The 1936 Summer Heat Wave Killed Thousands and Legalized Shorts

It was 120 degrees Fahrenheit the day residents of Altus, Oklahoma, believed Jasper Pendleton was wearing shorts while riding his bicycle. Thankfully for Pendleton, they were mistaken. In an effort to beat the historic mid-August heat, he had merely rolled up his pants.

It was a close call with a major faux pas, depending on where you were in the country in 1936, as the continent baked in a series of record-breaking heat domes that became known as the 1936 North American heat wave.

“Lots of cities throughout the country had anti-shorts laws, although they often didn’t call them that,” says Geoff Williams, author of the 2026 book The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America.

By today’s standards, it seems quaint for modesty to have been on the minds of sweltering Americans, but the dangerous conditions pitted long-held fashion standards against a boiling desire to cool off at all costs.

The year 1936 started off as one of the coldest winters in American history. The community of Langdon, North Dakota, experienced subzero temperatures for 41 days straight. On the other side of the state, residents of Parshall endured a low of minus 60.

By May, Americans were hardly surprised by rapidly warming temperatures. The mid-1930s were peak Dust Bowl years and hotter than average, and the country had endured a heat wave in 1934 that claimed nearly 1,500 lives in August.

What surprised people was how much worse it got. “It really was a heat dome setup over the entire country,” Williams says. “June was worse, July was a hellscape, and August was really, really bad. The country thought by August that it’s going to get a little better, and it really didn’t.”

The Upper Midwest and Great Plains were hit particularly hard. By 1936, a multiyear drought combined with overworked farmland to whip up severe dust storms across the Great Plains. The dry soil and lack of vegetation set the stage for an extra-punishing summer. “The climate of that region took on desert qualities,” the National Weather Service stated.

The successive heat waves amounted to an average temperature in the continental United States that summer of 74 F, a figure that was only surpassed in 2021 by one-hundredth of a degree. Many Midwestern cities experienced far hotter days and set temperature records in excess of 105 F that still stand today, per weather service data. Bloomington, Illinois, hit 112 degrees on July 6. Aberdeen, South Dakota, reached 114 degrees on July 10. Salina, Kansas, endured 116 degrees on July 18; the sunshine was so powerful rays through a window lit a house on fire.

The era’s scarcity of air conditioning (something most homes, hotels and even hospitals lacked) put the lives of millions of Americans in jeopardy. Common estimates place the national death toll at around 5,000, but Williams, having meticulously combed through newspaper records and engaged numerous historical societies in his research, estimates at least 11,000 Americans and roughly 780 Canadians died directly or indirectly in the heat wave.

The heat wave, somewhat ironically, drove Americans together. People packed into movie theaters, 40 percent of which had air conditioning at the time, and sometimes slept there. Many other people slept in parks and courthouse lawns—if they could manage it, anyway.

“It sounds kind of fun if you have a park with 200 other people, but people talk before they go to bed. They talk in their sleep,” Williams says. “It was very difficult to sleep when you have a crowd of people around.”

In addition to causing heatstroke and heart attacks, the extreme heat and lack of sleep drove people to make rash decisions and simple mistakes that proved equally deadly. People swam in disease-ridden rivers and floated on inner tubes despite not knowing how to swim. Sand-pit swimming holes were popular along rivers, but they also swallowed people whole. A middle-aged man in Nebraska fell off his roof while attempting to sleep on it overnight.

In some cases, people’s own possessions betrayed them. A tin roof-topped house burned down in New York after the metal became too hot. Tire blowouts caused numerous collisions. Electric fans, lacking modern-day protective cages, mangled and maimed people across the country.

“The heat can kill you in a lot of creative ways,” Williams says.

In July, the Des Moines Tribune ran the headline, “Wear Little Clothing If You Like—It’s Legal.” This reminder to Iowans about their sartorial rights not only reflected the fashion norms of the era, but it also underscored how liberal Des Moines was on the topic.

That wasn’t the case in Yonkers, New York, which did have an anti-shorts law. On July 10, Rose O’Gorman and William Matthias were fined $10 each (around $220 in 2026) for violating the city’s ban on wearing shorts in public. Although a sympathetic judge suspended their fines, O’Gorman and Matthias—who wore shorts hoping to be caught—took their case to the New York Court of Appeals. In 1937, they won, liberating bare legs in the New York City suburb to this day.

Yet, the 1936 heat wave didn’t spark a lasting, widespread fashion revolution. “Overall, society went back to hats and gloves, but I do think it paved the way,” Williams says. “The heat wave summer of 1936 changed a lot of minds.”

In the following decades, more people came to embrace shorts, and by the 1950s, they were here to stay.