1949 History, Fun Facts, and Trivia

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device, and the Doomsday Clock moved to three minutes to midnight. NATO was founded. The Berlin Airlift, which had been supplying West Berlin since June 1948, was still ongoing. George Orwell published 1984. The 45 RPM record was introduced. Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway. The first Emmy Awards were presented at a Hollywood athletic club. Wile E. Coyote chased the Road Runner for the first time. The White House was gutted to its outer walls and rebuilt. A 3-year-old girl fell into a well in California, and the rescue attempt became the first major live television news event. It was a year in which the Cold War settled into its long, permanent configuration and popular culture began assembling the tools it would use for the next decade.

Quick Facts from 1949

• World-Changing Events: NATO was founded on April 4, 1949, binding the United States to the defense of Western Europe; the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device in August, ending the American atomic monopoly and moving the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight
• Top Song: Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend) by Vaughn Monroe was the best-performing single of the year on the Billboard Year-End chart
• Influential Songs: Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific and Baby, It’s Cold Outside
• Must-See Movies: The Third Man, Adam’s Rib, White Heat, Twelve O’Clock High, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Mighty Joe Young
• Most Famous Person in America: Bob Hope, whose combination of film work, radio, and USO tours had made him one of the most recognized entertainers in the country
• Notable Books: 1984 by George Orwell
• Price of 1 Pound of Bacon: 49 cents
• US Life Expectancy: Males: 65.2 years / Females: 70.7 years
• The Funny Duo: Abbott and Costello
• The Funny Guy: Milton Berle
• Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Ox, associated with diligence, persistence, and endurance — qualities required for surviving a year this consequential
• Doomsday Clock: 3 minutes to midnight — the closest it had been since its creation
• The Habits: Wearing argyle socks, watching Death of a Salesman on Broadway
• The Conversation: Did you hear the Soviets have the bomb? And have you seen Death of a Salesman?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1949

Girls: Linda, Mary, Patricia, Barbara, Susan Boys: James, Robert, John, William, Michael

Linda remained at the top for girls, having risen from relative obscurity to dominance during the 1940s. James held the top spot for boys. William had climbed back into the top five — a name with the kind of deep cultural roots that keep it circulating across centuries. Michael was rising steadily toward the dominance it would establish in the 1950s.

Fashion Icons and Sex Symbols of 1949

Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Martine Carol, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Lana Turner

Rita Hayworth had married Prince Aly Khan in May 1949, generating the kind of press coverage that made the marriage of a Hollywood actress to a European royal feel like an international event. Marilyn Monroe was a contract player at 20th Century Fox, doing small roles and building toward the commercial breakthrough that was still several years away. Hedy Lamarr had not only Samson and Delilah in theaters but held a patent, co-developed with composer George Antheil during the war, for a radio guidance system using frequency hopping — the technology that underlies modern WiFi and Bluetooth.

The Quotes

“Meep meep!” — the Road Runner, who made his debut in Fast and Furry-ous on September 17, 1949, and whose vocalization has been transcribed as both “meep meep” and “beep beep” in subsequent discussion; the Road Runner himself has never clarified

“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” — James Cagney as Cody Jarrett in White Heat, one of the most theatrical exit lines in American crime cinema, delivered as the character detonates himself atop a flaming oil tank

“What a dump.” — Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest, a line so distinctive in delivery that Edward Albee used it as a recurring reference in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and a generation of audiences who had never seen Beyond the Forest knew the line from Albee

Time Magazine’s Man of the Year

Winston Churchill, for the publication of the first volume of his six-volume The Second World War memoir and for his continued international prominence as a statesman in opposition, was the Leader of the Opposition in Britain, having lost the 1945 general election despite leading the country to victory. The recognition acknowledged both his historical significance and his continuing influence on Western strategic thinking at the dawn of the Cold War.

Miss America

Miss America: Jacque Mercer, Litchfield, Arizona

We Lost in 1949

Buddy Clark, the singer who had been one of the most popular radio voices of the 1940s and whose recordings of Linda and How Are Things in Glocca Morra had made him one of the best-known vocalists in America, died on October 1, 1949, at age 37, in a plane crash in Beverly Hills when the small aircraft he was a passenger in crashed on approach to landing. He had been traveling to a football game.

Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, died August 16, 1949, at age 48, five days after being struck by a drunk driver while crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta. She had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Gone with the Wind had sold approximately 8 million copies by the time of her death and has sold approximately 30 million since. She had published no other novel.

America in 1949 — The Context

Harry Truman’s second inauguration on January 20, 1949, was all the more remarkable because virtually no one in the political establishment had expected it. Every major poll had predicted that Republican Thomas Dewey would defeat Truman in the 1948 election; the Chicago Tribune famously printed its early edition with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman won 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. He held up the Tribune front page the following morning in one of the most satisfying gestures in American political history.

The Berlin Airlift, which had begun June 24, 1948, when the Soviet Union blockaded all ground access to West Berlin, was still ongoing when 1949 began. Allied aircraft had been flying in food, fuel, and supplies for seven months, completing approximately 200,000 flights over the course of the airlift. The Soviets lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949, acknowledging that the airlift had succeeded. The airlift was the first major test of Western resolve in the Cold War and established the willingness to bear significant cost in defense of West Berlin.

NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — was founded on April 4, 1949, when 12 nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, committing each to treat an attack on any member as an attack on all. The founding members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty transformed American foreign policy from its traditional preference for non-entanglement in European affairs to a permanent commitment to European security.

The Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device — designated RDS-1 by the Soviets, nicknamed “Joe 1” by the Americans — on August 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. President Truman announced the Soviet test to the American public on September 23. The American nuclear monopoly, which had been the central strategic advantage of the postwar period, was over. The Doomsday Clock moved from seven minutes to three minutes to midnight. The arms race that would define the next four decades had begun.

The Cold War’s Escalation

The fall of China to Communist forces was one of the year’s defining geopolitical events. Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army had been fighting the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek since 1946; by 1949, the Communist forces had effectively won. Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. The “loss” of China — as it was described in American political discourse — combined with the Soviet nuclear test generated a political crisis for the Truman administration that McCarthy would exploit beginning the following year.

The Berlin Airlift’s successful conclusion in May 1949 was a significant Western victory, demonstrating that the Soviets could be resisted through patience and logistics rather than military confrontation. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was proclaimed on May 23, 1949. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was proclaimed on October 7. The division of Germany was formalized.

Pop Culture Facts and History

1984 by George Orwell was published June 8, 1949, a month before Orwell died of tuberculosis. The novel, set in a totalitarian state called Oceania, where the ruling Party maintains power through constant surveillance, doublethink, and the rewriting of history, was written by a man who knew he was dying. Orwell had worked on it while bedridden on the Scottish island of Jura. The concepts it introduced — Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the memory hole, Room 101, the Two Minutes Hate — entered the English language immediately and have never left. Orwell died January 21, 1950.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller opened February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre in New York City, directed by Elia Kazan, with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The play ran for 742 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and has been produced continuously around the world since its premiere. Miller’s portrayal of a man who has built his life on a false premise — that personal attractiveness and likeability are sufficient for commercial success — was immediately understood as both a critique of American capitalism and a universal study of self-delusion. The salesman who could not stop selling himself a story he had stopped believing.

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner made their debut in the animated short Fast and Furry-ous on September 17, 1949, directed by Chuck Jones. The relationship between the two characters — the Coyote’s infinite resourcefulness in pursuit of prey who defeats him through speed alone, the Coyote’s increasing reliance on Acme Corporation products that invariably malfunction — was a parody of both cinematic chases and American consumer faith in technology. The shorts have been analyzed as Beckettian absurdism, as economic allegory, and as slapstick. Jones maintained they were slapstick.

The Kathy Fiscus rescue attempt, April 8-9, 1949, was the first major live television news event. Three-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell into an abandoned well shaft in San Marino, California. Television cameras from KTLA in Los Angeles filmed the rescue attempt continuously for 27 hours, the first time an American audience watched a live news event unfold in real time on television. Approximately 100,000 viewers watched, an extraordinary number for 1949. Kathy was found dead; she had likely died within hours of the fall. The broadcast established television’s capacity to hold an audience through a live emergency and foreshadowed the medium’s transformation of American news consumption.

The Road Runner cartoon’s debut introduced the sound effect — “Beep beep” or “Meep meep” — that became one of the most imitated sounds in American popular culture. Chuck Jones imposed strict rules on the Road Runner and Coyote cartoons: the Road Runner never left the road, the Coyote was always smarter than the Road Runner except in terms of results, and all Acme products functioned correctly except when used by the Coyote.

The 45 RPM single, introduced by RCA Victor on March 31, 1949, was the format around which popular music consumption would organize itself for the next three decades. The smaller, more durable disc replaced the fragile 78 RPM shellac record and the format was better suited to containing one song per side, making it the natural medium for the single as the commercial unit of popular music. The first commercially released 45 was You’re Adorable by Perry Como.

The “Hollywoodland” sign — built in 1923 on Mount Lee as an advertisement for a housing development — had its last four letters removed in 1949, officially becoming the “Hollywood” sign. The sign had been built to last only 18 months and had been deteriorating for years; the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce took it over and restored the remaining letters. The “land” had been advertising a neighborhood. The truncated version advertised a mythology.

The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, was released in Britain in September 1949. Set in postwar Vienna, its cinematography — canted angles, deep shadows, wet cobblestones — and Anton Karas’s zither score created one of the most distinctive visual and aural environments in cinema. Orson Welles arrived on set for his pivotal role relatively late in production, delivered what became the film’s most quoted speech — about the cuckoo clock and the Borgias — which he reportedly wrote himself, and left. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Frank McNamara, a New York credit manager, had dinner with clients at a Manhattan restaurant in 1949 and realized he had no cash to pay the bill — his wife paid on his behalf. The experience inspired him to create a card that could be used for restaurant charges without cash. He founded the Diners Club in early 1950; the first cards, made of cardboard, were sent to 200 members. The modern credit card industry traces its origin to that forgotten wallet.

The National Basketball Association was formed in August 1949 when the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League merged, combining their franchises into a single 17-team league. The BAA had been founded in 1946; the NBL had operated since 1937. The merger rationalized a fragmented landscape and established the framework that produced the modern NBA.

Red Byron won the first NASCAR Strictly Stock Series championship in 1949, having won two of the season’s eight races. The series was founded by Bill France Sr. in 1948; the first race was held on June 19, 1949, at Charlotte Speedway. Byron’s championship established a competitive framework that would grow into the most-watched motorsport series in American history.

Nobel Prize Winners in 1949

Physics was awarded to Yukawa Hideki of Japan, the first Japanese Nobel laureate, for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces — theoretical work completed in 1935 that was confirmed by the experimental discovery of the pi meson in 1947.

Chemistry honored William Francis Giauque for his contributions to chemical thermodynamics, particularly regarding the behavior of substances at extremely low temperatures.

Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Walter Rudolf Hess for his discovery of the functional organization of the interbrain as a coordinator of the activities of the internal organs, and to António Egas Moniz for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses — the procedure known as the prefrontal lobotomy. The prize to Moniz has been criticized in the decades since as recognizing a procedure that was subsequently found to cause severe permanent neurological damage in most patients. More than 40,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States between 1936 and the 1970s.

Literature recognized William Faulkner of the United States for his powerful and artistically distinctive contribution to the modern American novel. Faulkner’s primary work — The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August — had been published in the late 1920s and 1930s; by 1949, most of his major novels were out of print. The Nobel brought them back into print and secured his canonical position.

Peace was awarded to John Boyd Orr of Britain, for his scientific research into nutrition and his work as the first Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, serving from 1945 to 1948.

1949 Toys and Christmas Gifts

Silly Putty, Candy Land, Kewpie dolls, Cootie, and Clue — the latter having debuted in the United Kingdom in 1948 and arriving in the United States in 1949 — rounded out a holiday season that was beginning to reflect postwar consumer prosperity. Silly Putty was developed by General Electric engineer James Wright in 1943 as a synthetic rubber substitute; it had no obvious industrial application but was distributed as a novelty until advertising consultant Peter Hodgson saw its commercial potential, packaged it in plastic eggs, and sold 250,000 units through the Neiman Marcus catalog.

Broadway in 1949

Death of a Salesman, as noted, was the theatrical event of the year and the decade.

South Pacific, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, opened April 7, 1949, at the Majestic Theatre and ran for 1,925 performances — the second-longest run in Broadway history at that time. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making it the second musical to do so after Of Thee I Sing in 1932. Some Enchanted Evening and I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair became standards. The show’s subplot, involving an American naval officer’s discomfort with his French colleague’s mixed-race children, addressed racial prejudice directly — the character Bloody Mary, a Tonkinese woman, was explicitly not the romantic lead, and the show argued that racism was taught rather than innate, a position that generated both praise and controversy.

Best Film Oscar Winner

Hamlet, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, won Best Picture at the 21st Academy Awards on March 24, 1949, for the 1948 film year. It was the first non-American film to win Best Picture. Olivier also won Best Actor. The film’s decision to present the play in a more cinematic than theatrical manner — using close-ups, a roving camera, and the visual language of film rather than simply recording a stage performance — established an approach to Shakespeare adaptation that subsequent filmmakers have either followed or deliberately rejected.

Top Movies of 1949

1. Samson and Delilah
2. Battleground
3. The Sands of Iwo Jima
4. I Was a Male War Bride
5. Twelve O’Clock High
6. The Heiress
7. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
8. The Third Man
9. White Heat
10. Adam’s Rib

Samson and Delilah, the Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic, was the year’s highest-grossing film. Twelve O’Clock High, directed by Henry King and starring Gregory Peck as a World War II bomber group commander under extreme psychological strain, is considered one of the finest war films ever made and has been used in military leadership training programs for decades. White Heat gave James Cagney the role of Cody Jarrett, a psychopathic gangster with an Oedipus complex, in what most critics consider his finest late performance. The Third Man was the critical leader and is now consistently ranked among the greatest films in cinema history.

Most Popular TV Shows of 1949

Television in 1949 was still a regional medium; the first coast-to-coast television broadcast would not occur until 1951. Programming was concentrated in major cities. The shows were watched with intensity, partly because the medium was new and partly because the programming was genuinely innovative. Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle was the dominant draw; it drew viewers to the medium itself, with appliance stores reporting that television sets sold faster on Tuesday nights, when Berle’s show aired, than on any other night.

Sports Champions of 1949

World Series: The New York Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers four games to one, the first of five consecutive World Series championships for the Yankees — a dynasty that lasted until 1954. Casey Stengel managed the Yankees to his first championship in his first season. Joe Page pitched brilliantly in relief throughout the Series.

NFL Champions: The Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Los Angeles Rams 14-0 on December 18, 1949, in Los Angeles, in a game played in a torrential rainstorm. The Eagles had also won the 1948 championship in a blizzard; their consecutive championships, both in extreme weather, produced the nickname “the weather team.” Steve Van Buren, the Eagles’ primary offensive threat, had a near-perfect record in championship games.

NBA Champions: The Minneapolis Lakers defeated the Washington Capitols two games to none in the BAA Finals — the last BAA championship, as the league merged with the NBL in August 1949 to form the NBA. George Mikan was the dominant center of his era, helping make the Lakers the first dynasty of what would become the NBA.

Stanley Cup: The Toronto Maple Leafs defeated the Detroit Red Wings four games to none, winning their third consecutive championship. Turk Broda was the goaltender. The Leafs’ three-peat established them as the dominant franchise of the postwar era.

U.S. Open Golf: Cary Middlecoff won at Medinah Country Club in Illinois, defeating a field that included Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. Middlecoff was a dentist who had turned professional in 1947 and won the U.S. Open in just his second full season.

U.S. Open Tennis: Richard “Pancho” Gonzales won the men’s title, and Margaret Osborne duPont won the women’s. Gonzales, who had grown up in Los Angeles and taught himself to play on public courts, was one of the first American tennis stars not to come from the country club tradition. He defended his U.S. Open title the following year and then turned professional, spending most of his peak career outside the Grand Slam circuit.

Wimbledon: Ted Schroeder of the United States won the men’s title, and Louise Brough won the women’s.

NCAA Football: Notre Dame, under Frank Leahy, won the national championship with an undefeated 10-0 season. The Irish had also won in 1947 and 1946; their dynasty under Leahy was the dominant program of the postwar era.

NCAA Basketball: Kentucky, under Adolph Rupp, won the national championship with a perfect 32-2 record. Alex Groza and Ralph Beard led the team. The following year, several Kentucky players were implicated in a point-shaving scandal that suspended the program for the 1952-53 season.

Kentucky Derby: Ponder, trained by Ben Jones and ridden by Steve Brooks, won the Derby and came close to the Triple Crown before finishing second in the Preakness.

Frequently Asked Questions About 1949

Q: What was the significance of the Soviet nuclear test?
A: The Soviet Union’s detonation of its first nuclear device on August 29, 1949, ended the American nuclear monopoly that had existed since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Doomsday Clock moved from seven to three minutes to midnight. The arms race that would define the Cold War began immediately. The Truman administration’s response included the decision to develop the hydrogen bomb, announced on January 31, 1950.

Q: What was the Berlin Airlift?
A: Beginning June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded all ground access to West Berlin, attempting to force the Western Allies out. Rather than abandon the city or attempt to force the blockade militarily, the United States, United Kingdom, and France supplied West Berlin entirely by air for 11 months — approximately 200,000 flights delivering 2.3 million tons of supplies. The Soviets lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. The airlift was the first major test of Western resolve in the Cold War.

Q: Why was Death of a Salesman significant?
A: Arthur Miller’s play, which opened February 10, 1949, used the story of a failing salesman’s psychological collapse to examine the gap between the American Dream’s promises and its reality. Willy Loman’s belief that personal charisma and being well-liked were sufficient for success was presented as both an individual tragedy and a cultural critique. The play won the Pulitzer Prize, ran 742 performances, and has been produced continuously for over 75 years.

Q: What was NATO, and why was it founded?
A: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded on April 4, 1949, with 12 founding member nations committing to collective defense — an attack on any member would be treated as an attack on all. It was founded in direct response to the Soviet threat to Western Europe, represented by the Berlin Blockade in 1948 and the Soviet nuclear test in 1949. The treaty represented a permanent break from American non-entanglement in European affairs.

Q: What did 1984 predict?
A: George Orwell’s novel, published June 8, 1949, depicted a totalitarian state that maintained power through continuous surveillance, the manipulation of language (Newspeak), the rewriting of history, and the destruction of independent thought. The concepts it named — Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the memory hole, unperson — have been applied to real political situations so frequently in the decades since that they have become standard political vocabulary. Orwell was dying of tuberculosis when he finished it; he died seven months after publication.

In a year when the Soviet bomb ended the American nuclear monopoly, NATO was founded, 1984 was published, Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway, the 45 RPM record arrived, Wile E. Coyote chased the Road Runner for the first time, and a 3-year-old girl’s rescue attempt became the first live television news event, 1949 compressed into twelve months the essential framework of the half-century that followed. The Cold War was fully formed. Television was learning what it could do. George Orwell had described the worst-case scenario clearly enough that it has been cited in political arguments ever since. The Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight. It had not been that close before, and would not be again until 2018.