June 1921

June 1, 1921 (Wednesday)

• The Greenwood massacre in the black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma was brought under control after 21 African Americans and nine Whites had been killed, and the city had been placed under martial law. Initial reports listed at least 55 black and 30 white deaths.
• The 1921 Canadian Census was taken and showed a total population of 8,788,483. It showed a 22 percent increase in the number of Canadians since 1911, with the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan having grown by more than 50 percent.
• Arturo Alessandri Palma, the President of Chile proposed to the Chilean Congress that a plebiscite be held in the disputed Tacna-Arica region, allowing voters to determine whether their region should remain part of Chile or become part of Peru.
• Born: Nelson Riddle, American musician and bandleader; in Oradell, New Jersey
• Died: Yakov Lidski, 52-53, Warsaw-based Jewish bookseller and publisher

  June 2, 1921 (Thursday)

• The International Olympic Committee voted to award the 1924 Summer Olympics to Paris, choosing the capital of France ahead of Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Prague and Rome.
• Eight members of a patrol of the Royal Irish Constabulary reserves were killed by the Irish Republican Army in the Carrowkennedy ambush near Westport, County Mayo as the RIC's two trucks and an auto were stopped in a rural area. The car had broken down while on its way back to Westport and was being towed by one of the trucks. After realizing that they were outnumbered, the 16 surviving RIC men surrendered to the IRA, which disarmed them and then released them.
• Died: Phebe Ann Hanaford, 92, American Universalist minister

  June 3, 1921 (Friday)

• Lord Byng was appointed as the new Governor General of Canada, succeeding the Duke of Devonshire.
• In Berlin, a German criminal court acquitted Soghomon Tehlirian of the charge of assassinating former Ottoman Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha on March 15.
• The Birthday Honours of King George V of the United Kingdom recognized, among others, Canadian manufacturer Douglas Alexander ; Indian businessman and philanthropist Jehangir H. Kothari ; and Scottish legal expert John Rankine.
• A British-operated artillery shell factory in Dublin, the only one in Ireland, was destroyed in an attack by Irish Republican forces.
• The 1921 Far Eastern Championship Games ended in Shanghai. China, Japan and the Philippines were the only competing countries.
• In the U.S., the Pueblo Flood in Pueblo, Colorado, began after torrential cloudbursts.
• Died: Simon Baruch, 80, American physician and advocate of hydrotherapy

  June 4, 1921 (Saturday)

• At least 127 people were drowned and large sections of the U.S. city of Pueblo, Colorado were heavily damaged by the bursting of several dams after heavy rains flooded the Arkansas River and the Fountain River. The business section of Pueblo was covered by waters at least deep and as high as in low-lying areas. The initial death estimate was 500 people.
• Menshevik forces captured Omsk in Siberia from the Soviet Bolsheviks, while Japan prepared to transport other anti-Bolshevik forces to reinforce the Menshevik capture of Vladivostok.
• British Prime Minister David Lloyd George presented an offer to striking British miners for settlement, and set a deadline of June 18 for them to accept it.
• At the Leipzig War Crimes Trials, a German court acquitted Karl Neumann, the U-boat commander who had torpedoed and sunk the British hospital ship HMHS Dover Castle, accepting his defense that he was just following orders. As commander of SM UC-67, Neumann ordered the sinking of Dover Castle on May 26, 1917, although 302 of the 314 crew were rescued and there were no hospital patients on the ship at the time.
• The Allied Reparations Commission awarded 600,000 tons of confiscated German ships to the United States.
• Died:
• * Ludwig Knorr, 61, German chemist and co-developer of Aspirin
• * Heinrich Albers-Schönberg, 56, German physician and radiologist, first to identify osteopetrosis; died of "cardiac failure consequent upon pneumonia."

  June 5, 1921 (Sunday)

• A treaty was signed between Czechoslovakia and Romania, to combat possible Hungarian revisionism within the so-called "Little Entente."
• In New York City, an ordinance was passed to encourage the construction of new residences to accommodate 13,000 additional families by exempting them from city taxes for ten years if built in 1921 and 1922.
• Born: Thomas C. Peebles, American physician, first person to isolate the measles virus; in Newton, Massachusetts
• Died:
• *Laura Bromwell, 24, American stunt pilot; killed after she lost control of her plane at the top of a loop over Long Island, New York, and crashed from an altitude of 1,000 feet
• *Georges Feydeau, 58, French playwright
• *Alexander Kellas, 52, Scottish mountaineer and chemist; died of a heart attack during the British expedition to Mount Everest

  June 6, 1921 (Monday)

• The British government halted a five-month campaign of "reprisal burning" of the homes of Irish Republicans after the strategy had literally backfired. Tom Barry and his 3rd Cork Brigade had responded to the burning of Sinn Féin members' homes by burning down the much larger homes of Unionists, and as one observer would later note, "the huge homes of rich, politically influential Loyalists were worth far more than an Irish cottage." Years later, Barry would say of the British, "they had gone down in the mire to destroy us and down after them we had to go."
• Congolese religious leader Simon Kimbangu and his followers were arrested at Thysville by Belgian colonial authorities on the orders of administrator Léon Morel, but Kimbangu was able to escape and would remain a fugitive for three more months.
• Died: James A. Bradley, 91, American brush manufacturer and real estate developer, founder of the beach resorts of Bradley Beach, Ocean Grove, and Asbury Park, New Jersey

  June 7, 1921 (Tuesday)

• The Parliament of Northern Ireland began operations in Belfast, with 40 of the 52 seats filled by the swearing in of Unionists. The remaining 12 seats remained empty as the Sinn Féin and the Irish nationalists who had won office refused to take the oath of loyalty to the crown.
• Allied troops in the disputed Upper Silesia region created a temporary buffer zone between the properties divided between Germany and Poland, with British troops and French troops enforcing the division.
• U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes informed Mexican President Álvaro Obregón that the U.S. would not give diplomatic recognition until Mexico bound itself to the discharge of primary international obligations.
• U.S. President Warren G. Harding welcomed Panama's Foreign Minister, Marcisco Garay, to the White House to hear Panama's protests against the U.S. arbitrated settlement of the Panama and Costa Rica boundary.
• An assistance pact was signed between Romania and Yugoslavia.
• Patick Maher and Edmond Foley, the last of the "Forgotten Ten" Irish republicans, were executed in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin.
• In the Los Angeles mayoral election, incumbent Meredith P. Snyder was narrowly defeated by George E. Cryer.
• Died: Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, 64, Danish ornithologist and teacher

  June 8, 1921 (Wednesday)

• U.S. Army Air Service test pilot Harold R. Harris became the first pilot to fly a pressurized aircraft, when he successfully took a Dayton-Wright USD-9A aloft with an experimental pressurized cockpit.
• The Highland Park Mosque, "the first building in the United States constructed by Muslims to use as a mosque consistent with the architectural traditions of that faith", was opened in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, Michigan, at 242 Victor Street. It operated until 1926, when it was sold to the city of Highland Park by its builder, real estate developer and Syrian immigrant Mohammed Karob.
• President Alvaro Obregon of Mexico decreed a 25% increase on the export tax for Mexican petroleum, effective July 1.
• Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees, the highest-paid major league baseball player in the world, was placed in jail by a New York traffic court magistrate after being convicted of speeding and fined $100 after having driven on a city highway. Placed in a cell at 11:30 in the morning, "The Home Run King" served five and a half hours and was released at 4:00 in the afternoon, forty minutes before he was scheduled to bat for the Yankees at the Polo Grounds.
• Born: Suharto, Indonesian military officer and politician, served as President of Indonesia from 1968 to 1998; in Kemusuk, Dutch East Indies
• Died: Roderick Maclean, 66 or 67, Scotsman who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria on March 2, 1882

  June 9, 1921 (Thursday)

• The British Government issued a White Paper publishing the text of a letter and text purporting to be a proposal for a treaty between Irish Republicans and the government of the Soviet Union. According to the release from the office of UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a June 15, 1920 letter was written by Dermot O'Hegarty to Desmond FitzGerald. The letter, said to have been captured in Dublin by British Army intelligence, attached a memorandum written by Patrick McCartan, stating that McCartan was working with American attorney John T. Ryan to negotiate with the Soviets.
• Died:
• *Luis María Drago, 62, Argentine politician and lawyer, served as Foreign Minister of Argentina, authored the Drago Doctrine in a diplomatic note in 1902 to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. During the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903, a blockade of Venezuela by European nations to collect debts owed, Drago proposed an addition to the Monroe Doctrine, that no foreign power should use force to collect a debt owed by a nation in the Western Hemisphere. As a result, the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 asserted that foreign powers would be required to ask U.S. aid in resolving the debt rather than using military force
• *Frederick W. Galbraith, 47, American World War I veteran, National Commander of the American Legion; killed in an auto accident in Indianapolis
• *Louis de Rougemont, 73, Swiss hoaxster who claimed that he had lived among cannibals in Australia for 30 years