Notable cultural/homefront events, 1942
January 26th: Major League Baseball commissioner John J. Pershing announces for the upcoming 1942 season a series of rule changes. The most notable was the repeal of the pre-revolution ban on female players for participating in Major League games, allowing the Chicago White Sox to sign Jackie Mitchell as the first female Major League Player.
February 3rd: Inspired by the rise of American superheroes, the Canadian national personification Johnny Canuck is reinterpreted as a superhero in Dime Comics #1.
February 23rd: Shortly following the announcement of INTREV’s formation, the Alexandrov Ensemble and All-American Labor Band (formed from the US Army’s Pershing’s Own after the Revolution) stage a joint performance at Red Square during Red Army Day.
February 28th: The San Francisco Opera performs an adaptation of Journey to the West , with an all-Chinese cast. Done in the style of traditional Peking opera, the production is broadcast nationwide on PBS radio. The funds raised are donated to the ongoing war effort in China.
March 3rd: Veit Harlan’s historical film The Great King , a depiction of the Prussian king Fredrick the Great, debuts. While unremarkable and covertly Nazi propaganda, the film is notable for uncredited rewrites by a young Swedish expat named Ingmar Bergman.
_March 15th:_The Romance of Reynard, the newest animated feature from Hyperion is released. Based on the European folk figure Reynard the Fox, the film is relatively successful, and becomes part of a new push towards “pro-French and pro-British” propaganda
March 20th: Speculative Worlds features the story “Roundabout” by Isaak Ozimov (under the alias HB Ogden, due to his drafting for the war.) The story establishes the so-called “Three Laws of Robotics”
April 4th: The BBC formally ends its television broadcast, with the final broadcasting being the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon Oswald’s Last Stand. It is feared the VHF signals will be used by enemy bombers, and many engineers are needed to help man radar stations.
_April 14th:_How The Steel Was Tempered , an adaptation of the popular Nikolai Ostrovsky novel of the same name, is released. The directorial debut for Austrian screenwriter Billy Wilder, the drama stars Welsh-American actor Ray Milibrand as incorrigible, formidable Bolshevik veteran Pavel Korchagin and Soviet actress Irina Fedotova as his love interest Tonia
April 25th: Six are killed in a shootout at a Japanese family restaurant in Berkley. Two men are arrested, claiming that the attack was revenge for the Japanese attack in the Aleutian Islands.
May 1st: Irving Berlin’s musical This Is The Army, which had been conceived in part by army officers at Camp Upton as a morale booster for the ongoing war, makes its Broadway debut.
_May 13th:_Nighthawks , a painting of a late night diner by American realist Edward Hopper, is sold to the Revolutionary Art Institute in Chicago.
May 15th: A report from the Secretariat of Public Safety first officially uses the term “crime of hatred” (previously used in prior iterations in the press) to describe the growing trend of violent crimes against Japanese Americans.
May 18th: The radio program Counterspy debuts, using real stories from ongoing American counter-intelligence efforts against the German Abwehr and the Japanese military intelligence agencies. Indeed, the first broadcast features an introduction by J. Edgar Hoover himself.
June 4th: An American in London, using music from a variety of artists including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and the late George Gershwin, is released by the Culver City Collective, one of many propaganda films focusing on the reluctant friendship of the United Republics and the newly formed Franco-British Union.
June 11th: The Tintin story Secret of the Unicorn begins publication in the Belgian Catholic newspaper Le Soir(now seized and controlled by Nazi/Rexist sympathizers).
June 20th: The Portsmouth Incident: A strange object is spotted over the English city of Portsmouth, prompting a panic over fears of a Nazi invasion and the firing of several shells. While confirmed as a false alarm, the object is never identified.
July 1st: In the wake of the civil war in France, The Stranger by Albert Camus makes an inauspicious debut.
July 4th: Yankee Doodle Dandy , a biographical picture about Broadway star and producer George M. Cohan, makes its Red Carpet debut in Havana, starring Fred Astaire as Cohan. The film is part of a new collaboration between the government and Warner-Columbia for “patriotic content” in the wake of the ongoing war in Brazil.
July 12th: In occupied Barcelona, amid the White Terror, works by authors and artists deemed “subversive” or “degenerate” are burned in front of the Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia. Among those burned are works by Picasso, Dali, Ernst, Hirsfield, Kafka, and Miro.
July 20th: The comic Crime Does Not Pay , based on stories of real life murders, gangsters and counterrevolutionaries, debuts. Published by Lev Gleason (the head of the cartoonist union), the book would spawn a new genre of “crime comics”, which would, in time, spark controversy.
August 1st: The Leningrad Premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.7: While Dmitri Shostakovich had his world premiere for the composition in Kuybyshev in March, the piece is performed in besieged Leningrad (where he had intended to premiere it before the siege) by the Leningrad Radio Orchestra with help from military performers. Despite horrid conditions around the musicians, the concert is a success, with the help of front commander Lieutenant-General Lenoid Govorov, who manages to keep the Germans from interrupting the concert and even broadcasts it across enemy lines as propaganda.
August 5th: Tintin in Germany , a parody of the popular Tintin strip by an anonymous (possibly French) cartoonist, is released clandestinely across Loyalist forces in France and Spain. The strip features the Tintin character collaborating with the Nazis and partaking in various fascist activities.
August 9th: The Sunday Worker (the Sunday supplement for the Daily Worker) releases a list of the top best selling books in the country, becoming the main barometer for the popularity of books for decades to come.
August 24th: Saludos Camaradas, a Hyperion live-action/animated feature film, debuts in Mexico City. An anthology focusing on each of the combatants in the Latin American front, the film is notable for introducing the characters Jose Carioca (a Brazilian parrot, whose cheeriness punctuates the tragedy of Integralism).
September 13th: Members of the Asiatic Council (the Asian American section of the WCPA) sends an open letter in the New York Times, expressing concern about “offensive depictions” of Japanese people in propaganda cartoons featuring popular characters like Popeye, Superman, and Donald Duck.
_September 30th:_The PBS Quiz Hour , a television trivia game show influenced by radio quiz shows like Truth or Consequences , makes its debut on Station WCBW in New York.
October 5th: The St. Louis Cardinals defeat the Cleveland Combrigs at the World Series, 4-1.
October 6th: The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) is formed in response to the famine in occupied Greece.
October 12th: John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry of Iowa State University demonstrate the first automatic electronic digital computer to the State Planning Commision. The machine is powered by roughly 350 vacuum tubes and can solve a set of twenty-five linear equations with up to twenty-five unknown variables. While the intermediate-result punch-card system is balky and will require re-engineering, it demonstrates a major leap forward in computing technology, prefiguring many features of the modern digital computer.
October 20th: Purportedly in response to American anti-Brazilian propaganda like Saludos Camaradas or Michael Curtiz’s Viva Rio! , the Integralists released Aquarela do Brasil , an epic romance film starring Mesquitinha and Carmen Miranda, having a romance spanning from the 1920’s to the present, against the backdrop of the threat of communism and the glories of Integralism.
November 3rd: Commercial television begins in Cuba, with Station CMQ (an affiliate of the reformed National Broadcasting Company) beginning television broadcasting in Havana.
November 15th: Liberation releases “The Workers’ Armed Forces Calendar for 1943”, a pin-up calendar featuring various soldiers from the armed forces (from all genders and branches) in risque poses. The calendar, to raise funds for the war, is a massive success, and despite reservations from the Army, does receive an order for a 1944 Calendar.
December 5th: Despite rumors of “severe moral depravity and indiscretion” as well as “possible enemy sympathies”, covered up by his employer Warner Bros, actor Errol Flynn officially becomes a citizen of the United States, though because of his “propaganda value”, he is rejected for service in Brazil.
December 15th: In Mexico City, American soldier Eddie Leonski is arrested, accused of killing three women by strangulation. He is the first soldier to be tried under the new integrated INTREV military courts. After a rejected appeal, he is executed by a single shot to the back of the neck in the basement of the Palacio de Lecumberri. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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