1938
Munich Agreement sells out Czechoslovakia
Britain's Neville Chamberlain and France's Edouard Daladier met Hitler and Mussolini at Munich and handed over the Sudetenland without a Czech representative in the room. Chamberlain came home waving a paper and saying peace for our time to cheering crowds at Heston Aerodrome. Within six months Hitler had swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, and the word appeasement had acquired its permanent stain.
Mexico nationalizes its oil
President Lazaro Cardenas expropriated the holdings of foreign oil companies and created Pemex, the state oil monopoly. Americans and British fumed; Mexicans celebrated in the streets and donated jewelry to pay the compensation. Resource nationalism had scored one of its first big victories. March eighteenth became an unofficial national holiday.
Kristallnacht shatters German Jewry
After a Polish Jewish teenager shot a German diplomat in Paris, Nazi stormtroopers and ordinary Germans smashed the windows of Jewish shops, burned synagogues, beat Jews in the streets, and sent thirty thousand to concentration camps in a single coordinated night of terror. Glass glittered on sidewalks across the Reich the next morning. The Holocaust had visibly begun.
Germany annexes Austria
Wehrmacht columns crossed into Austria to cheering crowds tossing flowers in what Hitler called the Anschluss, the unification of the German-speaking peoples. Hitler, the Austrian corporal, rode into Vienna in an open car and declared his homeland part of the Reich. Jews in Vienna were immediately made to scrub streets on their knees while neighbors laughed. The West did nothing.
Howard Hughes flies around the world
The eccentric millionaire aviator and his crew of four flew around the world in three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes, beating the previous record by four days and proving that modern aircraft could shrink the globe. Hughes, already famous, became more so. He would spend the next three decades building aircraft, dating movie stars, and retreating into madness.
War of the Worlds radio broadcast
Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air adapted H. G. Wells's Martian invasion novel as a fake news broadcast. Listeners tuning in late thought the attack was real. Panicky Americans jammed police switchboards. Welles, twenty-three, became famous overnight. He later called it the only fun I ever had in radio.
Seabiscuit beats War Admiral
In a match race at Pimlico, the undersized Seabiscuit beat Triple Crown winner War Admiral by four lengths as forty thousand people screamed in the stands and forty million Americans listened on radio. In a year of bad news, a horse with crooked knees had given Depression-weary Americans a plain underdog triumph. Newspapers called him the horse of the year.