Claire McCardell’s “popover” dress won the Harper’s Bazaar competition
for the most attractive and practical housedress.
Popular films
included:
Casablanca with Humphrey
Bogart, Ingrid
Bergman and Paul Henreid
Woman of the Year
starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
Yankee Doodle
Dandy
starring James Cagney.
In Which
We Serve
written by Noel
Coward
The Magnificent
Ambersons
directed by Orson Wells
Mrs.
Miniver
starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, directed by
William Wyler
This Gun
For Hire
starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake
General Foods
began supplying instant coffee to the U.S. Army.
Fiction included: Louis Bromfield’s Until the Daybreak,
James Gould Cozzens’s The Just and the Unjust, William
Faulkner’s
Go Down, Moses, Rachel Field’s And Now Tomorrow, Nancy
Hale’s
The Prodigal Woman, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on the
Road,
John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, and Eudora Welty’s The
Robber
Bridegroom.
Popular songs included: “All I Need Is You” by Dinah Shore, “Back
to Donegal” by Bing Crosby, “Daybreak” by Tommy Dorsey with Frank
Sinatra, “Der Fuehrer’s Face” by Spike Jones and his Band, “I Lost My
Sugar in Salt Lake City” by Johnny Mercer, “The Lamplighter’s Serenade”
by Glenn Miller with Ray Eberly, “Lonely River” by Gene Autry, “Lover
Man” by Billie Holiday, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” by
Kay Kyser and his Orchestra, “Strip Polka” by the Andrews Sisters,
“Take Me” by Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra, and “White Christmas” by
Bing Crosby.
The Congress of Racial equality was founded by James Farmer, Bayard
Rustin, and A.J. Muste.
The Committee on Women in World Affairs was founded.
Chemist Louis F. Fieser of Harvard University invented napalm.
January 2: The Office of Civilian
Supply announced that production of all civilian trucks and car
productions would cease during the duration of the war.
February 19: President
Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered the removal of all
Japanese-Americans
on the West Coast to internment camps during the war.
February 8: Mark Rothko held his
first solo exhibition at the Artists’ Gallery in New York.
March 6: The Artists in Exile
exhibit premiered at the Pierre Matisee Gallery in Manhattan.
April 9: Igor Stravinsky’s Circus
Polka debuted with the Ringling Brothers circus with fifty
elephants and
fifty showgirls choreographed by George Balenchine.
December 25: The Motion
Picture
Herald poll indicated that Abbott and Costello were the leading box
office attraction of 1942.