1937

Notable Events of 1937

January 9th: Peru holds long-awaited elections following the conclusion of the country’s Revolution in March 1936, returning a large majority for the Peruvian Communist Party and other left-wing forces.

January 11th: The first issue of Look magazine is published in the UASR.

January 23rd: The “Moscow Trials” begin against 17 prominent members of the Communist Party, accused of plotting to overthrow the Soviet government. In spite of outrage within the UASR, journalistic coverage is restricted to avoid complicating relations.

January 29th: The Good Earth , adapted from Pearl S. Buck’s novel of the same name, is released in the UASR, co-produced by Micheaux Films and Culver City Collective. Starring Anna May Wong, it would be a massive box office success.

January 30th: Norwegian Ingrid Christensen is the first woman to land in Antarctica.

February 3rd: American Foreign Secretary John Reed announces that several Jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, the Dorsey Brothers, and Benny Goodman will make a tour of the Soviet Union to promote the American artform of Jazz. Josef Stalin will attend their opening concert in Moscow.

February 5th: Month-long flooding of the Ohio River devastates areas from Pennsylvania to Illinois. With many workers displaced and construction delayed, the Red Guards is sorely tested, but is able to send aid and support for those displaced.

February 6th: John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men is published, a tragic tale set in the large scale farming communes of California.

February 8th: The Battle of Jarama River begins with an offensive by Republican forces against Nationalists on the other side.

February 11th: The nylon bristled toothbrush, the first commercial use of nylon, goes on sale in some markets.

February 12th: The first ground test of a jet engine is performed by RAF air officer Frank Whittle in Rugby, England. Attending this test is several key figures of Gloster Aircraft Company including designer George Carter, with whom he would develop the first operational jet aircraft.

February 15th: Aviator and businessman Howard Hughes makes a record flight across the Atlantic, going from London to Quebec City. However, while returning over Ireland, his plane malfunctions and crashed. Hughes survives relatively unscathed due to his piloting skills.

February 21st: The Non-Intervention Committee commissioned by the League of Nations attempts to prevent foreign nationals from intervening in Spain. However, as with all directives from the League in regards to the Spanish conflict, this is ignored by both Comintern and the Axis. France does close its Spanish border to prevent fighters from entering.

February 22nd: Orson Welles brings a new version of Julius Caesar , complete with new fascist overtones to the stage for the first time, garnering praise and condemnation from fascist nations.

February 26th: Prince Chichibu rises to the position of Kanpaku , nominally chief advisor for the Emperor but effectively first secretary and regent. He will now be leading Japan.

February 28th: The North Atlantic Defense District is established, a joint command tasked with the defense of the American North Atlantic coast in the event of war with Britain. The District units Army/Navy Coastal Batteries, Navy littoral craft, air defense troops, maritime strike aircraft, and local Red Guards/Militia forces under a single hierarchy. Additional districts, covering the Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic Coasts follow later.

March 1st: The first issue of the anthology comic book Detective Comics is published by the Syndicated Features. It features Slam Bradley, the creation of Cleveland-based cartoonists Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

March 4th: KMT General Secretary Wang Jinwei openly raises the question of replacing Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi as commander-in-chief, following his bungled campaign against Guizhou, relying only on natively trained troops.

March 19th: The papal encyclical Divini Redemptoris is published, strongly condemning communism, and causing further alienation among American Catholics.

March 21st: The highly publicized marriage between King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson takes place, with some token opposition both from within the Royal Family and from many on the left. Simpson takes the title “Wallis, Princess Consort.”

April 1st: Aden became a British Crown Colony.

April 2nd: The Congress Party wins a number of seats in the first Provincial Elections held in British India. The American-based Ghadar Party denounces it as a sham.

April 3rd: Pujie (the second-in-line to the throne of Manchukuo) and Hiro Saga, his Japanese fiancee, marry in Tokyo.

April 10th: Herge’s The Broken Ear is collected and released. It features his character of Tintin fighting the quasi-Integralist forces of the South American nation of San Theodoros, beginning to ramp up their oppression against native peoples and stealing their artifacts.

April 14th: After some hiatus due to the chaos of the Revolution, Rodgers and Hart make their return to Broadway with Hallelujah, I’m a Bum , an adaptation of a pre-Revolution film with music by the pair.

April 17th: Beloved cartoon character Daffy Duck makes his debut in Porky’s Duck Hunt , directed by Tex Avery for Termite Terrace’s Looney Tunes series.

April 19th: DFLP party leader Robert LaFollette announces he will step down from both his representative position and his leadership in the party. He admits an “unfortunate incident” convinced him and his brother Phillip that he might need to take some time off from politics. Missouri DFLP Chair and Great War and Revolution veteran Harry S. Truman is appointed in his place.

April 25th: After four years of protest, particularly from the Navy, the Revolutionary Military Committee partially re-establishes “bourgeois” military ranks in the Armed Forces. The revolutionary positional ranks remain official, but a new unified rank system is created as an approved form of address. This does not please the Navy.

April 30th: The merger of the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain is formalized, and the new party takes the name “The Commonwealth Workers’ Party”, holding their first Congress in Birmingham.

May 3rd: The Condor Legion undertakes a massive terror bombing campaign in the Basque Country.

May 5th: Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton is serialized in the pages of Speculative Worlds , introducing American readers to the British author.

May 8th: Red NRA troops under the command of General Zhang Guotao capture Chongqing, dissolving the Republic of China pretender regime there, and establish the Sichuan Soviet.

May 9th: Protests begin in Detroit over the recently unveiled Highland Park Freeway project. Facilitated by student-worker organizing committees, the movement is driven by concerns in the party cadres that corruption and bureaucratic deformation were beginning to throttle the revolution.

May 18th: In the midst of violent clashes between the National Socialist and Fascist League and the newly formed Commonwealth Workers’ Party in London, outgoing Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin makes a final address denouncing both Communism and Fascism.

May 20th: The beloved children’s play Revolt of the Beavers is first performed at the Adelphi Theater. It would be praised for introducing the ideals of Marxism and class consciousness for a children’s audience.

May 21st: The North Pole-1 Station, co-managed by the UASR and USSR, becomes the first manned drift ice research stations in the Arctic Ocean.

May 23rd: John D. Rockefeller, one of the most notorious American industrialists and leading “Robber Baron”, dies at age 97 in London.

May 27th: The Golden Gate Bridge opens in San Francisco. Premier William Foster pushes a button in Debs, signaling it as open for traffic.

June 1st: The Institute for Sexual Science opens in Metropolis, with Alfred Kinsey serving as its first director. The Institute is joined by academic students and colleagues of the late Magnus Hirschfield now in exile from Germany.

June 4th: The Imperial Japanese Army begins its attacks on Republic-held lands in China from Manchukuo, beginning a low-level, undeclared war against the Republic.

June 8th: Jean Renoir’s anti-war film Le Grande Illusion is released in France.

June 9th: The Revolt of the Cadres begins in Detroit, with the completion of recall petitions for the Detroit Soviet and the Detroit party bureau.

June 11th: A Day at the Races, featuring the Marx Brothers, debuts in American theaters.

June 12th: The workers of the River Rouge Complex vote to strike in sympathy with the sailors of the Great Lakes freighters and the corruption in the state government.

June 14th: Flag Day begins celebration after four years of inactivity, celebrating both the old and new American flags.

June 16th: The Cradle Will Rock, the “crown jewel of the Secretariat of Culture’s Theater Grants” debuts.

June 20th: African National Congress Chairman Richard Wright announces that the anti-fascist refugee program would extend to Africans oppressed by the colonial powers of Europe, including Libyans and Ethiopians oppressed by Italian fascism.

June 24th: The new building for the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal opens, and begins operations.

June 28th: A group of American public intellectuals, journalists and lawyers form a commission to investigate the ongoing trials in Moscow and the role of the WCP in suppressing journalistic coverage of what would eventually be known as the Great Purge.

July 1st: A nation-wide anti corruption investigation ends with the arrest of several members of the WCP Party Congress, including the Central Committee member Leonard King*. The investigation, conducted by Party internal affairs in cooperation with the Proletarian Guard, implicates dozens of minor officials in rent-seeking and bribery in collective farms across the South and Midwest.

July 4th: Believing the country now in thrall to Soviet and American social imperialism, Jiang Jieshi bears what had been previously unbearable. He begins clandestine meetings with agents of the Japanese government and likeminded generals in the NRA.

July 5th: Spam, a precooked canned pork product, is introduced by AgSec.

July 7th: The Palestine Royal Commission, known as the Peel Commission for its lead investigator, Lord Peel, releases its report on the Mandate of Palestine, recommending against dividing it into Arab and Jewish states.

July 11th: American composer George Gershwin dies of a brain tumor in Los Angeles.

July 15th: WFRAAF squadron leader Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan land in Oakland, making Earhart the first woman to successfully complete a round-the-world flight.

July 18th: Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington pay tribute to the late George Gershwin in their Leningrad Conservatory stop, by playing Rhapsody in Blue.

July 24th: After Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard John Rankin announces in a speech that they will continue the struggle against “Judeo-Bolshevism and racial degeneration” on the mainland, another faction announce they will suspend their efforts and flee to Cuba. This split is rumored to have been facilitated by Section 9.

July 28th: Pablo Picasso finishes Bilbao , a depiction of the devastation wrought on the Basque city during its bombing by the Condor Legion.

August 2nd: Charles Luciano, one time architect of the American Mafia, is executed on Riker’s Island. Before his death, he gives a brief prayer in Italian and says in English, “It was good. While it lasted.”

_August 4th:_Amazing Stories UK is launched, a British based spin-off of the popular Cuban science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

August 5th: Marshal Tukhachevsky is arrested by the GUGB. Numerous other Soviet officers will join him.

August 17th: WCP Nationalities Secretary Langston Hughes sides with the Lakota in their dispute with architect Gutzom Borglum over the proposed “Mount Rushmore” monument in the Lakota’s sacred Black Hills. Borglum would later defect to Cuba, where he was given permission to create a new monument there.

August 21st: The Second Moscow Trial begins. Numerous figures on the left and right flanks of the All-Union Communist Party, such as Alexander Bogdanov and Nikolai Bukharin, are trotted out as part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet government at the behest of “internationalist-adventurists” led by Leon Trotsky.

August 25th: The Sukhoi Su-2 has its first flight at Long Beach. This is one of the first results of Comintern collaboration on military aviation.

September 1st: The Army of Africa under the command of Francisco Franco launches an offensive to capture Asturias, a region in the Basque country in northern Spain, currently under the control of the Republicans. The campaign involves heavy cooperation with the German and Italian militaries, in particular the German Condor Legion, infamous for the bombing of Bilbao.

September 5th: Actor Spencer Tracy died of pneumonia while filming Winter Guard in Siberia.

September 11th: DRP Chairman Robert Taft makes a radio speech denouncing the Foster government, and alleging that the MDSS has been monitoring members of his party. SecPubSafe denies these accusations.

September 14th: The Nyon Conference is held, where various Mediterranean nations meet to address the issue of unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain and France are allowed to patrol the Western Mediterranean and Turkey, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania agree to not patrol beyond their own seas. Despite being the largest proponents of unrestricted submarine warfare, Germany and Italy are notably absent.

September 15th: Premier Foster and his wife Esther attend a performance of the play Lost Colony by Paul Green, performed on Roanoke Island in North Carolina, focusing on the 1590 disappearance of the colonists on that island.

September 21st: The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien is published in the United Kingdom, a short fantasy story centering on a short creature called a hobbit and his journey in a fantasy land.

September 23rd: Vittorio Mussolini, Benito’s second son, establishes the “Royal Pictures” in Havana in partnership to producer Hal Roach.

September 30th : With the “rampant intervention in the conflict,” the League of Nations announces that “non-Intervention” policy for the Spanish Civil War is under review for potential cancellation.

October 2nd: Controversy arises when Hugo Black, an Alabama Democratic-Republican representative, was revealed to have been a member of the Klan. He would be forced to resign due to the revelation.

October 4th: Emma Goldman steps down as Secretary of Labor, citing health and age, though there are rumors of increasing disagreements between her and the leadership of the party. Eugene Dennis, deputy Chief Whip, is appointed in her place.

October 6th: Premier Foster makes the first pitch at the World Series at Yankee Stadium in New York, starting the game between the Giants and the Yankees _

October 8th:_ A commission led by New York City Soviet Chairman Fiorello LaGuardia and AgSec head Henry Wallace concludes that “marihuana” is not a dangerous substance, and can be used for medicinal purposes.

October 9th: Foreign Minister John Reed declines on behalf of the UASR an invitation for a League of Nations mediated conference on foreign volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. He states that the UASR will restrict volunteers when Germany and Italy agree to do the same.

October 11th: King Edward VII and Wallis, Princess Consort make a state visit to Berlin, where they are given a personal audience with Adolf Hitler. The meeting sparks considerable controversy and mockery, especially in the American and Soviet press.

October 12th: The German Condor Legion begins using incendiaries in large quantities on the frontlines in Asturias to flush out Republican positions and test the concept of carpet bombing.

October 24th: Long time Daily Worker cartoonist Ted Geisel makes his children’s book writing debut with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

October 27th: After almost two months of delaying the Nationalist advance, the Republican government orders an evacuation from Asturias. Many try to evacuate on the Republican destroyer Ciscar, but it is sunk by planes from the Condor Legion. Only high-ranking Republican officers manage to escape on gunboats and fishing vessels.

October 29th: Gijón falls to the advancing Nationalist forces. The Asturias Campaign and the main conflict in the Basque country is over, but guerilla warfare from Basque militias and Republican soldiers continues.

October 31st: Upon the expiration of his term, Upton Sinclair announces in a public radio address that he will not pursue another term as Secretary General, and will return to his first love of writing. Haim Kantorovich is elected to replace him.

November 7th: On the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution, there are simultaneous parades in Moscow, Leningrad, Metropolis, Los Angeles, and Deleon-Debs. In Moscow, speeches are given by American Foreign Minister John Reed and Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin. Premier Foster handles the speech in Deleon-Debs, where he vows to continue the struggle for “the Spanish peoples.”

November 13th: The PBS Symphony Orchestra, under the tutelage of exiled Italian composer Arturo Toscanini, makes its debut across all PBS stations.

November 15th: The PBS Radio Lab broadcasts a teleplay based on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in what is regarded as the first television based film.

December 1st: The “Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization” begins before a secret meeting of the Soviet Supreme Court. Unlike the previous show-trials, the condemned are executed promptly following sentencing.

December 10th: John Atanasoff drives out to Rock Island, Illinois SR for a night of inspiration and drinking. The night’s epiphany leaves him with a hangover and a possible design for a new, truly automatic computer.

December 16th: The Nazi government restricts the giving of passports to Jews.

December 21st: Hyperion Animation’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the first major feature length animated film, premieres in Hollywood. With its subversion of the traditional fairy tale and social realist retelling, it is both a critical and box office success. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation