1941 Hit Parade

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.