December 1901

December 1, 1901 (Sunday)

• French Roman Catholic priest Charles de Foucauld began his North African desert ministry, offering his first mass to French Foreign Legion soldiers at the Algerian oasis of Béni Abbès. At the time, "He was the only priest, and often the only Christian, for 250 miles," and, until his murder in 1916, would minister to both French Christians and North African Muslims, as well as purchasing the freedom of slaves.
• A crowd of 100,000 people turned out at Hyde Park, London to demonstrate in sympathy for recently fired British Army General Redvers Buller.
• Died: George Lohmann, 36, English cricketer regarded as one of the greatest bowlers of the 19th century, of tuberculosis

  December 2, 1901 (Monday)

• The United States Supreme Court rendered two 5–4 decisions in the newest Insular Cases before it, holding specifically that Puerto Rico and the Philippines had become American territories as soon as the treaty ending the Spanish–American War had been ratified. Regarding the Philippines, duties on imports from those islands under the Dingley tariff were illegal and had to be refunded because that tariff only applied to foreign imports, and the Philippine Islands "have never been foreign since the treaty of peace." On the other hand, duties collected on imports from Puerto Rico under the Foraker Act were legal, according to the Court, because they had been imposed under a law passed by Congress after the treaty was signed, to create a civil government in Puerto Rico.
• The American steamship Matteawan departed from Nanaimo, British Columbia with a crew of 33 people and a load of 4,800 tons of coal bound for San Francisco and disappeared, apparently the victim of a gale that struck western Canada the next day.
• More than a year after its members were elected, the 57th United States Congress held its first legislative session. The Congress had assembled earlier in 1901 in order to swear in members elected in 1900, but had adjourned without introducing new legislation. Three new U.S. Senators were sworn in before business began, and Speaker of the House David B. Henderson of Iowa was re-elected.
• At Charleston, South Carolina, the South Carolina and Interstate West Indian Exposition was opened for tourists.
• American welterweight boxing champion Kid McCoy put on an exhibition and fought three different opponents in one night, not only winning all three, but knocking out all three men.
• Born: George Owen, Canadian-American hockey player, defenseman for the Boston Bruins and member of the College Football Hall of Fame and the United States Hockey Hall of Fame; in Hamilton, Ontario
• Died: Lafayette L. Foster, 50, American politician and journalist, President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, died of pneumonia.

  December 3, 1901 (Tuesday)

• The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was passed by the Parliament of Australia, primarily to restrict non-Europeans from permanently entering the country. Under the new law, which was given royal assent on December 23, a person seeking to legally immigrate was required "to write a passage of 50 words in a European language chosen at the examiner's discretion" as dictated by the examiner.
• The British warship HMS Condor sank in a gale the day after it departed from the port of Esquimalt, British Columbia, en route to Honolulu, Hawaii. Wreckage was recovered on the Canadian and American coastlines, and none of the crew of 130 officers and men were ever seen again.
• During a celebration at the Portuguese Indian city of Goa for the feast day of Saint Francis Xavier, an overcrowded launch capsized and sank from shore, drowning 140 Roman Catholic celebrants.
• The weekly Romanian magazine Sămănătorul was published for the first time, and would endure until 1910.
• The Aero Club of Great Britain was founded by Frank Hedges Butler, his daughter Vera Butler, and Charles Rolls for "the encouragement of aero auto-mobilism and ballooning as a sport".
• King C. Gillette applied for the patent for the first safety razor that would use disposable razor blades. U.S. Patent 775,134 would be granted on November 15, 1904. Gillette, whose American Safety Razor Company would become the multibillion-dollar Gillette Company, is said to have been given the idea by his employer, inventor William Painter, who suggested that Gillette's success would come from something which could be used and eventually thrown away.
• U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt gave his first message to the United States Congress, but in the manner that was customary for that time, with the text being read aloud by persons other than the President. Roosevelt's speech was more than 20,000 words. With antitrust measures as his first item, Roosevelt asked Congress to create what would become the United States Department of Commerce and Labor with a Bureau of Corporations, as well as an expansion of the United States Navy. He also placed conservation high on the list of national goals, asking Congress to develop irrigation and forestry in the U.S. and, in light of the September assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist, called for a tightening of immigration laws to bar "all persons who are of a low moral tendency or unsavory reputation".

  December 4, 1901 (Wednesday)

• The Hawaiian Pineapple Company was founded by James Dole, in order to carry out his idea of canning pineapples for year-round sale in the United States. The cannery itself would not be completed until late 1903, but Hapco would have half of the American canned pineapple market by 1907, marketing its product under the Dole pineapple brand name. The Castle & Cooke company would acquire full ownership of Hapco in the late 1960s and rename itself Dole Food Company.
• Even while she and the Guangxu Emperor were still on their journey from Xi'an back to Beijing, they issued an Imperial Decree rescheduling civil service examinations that had been postponed because of the foreign intervention in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion.
• The last Broadway production to be staged in New York City's Lyceum Theatre, Clyde Fitch's play The Girl and the Judge, began a 125 performance run. The Lyceum would close in 1902 after the completion of the Fitch play.
• A spokesman for Stanford University in California announced that the Stanford Cardinal football team would play a postseason game against the unbeaten University of Michigan team on New Year's Day in Pasadena, California. Michigan coach Fielding H. Yost had coached Stanford in the 1900 season, before being hired at Michigan, but had sent a letter to the Stanford administration urging a holiday date for a game between the two universities. At the same time, the organizers of Pasadena's inaugural "Fiesta of Flowers and Beauty" had been anxious to include an east vs. west college football match as part of the festival, and had negotiated with Michigan and with the University of California, which finished the 1901 season at 9–0–1, but "was not enthusiastic on the subject" of a New Year's Day match up. Thus, the 3–2–2 Stanford Cardinals were invited as the western representative. On January 1, 1902, Michigan would win the very first Rose Bowl Game.

  December 5, 1901 (Thursday)

• After being kept secret during United States Senate hearings, the text of the recently signed Hay–Pauncefote Treaty, and the details of the agreement with the United Kingdom about the Isthmian Canal, were revealed to the public.
• At Waltham, Massachusetts, the Waltham Watch Company offered its employees a one-hour reduction in the work week without a reduction of pay.
• American stage actor and Yiddish theatre star Jacob Pavlovich Adler debuted a Yiddish version of William Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, at the People's Theater in New York City. The production, titled Shylock, was edited to "cut the original text to heighten the leading character's importance", a formidable task since the Jewish moneylender Shylock "appears in only five scenes out of twenty," theater historian Joel Berkowitz would comment later, adding, "To make him the central character in terms of stage time requires a reworking of the plot" and "a restructuring of the text."
• Born:
• * Walt Disney, American animator and film producer, founder of The Walt Disney Company, creator of Mickey Mouse; in Chicago
• * Milton H. Erickson, American psychiatrist; in Aurum, Nevada
• * Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist, 1932 Nobel Prize laureate; in Würzburg
• Died: Karl von Hegel, 88, German historian

  December 6, 1901 (Friday)

• The secret Turkish organization Committee of Union and Progress, composed of members of the Young Turks movement, approved a plan to carry out the assassination of Abdul Hamid II, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. One of the people at the meeting, however, was a spy for the Sultan, and informed security forces, who shut down the CUP's center in Istanbul.
• The French Parliament passed a law allowing the French government to borrow against the Chinese indemnity payments that it expected would be made over the next 39 years, and directed the immediate payment of the French military for the expedition costs and the reimbursement for French missionaries, industrialists and private individuals who suffered damages during the Boxer Rebellion.
• Austria's Reichsrath, the lower house of the Austrian side of the Austria-Hungary empire, rejected a bill to establish a university for its Slav minority.
• The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst Jews received a transfer of land holdings in Haifa, then a part of Palestine, from David Christian Joseph, a former Jew who had converted to Christianity and founded a Christian mission in Haifa.
• The first five people to venture to the new Finnish colony on British Columbia's Malcolm Island, Sointula, departed Nanaimo on a 175-mile journey by sailboat. One of the men, Johan Mikkelson, was injured when his shotgun misfired, and had to be dropped off at Alert Bay for treatment, but the other four arrived at the island on December 15.
• A mishandled execution at Danville, Arkansas, left the victim alive even after he had been removed from the scaffold. Bud Wilson, a prisoner who had killed a guard at the Yell County jail, was hanged at 9:45 in the morning, and, 20 minutes later, lowered into a coffin. "Before the lid was placed upon the coffin," a report the next day noted, "the body began moving about. Wilson opened his eyes and his whole frame shook with tremors." Rather than rendering him medical treatment, the county deputies saw to it that he was "carried up the steps to the scaffold for the purpose of hanging him again", but he died from his injuries before he could be executed.
• Born: Carl Langbehn, German lawyer and resistance leader who was hanged for treason after making a secret trip to Switzerland to meet with the American OSS; in Padang, Dutch East Indies