On December 7 the familiar four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony became the first ones ever performed by the New York Philharmonic—or the Philharmonic Society of New York, as it was then known. One of the orchestra’s founders, the young violinist Ureli Corelli Hill, conducted the sixty-three performers in New York’s Apollo Rooms; the orchestra followed with various shorter pieces. Hill was a largely self-taught musician who had held first chair for the New York Sacred Music Society and there conducted the American full-length premiere of Handel’s Messiah, in 1831.

The death of the German-born pianist Daniel Schlesinger in 1839 had brought together the New York musical powers who would form the country’s first significant orchestra. An American orchestra of European quality had been Schlesinger’s dream. After its first three concerts in 1842, the Philharmonic gave the American premiere of Beethoven’s Third Symphony the next season and in 1846 performed the American premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Prohibition forces were approaching a tremendous victory when on December 17 the Senate passed a resolution to send an amendment to the states that would outlaw the “manufacture, sale or transportation” of beverage alcohol. The proposed Eighteenth Amendment, which originated with the dry, godly Sen. Morris Sheppard of Texas, soon whipped through thirty-six state legislatures. The coincidence of wartime strictures, strong sponsorship in the Congress, and prejudice against the high proportion of brewers with German names gave the movement its peculiar strength. The amendment’s passage came as an ugly shock to those wet lawmakers who had voted for it certain that it could never clear the necessary three-quarters of the states in the allotted seven years. In fact, it was the law of the land within thirteen months. (Only thirteen states were completely dry at the time the amendment was proposed.) Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, an abstainer himself, predicted that the latest addition to the Constitution would “last as long as the preamble.… The saloon is as dead as slavery!”

The formal date for enforcement—midnight, January 16, 1920—did not turn into the farewell drunken festival it might have become, mostly because various wartime Prohibition measures had already ruined the surprise. The American temperance movement was nothing new; Michigan had been dry from 1856 to 1875. In the 1880s schoolchildren wore blue ribbons and signed pledges showing their contempt for the Cup of Death. “There is a happy time, not far away,” children were taught to sing, “When Temp’rance truth shall shine bright, bright as day.” Similarly, saloon patrons sang “Good-bye, whiskey, good-bye, gin” when the Prohibiion Amendment finally triumphed.

In addition to being impossible to enforce and flagrantly abused by thriving rumrunners and bootleggers, the law made millionaire celebrities out of mobsters like Al Capone and coincided with that time of staggering public drunkenness later called the Jazz Age. By 1927 Edmund Wilson could give a “Lexicon of Prohibition” of well over a hundred circulating euphemisms for drunkenness, from “full as a tick,” “slopped to the ears,” “scrooched,” and “spifflicated” to “loaded to the muzzle,” “lathered,” “fried to the hat,” “organized,” “squiffy,” “over the Bay,” “Wapsed down,” and “to burn with a low blue flame.” Old terms like “bender” and “spree” were heard less often under Prohibition, according to Wilson, since these words implied quaintly that heavy drinking was a break from the ordinary. “Fierce protracted drinking” had grown “universal,” he wrote, and enriched the language (even as it damaged its practitioners) so that “more nuances are nowadays discriminated than was the case before Prohibition.”

Prohibition lived imperfectly on into the Depression, when on April 7,1933, President Franklin Roosevelt had perhaps the easiest night a new Chief Executive ever had, toasting the return of legal drink with a beer.

In December New York’s Museum of Modern Art was showing, in addition to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and some nice stands of French woods by Cézanne, a lot of cutting-edge American war propaganda—200 screaming scenes from among 2,224 posters submitted to the Office of Civil Defense. Many of the artists had cribbed from President Roosevelt’s rousing State of the Union message, laying quotations from it over images of Jap and Hun doing their hideous work or of sailors drowned by “loose lips.” Along the museum’s hallways Nazi daggers plunged through church windows or ripped the Stars and Stripes; Hitler sneered over a smoldering battlefield at the picture of a crying orphan. The most effective of the visceral works would be reproduced and mass-distributed by the Office of War Information to win civilian hearts and minds.

So many women had sent off their husbands to the fighting in the first year of American involvement that a new book appeared to help them adjust, Ethel Gorham’s So Your Husband’s Gone to War, from Doubleday. In it the Bonwit Teller ad writer covered everything from preparing for furloughs and coping with a smaller apartment to giving parties for women and restraining the office “wolf” who proves too helpful.

Enrico Fermi had come to Chicago in the spring of 1942 to lead the effort to construct the world’s first atomic pile, of blocks of graphite and uranium metal. The Manhattan Project scientists under Fermi’s leadership worked for months in secret beneath the stadium stands at the University of Chicago, built their pile in November, and, on December 2, achieved a faint but hugely significant self-sustained nuclear reaction with it.

The Supreme Court ruled on December 21 to validate that new American tradition, the Las Vegas divorce, forcing the other states to honor these quickie agreements as binding.