1938

_Notable events of 1938

January 1st: _The Turkish government officially repudiates the treaty of Kars that saw the loss of Western Armenia made official. With the revanchist regime in Turkey taking on an increasingly hostile tone towards the Soviet Union, few are surprised when Turkey enters into an agreement with Germany later in the same day.

_January 5th:_Treasure Island , a Soviet adaptation of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel, is released. The film stars American Gary Cooper to appeal to audiences in the United Republics.

January 13th: Jan Christian Smuts secures a solid supermajority in South African snap elections following the disappearance of an aircraft carrying James Hertzog over the Atlantic as the grand coalition is dissolved. Hertzog’s disappearance leads to the commonwealth-lukewarm National Party collapsing in an election it was not prepared for.

January 17th: The Australian and New Zealandic governments conclude the treaty of Wellington that will see New Zealand incorporated as states within Australia with provisions to ensure the continued protection of the status of New Zealand’s Maori populace. This move, pushed for by Britain to consolidate its Pacific holdings; seeks to guarantee the defense of the Empire’s far east against the American and Soviet pacific fleets.

January 20th : Farouk the first, King of Egypt, receives a Mercedes Benz 540k luxury car as a wedding present from Adolf Hitler. The delighted King sends the Fuhrer his thanks for the fabulous vehicle worth more than the average lifetime earnings of most Egyptians.

January 22th: Minimalist metafictional play Our Town is first performed at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey.

January 27th: “Disposal facility one” is established under the supervision of the Guarda Verde for Brazilian queer people, atheists, communists, and many other non-Christians. The facility is in truth, a slave camp made to work the condemned to death to extract resources from Brazil’s hinterland. While Salgado resists Barroso’s desire to have Jews sent to camps such as these; he folds on certain issues such as industrialization and to Christiano Boaventura’s scheme to exterminate “deviancy”.

February 4th : Adolf Hitler abolishes the War Ministry and creates the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the Armed Forces), giving him direct control of the German military. In addition, Hitler dismisses political and military leaders considered unsympathetic to his philosophy or policies. General Werner von Fritsch is forced to resign as Commander of Chief of the German Army following accusations of homosexuality, and replaced by General Walther von Brauchitsch. Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath is dismissed, and replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop.

February 9th: Hyperion Animation’s Snow White is released to critical acclaim across the United Republics.

February 11th: A new general election is held in the Irish Free State, returning a comfortable majority for Éamon de Valera’s anti-communist Irish republican Fianna Fáil party, running on the notion that only they could finally resolve the question of Ireland’s constitutional status. In spite of this, accusations of illegal overseas interference by British authorities against the left-wing Republican Labour Party (formed the previous year by the Labour Party and left-wing FF dissidents) and the Workers’ Communist League persist.

February 13th : Egypt’s industrialization program continues apace and reaches an important milestone of opening Egypt’s first major motor vehicle factories, as the technically independent Kingdom seeks to complete its first five year plan under the auspices of the reform minded Prime Minister Talaat Harb.

February 20th: The 1938 National Convention for the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party concludes in Haywood City, re-electing Franklin D. Roosevelt as Party Chairman and nominating Minuteman war hero Harry S Truman as Party leader in the upcoming election.

February 24th: Codreanu’s Guarda Fiera seizes control over Romania, the movement seeks to impose an ultrareactionary path for Romania away from all the degeneracies of modernity that it perceives. Only the industry necessary for the armed forces are to be tolerated in its initial plans for the country to drag it back to the middle ages; though it is forced to compromise on this by the interests of German capital. .

March 8th : After year-long negotiations, Japan is allowed administrative rights in the Dutch East Indies, as part of an agreement for ensuring the security of the islands in the aftermath of the 1936 July Uprising. In effect, this meant a Japanese takeover backed by the British and French, who are paying Japan in important resources such as oil in exchange for military support against the communists.

March 10th: At the tenth Academy Awards (“Oscars”), Lost Horizon based on the James Hilton novel, winds Outstanding Production, while The Good Earth(based on the Pearl S. Buck novel of the same name) wins Outstanding Artistic Achievement. For her role as O-Lan in The Good Earth , Anna May Wong wins Best Actress, the first woman of color to do so.

March 12th : The Democratic-Republic Convention in Los Angeles ends with former Railway Secretary Robert Taft as Party Leader, and New York representative Thomas Dewey as Party Chairman

March 13th: Clarence Darrow, veteran civil liberties lawyer and ILDC co-founder, dies in Chicago. The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal has a moment of silence in his honor.

March 18th : The first concept car, the Cadillac Futuron, gets unveiled by the Dynamo collective, previewing design concepts and technology to be implemented in future automobile designs.

March 25th : The Party Congress of the Workers’ Communist Party of America in Cleveland endorses the continuance of the Foster-Kantorovich government.

April 5th: Bob Clampett’s Warlord of Mars, based on the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is released by North Avenue Animation and Culver City. Sergei Eisenstein calls the film, alongside Commander Columbia and Snow White , “the beginning of a new animation age”.

April 12th: The Chicago Ravens (formerly the Blackhawks) defeat the Toronto Maple Leafs 3 games to 1 at the Stanley Cup.

April 13th : Commander Columbia; first in what will come to be a staple of American animation to the present day; is released to substantial fanfare even if the enormity of its budget leaves its financial success as middling at best. Featuring the origins of its leading deity like figures; Amanda Aaron and Vladimir Volkov and the battle against both German agents and the mythic fallen hero Siegfried; the film is also in many ways a form of overt propaganda by the American government to embody its new America.

April 18th: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s iconic character Superman makes his debut on the cover of Action Comics #1. The cover shows Superman attempting to stop an execution by a pair of counterrevolutionaries.

April 21st: Nazi Germany and the UK both fly their first jet aircraft, developed independently from each other. The coincidental nature of this is lost on no one.

May 1st : Major fighting at the outskirts of Wuhan province is seen in China as the Japanese army and the National Republic seek to capture the strategic area. American and Soviet trained aerial units fight a major aerial defensive battle to intercept swarms of Co-Prosperity Sphere dive and level bombers dispatched to shatter the defensive works in the largest aerial battle seen in the world up to that point.

May 10th: Subhas Chandra Bose publishes an editorial in the Indian National Congress newspaper, Congress Sandesh , praising the accomplishments of the United Republics in a short span of time (reversed from his initial trepidation), and calling for the INC to form a popular front with the Communist Party of India to achieve independence and build a socialist India.

May 15th: UASR general election: The WCP maintains its majority, but the DFLP manages to make more gains in Republic governments and the All-Union government. The True Democrats find themselves unable to run candidates in many areas due to numerous local bans.

May 17th: With the Spanish Civil War at a stalemate, the League of Nations finally succeeds at getting a conference to end the conflict and withdraw foreign volunteers.

May 19th: Czechoslovak military intelligence receives reports of major German military concentrations at the border. The Czechoslovak military prepares to mobilise.

May 21st: Lin Bao’s forces in command of Soviet supplied tanks engage in brutal tank to tank warfare at the outskirts of the central plains offensive by the Japanese, Manchurian, and National Republican Chinese armies. Though the fighting is inconclusive, it buys precious time to prepare the defenses of the inner areas of China as the Co-Prosperity sphere’s advance seems virtually unstoppable.

May 25th: Jan Smuts receives the findings of the Capetown Report on the economic effects of apartheid, the report concludes that apartheid would be economically ruinous and unsustainable in the long term for South Africa. Though once having advocated for separation, the report shifts Smuts towards the gradual enfranchisement of South Africa’s black majority in the hopes of defanging the growing ANC and SACP.

May 27th: John Curtin; having long ago committed to the Australian Communist Party and the Australian chapter of the IWW; denounces the Australian Labor party for its drift towards racial division and economic liberalism as the party’s prospects in future elections look increasingly bleak in the face of the hegemonic National Liberal Party.

May 31st: The Adventures of Robin Hood, directed by John Cromwell and starring Marion Morrison and Laraine Day, is released. The film features proto-socialist Hood battling Claude Rains’ Prince John (with a Hitler mustache) and Cary Grant’s Sheriff (with vaguely Henry Ford appearance).

June 4th: 20 year old Henry Ford II, grandson of Henry Ford who had legally changed his last name to O’Hearn, gets admitted as a trainee to the WFRAAF. On the side, he also participates in local auto races.

June 5th: PBS and IBF introduce a joint news program The News Round-Up , to give coverage of the crisis in Czechoslovakia.

June 7th: Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš is deposed after he signals a willingness to capitulate to German demands on the Sudetenland. A provisional government, chaired by Antonin Hempl of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers Party, with participation by the Communist Party, the National Social Party, and the Czechoslovak People’s Party.

June 12th: Warner Bros. and Columbia co-production Gone with the Wind , the adaptation of the best-selling Civil War set novel by Margaret Mitchell starring Errol Flynn and Vivian Leigh, becomes a smash in Great Britain and Cuba. The American press, meanwhile, viciously denounce the film as “racist” and “neo-Confederate”.

June 12th cont : Commander Columbia receives its Russian dub release in the Soviet Union and Spanish dub release in Mexico, Chile and other America friendly nations; with some reels making it into a number of Chinese theatres. Once again; the sheer enormity of the production efforts bites into the returns of the film, but with the propagandistic intentions of the series the actual return on investment is of no real consequence to its producers.

June 16th : Alan Turing presents his Ph.D. thesis, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, to the London Mathematical Society.

June 20th: The Green Hills of Africa , an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s non-fiction account of a safari trip he took, is released, starring Clark Gable as Hemingway.

June 24: A 450-metric-ton (496-short-ton) meteorite explodes about 12 miles (19 km) above the earth, near Chicora, Pennsylvania.

June 26th: The plantation base of Sons of the Confederacy Imperial Wizard John E. Rankin is raided by Public Safety units under John Dillinger and Joe Brutus. Rankin is taken alive to be put on trial. A search of the base reveals several receipts for funding from the pocket of the “Continental Congress” and Rankin in particular to the campaigns of several True Democrat representatives.

July 30th: Citing violence against Sudeten Germans, Germany issues a declaration of war against Czechoslovakia. Within minutes of the notice being presented to the Czechoslovak, consulate, Luftwaffe planes cross the border to begin bombarding defensive positions.

July 4th: True Democrat representatives Francis E. Walter; Joe Starnes ; Martin Dies, Jr.; J. Parnell Thomas; Edward J. Hart ; John B. Frazier, Jr.; Noah M. Mason; Herbert C. Bonner; John McDowell; and Carl Curtis are arrested based on the leaks in the Rankin raid. They become collectively known as the “True Democrat Ten”.

July 9th: Russian and American white emigre and notorious fascist exile Anastasy Vonsiatsky purchases a home in Toronto Canada and comes into contact with the Esoteric Brotherhood of Perun, a Slavic Neopagan Russian fascist organization in the dead of night. Though considering himself a devoted Christian, he will slowly be convinced of the enlightenment of this philosophy.

July 16th: The Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria finishes construction. Its first prisoners will arrive shortly after the opening.

July 19th: On the third anniversary of the fall of the Rio Commune, the “Organization of Brazilian Homosexuals”, made up of refugees fleeing from the increasingly genocidal Integralist regime holds its first public meeting in Lima, Peru.

July 20th: The League of Nations conference on the Spanish Civil War ends with both a “Spanish State” and the “Spanish Free Soviet Republic” being recognized and their territories established. Germany, Italy, the UASR and USSR officially agree to withdraw foreign volunteers from the country. (Unofficially, many advisers stay behind.)

July 22nd : Farouk draws international scandal to the Kingdom of Egypt by making a visit to the UASR in what was ostensibly a tour trip, but came to have the secondary purpose of acquiring a truly enormous quantity of pornography through his royal retainers; including the world’s most complete collection of Tijuana bibles to that point.

July 28th: “Arthur the Second ” is released to demonstrate the power of British cultural industries, with the animated film seeking to demonstrate a uniquely British approach to the rapidly burgeoning medium and making its own take on the British Icon of its most legendary ever hero.

August 1st: Argentina opens up its first major school of Flamenco staffed by refugees from the war torn Iberian Peninsula.

August 6th: Leon Schlesinger Productions (in collaboration with Warner Bros) releases the animated The Unabridged Memoirs of Davy Crockett , featuring a more fantastical version of various points in his life, up to his death at the Alamo. It was a commercial success at the time, though it was criticized for the racial stereotypes used in the film as well as its somewhat incoherent plot. This was the first major collaboration between Schlesinger, Hugh Harman, and Rudolf Ising since their escape to Cuba, as well as their first feature length film.

August 9th: J. Parnell Thomas announces he will testify against his fellow True Democrats in exchange for a lighter sentence.

August 15th: At the trial of John Rankin, it emerges that he had significant contact with the German American Bund, and possibly had Nazi contacts.

August 19th: Following a tip by a local resident, the Red Guards staged a raid on a suspected Sons of Liberty stronghold in Key West. In the raid, a large cache of Italian weapons was found, as well as a flatbed truck converted into an improvised armored car. The trucks were dismantled, and the Sons of Liberty members arrested, including a Mafia operative named Carlo Gambino.

August 24th: Acting in concert with Slovakian far-right groups, the Kingdom of Hungary invades Slovakia as the German Army completes the bloody taking of the Sudetenland.

August 27th : Japanese animated film “Saga of Susanoo ” is released in the territories of the Empire of Japan, a straightforward retelling of the mythology of the Storm God and his famous duel with the eight headed serpent Yamata no Orochi to save Japan from its destructive rampage.

August 28th: George Orwell’s account of the 1936 UASR General Election, Homage to America is released, with an appendix on the most recent election. While optimistic, Orwell also has concerns over the machinations of Foster and Browder and warns Americans to be wary.

September 5th : A team of physicists at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi and Rudolf Peierls conduct the first successful nuclear fission experiment based on research acquired from European physics emigrés and publicly available research papers. After some initial dithering about the importance of the energy values of uranium fission, they (under the direction of Leo Szilard) decide to send the paper to the Secretariat for Defense first. In a matter of months, German and British scientists will independently confirm the experimental properties of nuclear fission.

September 10th: Italian Futurist firebrand D’Annunzio makes a full recovery from a near stroke, though his advanced age prevents him from fully threatening the much younger Mussolini’s position; he returns to public life with a seeming resurgence of health and vigour.

September 14th: Popeye the Sailor in Gulliver’s Travels, featuring EC Segar’s legendary character in an adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s travelogue, is released by Fleischer Studios in response to films like Commander Columbia and Warlord of Mars. Notably, except for the cartoony Popeye, a majority of the film is realistic, including rotoscoping. It’s success allows Fleischer to move forward with their next feature: an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1901 work The Life of the Bee.

September 18th : The People’s Secretariat for Aeronautics is established with regulatory authority over civilian aircraft and rocket production and use. The Rocket Propulsion Laboratory and the People’s Advisory Committee for Aeronautics are folded into the organization. Former CalTech and RPL science Theodore von Karmen is appointed Secretary.

September 23th : A new constitution removing references to the British monarch is approved following a popular referendum in Southern Ireland, formally ending the Irish Free State but leaving references to the monarch in statute law, allowing them to continue to play a role in representing Ireland internationally. This ambiguity has long since continued as a point of political contention in Ireland.

September 25th: While communist groups escape into exile or underground, the Czechoslovak government capitulates to Germany.

October 1st: Italian animated film Glories to Come is released to tremendous state sponsored fanfare within Italy. Promising a triumphant vision of the new regime’s vision of the world, this animated epic preaches the manly virtues of the fascist regime, the virtues of a speedy march towards national progress and triumphs, and is considered one of the great pinnacles of Futurist art. Of substantial note though, is an unavoidable undercurrent of misogyny that runs through the whole of the film.

October 3rd: Mohandas Gandhi and Jawharlal Nehru jointly reject calls for a popular front, insisting on staying the course towards unilateral independence without necessarily calling for a communist state.

October 9th: Imperial Wizard John E. Rankin is sentenced to death via firing squad for counterrevolutionary activities, murder, accessory to murder and terrorism. His outbursts of vicious racism and paranoia are broadcast nationwide.

October 11th: Nazi Germany releases its first feature length animated film titled Knight of the West , a fantasised propaganda piece made in Hitler’s favoured Disney-esque style featuring the story of a brave Teutonic Knight who awakens from under the mountain to aid the German people in their time of need against the Jewish menace.

October 14th: After much deliberation, a committee assembled by the Tektology Union, including nuclear scientists Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer, as well as biologist HJ Mueller and physicist Albert Einstein, declares nuclear research “sensitive information”, and recommends it be classified.

October 20th: War of the Worlds , a motion picture based on the HG Wells story of the same name, is released to positive reception in the United Kingdom and its dominions as a tour de force of British cinema and a sterling example of the successes of steps taken to subsidize British film, a victory for producer Alexander Korda (and newly UK based MGM).

October 23rd : Konrad Hallgren returns to Swedish political politics by unifying the far right parties into the “National Union of Sweden”. Showing a far more respectable face, the SNU eats into the support of the major parties as its anti-communist message resonates with the embattled elites.

October 30th: Creation , a co-production of Mosfilm and Culver City, is released, directed by Aleksandr Ptushko. Based partially on a concept lead animator Willis O’Brien had shopped in the early 30’s (which evolved into King Kong), with reworked elements from Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Land that Time Forgot , the film centers on a WFRN submarine (with Soviet crew members) stranded on an island of dinosaurs.

November 1st: The Secretariat of Defense releases a confidential memo to declare research into “the nuclear and atomic sciences” confidential, and to make “inquiries into possible uranium extraction domestically and in the Soviet Union”, as well as possibly obtaining uranium from the Belgian Congo through trade.

November 3rd : Due to strange atmospheric conditions, a BBC television broadcast is received in New York.

November 9th: Kristallnacht: Throughout Germany, SA paramilitaries and Nazi supporters destroy Jewish owned businesses, buildings and synagogues. In addition, 91 people are killed, and 30000 Jewish men are rounded up and arrested.

November 11th: In a radio address, Premier William Foster denounces the wanton violence committed during Kristallnacht. He states that Adolf Hitler “has the blood of innocents on his hands”, and reaffirms American support for the oppressed peoples of Germany and opposition to the “death cult of Nazism”

November 14th: The trial of Francis E. Walter, one of the True Democrat Ten, starts in DeLeon-Debs, the first of the True Democrat trials. He pleads not guilty to all charges of bribery and aiding and abetting counterrevolution. He claims that he had never knowingly took any money from Rankin or anyone affiliated with the Sons of Liberty. His lawyer Harold Medina also claims that Walter’s beliefs are protected by Article V in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Infromants debunk this, stating that he had regular meetings with known Sons affiliates and had taken money from them knowing who they were.

November 16th: Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman first synthesizes Lysergic acid diethylamide from lysergic acid, while trying to find possible pharmaceuticals from the fungus ergot.

November 18th: Francis Walter is found guilty on all charges and is sentenced to life in Leavenworth Prison.

November 21st: Carl Curtis announces his intention to testify against his fellow True Democrats in exchange for a lighter sentence.

November 28th: Under the direction of Dorothy Thompson, a group of prominent German-Americans (including baseball legend Babe Ruth) denounce Nazism, the German American Bund and the rumored collusion between them and the Sons of Liberty.

December 1st: Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky is released to wide acclaim across the Soviet Union and the United Republics. Filmed partially in the Melrose soundstage in Hollywood, the story of the Novograd prince and his war with the Teutonic Knights will be seen as an instant classic.

December 3rd: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Congress Socialist Party announce they will form a separate party from the INC, feeling they have irreconcilable differences.

December 9th : In the midst of the trials of the True Democrat Ten, Public Safety Secretary Henry Winston announces that a ban on the True Democrats is being considered.

December 18th: A Christmas Carol is released by Culver City. It is a socialist reinterpretation of the classic Charles Dickens story, with Scrooge giving away his fortune and closing the shop at the end.

December 23rd: Fishermen outside Chalumna River in South Africa catch a strange fish. It is identified as a coelacanth, a prehistoric fish which has been absent from the fossil record for 65 million years.

December 25th : The Congress-in-exile of the United States approves a Constitutional Amendment declaring General MacArthur “President and Protector of the Constitution” for an indefinite period, ending only with the restoration of “constitutional government” in the mainland. The “Christmas Day Declaration” solidifies MacArthur’s rule over Cuba and codifies the rule of the National Salvation Front. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation