1935 History, Facts and Trivia
Quick Facts from 1935
Top Ten Baby Names of 1935
Girls: Mary, Shirley, Barbara, Betty, Patricia Boys: Robert, James, John, William, Richard
U.S. Life Expectancy in 1935
Males: 59.9 years; Females: 63.9 years
When Social Security set the retirement age at 65 in 1935, the average American lived to 61.7. The math was intentional.
The Stars
Josephine Baker, Joan Blondell, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Jean Harlow, Hedy Lamarr, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Thelma Todd, Mae West
The Quotes
“What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” — Thomas R. Marshall, Vice President under Woodrow Wilson, a quote that had been circulating since the 1920s but summed up the Depression-era mood precisely
Time Magazine’s Man of the Year
Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, recognized that Italy had invaded his country, and the world’s response — largely a shrug — revealed the League of Nations to be considerably less powerful than advertised
Miss America
Henrietta Leaver, Pittsburgh, PA
We Lost in 1935
Will Rogers — America’s most beloved humorist, radio personality, and social commentator- died August 15, 1935, in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, along with aviator Wiley Post. He was 55. The airport in Barrow, Alaska, was named for him. It is accessible almost entirely by air, because no roads lead there, and sea ice blocks access most of the year.
T.E. Lawrence — “Lawrence of Arabia,” the British army officer and writer whose involvement in the Arab Revolt of World War I made him one of the most romanticized figures of the 20th century, died May 19, 1935, from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. He was 46.
Cudjoe Lewis, the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade in the United States, died in Africatown, Alabama, in 1935. He had been brought to America illegally in 1860, decades after the international slave trade had been banned. He was believed to be in his late 90s.
America in 1935 — The Context
Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the third year of his first term, navigating the deepest economic depression in American history. Unemployment was running at roughly 20%. The Dust Bowl was making large sections of the Great Plains uninhabitable. In response, FDR pushed through the Second New Deal — the Social Security Act, the Works Progress Administration, and the Revenue Act of 1935, which imposed a 79% income tax on earnings over $5 million. That top rate affected exactly one person: John D. Rockefeller.
In Europe, Germany was rearming under Hitler and had passed the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jewish citizens of civil rights. Italy invaded Ethiopia. The world was watching and largely declining to intervene. The League of Nations, in theory the organization designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing, was demonstrating its limitations in real time.
The Dust Bowl and Black Sunday
The Dust Bowl — a years-long ecological disaster caused by drought, over-farming, and the destruction of native prairie grasses across the Great Plains — reached its worst single day on April 14, 1935. A massive black cloud rolled across Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, reducing visibility to zero and burying farmsteads under feet of topsoil that had once fed the country. Hundreds of thousands of families abandoned their land and headed west. John Steinbeck would write about them in The Grapes of Wrath four years later.
Social Security
The Social Security Act was signed by President Roosevelt on August 14, 1935, creating the federal retirement and unemployment insurance system. The retirement age was set at 65. Average life expectancy at the time was 61.7 years. The program was designed to be self-funding through payroll taxes. It remains the largest government program in American history and has paid benefits to virtually every American family since.
The 7th Academy Awards
It Happened One Night swept all five major categories at the ceremony on February 27, 1935: Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was the first film in history to accomplish that sweep. The feat would not be repeated until One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1976, and then again with The Silence of the Lambs in 1992.
Walt Disney received an honorary Oscar for the creation of Mickey Mouse, with the statuette accompanied by seven miniature Oscars — one for each of the Seven Dwarfs, which Disney had not yet released but was already promoting.
Porgy and Bess
George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York on October 10, 1935. With a libretto by DuBose Heyward and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, it introduced Summertime, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, and It Ain’t Necessarily So to the American songbook. The production was controversial from the start, with ongoing debates about its portrayal of Black American life that have never fully been resolved and have made every revival a cultural event in itself.
Jesse Owens: The Greatest 45 Minutes in Sports History
On May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten track and field championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 21-year-old Ohio State sophomore Jesse Owens set three world records and tied a fourth in the span of 45 minutes. He tied the world record in the 100-yard dash, then set world records in the long jump, the 220-yard dash, and the 220-yard low hurdles — on a bad back, after spraining his tailbone falling down stairs earlier that week. Sports historians still refer to it as the greatest single athletic performance in track and field history. The following year at the Berlin Olympics, he added four gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler.
Pop Culture Facts and History
Monopoly was released by Parker Brothers in 1935, though the game had been invented by Charles Darrow, who had adapted it from an earlier design by Elizabeth Magie. The starting bank contained $15,140. It was recently updated to $20,580. Each player still starts with $1,500. Monopoly became one of the most popular Depression-era purchases precisely because playing at being a real estate tycoon cost only the price of a board game.
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on June 10, 1935, in Akron, Ohio, when stockbroker Bill Wilson met with surgeon Bob Smith. The organization has no dues, no fees, no hierarchy, and no outside affiliations, and has helped an estimated 2 million people maintain sobriety. The “twelve steps” it pioneered have been adapted by virtually every addiction recovery program since.
The first Penguin paperback books were published in 1935, priced at sixpence each — the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Publisher Allen Lane’s goal was to make quality literature affordable enough to buy at a train station newsstand. It revolutionized publishing and created the modern mass-market paperback.
The word “dumpster” was coined in 1935 by George Dempster, who named his new metal waste container the “Dempster Dumpster.” The trademark was so thoroughly genericized that virtually no one today knows it had a proper name.
The first brief underwear, the “Jockey short”, was introduced by the Cooper Underwear Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on January 19, 1935. It was inspired by a postcard of a man in a French swimsuit. More than 30,000 pairs sold in the first three months.
The first Chevy Suburban rolled off the line in 1935, making it the longest continuously produced automobile nameplate in history. It is still in production today.
The world’s first parking meters were installed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on July 16, 1935. The inventor was Carl Magee. The first person to receive a parking ticket was a police officer who parked in front of one of the new meters without paying. History does not record whether he paid the fine.
The first canned beer went on sale on January 24, 1935, sold by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company in Richmond, Virginia. Cans were lighter, cheaper to ship, and didn’t shatter. The beer industry changed permanently.
Boxed wine was also introduced in 1935. It did not immediately transform wine culture, but it planted a seed.
Porky Pig made his first appearance in the Warner Bros. cartoon I Haven’t Got a Hat in 1935. His stutter was not initially intentional — voice actor Joe Dougherty had an actual stutter that was difficult to control. He was eventually replaced by Mel Blanc, who deliberately performed the stutter.
The Ritz Cracker went on sale nationwide in 1935 at 19 cents a box. The name was chosen to evoke glamour and luxury during the Depression. A cracker for 19 cents that made you feel like you were eating at the Ritz was a marketing idea perfectly calibrated to its moment.
Radar was first demonstrated as a practical technology by British scientist Robert Watson-Watt in February 1935. The demonstration detected an RAF bomber at a distance of eight miles. By the time World War II began four years later, Britain had a network of radar stations along its coastline that proved decisive in the Battle of Britain.
Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California in January 1935, crossing 2,400 miles of the open Pacific. Eleven others had attempted it previously. Three had died trying.
Sir Malcolm Campbell became the first person to drive an automobile at over 300 miles per hour on September 3, 1935, setting a land speed record of 301.337 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in his car, Bluebird. He had broken his own record nine times previously.
The word “drone,” as applied to remote-controlled aircraft, was coined in 1935 when Britain developed the DH.82B Queen Bee, a pilotless biplane used for anti-aircraft gunnery practice. The name referenced the male bee — expendable, unguided, and subordinate to the queen.
Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment was published in 1935 by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger to illustrate a paradox in quantum mechanics. The hypothetical cat, simultaneously alive and dead until observed, has since become the most famous cat in the history of science — despite never existing.
The Cincinnati Reds hosted the first night game in Major League Baseball history on May 24, 1935, at Crosley Field, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1. President Roosevelt pressed a button in Washington to turn on the lights remotely. Baseball’s resistance to night games had kept them out of the major leagues for decades despite their obvious appeal to working-class fans.
Avery Dennison, then operating under the name Kum Kleen Products, introduced self-adhesive labels in 1935. The name was changed shortly afterward, for reasons that should require no explanation.
The term “boondoggle” entered everyday American vocabulary in 1935 when the press reported that FDR’s New Deal had spent $3 million teaching unemployed people to make braided leather ornaments called boondoggles. The word became shorthand for any overpriced, pointless government expenditure and has remained in active use ever since.
Sigmund Freud, in a 1935 letter to an American mother concerned about her son’s homosexuality, wrote: “It is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. It cannot be classified as an illness.” The letter was considered remarkable at the time and is still cited in discussions of 20th-century attitudes toward sexuality.
A message in a bottle thrown into the sea in 1784 by Japanese seaman Chunosuke Matsuyama, describing a shipwreck, washed ashore in 1935 in the village of Hiraturemura, where Matsuyama had been born 151 years earlier.
The Gallup Poll was introduced in 1935 by George Gallup, providing the first scientific method for measuring American public opinion. Politicians have been paying attention to it and occasionally ignoring it ever since.
Tyson Foods was founded in 1935 in Springdale, Arkansas, by John W. Tyson, who began by selling chickens from the back of a truck. It is now the world’s second-largest meat processor.
Senator Huey Long of Louisiana delivered the longest speech in U.S. Senate history on June 12-13, 1935, speaking for 15 hours and 30 minutes. His topics included the Constitution, Shakespeare, recipes for pot liquor and turnip greens, and the proper way to fry oysters. He was assassinated three months later.
Rabbi Tobias Geffen was given access to Coca-Cola’s secret formula in 1935 to verify whether the drink was kosher. He found that it contained non-kosher beef tallow and requested that it be replaced with vegetable glycerin. Coca-Cola complied, and the drink was certified kosher. The addition of high-fructose corn syrup decades later made it non-kosher again.
The Indiana Jones timeline places Temple of Doom in 1935, making it a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is set in 1936. The films were released in reverse chronological order, which bothered nobody until they watched them again.
Detroit had one of the great single-city sports years in professional history in 1935: the Tigers won the World Series, the Lions won the NFL Championship, and the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup — each franchise’s first championship title. The city has been patiently waiting to repeat it ever since.
The Scandalous
The Nye Committee, a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Gerald Nye — concluded in 1935 that the United States had entered World War I primarily to protect the financial interests of banks and arms manufacturers. The report was widely read and contributed to the isolationist mood that shaped American foreign policy through the late 1930s.
FDR’s Revenue Act of 1935 imposed a 79% tax rate on incomes over $5 million. It applied to exactly one American: John D. Rockefeller. Congress passed it anyway.
The Habits
Playing Monopoly; listening to swing on the radio; going to see Shirley Temple’s latest film; reading whatever James Hilton published; and trying to sound cheerful while the dust piled up outside.
Nobel Prize Winners
Physics — James Chadwick — for the discovery of the neutron, which made both nuclear power and the atomic bomb possible; Chadwick reportedly described his feelings about the latter development as “grief”
Chemistry — Frederic Joliot and Irene Joliot-Curie — for the synthesis of new radioactive elements, extending the work of Irene’s mother, Marie Curie
Medicine — Hans Spemann — for the discovery of the organizer effect in embryonic development
Literature — not awarded in 1935
Peace — Carl von Ossietzky — German pacifist journalist who had been imprisoned by the Nazis for exposing secret German rearmament; Hitler refused to allow him to collect the prize and stripped him of German citizenship
Trivia: 1935 was the last year in which no American won a Nobel Prize.
Broadway in 1935
Porgy and Bess opened on October 10, 1935, at the Alvin Theatre. George Gershwin’s landmark American opera ran for 124 performances in its initial Broadway run before going on tour. It has been revived repeatedly and remains one of the most discussed and debated works in American musical theater.
Jumbo opened November 16, 1935, at the Hippodrome — a spectacle combining circus acts, music by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and a live elephant. It ran for 233 performances and was sufficiently eccentric to have been produced only in the 1930s.
Best Film Oscar Winner
It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra and starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, won all five major Oscars at the February 1935 ceremony, presented for the 1934 film year. It was the first film to accomplish the sweep. Colbert reportedly told a friend before the ceremony that she had no chance of winning. She was on her way to the train station when she was pulled back for the ceremony.
Top Movies of 1935
Popular and Best-Selling Books of 1935
Come and Get It — Edna Ferber
Death in the Clouds — Agatha Christie
Europa — Robert Briffault
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh — Franz Werfel
Good-bye, Mr. Chips — James Hilton
Green Light — Lloyd C. Douglas
Heaven’s My Destination — Thornton Wilder
Lost Horizon — James Hilton
Of Time and the River — Thomas Wolfe
Time Out of Mind — Rachel Field
Vein of Iron — Ellen Glasgow
Biggest Pop Artists of 1935
Ambrose and His Orchestra, Fred Astaire, The Boswell Sisters, Bing Crosby, Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, Xavier Cugat and His Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra, The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, Eddy Duchin and His Orchestra, Duke Ellington, Ruth Etting, Jan Garber and His Orchestra, Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, Johnny Green and His Orchestra, Billie Holiday, Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, Ray Noble and His Orchestra, Louis Prima, Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra, Victor Young and His Orchestra
Sports Champions of 1935
World Series: Detroit Tigers — defeated the Chicago Cubs 4-2, the first World Series title in Tigers history
NFL Champions: Detroit Lions — also their first championship
Stanley Cup: Montreal Maroons
U.S. Open Golf: Sam Parks Jr. — a local club pro who had played Oakmont regularly and knew its slopes better than anyone; his win over the heavily favored field remains one of the great upsets in major championship history
U.S. Open Tennis: Men/Women: Wilmer Allison / Helen Jacobs
Wimbledon: Men/Women: Fred Perry / Helen Wills Moody
NCAA Football Champions: Minnesota and SMU (co-champions)
Kentucky Derby: Omaha, who went on to win the Triple Crown that year, the third horse to do so
Boston Marathon: John A. Kelley, 2:32:07
Sports Highlight: Detroit’s three major sports franchises, the Tigers, Lions, and Red Wings, each won their respective championships in 1935, each for the first time. No city has replicated that three-sport championship year since. Omaha’s Triple Crown victory was the last until Citation in 1948.
FAQs: 1935 History, Facts and Trivia
Q: What was the worst natural disaster of 1935 in the United States?
A: “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935, when one of the most severe dust storms in American history rolled across eastern New Mexico, Colorado, and western Oklahoma, part of the broader Dust Bowl crisis that displaced hundreds of thousands of farming families throughout the decade.
Q: What board game was released in 1935 that is still one of the best-selling games in the world?
A: Monopoly, published by Parker Brothers in 1935. The starting bank contained $15,140, recently updated to $20,580. Each player still starts with $1,500.
Q: What major social safety net program was established in 1935?
A: The Social Security Act, signed by President Roosevelt on August 14, 1935, creating a federal retirement and unemployment insurance funded through payroll taxes.
Q: What was Jesse Owens’ greatest athletic performance, and when did it happen?
A: At the Big Ten championships on May 25, 1935, Owens set three world records and tied a fourth within 45 minutes — the 100-yard dash, long jump, 220-yard dash, and 220-yard low hurdles — while nursing a back injury. Sports historians consider it the greatest single track-and-field performance in history.
Q: What film swept all five major Oscars at the 1935 ceremony?
A: It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra and starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, was the first film to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the same ceremony.
Q: What organization was founded in 1935 that has helped millions of people with addiction?
A: Alcoholics Anonymous, founded on June 10, 1935, in Akron, Ohio, by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. Its 12-step model has been adopted by addiction recovery programs around the world.
Q: What underwear product was introduced in 1935?
A: The Jockey brief, introduced by the Cooper Underwear Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on January 19, 1935. More than 30,000 pairs sold in the first three months.
Q: What was unusual about the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935?
A: It was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist journalist imprisoned by the Nazis. Hitler refused to allow Ossietzky to travel to collect the prize and stripped him of German citizenship. Ossietzky died in Nazi custody in 1938.
More 1935 Facts & History Resources:
Most Popular Baby Names (BabyCenter.com)
Popular and Notable Books (popculture.us)
Broadway Shows that Opened in 1935
1935 Calendar, courtesy of Time and Date.com
Fact Monster
The Great Depression Federal Reserve
1930s, Infoplease.com World History
1935 in Movies (according to IMDB)
Retrowaste Vintage Culture
1930s Slang
Wikipedia 1935
Nazi Germany Timeline