1935

"Don't let me die, I have got so much to do.

The last words of assassinated Louisiana Senator Huey Long, to his doctors, September 10, 1935.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

Retired US Marines Major-General Smedley Butler, from his book War Is A Racket, 1935.

In the year 1935...

• Dark clouds gather over Europe as...
  • Italy invades Ethiopia.
  • German dictator Adolph Hitler openly flouts the Treaty of Versailles by publicly announcing German rearmament.
  • Germany passes the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of basic rights and freedoms.
• US President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacts three of the most iconic laws of the New Deal, creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which creates thousands of jobs by putting the unemployed to work on public works projects, signing the Social Security Act which creates a federal program to care for the aged and the handicapped, and approving the National Labor Relations Act, which gives labor unions the power of collective bargaining.
• American labor leaders establish the Congress for Industrial Organization (CIO) for the purpose of organizing workers in heavy industrial sectors.
• A massive Earthquake destroys the town of Quetta in modern-day Pakistan killing more than 26,000.
• The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 smashes Florida, killing 483.
• As part of a filibuster, Huey Long of Louisiana makes the longest speech in US Senate history on the night of June 12, clocking in at 15 and a half hours and 150,000 words.
• Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger first presents the famous thought experiment now known as "Schrödinger's Cat in a German magazine article.
• DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers invents Nylon.
• Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in New York City by William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith.
• The Pan American Airways flying boat China Clipper delivers the first airmail across the Pacific Ocean.
• Construction begins on Hoover Dam.
• National Periodical Publications (later known as DC Comics) publishes New Fun Comics, the first modern comic book.
• The briefs style of men's underwear is sold for the first time by Chicago clothier Coopers, Inc.

These people were born in 1935:

• Elvis Presley.
• Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
• American baseball legends Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson, and Sandy Koufax.
• Jordan's King Hussein.
• Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
• American film director Woody Allen.
• Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa.
• Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
• English actress and singer Julie Andrews.
• Canadian actor Donald Sutherland.
• American actress Carol Burnett.
• American actor Richard Chamberlain.
• Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, author of Orientalism.
• American composer Peter Schickele, aka P.D.Q. Bach.
• American football star and politician Jack Kemp.

These people died in 1935:

• English soldier and adventurer T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.
• Populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long, assassinated by Carl Weiss with perhaps the aid of his doctors.
• French military officer Alfred Dreyfus, whose treason trial, known as the "Dreyfus Affair," divided the entire French nation.
• US Supreme Court chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
• American social worker Jane Addams, founder of Hull House.
• French automotive pioneer André Citroën.
• Ma Baker and the Baker Gang, gunned down in a shootout with the FBI.

1934 - 1935 - 1936

20th century