1938 History, Facts, and Trivia

In 1938, a man in a red cape changed everything. Superman debuted in Action Comics #1, and pop culture has never fully recovered. On the radio, Orson Welles convinced a sizable portion of America that Martians had landed in New Jersey. At the movies, Errol Flynn swung through Sherwood Forest and Frank Capra proved that idealism still played well with audiences. Adolf Hitler was named Time’s Man of the Year, a mule won a Republican primary in Washington State, and George Bernard Shaw won an Oscar. If 1938 sounds like a lot, that’s because it was.

Quick Facts from 1938

World-Changing Event: Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster of Cleveland, Ohio
Influential Song: “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)” by Benny Goodman, immortalized at Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938
Must-See Movies: The Adventures of Robin Hood, You Can’t Take It With You, Angels with Dirty Faces, Boys Town, Test Pilot, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Room Service, and The Terror of Tiny Town
Most Famous Person in America: Clark Gable was the dominant male star of the era, consistently topping popularity polls
Notable Books: Our Town by Thornton Wilder and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Price of 24 oz of Salt: 3 cents
US Life Expectancy: Males: 61.9 years / Females: 65.3 years
Funny Duo: Abbott and Costello
Miss America: Marilyn Meseka, Marion, Ohio
Time Man of the Year: Adolf Hitler
Broadway: Hellzapoppin opened September 22, 1938, and ran until December 17, 1941
The Quote: “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.” — Jean Rostand
The Conversation: Did you hear Orson Welles last night? Are the Martians really here?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1938

Girls: Mary, Barbara, Patricia, Betty, Shirley Boys: Robert, James, John, William, Richard

Mary had held the top spot for girls through most of the preceding decades. Shirley Temple’s box office dominance in the mid-1930s is widely credited with pushing Shirley into the top five. Barbara was climbing steadily and would reach number one by the mid-1940s.

The Stars of 1938

Claudette Colbert, Olivia de Havilland, Betty Grable, Hedy Lamarr, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner

Lana Turner was just beginning. Barbara Stanwyck had already earned three Oscar nominations. Hedy Lamarr had just arrived in Hollywood from Austria, and MGM was still figuring out what to do with her. The depth of talent active in any given year of this era was genuinely remarkable.

What Happened in 1938?

By the time 1938 ended, the world had moved several unavoidable steps closer to war. Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in March in what became known as the Anschluss, then extracted the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia through the Munich Agreement in September, with Britain and France standing aside. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London waving the signed document and declared “peace for our time.” The peace lasted about six months.

Time magazine named Hitler its Man of the Year, a recognition based on documented impact rather than admiration, a distinction the editors felt compelled to explain at considerable length.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing the first federal minimum wage at 25 cents an hour and capping the standard workweek at 44 hours. Not a glamorous headline, but one that permanently reshaped American working life. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act also became law, giving the FDA real enforcement authority and, among its more specific provisions, banning candy containing embedded toys or trinkets with no functional value. Kinder Egg lawyers have been navigating that clause ever since.

The March of Dimes was established to combat infantile polio, with President Roosevelt as its public face. The name was coined by comedian Eddie Cantor, riffing on the popular newsreel segment “The March of Time.” It became one of the most successful charitable fundraising campaigns in American history.

The New England Hurricane of September 1938 struck without warning, killing between 600 and 800 people and causing catastrophic damage across Long Island and southern New England. Forecasters had tracked the storm but expected it to turn out to sea, as hurricanes in that region typically did. It did not turn. Sandy Point Island in Rhode Island did not exist before the storm. The hurricane deposited enough material to create it from scratch.

The term “gaslighting” traces back to a 1938 stage play called Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates his wife into doubting her own sanity by dimming the gas lights in their home and denying any change. The 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman spread the concept to a wider audience. The word now turns up in congressional testimony, therapy offices, and a reliable percentage of breakup texts.

What Were the Biggest Movies of 1938?

The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, arrived in Technicolor at a time when color was still a novelty, and audiences responded accordingly. The film is still considered one of the finest adventure pictures ever made. For the archery sequences, the production hired a professional archer to shoot extras wearing protective padding rather than relying on camera tricks. Extras received $150 per hit, which, adjusted for inflation, remains a fairly reasonable rate for getting shot with an arrow on a movie set.

Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You won Best Picture. Angels with Dirty Faces put James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in a crime drama that still holds up. Boys Town gave Spencer Tracy one of his most celebrated roles opposite a young Mickey Rooney. Test Pilot paired Clark Gable with Myrna Loy and delivered exactly what audiences expected from that combination.

The Terror of Tiny Town featured an all-little-person cast, a Western with singing cowboys, and a villain in a ten-gallon hat. It has never been called a masterpiece, but it has never been forgotten either.

Howard Hawks directed Bringing Up Baby, a screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn that flopped on original release and has since been recognized as a genre classic. The film is generally credited as the first American movie to use the word “gay” to mean homosexual. Asked why he is wearing a woman’s nightgown, Grant’s character responds, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden.” Most audiences at the time read it as a declaration of high spirits.

The screenplay for John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing was based on a 1938 science-fiction novella called Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr. The creature is called “the Thing” throughout the original text, and the character names and central plot points carried over nearly intact.

What Were the Biggest Songs of 1938?

Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert on January 16, 1938, is generally considered one of the most significant single performances in American music history. The show was sold out, people were sitting in the aisles, and when Gene Krupa’s drum solo launched Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing), something shifted permanently. Swing music, which had been building through the mid-decade, was declared legitimate in a venue that had previously belonged exclusively to classical music.

The recording of that night was discovered in a closet at Goodman’s Connecticut home in 1950 and is now preserved in the Library of Congress. The song runs nearly twelve minutes and still does not wear out its welcome.

“Sing, Sing, Sing” was originally recorded in 1936, but the Carnegie Hall version became the definitive take. Goodman did not plan to record the show. A Columbia Records engineer made the acetate at the last minute on his own initiative.

What Books Were People Reading in 1938?

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town debuted on Broadway in February 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play strips the stage of all scenery, uses a narrator who speaks directly to the audience, and asks people to notice the unremarkable details of daily life before they are gone. It remains one of the most-produced plays in American theater history.

Daphne du Maurier published Rebecca, a gothic novel about a young woman overwhelmed by the memory of her husband’s first wife. Alfred Hitchcock adapted it two years later, and it won Best Picture. The novel has never gone out of print.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel was a bestseller widely credited with influencing the political debate that eventually led to the creation of Britain’s National Health Service.

1938 Bestseller List: Action at Aquila by Hervey Allen, All This, and Heaven Too by Rachel Field, And Tell of Time by Laura Krey, The Citadel by A.J. Cronin, The Mortal Storm by Phyllis Bottome, My Son, My Son! by Howard Spring, Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, Our Town by Thornton Wilder, The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

What Were the Oscar Winners for 1938?

The 10th Academy Awards ceremony was held on March 10, 1938, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, honoring films released during 1937. Bob Burns hosted. The Life of Emile Zola won Best Picture. Spencer Tracy won Best Actor for Captains Courageous, the first of two consecutive wins in that category. Luise Rainer won Best Actress for The Good Earth, her second consecutive victory, making her the first performer to win back-to-back Best Actress awards.

Disney’s The Old Mill won the first-ever Best Animated Short Film award, the first time an animated short received official recognition at the ceremony.

An impostor accepted the Best Supporting Actress award on behalf of Alice Brady, who was absent with a broken ankle. The Oscar was never delivered to Brady. The impostor’s identity and the whereabouts of the statuette have never been established, making it one of the stranger unsolved cases in Academy Awards history.

At the following year’s ceremony in February 1939, George Bernard Shaw received an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for Pygmalion, released in 1938. Shaw had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, making him the only person in history to hold both honors. He reportedly tried to refuse the Oscar before being talked into accepting.

Walt Disney also received a special Honorary Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: one full-sized statuette and seven miniature ones. The presenter was Shirley Temple, then ten years old.

Firsts, Inventions, and Wonders of 1938

Ruth Graves Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie at her Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, by breaking up a Nestle chocolate bar and adding the pieces to a standard butter cookie recipe. She expected them to melt into the dough. They held their shape. Nestle later acquired the rights to the Toll House name in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate, which remains one of the better licensing deals in culinary history.

In 1938, fishermen off the coast of South Africa caught a living coelacanth, a species of fish believed to have gone extinct approximately 65 million years ago. It was identified by curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who contacted scientist J.L.B. Smith. Smith later described the moment he confirmed the identification as the most significant event of his scientific life. The coelacanth is more closely related to reptiles and mammals than to most modern fish. A second population was not discovered until 1997, off the coast of Indonesia.

Rudolf Caracciola drove a Mercedes-Benz W125 at 268 mph (432 km/h) on a closed section of the German Autobahn in 1938. The record has never been broken on a German public road and remains among the highest speeds ever recorded on a public highway anywhere in the world.

John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor already credited with the first working television demonstration, demonstrated color television in London’s West End in 1938. Commercial viability was still two decades away, but the proof of concept was established.

Samsung was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chul in Daegu, Korea, as a small trading company dealing primarily in dried fish, groceries, and noodles. Electronics were still several decades away.

Scrabble was created in 1938 by Alfred Mosher Butts, an unemployed architect who spent years refining the tile distribution by analyzing letter frequency in the New York Times. The game sat largely unnoticed until 1952, when the president of Macy’s played it on vacation, was surprised to find his store did not carry it, and placed a large order. Within two years, four million sets had been sold.

John Deering, a convicted murderer, agreed to be monitored by an electrocardiogram during his execution in 1938 so that the effects on the human heart could be observed and recorded. The resulting data contributed to medical understanding of cardiac response to extreme physiological stress.

Pop Culture Facts and History

Superman made his first appearance in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938. The character was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two teenagers from Cleveland who had been trying to sell the concept to newspaper syndicates since 1933. The issue sold out immediately. Graded copies have since sold at auction for over three million dollars, making Action Comics #1 the most valuable comic book in the world.

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds on CBS, formatted as a series of emergency news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. A portion of the audience that tuned in after the opening disclaimer took it literally. The extent of the panic has been disputed ever since. Many media historians argue that newspaper reporters exaggerated the hysteria in their coverage to discredit radio as a competing news medium. The real number of people who genuinely believed Martians had landed was probably far smaller than the headlines suggested. It made for a better story the other way.

The Addams Family debuted in 1938 as single-panel cartoons in The New Yorker, drawn by Charles Addams. The characters had no names at the time. Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, and the rest would not be named until the 1964 television series.

National Donut Day was established on June 1, 1938, by the Salvation Army to honor the “Doughnut Dollies,” women volunteers who served doughnuts to American soldiers in France during World War I. The holiday predates the modern donut chain industry’s enthusiasm for it by several decades.

The BBC broadcast its first multi-episode television drama, a crime series called Telecrime, in 1938. After five episodes, the show went on a seven-year hiatus due to World War II and resumed in 1946, when the remaining twelve episodes aired. It holds the distinction of having the longest production hiatus in television history, through absolutely no fault of its own.

Helen Hulick, a Los Angeles kindergarten teacher who had witnessed a burglary, was jailed for five days for appearing in court wearing slacks. The judge had already rescheduled her appearance once and warned her. She came back in slacks anyway. Her response to sentencing: “I’ll come back in slacks, and if he puts me in jail, I hope it will help to free women forever of anti-slackism.” It eventually did, though it took longer than it should have.

Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazi government, Germany’s highest civilian honor for non-citizens, along with a personal note from Adolf Hitler, who had kept a portrait of Ford in his office for years and cited him in Mein Kampf. Ford accepted without apparent reservations.

The diamond engagement ring as a cultural expectation was largely the product of a 1938 advertising campaign by the De Beers Diamond Group, developed to address slumping sales during the Depression. The subsequent “A Diamond Is Forever” tagline, introduced in 1947, completed the work. It remains one of the most effective pieces of manufactured tradition in commercial history.

Assassin’s Creed drew its central philosophy and the concept of the Assassin Brotherhood from Alamut, a 1938 Slovenian novel by Vladimir Bartol about the historical figure Hassan-i Sabbah. The game’s developers have cited the novel as a direct source.

After the real von Trapp family fled Austria following the Anschluss in 1938, the Nazis converted their abandoned home into the personal headquarters of Heinrich Himmler.

The US Assistant Secretary of the Interior ended the Cherry Tree Rebellion protest in Washington DC by serving the 150 women demonstrators free, never-ending cups of coffee. A collective bathroom break eventually dissolved the protest. History does not record whether anyone considered this a victory.

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 prohibited confectionery products containing embedded toys or trinkets unless the object had functional value. The law essentially banned the sale of any candy with a prize baked inside. Kinder Eggs remained a point of contention at the US border for decades afterward.

Politics in 1938

The town of Milton, Washington, elected a Republican named Boston Curtis as precinct committeeman, only to discover afterward that Boston Curtis was a mule. The Democratic mayor, Kenneth Simmons, had entered the animal on the ballot to demonstrate that voters often have no idea who they are supporting. The mule won with 51 votes, ran no campaign, offered no platform, and signed his filing papers with a hoofprint. The mayor witnessed the signature. No charges were filed.

Nobel Prize Winners in 1938

Physics was awarded to Enrico Fermi, who accepted the prize in Stockholm and did not return to Italy. He used the trip as cover to emigrate to the United States with his Jewish wife, Laura, escaping Mussolini’s racial laws. Within four years he was in Chicago, leading the team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor.

Chemistry went to Richard Kuhn for his work on carotenoids and vitamins. Kuhn was initially ordered by the Nazi government to refuse the prize, though he accepted it after the war ended.

Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Corneille Jean François Heymans of Belgium for his discovery of the role played by the sinus and aortic mechanisms in the regulation of respiration.

Literature went to Pearl S. Buck, the third woman to receive the prize and the first American woman. Her Nobel lecture addressed the dual literary traditions she had absorbed as an American writer raised in China.

Peace was awarded to the Nansen International Office for Refugees in Geneva, established to assist the millions of people displaced by World War I and its aftermath. The organization was dissolved the following year as the scale of displacement from the approaching new conflict made its mission effectively impossible.

Broadway in 1938

Hellzapoppin opened on September 22, 1938, at the Winter Garden Theatre, a revue built around comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. It ran until December 17, 1941, clocking 1,404 performances and holding the record for the longest-running Broadway show for several years. The production was deliberately chaotic, constantly breaking the fourth wall, planting performers in the audience, and changing the material almost nightly. No two performances were quite the same.

Popular and Best-Selling Books of 1938

Action at Aquila by Hervey Allen
All This, and Heaven Too by Rachel Field
And Tell of Time by Laura Krey
The Citadel by A.J. Cronin
The Mortal Storm by Phyllis Bottome
My Son, My Son! by Howard Spring
Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Sports Champions of 1938

World Series: The New York Yankees swept the Chicago Cubs four games to none, their third consecutive championship. The Cubs had not won a World Series since 1908 and would not win again for another 78 years.

NFL Champions: The New York Giants defeated the Green Bay Packers 23-17 at the Polo Grounds. It was the Giants’ second NFL title of the decade.

Stanley Cup: The Chicago Blackhawks defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs three games to one. It was a notable upset, as Toronto had been the heavy favorite entering the series.

U.S. Open Golf: Ralph Guldahl won his second consecutive U.S. Open title, one of only four players in history to accomplish the feat.

U.S. Open Tennis: J. Donald Budge won the men’s title, and Alice Marble won the women’s, both Americans, at a time when American dominance of the tournament was not yet guaranteed.

Wimbledon: Don Budge won the men’s title, and Helen Wills Moody won the women’s. Budge’s 1938 season stands as one of the most dominant in tennis history. He won all four major championships that year, the first player ever to accomplish what is now called the Grand Slam.

NCAA Football Champions: TCU, led by Davey O’Brien, who won the Heisman Trophy that year and remains one of the smallest players ever to do so at 5 feet 7 inches and 150 pounds.

Kentucky Derby: Lawrin, trained by Ben Jones for owner Herbert Woolf, won in a time of 2:04.8. It was the first Kentucky Derby victory for trainer Jones, who would go on to win five more.

FIFA World Cup: Italy defended its title, defeating Hungary 4-2 in the final in Paris. It was the second consecutive World Cup victory for Italy and the last until 1982.

Boston Marathon: Leslie S. Pawson won in 2:35:34, his second Boston Marathon victory. He would win a third in 1941.

On September 18, 1938, the Chicago Bears defeated the Green Bay Packers 2-0, one of only five NFL games in history to end with that score. The complete list: Akron Pros 2, Buffalo All-Americans 0 (November 29, 1923); Kansas City Cowboys 2, Buffalo Rangers 0 (November 21, 1926); Frankford Yellow Jackets 2, Green Bay Packers 0 (November 29, 1928); Green Bay Packers 2, Chicago Bears 0 (October 16, 1932); Chicago Bears 2, Green Bay Packers 0 (September 18, 1938). The Bears and Packers account for three of the five, which says something about the nature of that rivalry.

Frequently Asked Questions About 1938

Q: When did Superman first appear?
A: Superman debuted in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938, published by Detective Comics. The character was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster of Cleveland, Ohio. They had been trying to sell the concept to newspaper syndicates since 1933.

Q: Did the War of the Worlds broadcast really cause a mass panic?
A: The extent of the panic was significantly overstated. Most radio listeners knew it was a drama program. Many media historians have argued that newspaper reporters, threatened by radio as a competing news medium, deliberately amplified the hysteria in their coverage. A genuine panic occurred in isolated areas, but the national hysteria narrative was largely a newspaper invention.

Q: What was the first federal minimum wage?
A: The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set the first federal minimum wage at 25 cents an hour, with a maximum workweek of 44 hours. It was signed by President Roosevelt and took effect on October 24, 1938.

Q: Who won the 1938 World Series? A: The New York Yankees defeated the Chicago Cubs four games to none, their third consecutive championship and seventh overall.

Q: Where does the word “gaslighting” come from?
A: The term derives from the 1938 British stage play Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates his wife into doubting her own perception of reality by secretly dimming the gas lights and denying any change. The 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman brought the concept to a much wider audience.

Q: What was the fastest speed ever recorded on the German Autobahn?
A: Rudolf Caracciola reached 268 mph (432 km/h) in a Mercedes-Benz W125 on a closed Autobahn section in 1938. The record has never been surpassed on a German public road.

Q: Who was Boston Curtis?
A: Boston Curtis was a mule who was elected Republican precinct committeeman in Milton, Washington in 1938, having been placed on the ballot by the town’s Democratic mayor to demonstrate that voters often do not know who they are supporting. The mule won by 51 votes, offered no platform, and signed his filing papers with a hoofprint.

In a year when Superman arrived in print, a radio drama about Martians sent people to their phones, a mule won a primary, and the world’s fastest car hit 268 miles an hour on a German highway, 1938 managed to be simultaneously absurd and ominous in almost equal measure. The people paying attention knew what was coming. The ones who weren’t had a mule to vote for.

More 1938 Facts & History Resources:

Most Popular Baby Names (BabyCenter.com)
Popular and Notable Books (popculture.us)
Broadway Shows that Opened in 1938
1938 Calendar, courtesy of Time and Date.com
Fact Monster
The Roosevelt Recession (1937-1938)
1930s, Infoplease.com World History
1938 in Movies (according to IMDB)
Retrowaste Vintage Culture
1930s Slang
Wikipedia 1938
WW II Timeline from Brown University