1931 History, Facts, and Trivia

Quick Facts from 1931

Amazing Event: The Empire State Building, 102 stories, 1,454 feet to the tip of its antenna, constructed in 13 months by a workforce of up to 3,400 men daily, opened on May 1, 1931. It was immediately nicknamed the “Empty State Building” by New Yorkers because Depression-era economics meant few tenants could afford to lease space. It did not become profitable until 1950.
Top Songs: Minnie the Moocher by Cab Calloway, and the standards As Time Goes By and Dancing in the Dark
Must-See Movies: City Lights, Frankenstein, Dracula, M, The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Monkey Business
The Most Famous Person in America: Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights was his masterwork, or Babe Ruth, who was simply always Babe Ruth
The Hottest New Movie Star: Jean Harlow
Notable Books: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck and Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Man’s tuxedo: $25.00; loaf of bread: 8 cents; new Ford car: $430; average house: $6,790
U.S. Life Expectancy: Males 59.4 years; Females 63.1 years
The Funny Observational Humorist: Will Rogers
Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Goat, associated with creativity, gentleness, and adaptability — the country needed all three
The Conversation: Did you hear they finally made The Star-Spangled Banner the anthem? And what do you think about Al Capone?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1931

Girls: Mary, Betty, Dorothy, Barbara, Joan
Boys: Robert, James, John, William, Richard

The Stars

Josephine Baker, Joan Blondell, Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Dolores Del Rio, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Thelma Todd

Time Magazine’s Man of the Year

Pierre Laval, the French Prime Minister, was recognized for his role in European diplomacy during a year of escalating international instability

Miss America

No Miss America was crowned in 1931. The pageant remained suspended.

We Lost in 1931

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, the practical electric light bulb, and over 1,000 other patents, died October 18, 1931, at age 84, at his home in West Orange, New Jersey. He had been in poor health for years but continued working. On the night he died, Henry Ford asked that American homes voluntarily dim their electric lights for one minute in tribute to the technology for which Edison was largely responsible. The lights went dim across the country.

Nikola Tesla, his great rival, submitted the only unfavorable notice to the New York Times, describing Edison’s methods as “inefficient in the extreme” and noting that “just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor.” Tesla was not wrong. He was also not gracious.

Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach who had built one of the most celebrated programs in the history of college sports, died March 31, 1931, at age 43, when the Fokker trimotor carrying him crashed in a wheat field near Bazaar, Kansas. His record at Notre Dame was 105-12-5. He had been traveling to Los Angeles to work on a film project. President Hoover called his death “a national loss.”

Anna Pavlova, the Russian prima ballerina who had done more than any single individual to bring classical ballet to worldwide audiences through her touring company, died January 23, 1931, at age 49, in The Hague, of pneumonia.

Born in 1931

James Dean — February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana. He made three films, became one of the most imitated actors of the 20th century, and died at 24.

Toni Morrison — February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. She became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Willie Mays — May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama. He made the greatest catch in baseball history in 1954 and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player ever.

Mikhail Gorbachev — March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Russia. He became the last leader of the Soviet Union and oversaw its dissolution.

America in 1931 — The Context

Herbert Hoover was in the third year of his presidency, and the Depression was deepening. Unemployment was approaching 16% — it had been under 4% in 1929. Over 2,000 banks had failed since the crash. Hoover’s approach — encouraging voluntary cooperation from business, providing loans to banks and corporations through the newly created Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but resisting direct federal relief to individuals — was failing visibly. Hoovervilles, the cardboard and tin shantytowns that ringed every major American city, bore his name as a permanent editorial comment.

The country found what escape it could in the movies — Dracula, Frankenstein, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Jean Harlow, and James Cagney. The gangster film was the genre of the moment because the gangster, whatever his crimes, seemed to be the only person in America doing well.

The Empire State Building

Construction on the Empire State Building began on March 17, 1930. Workers — at peak, 3,400 per day — completed 14 floors per week on average, working in all weather conditions from an open framework 1,000 feet above Midtown Manhattan. A total of 3,400 workers built a 102-story skyscraper in 13 months and 5 days. Five workers died during construction.

President Hoover dedicated the building by pressing a button in the White House on May 1, 1931, which lit it up. The official ceremony was a rare Depression-era display of ambition and achievement. New Yorkers then called it the “Empty State Building” for the next 19 years because so few tenants could afford to rent space. Dirigible moorings at the top were intended as a passenger terminal for transatlantic airships; a single blimp docked there once, briefly. The building did not turn a profit until 1950. It became the most recognized building in the world anyway.

Al Capone

Al Capone, whose Chicago crime organization had grossed an estimated $60 million per year during Prohibition from bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution, was convicted of federal income tax evasion on October 17, 1931, and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. The FBI had spent years trying to connect him to murders and extortion without success. It was IRS agent Frank Wilson and a team of investigators who ultimately found that Capone had never filed income tax returns despite earning millions.

The conviction on tax evasion, not murder, not bootlegging, not extortion, but taxes, was a tactical masterstroke. Capone had assumed he was untouchable because witnesses against him had a habit of disappearing. The IRS’s approach required only documentation of income, not witnesses. Capone began his sentence in Atlanta and was transferred to Alcatraz when it opened in 1934.

Dracula and Frankenstein

Universal Pictures released two films in 1931 that defined horror cinema for a generation and launched a monster franchise that continued for decades.

Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi, opened on February 12, 1931. Lugosi’s Hungarian accent, formal dress, and hypnotic gaze established the visual template for vampires in Western popular culture. The film had been produced as a silent with a sound version shot simultaneously in Spanish, which many film historians consider the superior version.

Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the Monster, opened on November 21, 1931. Karloff’s performance — conveying confusion, longing, and violence through Jack Pierce’s elaborate makeup without dialogue — was more sophisticated than the film’s reputation suggests. The line “It’s alive!” was followed by “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” — the latter censored by a clap of thunder in the original release as blasphemous. Most props used in Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody Young Frankenstein were actual props from the original 1931 film.

The cinematographer for both films — Karl Freund — also shot most of the I Love Lucy episodes twenty years later. The visual grammar of Universal horror films and that of 1950s situation comedy share a direct lineage.

Pop Culture Facts and History

City Lights, written, directed, produced, and starring Charlie Chaplin, was released on January 30, 1931. Chaplin had refused to make a talking picture despite the industry’s complete conversion to sound, which began with The Jazz Singer in 1927. He considered spoken dialogue a lesser form of cinematic performance. City Lights had a synchronized music-and-sound-effects track but no dialogue. It is his most personally considered film — a love story between the Tramp and a blind flower girl who mistakes him for a millionaire. The final scene, in which the girl’s sight is restored and she recognizes her patron, is considered one of the most affecting endings in film history.

M, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre as a child murderer, was released in Germany on May 11, 1931. It was Lang’s first sound film and one of the first psychological crime thrillers, in which the audience is placed uncomfortably in the perpetrator’s perspective. The whistled Grieg melody that Lorre uses throughout remains one of the most recognizable musical motifs in cinema.

The Public Enemy, released April 23, 1931, starred James Cagney as a small-time criminal who rises to bootlegging success. The scene in which Cagney shoves a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face became one of the most famous moments in early sound cinema and made Cagney a star immediately.

Little Caesar, released January 9, 1931, starring Edward G. Robinson, was the film that established the gangster genre as a major Hollywood category and introduced the now-standard arc of the immigrant criminal who rises and falls by his own violence.

The Star-Spangled Banner was officially designated the national anthem of the United States on March 3, 1931, when President Hoover signed the congressional act into law. The song was written by Francis Scott Key in 1814, based on a poem he composed during the Battle of Baltimore while watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry. It had been widely used as an unofficial anthem but had no legal status until 1931. Its notoriously difficult vocal range has made “America the Beautiful” and “Hail Columbia” persistent alternative candidates, a debate that continues informally.

Nevada legalized gambling on March 19, 1931, becoming the first state to do so. The decision was explicitly economic — the state needed Depression-era revenue. Las Vegas, then a small railroad town, would not begin its transformation into a gambling destination until the late 1930s and 1940s. The 1931 legislation provided the legal foundation for everything that followed.

The Hoover Dam began construction on March 11, 1931, in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border. It required approximately 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to pave a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York. Ninety-six workers died during its construction, which was completed in 1935 — two years ahead of schedule. The dam created Lake Mead, still one of the largest reservoirs in the United States, and provided power and water to the American Southwest.

Jackie Mitchell, a 17-year-old female pitcher, struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession during a New York Yankees exhibition game against the Chattanooga Lookouts on April 2, 1931. Ruth swung and missed three times. Gehrig also struck out. Mitchell had a drop ball that confounded both hitters. The Commissioner of Baseball voided her contract shortly after, declaring baseball “too strenuous” for women. Mitchell went on to pitch in exhibitions and barnstorming events for years.

Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, the painting featuring melting pocket watches draped across a dreamscape, was first exhibited publicly at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris in 1931. It had been painted in approximately two hours on a small canvas. Dalí described being inspired by a piece of melting Camembert cheese. The work subsequently became one of the most recognized paintings in Western art history and the most commonly purchased poster among college students for approximately 50 years.

The American Dream was given its defining expression in 1931 by historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America: “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Adams’ formulation, emphasizing social mobility and individual achievement rather than material acquisition, was the first codified use of the phrase. The phrase had existed informally before Adams; his definition gave it canonical form.

Dick Tracy, the square-jawed detective comic strip by Chester Gould, debuted in the Detroit Mirror on October 4, 1931. It was the first detective comic strip to feature realistic criminal violence and police procedure, and introduced a gallery of grotesquely deformed villains that made it distinctive from every other comic strip of the era.

The Airstream trailer was introduced by Wally Byam in 1931, developed from designs he had published in a magazine. The polished aluminum teardrop shape became one of the most recognizable designs in American product history. Approximately two-thirds of all Airstream trailers ever manufactured are still in use — a durability record few manufactured products can match.

Alka-Seltzer was introduced by the Dr. Miles Medical Company of Elkhart, Indiana, in 1931. It combined aspirin, citric acid, and sodium bicarbonate in an effervescent tablet. Company president Hub Beardsley had noticed that employees at the local newspaper were recovering from colds quickly by taking a combination of aspirin and bicarbonate of soda. He asked his chemist to develop a tablet combining both. Ten billion Alka-Seltzer tablets had been sold by the time the jingle “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” was introduced in 1972.

The Joy of Cooking was self-published by Irma Rombauer in 1931, following her husband’s death. She had no culinary training and financed the printing herself for $3,000. The book found its audience through word of mouth. Bobbs-Merrill acquired it in 1936, and the subsequent expanded editions made it the best-selling American cookbook of the 20th century. It has never gone out of print.The

Times New Roman typeface was commissioned in 1931 by The Times of London, designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. The newspaper wanted a typeface that was both highly legible and efficient in its use of column space. Times New Roman became one of the most widely used typefaces in the world, appearing on hundreds of millions of documents as the default font for word processors decades after Morison designed it.

Mary Elizabeth Frye, an American housewife and florist in Baltimore, Maryland, wrote the poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” in 1931 on the back of a paper bag, inspired by the grief of a young woman whose mother had died in Germany during a time when travel was impossible. Frye never published or copyrighted it, and the poem circulated privately for decades before its authorship was traced. It has become one of the most widely read poems at funerals in the English-speaking world.

CBS began network radio operations in 1931. Little Orphan Annie debuted on the radio. Warner Brothers released the first Merrie Melodies cartoon — Lady, Play Your Mandolin! — on September 19, 1931, beginning the series that produced Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig over the following decade.

Japan invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931, following the Mukden Incident — an explosion on a Japanese-controlled railway that Japanese military officers had staged as a pretext. The invasion established the puppet state of Manchukuo and was the first major act of expansionist aggression that would eventually produce World War II in the Pacific. The League of Nations condemned the invasion. Japan ignored the condemnation.

Jane Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, becoming the first American woman to win it. She had been nominated 91 times before winning. Addams had co-founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 as a settlement house serving immigrant and working-class communities, and had spent four decades working on social reform, women’s rights, and international peace. Sharing the prize with Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler was somewhat anticlimactic by comparison.

Nobel Prize Winners

Physics — not awarded in 1931
Chemistry — Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius for the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods, foundational to the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizers and synthetic fuels
Medicine — Otto Heinrich Warburg for his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme, foundational to cancer biology research; Warburg’s observation that cancer cells preferentially use glycolysis even in the presence of oxygen is still studied
Literature — Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Swedish poet, awarded posthumously, the only posthumous Nobel Prize in Literature ever given; he had declined the prize during his lifetime
Peace — Jane Addams and Nicholas Murray Butler; Addams for her lifelong work in social welfare and international peace; Butler for his work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Broadway in 1931

The Band Wagon opened June 3, 1931, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz, starring Fred and Adele Astaire in their final Broadway appearance together. It introduced Dancing in the Dark and was considered the most sophisticated revue of the decade.

Of Thee I Sing began its pre-Broadway tryouts in 1931 and opened on Broadway in December. The Gershwin musical satire of American politics won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.

The 4th Academy Awards

Cimarron, directed by Wesley Ruggles, won Best Picture at the ceremony on November 10, 1931, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, hosted by Conrad Nagel. It was the first Western to win Best Picture. Marie Dressler won Best Actress for Min and Bill at age 62, a record for the oldest Best Actress winner that stood for decades. Lionel Barrymore won Best Actor for A Free Soul. The ceremony was the first to be broadcast on the radio.

Top Movies of 1931

City Lights
Frankenstein
Dracula
The Public Enemy
Little Caesar
M
Monkey Business
Night Nurse
The Front Page
The Threepenny Opera

Popular and Best-Selling Books of 1931

A White Bird Flying — Bess Streeter Aldrich
Back Street — Fannie Hurst
The Good Earth — Pearl S. Buck
Grand Hotel — Vicki Baum
The Road Back — Erich Maria Remarque
Shadows on the Rock — Willa Cather
Years of Grace — Margaret Ayer Barnes

Biggest Pop Artists of 1931

Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Kate Smith, The Boswell Sisters, Duke Ellington, The Mills Brothers, Rudy Vallee, Ruth Etting, Russ Columbo, Guy Lombardo, Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians

Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher was recorded on January 28, 1931, and became one of the most recognizable performances of the decade. The “hi-de-ho” call-and-response refrain was improvised during a live performance at the Cotton Club when Calloway forgot the lyrics. The improvisation worked so well, he kept it. The song was used in the Betty Boop short Minnie the Moocher in 1932, in which Calloway performed the rotoscoped ghost walrus character, and apparently executed a move that resembles the moonwalk 50 years before Jackson.

The Habits

Going to the movies; listening to the radio; reading the newspaper headlines and putting them back before buying; riding freight trains; standing in bread lines; playing cards at home; and wondering whether things would get better before they got worse.

Sports Champions of 1931

World Series: St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Philadelphia Athletics 4-3; the Cardinals won Games 6 and 7 at home; Pepper Martin hit .500 with five stolen bases in one of the great individual World Series performances
Stanley Cup: Montreal Canadiens defeated the Chicago Blackhawks 3-2
U.S. Open Golf: Billy Burke — won in the longest playoff in U.S. Open history, requiring 72 additional holes over two days after tying the 72-hole regulation
U.S. Open Tennis: Men/Women: H. Ellsworth Vines / Helen Wills Moody
Wimbledon: Men/Women: Sidney Wood / Cilly Aussem; Wood was awarded the title without playing the final when his opponent, Frank Shields, withdrew with an injury
NCAA Football Champions: USC
Kentucky Derby: Twenty Grand, who also won the Belmont Stakes and was the Horse of the Year; his Kentucky Derby time of 2:01.8 stood as the track record for 35 years
Boston Marathon: James Henigan, 2:46:45

Sports Highlight: Jackie Mitchell’s April 2 exhibition game performance, striking out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession as a 17-year-old female pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts, remains one of the most discussed events in baseball history. The Commissioner’s subsequent voiding of her contract was widely understood as an acknowledgment that the moment was too embarrassing to the established order to be left uncommented upon.

FAQs: 1931 History, Facts, and Trivia

Q: How was the Empire State Building built so quickly?
A: By running multiple construction operations simultaneously at different floors, using an army of up to 3,400 workers daily, and prefabricating components off-site for rapid installation. The frame rose at an average rate of 4.5 stories per week. The project was completed in 13 months and 5 days. Five workers died in a construction accident.

Q: How was Al Capone finally convicted? A: On federal income tax evasion charges, after IRS investigators found he had earned millions without filing returns. The FBI had spent years trying to connect him to murders and extortion. The IRS required only documentation of income, not cooperative witnesses. Capone was convicted on October 17, 1931, and sentenced to 11 years.

Q: What happened when Jackie Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig?
A: On April 2, 1931, Mitchell, a 17-year-old female pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts, struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game against the Yankees. The Commissioner of Baseball voided her minor league contract shortly after, on the grounds that baseball was “too strenuous” for women. She continued pitching in exhibitions.

Q: When did The Star-Spangled Banner become the national anthem?
A: March 3, 1931, when President Hoover signed the congressional act designating it officially. The song had existed since 1814 and had been used informally as an anthem for over a century before receiving legal status. Its three-octave range has made it a perpetual challenge for singers and a perpetual point of contention for those who prefer “America the Beautiful.“

Q: What was the “American Dream” in 1931?
A: Historian James Truslow Adams first used and defined the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America, describing it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” His definition emphasized social mobility over material acquisition, a distinction that subsequent usage has not always honored.

Q: What were Dracula and Frankenstein, and why do they matter?
A: Two 1931 Universal Pictures horror films starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, respectively. They established the visual templates for vampire and monster characters in Western popular culture that have persisted in every subsequent generation of horror films, television, literature, and costume choices. Karloff’s Frankenstein makeup and Lugosi’s cape and accent are still the default forms of their respective characters nearly a century later.

Q: What did Nikola Tesla say when Thomas Edison died?
A: He submitted the only critical notice to the New York Times, describing Edison’s methods as “inefficient in the extreme” and noting that theoretical knowledge would have saved Edison “90 percent of the labor.” Tesla was factually accurate and historically ungracious in approximately equal measure.

More 1931 Facts & History Resources:

Most Popular Baby Names (BabyCenter.com)
Popular and Notable Books (popculture.us)
Broadway Shows that Opened in 1931
1931 Calendar, courtesy of Time and Date.com
Fact Monster
The Great Depression Hoover Library
1930s, Infoplease.com World History
1931 in Movies (according to IMDB)
Retrowaste Vintage Culture
1930s Slang
Wikipedia 1931
WW II Timeline