1939 Timeline

Key: Politics and Society, Science and Technology, Arts and Culture, World

Jan. 4: President Roosevelt presents the Annual State of the Union address to Congress
Jan. 12: Roosevelt recommends a 2 year defense budget of $535 million in a special message to Congress
Jan. 31: Roosevelt meets with members of the Senate Military Affairs Committee to discuss the policy of selling airplanes to France

Feb. 27: Sit-down strike declared illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court
Feb. 14: Justice Louis Brandeis submits his letter of resignation from the Supreme Court to the President

German American Bund Rally

March 20: William O. Douglas succeeds Brandeis in Supreme Court

May 5: The United Mine Workers force a stoppage of soft-coal production when union and operators fail to reach an agreement. Work resumes May 13 when a contract is signed

June 10: President Roosevelt entertains King George VI and Queen Elizabeth as his house guests at Hyde Park

July 1: President Roosevelt established the Federal Works Agency as a consolidation of five existing agencies
July 6: Herbert Hoover urges American neutrality

August 2: Roosevelt signs into law the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity by employees of the federal government

Sept. 3: FDR Fireside Chat #14: On the German Invasion of Poland

Sept. 7: William Schirer on the Invasion: the view from Berlin

Sept. 10: The Miss America crown is won by Patricia Donnelly, a 19 year old from Michigan

Jan. 17: Physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch send papers to a London journal that confirm the process of splitting atoms: a term they coin "nuclear fission"

June 28: The first regular transatlantic passenger air service begins when PanAm flies 22 passengers from New York to Portugal

Oct. 25: Nylon stockings are first sold in the U.S.

January 1939

February 1939

March 1939

April 1939

May 1939

June 1939

July 1939

August 1939

September 1939

October 1939

November 1939

December 1939

Songs released in 1939
Somewhere Over the Rainbow Deep Purple Beer Barrel Polka It Takes a Worried Man Tuxedo Junction, Glenn Miller Jim Jam Jump Ella Fitzgerald	Three Little Fishies Kay Kyser I Got Rhythm, The Five Spirits It Aint What You Say, Sy Oliver I Hear the Angels Sing, Benny Goodman and Martha Tipton (clip) It's a Blue World Glenn Miller South of the Border, Shep Fields (clip)

Jan. 1: The AP poll chooses Texas A and M as the national collegiate champions

The 30s Jukebox

The Grapes of Wrathby John Steinbeck is published

Feb. 23: You Can't Take It With Youwins Academy Award for best film

Feb. 25: the Golden Gate International Exposition opens

Lux Radio Theatre, Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key
Lux Radio Theatre It Happened One Night
The March of Time: The Fuhrer is wowed by Marion Daniels' tap dancing to his favorite music, The Merry Widow Waltz

March 21: Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf

April 20: The NY World's Fair Opens
The New York World's Fair begins and includes the first exhibition of television
To New Horizons. Shown in the Futurama exhibit at the huge General Motors Pavilion, it presented a vision of America as it might be in 1960
The March of Time:The World's Fair as Propaganda

The City: a documentary film on the possibilities of the American City prepared for the World's Fair.

New Frontiers, the company which produced The City, also produced a number of the most important documentary films of the 1930s.

May 1: Pulitzer Prizes awarded:Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, fiction;Benjamin Franklin, by Carl Van Doren, biography;Selected Poems, by John Gould Fletcher, poetry
May 10: The Methodist Church reunites after 109 years of division

General Motors cartoon explains the benign relationship between producers and consumers

June 14: John Lomax and his wife Ruby finish their three-month tour recording hours of folk music from 300 performers

Your Hit Parade Top 15 Songs
Columbia Workshop, Radio Play by William Saroyan

Films released in 1939
Films Released in 1939 The Wizard of Oz (Real Audio) Gone With The Wind You Can't Take It With You Boys Town Jezebel Kentucky Good Bye Mr. Chips Of Mice and Men	Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Ninotchka of Mice and Men Stagecoach Wuthering Heights Drums Along the Mohawk Young Mr. Lincoln Snow White

Sept. 14.: The Wizard of Oz premieres starring the adolescent Judy Garland

Sept. 17: U.S. singles tennis championships are won by Robert Riggs in the men's division and Alice Marble in the women's

The Princess and the Pauper: General Motors cartoon version of a classic fairy tale

Ah Wilderness, by Eugene O'Neill (stage debut 1933)

Oct.8: The World Series is won by the New York Yankees who sweep the Cincinnati Reds in four games. Fans pay homage to Lou Gehrig who has been diagnosed with a debilitating disease

Books Released in 1939

Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
Adventures of a Young Man, John Dos Passos
The Wild Palms, William Faulkner
Captain Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forester
Collected Poems, Robert Frost
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Carl Sandburg
An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor

Women's Fashions in the 1930s

Dec. 10: The NFL championship is won by the Green Bay Packers, defeating the New York Giants
Dec. 15: Gone With the Wind premieres in Atlanta. Based on Margaret Mitchell's novel the movie is a blockbuster and goes on to receive 10 Academy Awards

Amos 'n' Andy: Andy's Wedding
Campbell Playhouse, Thornton Wilder's Our Town with Orson Welles
Lux Radio Theatre, Pinnochio
Dec. 24: A Christmas Carol, Pt. I and Pt. 2

Jan 1: The State of the Union Address

March 3: The March of Time
March 15: German troops seize the Moravia and Bohemia regions of Czechoslovakia
March 17: The March of Time
March 17: The Roosevelt administration issues a statement deploring the German takeover of Czechoslovakia as a threat to world peace.
March 23: Lithuania surrenders Memel, a seaport on the Baltic Sea to German demands

April 1: Roosevelt signs a proclamation ending the arms embargo against Spain
April 1: The Spanish War ends. The Loyalists capitulate; the Nationalists have complete control of Spain
April 28: Hitler nullifies a nonagression treaty with Poland and naval treaties with Great Britain

May 22: The foreign ministers of Germany and Italy sign a military alliance, known as the Pact of Steel

July 26: Secretary of State Hull notifies the Japanese government that the 1911 commercial treaty will expire in six month

The March of Time: The Looming Crisis in the Mediterranean
The March of Time: Japan: Modernized and Aggressive

Aug. 23:Nazi-Soviet non-agression pact signed, including the secret section that divided Poland between Germany and the USSR

Sept. 1: Germany invades Poland without a declaration of war
Sept. 1: Radio Warsaw reports on the German Inasion

Fireside Chat 14
The March of Time: American War Preparedness

Sept. 9: London evacuates its children to the countryside
Sept. 7: William Schirer reports on the German invasion of Poland

Sept. 3: Great Britain and France declare war on Germany
Sept. 3: Thirty Americans die when British passenger ship Athenia is sunk by a submarine
Sept. 17: Soviet Troops invade Poland from the east

The March of Time: The Maginot Line
The March of Time: the global refugee crisis

Oct. 18: All U.S. ports and waters are closed to submarines by presidential order

Nov. 4: 1939 U.S. Neutrality Act U.S. Congress passes the Neutrality Act of 1939. It repealed the prohibition of arms exportation

Nov. 8: Hitler narrowly evades an assassination attempt

Nov. 30: The Russo-Finnish War begins as Soviet forces invade Finland. The outnumbered Finns sue for peace in March 1940

Dec. 14: The League of Nations expels the Soviet Union and asks League members to provide assistance to Finland