March 1902

[March 1], 1902 (Saturday)

• In Brazil's presidential election, Rodrigues Alves of the Republican Party of São Paulo received 91.7% of the vote. Silviano Brandão, who was elected vice-president, would not live long enough to begin his term of office.
• The Canadian Amateur Hockey League season ended, with Montreal Hockey Club as champions.

  [March 2], 1902 (Sunday)

• Born:
• *Edward Condon, American nuclear physicist for whom the Franck–Condon principle of spectroscopy and the Slater–Condon rules of computational chemistry are named; in Alamogordo, New Mexico
• *Almer "Mike" Monroney, American politician who served as U.S. Representative and then U.S. Senator for Oklahoma ; in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Territory
• Died: Colonel Linnaeus Tripe, 79, British photographer and army officer.

  [March 3], 1902 (Monday)

• Born: Allalou, "The Father of Algerian Theatre", Algerian playwright; in Algiers

  [March 4], 1902 (Tuesday)

• The U.S. Department of the Navy ordered the transfer of all U.S. Navy shore properties in Cuba to the control of Governor-General Leonard Wood, who, in turn, would transfer the properties to control of the Republic of Cuba
• A tidal wave struck the coast of Central America, causing a great loss of life.
• Through the efforts of the National Civic Federation, the strike against National Cash Register was ended in Dayton, Ohio.

  [March 5], 1902 (Wednesday)

• Ten months after ironworkers had gone on strike in San Francisco, the walkout was settled. Although the demand for a nine-hour workday was not agreed to, the ironworkers received some concessions.
• Died:
• *Leonard Lewisohn, 64, American philanthropist
• *Benjamin Franklin Stevens, 69, American bibliographer

  March 6, 1902 (Thursday)

• Real Madrid, one of the most valuable professional sports franchises in the world, was founded as Madrid Football Club.
• The Spanish Treaty Claims Commission ruled against American claimants seeking damages for the 1898 destruction of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor.
• Prince Henry of Prussia, on the first state visit by German royalty to the United States, received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.
• Died:
• *Moritz Kaposi, 64, Hungarian physician and dermatologist who first identified the skin cancer now called Kaposi's sarcoma
• *Worthy S. Streator, 85, American railroad and coal mining entrepreneur who created the Atlantic and Great Western Railway and the Vermilion Coal Company. The company town, Streator, Illinois, was named in his honor.
• *Neil Bryant, 72, American minstrel show performer who continued the "Bryant's Minstrels" show into the early 80s after the death of founder Dan Bryant.

  [March 7], 1902 (Friday)

• The Boers won their last major victory over the British of the Second Boer War, at the Battle of Tweebosch. British Army General Paul Sanford Methuen and 200 of his men were forced to surrender to Boer General J. H. de la Rey in the Western Transvaal. General Methuen was wounded, but was quickly released from imprisonment
• A permanent United States Bureau of the Census was created by law.
• The U.S. steamer Waesland collided with the British steamer Harmonides off the coast of Anglesey, United Kingdom and sank; two passengers were killed.
• Born:
• *Heinz Rühmann, German actor, in Essen
• *Ernő Schwarz, Hungarian soccer player, in Budapest
• Died:
• *Christian Fenger, 61, pioneering American surgeon who refining techniques for the hysterctomy, for cleft palate repair, and for the safe removal of tumors from the spinal cord
• *Gaetano Casati, 63, Italian explorer of Africa
• *Pud Galvin, 45, American baseball player and Hall of Famer

  [March 8], 1902 (Saturday)

• Jean Sibelius's Second Symphony was performed for the first time, by the Helsinki Philharmonic Society, conducted by Sibelius himself, in Helsinki.
• The Charron, Girardot et Voigt 1902 armoured car goes into service for the first time.

  [March 9], 1902 (Sunday)

• Born: Will Geer, American actor known for the TV show The Waltons; in Frankfort, Indiana

  [March 10], 1902 (Monday)

• A U.S. circuit court ruling rejected Thomas Edison's bid to have a monopoly on motion picture technology.
• An antitrust suit was filed against the holding company that controls Northern Pacific Railway, Great Northern Railway and Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.

  [March 11], 1902 (Tuesday)

• Prince Henry of Prussia departed New York City.
• In the Queensland state election, Robert Philp's Ministerial Party were returned with a reduced majority. It was the first Queensland state election where voting was completed on a single day.
• The lower house of Denmark's Parliament, the Riksdag, ratified the treaty to sell the Danish West Indies to the United States.

  [March 12], 1902 (Wednesday)

• Died: John Peter Altgeld, 54, American political reformer and former Governor of Illinois; after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage during a speech.

  [March 13], 1902 (Thursday)

• Born: Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Egyptian singer, in Cairo

  [March 14], 1902 (Friday)

• The U.S. Senate, meeting in executive, closed-door session, unanimously ratified the Hague Peace Conference treaty of 1899.
• Born: Archduke Gottfried of Austria, in Linz

  [March 15], 1902 (Saturday)

• Born: Carla Porta Musa, Italian essayist and poet, in Como
• Died: Sir Richard Temple, 76, British colonial administrator who worked at alleviating famine in Bombay in the 19th century.

  [March 16], 1902 (Sunday)

• Five remaining members of the crew of the barge Wadena, and seven of their eight rescuers from the Monmoy Station, were drowned in a storm when the rescue barge was capsized by a wave off of the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts.

  [March 17], 1902 (Monday)

• Born: Bobby Jones, American golfer, in Atlanta

  [March 18], 1902 (Tuesday)

• Joseph Chamberlain, Britain's Colonial Secretary, sent a cable to the Governor General of Canada, the Earl of Minto, asking that Canada commit an additional 2,000 troops to fight alongside the British Army in the Second Boer War. Minto and Canada's Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier split over whether to honor the British request, but Laurier and his cabinet belatedly committed to supplying the requested men
• Pope Leo XIII delivered the last papal condemnation of the Freemasons, issuing the encyclical Annum ingressi.
• Born: General Siegfried Westphal, German Wehrmacht officer who later served as a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials; in Leipzig
• Died: Cadwallader John Bates, 49, English antiquarian and historian, from a heart attack

  [March 19], 1902 (Wednesday)

• The Populist Party, which had been a major American third party to rival the Republicans and Democrats during the 1890s, disbanded by merging back to the Democratic Party. At its height in 1897, the Populists had 22 seats in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate.
• The Ottoman Empire rejected a demand from the United States for reimbursement for the $72,000 ransom paid to Bulgarian rebels for the release of missionaries Stone and Tsilka.
• Denmark's Volksthing, the upper house of parliament, voted to ratify the treaty selling the Danish West Indies to the United States.

  [March 20], 1902 (Thursday)

• John Dillon, an Irish member of the United Kingdom House of Commons was suspended after calling fellow MP Austen Chamberlain a liar. Four days later, the Commons adopted Arthur Balfour's motion that the expulsion be limited to one week.
• Died: Mary Pulsifer Ames, 57, American botanist.

  [March 21], 1902 (Friday)

• Shannon Lass won the 64th Grand National steeplechase at Aintree, Liverpool.
• Born: Son House, American blues musician, in Lyon, Mississippi

  [March 22], 1902 (Saturday)

• Thirty-four striking employees of the Rothschild Petroleum Company at Batum were killed by Russian soldiers.
• U.S. Attorney General Philander C. Knox issued an opinion that the public lands of Puerto Rico were federally-owned United States property.

  [March 23], 1902 (Sunday)

• Traveling from Middelburg, South African President Schalk Burger arrived in British-controlled Pretoria under a flag of truce to discuss an end to the Second Boer War.
• Guglielmo Marconi announced that he would establish a wireless telegraph station at Sable Head on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island, the easternmost point on North America's Atlantic coast to England .
• Korea's Foreign Minister announced that the Kingdom would have no further relations with Russia's ambassador.
• Died: Kálmán Tisza, 71, Prime Minister of Hungary from 1875 to 1890

  [March 24], 1902 (Monday)

• Born: Thomas Dewey, American politician who was the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States in 1944 and 1948; in Owosso, Michigan
• Died: Salomon Mandelkern, 72, Ukrainian Jewish poet and author

  [March 25], 1902 (Tuesday)

• The U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove Democrat Congressman John S. Rhea of Kentucky from office after determining that Republican John McKenzie Moss had won the 1900 election. Moss was sworn in, but would be defeated for re-election by Rhea in November.
• Leonard Wood, the U.S. Governor-General of Cuba, was directed by President Roosevelt to transfer administration of the island to the government of the new Republic of Cuba on May 20.

  [March 26], 1902 (Wednesday)

• Cecil Rhodes, a British businessman who was one of the wealthiest men in the world, died at the age of 48 from heart disease. Born in 1853 in England, he had moved to southern Africa because of his health problems, he built his fortune as the owner of the mines of the British South Africa Company and served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. His company established the southern African territory of Rhodesia. In his will, he funded the Rhodes Scholarship that has provided scholarships to the University of Oxford for thousands of international students.

  [March 27], 1902 (Thursday)

• Died: Charles Petre Eyre, 84, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow since 1878

  [March 28], 1902 (Friday)

• Delegates to the constitutional convention for a new state constitution for Virginia voted to adopt three provisions to deter African-American participation. In addition to a poll tax of $1.50 starting in 1904, existing voters were to be subjected to a "literacy test" of reading, understanding and explaining a section of the new state constitution to the satisfaction of a county examiner— persons who had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, however, were exempt from the test, as were their sons, setting an example of a "grandfather clause" that would be enhanced by other southern states.
• Born: Dame Flora Robson, 82, English actress, in South Shields, County Durham
• Died: Georg Herbert Münster, 81, Germany's ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1873 to 1885, and France from 1885 to 1900.

  [March 29], 1902 (Saturday)

• Although U.S. senators were elected by their state senates rather than by the public prior to 1913, the party nominees for the state senate to choose from were chosen in a party primary election. In Arkansas, incumbent U.S. Senator James K. Jones lost to his challenger for the Democratic Party nomination, white supremacist and former Governor James P. Clarke.
• Bulgaria's government expelled U.S. diplomat Charles M. Dickinson as persona non grata for his comments regarding the case of missionary Ellen Stone.
• Born:
• *William Walton, English composer, in Oldham
• *Marcel Aymé, French writer, in Joigny
• Died: Sir Andrew Clarke, 77, British Army lieutenant general and colonial administrator. He served as Governor of Singapore and later as Governor of the Straits Settlements which included Singapore, and the Malaysian states of Malacca, Dinding, and Penang.

  [March 30], 1902 (Sunday)

• The 1902 Paris–Roubaix cycle race was won by Lucien Lesna.
• Born: Brooke Astor, American socialite and philanthropist; in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

  [March 31], 1902 (Monday)

• The first national meeting of the American Philosophical Association began, at a gathering at Columbia University, and was chaired by J. E. Creighton.
• Died: A. W. Ogilvie, 72, Canadian businessman who created the largest flour milling company in the British Empire.