Popular films
included:
Buck Pirates starring Abbott
and
Costello
Citizen Kane directed by and
starring Orson Wells
Dumbo
by Walt Disney
The Maltese Falcon directed by John
Huston and
starring Humphrey Bogart
Meet John Doe directed by Frank
Capra
Suspicion directed by
Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary
Grant and Joan Fontaine
The Two-Faced Woman starring Greta
Garbo.
Fiction included: Edna Ferber’s Saratoga Trunk, F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our
Life, Carson
McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Vladimir Nabokov’s The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight, William Saroyan’s Fables,
and
Marguerite Steen’s The Sun Is My Undoing.
Popular songs included: “Aurora” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” by The
Andrews Sisters, “Everything Happens to Me” by Tommy Dorsey with Frank
Sinatra,
“Hawaiian Sunset” by Sammy Kaye with Marty McKenna, “The Hut-Sut Song”
by
Freddie Martin and his Orchestra, “I Don’t Want To Set The World On
Fire”
by The Mills Brothers, “This Love of Mine” by Tommy Dorsey with Frank
Sinatra,
and “When My Blue Moon Turns Gold Again” by Gene Autry.
Rosie the
Riveter, named for Rosina Bonavita, became the emblem of
female factory workers.
December 7: Japan
bombed Pearl
Harbor, Hawaii. The next day President Roosevelt signed a
declaration of war against Japan.
Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen won first prize in the Museum of Modern
Art competition for functional furniture.
College women and debutantes went hatless.
January: New York mayor Fiorella H.
La Guardia sponsored the press event, “New York Fashion Futures.”
March 17: The National Gallery of
Art was opened in Washington D.C.
June 25: President Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 8802 which banned racial discrimination in the defense
industries
and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee.