displayed in special retail fixtures that permit self-service, the briefs create a sensation as millions of men switch from boxer shorts to the new underwear (see 1946).
Max Factor of Hollywood opens a super-colossal salon in the film capital (see 1914). Now 58, he has a factory that employs 250 people producing cosmetics and wigs.
Lancôme is founded by Paris perfumer Armand Petitjean, 22, who has worked for François Coty and introduces five fragrances of his own formulation; he will expand his line with Nutrix skin cream as he builds a company whose beauty products will gain worldwide distribution.
The frozen body of former Denver society queen Elizabeth McCourt "Baby Doe" Tabor is found in a mine shack at Leadville, Colo., March 5. Dead at age 80, she has been penniless since the death of her late husband, Horace, in 1899 (see Opera, 1956).
Chess master Alex Alekhine loses his world title to Dutch chess master Machgielis "Max" Euwe, 34, but will regain it in a return match in 1937.
Monopoly is introduced November 5 by Parker Brothers of Salem, Mass., whose executives rejected the board game in 1933 because it took too long to play, involved concepts such as mortgages and interest that players would find confusing, and had rules that were too complex (see Sorry, 1934). Unemployed engineer Charles B. Darrow, 36, of Germantown, Pa., has adapted the Landlord's Game, devised at the turn of the century by one Lizzie J. Magie to popularize the ideas of Henry George (see 1879), who believed capitalism could work only if no one was permitted to profit from the ownership of land. Quakers at a school in Atlantic City, N.J., have given local place names to the board properties, but Darrow is awarded the patent (it will make him a multimillionaire), and although Parker Brothers has come close to bankruptcy the new game will revive its fortunes.
The 21-year-old Toro Co. introduces its first power lawn mower for homeowners (see Rotary Power Mower, 1946).
Federal agents kill Kate "Ma" Barker (née Arizona Donnie Clark), 61, and her husband, Fred, of the notorious Karpis-Barker gang January 16 outside Ocklawaha, Fla., in a 6-hour shootout. Fred Barker is a filling-station operator who has no record of any criminal activity; his wife has allegedly masterminded a series of robberies, kidnappings, and murders, but she may merely have lived off the proceeds of the crimes that her sons Lloyd, 38, Arthur, 35, and Fred committed (Fred was killed in 1927 at age 31). Her death ends a 20-month crime spree that has gripped the nation's attention.
The Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver introduced April 8 can be ordered with barrels ranging from 3½ to 8 3/8 inches in length and with the longest barrel fires a 158-grain semiwadcutter bullet at 1,515 feet per second (see 1908).
Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, 33, raids Polly Adler's brothel as part of a crackdown on an alleged prostitution syndicate (see 1924). Adler is convicted on charges of possessing pornographic films and serves 24 days under the alias "Joan Martin" (see 1943).
Newark, N.J., mobster Dutch Schulz (Arthur Flegenheimer), 33, is mortally wounded October 23 by gunmen from a newly organized New York crime syndicate who walk into his saloon headquarters and shoot him down along with his three companions. A major figure in liquor bootlegging during Prohibition, Flegenheimer has twice in the last 2 years been tried and acquitted on charges of having evaded income taxes on the proceeds of his various rackets.
Cleveland's mayor Harold H. Burton vows to shut down his city's gambling clubs and hires Chicago gangbuster Eliot Ness in December (see Capone, 1931). Now 32, Ness will close the region's largest gambling joint within a few months, personally fire police officers for drunkenness or sleeping on the job, reorganize the police department, plan the city's first police academy, and cope with a series of grisly murders.
The League of Nations moves into a gleaming white $6 million palace completed for the League at Geneva.
The 41-story International Building at 630 Fifth Avenue opens in New York's Rockefeller Center in May.
The U.S. Supreme Court moves from its chamber in the Capitol building to a dazzling white Vermont marble building of its own designed by the late New York architect Cass Gilbert. Erected on a site occupied by the Old Capitol Prison that housed Confederate prisoners of war in the 1860s, the structure has a single courtroom chamber that seats 300 spectators.
Williamsburg, Va., regains its colonial splendor after 8 years of reconstruction funded by a $94.9 million gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr. Boston architect William G. Perry, 52, has supervised the work of restoring 40 buildings on a 178-acre site (see 1699).
The first U.S. public housing project opens December 3 on New York's Lower East Side, where a row of tenements owned by Vincent Astor at 3rd Street and Avenue A has been demolished. Gov. Herbert Lehman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mayor La Guardia attend the opening of the eight-building complex built by the City Housing Authority (CHA) that was founded in February of last year with a promised grant of $25 million. In the next 40 years the CHA will build 228 projects with 167,000 apartments to house 560,000 persons; other cities will build similar projects.
Dust storms in western states stop highway traffic, close schools, and turn day into night.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) created in 1933 reaches its peak enrollment of 500,000.
An earthquake in Taiwan (Formosa) April 29 leaves 3,280 dead; a quake at Quetta in western India (Baluchistan) May 31 kills between 30,000 and 50,000. The quake measures 7.5 on the new Richter scale, devised by Ohio-born California Institute of Technogy seismologist Charles F. (Francis) Richter, 35, with help from German-born Caltech physicist Beno Gutenberg, 46. Their scale measures the intensity of earthquakes by recording ground motion in seismographs; each increase of one number means a 10-fold increase in magnitude (the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is judged to have been a quake of 8.3 on the scale—10 times greater than a quake of 7.3); a second earthquake in Taiwan July 16 measures 6.5 on the Richter scale and kills 2,700.
Former Los Angeles city engineer William Mulholland dies in self-imposed seclusion at his L.A. home in July at age 87, never having recovered from his grief over the loss of life when the St. Francis Dam gave way 7 years ago. His name will be honored in a scenic road atop the Santa Monica Mountains, a grade school in the San Fermando Valley, and a fountain near Griffith Park.
The hurricane that strikes the Florida Keys September 2 carries winds that will be estimated to be as strong as 180 miles per hour, the strongest ever to hit the United States.
Shenandoah National Park created December 26 by act of Congress occupies 193,593 acres in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains set aside for the purpose in 1926. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. has used matching funds to encourage North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia to preserve the Blue Ridge; the new park provides vistas of the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley.
U.S. fish cutters launch a boom with the discovery that the small white fillet of ocean perch from the Atlantic tastes much like freshwater perch.
A record 42-pound lobster is caught off Virginia.
U.S. farm prices begin to rise as the Commodity Credit Corp. purchases surplus farm commodities for distribution among the needy (see 1933; AAA, 1938).
The United States has 6.81 million operating farms, down from 7.2 million in 1931.
Five Acres and Independence by Maurice Grenville Kains, 67, is a practical guide to conducting a small farm. It becomes a bestseller as thousands of urban Americans go back to the land.
Farmers on the southern plains endure a fifth year of drought and dust storms. The wind in Kansas blows night and day for 27 consecutive days without cease in April; the duststorm on April 14 is so bad that oldtimers will remember it as "Black Sunday," when visibility was reduced to zero and it appeared that the once-fertile land was becoming a desert. President Roosevelt signs a Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act into law April 27 and appoints North Carolina-born activist Hugh Hammond Bennett, 54, to head the new Soil Conservation Service (see Soil Erosion Service, 1933). Bennett says Americans are the worst stewards of the land in history and estimates that soil erosion is costing the United States $400 million in diminished productivity alone each year; he works to make Americans soil-conscious. Families lose hope and begin leaving the "dust bowl" at the rate of about 50,000 per month, most of them bound for California, and before the migration is over about 25 percent of the population will have left. The Department of Agriculture finances production of a film (The Plow That Broke the Plains) designed to teach farmers soil-conservation techniques.
A Resettlement Administration created by executive order April 30 works to move people from poor lands to better lands under the direction of administrator Rexford Guy Tugwell (see 1933).
The Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act of 1934 is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court rules unanimously May 27 in Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. William R. Radford. Kentucky farmer Radford mortgaged his land for $9,000 and redeemed it for $4,445. Because it permitted Radford to buy his land back on deferred payments at an interest rate of 1 percent when the going rate was 6 percent, the law takes property without compensation, the court rules, and violates the Fifth Amendment. Little use has been made of the law anyway, and the farm-mortgage situation has improved without recourse to it.
Soviet horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin dies at Michurinsk June 7 at age 79, having developed more than 300 new types of fruit trees and berries in an effort to "prove" that acquired characteristics can be inherited (see 1926). Agronomist T. D. Lysenko carries on Michurin's ideas, calling his more scientific critics "Trotskyite bandits" and enemies of the state. "Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo," says Josef Stalin, and Lysenkoism becomes Soviet agricultural gospel (see Vavilov, 1940).
Japan achieves self-sufficiency in wheat production for noodles, having increased domestic production by 60 percent in just 3 years.
One-third of U.S. farmers receive U.S. Treasury allotment checks for not growing food and other crops or are committed to receive such checks under terms of the AAA law of 1933, but drought holds down production more than New Deal planting restrictions do (see Supreme Court decision, 1936).
The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) established by the Parliament at Ottawa in a law signed July 5 handles wheat exports and tells farmers how much they can plant each year with a guarantee that it will sell their crops. Headquartered at Winnipeg, Manitoba, the CWB will receive authority in 1949 to handle marketing of oats and barley as well as wheat.
German researchers synthesize vitamin B2 (see 1932; 1933). The vitamin will be called riboflavin.
University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Herbert McLean Evans, 53, isolates vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) from wheat germ oil with help from Oliver and Gladys Emerson.
Vitamin K—essential for blood "Koagulation"—is isolated by C. P. H. Dam and by Edward A. Doisy at St. Louis University (see 1937; population [Dam, Doisy], 1929).
Vitamin pioneer Lafayette B. Mendel dies at New Haven, Conn., December 9 at age 63.
Eat, Drink and Be Wary by F. J. Schlink relates horror stories related to food contamination (see Sinclair, 1905).
Chicago advertising copywriter Leo Burnett, 44, turns the 1925 "giant" symbol of Minnesota Valley Canning Co. into the jolly "Ho Ho Ho" Green Giant; he colors the giant green, dresses him in leaves, and with eight associates starts a new advertising agency under his own name. Minnesota Valley will change its name to Green Giant Co. in 1950 as it becomes the largest U.S. canner of peas and corn.
U.S. food packers ship 240 million cases of canned goods, up from 160 million in 1931.
Polyethylene will find wide use in food packaging (see 1953); the antioxidant qualities of vitamin E will prove valuable in extending the shelf life of foods.
The U.S. Government sues Canadian distillers for $60 million in taxes and duties evaded during Prohibition. The amount will be lowered to $3 million, and Distillers Corp.-Seagram will pay half of it (see 1933; 1943).
Chef Auguste Escoffier dies of uremia at his Monte Carlo home, Villa Fernand, February 12 at age 88.
Pan Am Clipper flights provide the first hot meals to be served in the air.
Ohio-born Chicago printing salesman Duncan Hines, 55, sends out a pamphlet listing his favorite eating places in lieu of a Christmas card and receives so many requests for copies that he goes into business leasing "Recommended by Duncan Hines" signs for as much as $20 per year. Guidebooks by Hines will be published under titles that include Good Eating and Lodging for a Night.
Ireland makes it a felony to sell, import, or advertise any form of birth control device or method.
Use of sulfonamides will make it far less hazardous for physicians to perform dilation and curetage, the most commonly employed means of terminating pregnancies. Economic pressures created by the Depression have created a record demand for abortions, which are generally performed by unqualified practitioners under non-sterile conditions.
Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) leader Heinrich Himmler starts a Lebensborn (life source) state breeding program to produce an "Aryan super race." He encourages young women of "pure blood" to volunteer their services as mates of SS officers to contribute blond, blue-eyed babies who will grow into thin-lipped narrow-nosed "Nordic beings" to carry on the "thousand-year Reich."
Japan's population reaches 69.2 million, up from 34.8 million in 1872. Emigration to Manchuria (Manchukuo) eases population pressures somewhat, and the birth rate falls to 14.4 per thousand, down from its peak of 15.3 in 1930, but overpopulation causes mounting anxiety.
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