An unexpected blizzard in early November kills 146 people in the upper Midwest. Many were duck hunters who were trapped near the Mississippi River. Among the casualties are 1.5 million turkeys intended for Thanksgiving who froze to death en route to Minnesota.
Hattie McDaniel, age 47, receives the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as “Mammy” in "Gone with the Wind" (1939), becoming the first Black actor to win an Academy Award. She appeared in 300 films during her career.
In the 1940 NFL championship game, the Chicago Bears (in the white jerseys) defeat the Washington Redskins, 73-0, in the most lop-sided NFL game in history.
Left: Young French hikers discover Stone Age paintings believed to be 17,000 years old in a cave complex near Lascaux, France. Right: Scientists discover the radioactive isotope carbon-14 which will be used to date archaeological and geological samples. Scientists will use this technique on the shoe of Ötzi the Iceman, a hunter found frozen in ice in the Alps in 1991, determining that he died 5,300 years ago.
Author Ernest Hemingway publishes "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War.
Trombonist and bandleader Tommy Dorsey released “I'll Never Smile Again” with lead vocals by Frank Sinatra. The 78 rpm record became the first No. 1 on Billboard's new Best-Selling Retail Records chart.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, age 58, is reelected to an unprecedented third term, garnering 449 electoral votes to Wendell Wilke’s 82. Wilke, a longtime Democratic activist, had changed his party affiliation to Republican in 1939. Both candidates are interventionists. Wilke will support FDR’s Lend-Lease policy and, later, will make two foreign trips as FDR’s envoy. Right: Winston Churchill, age 66, replaces Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister. He tells the House of Commons, "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Left: British troops await evacuation on the Dunkirk beach, May 26-June 4, 1940, after the fall of France. Right: Hitler visits Paris, but is unable to ascend the Eiffel Tower because the French have severed its elevator lift cables.
Acting on orders from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet secret police execute 22,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and others deemed ‘intelligentsia’ in April and May 1940, at locations near the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, Russia. Many of the military officers were POWs whom the Soviets captured in its 1939 invasion of Poland. Left: Polish POWs captured by the Red Army in 1939. Right: one of the mass graves discovered in the Forest in 1943.
Left: John F. Kennedy graduates from Harvard. Right: Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson, age 32, examines an electric light in the home of one of his constituents. Johnson had been instrumental in bringing electricity to the Texas Hill Country in 1939.
Born in 1940: Jack Nicklaus; John Lewis; Nancy Pelosi; Julie Christi; Al Pacino; Tom Jones; Nancy Sinatra; Ringo Starr; Martin Sheen; Raquel Welch; John Lennon; Pelé; John Gotti; Richard Pryor; Dionne Warwick; Anthony Fauci.
