March 1901

March 1, 1901 (Friday)

• Australia's Department of Defence was created, and assumed control over the naval and military forces of the six former colonies, by proclamation made by the Governor-General under Section 69 of the new Constitution. The new department's first headquarters was at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne and assumed jurisdiction over 30,000 total personnel, all but 1,750 of whom were in part-time service. Captain Muirhead Collins of the Royal Australian Navy, who formerly had guided the defense forces of the Victoria colony, became the first Defence Secretary.
• Albert Einstein was published in an academic journal for the first time, when the Annalen der Physik printed "Folgerungen aus der Kapillaritatserscheinungen", which he had submitted on December 13, 1900.
• A wireless telegraph network began operations on the five principal islands of the Territory of Hawaii, allowing instant communication for the first time between Oahu, Hawaii, Maui, Kauai and Molokai.
• Born: Tommy Jarrell, American fiddler and banjo player who attained nationwide recognition in the 1960s; in Round Peak, North Carolina

  March 2, 1901 (Saturday)

• The Platt Amendment, which provided seven conditions for the withdrawal of American troops from Cuba in return for a treaty that would require American approval of most of that new nation's foreign affairs, was signed into law by President William McKinley. Introduced on February 25 by U.S. Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut as an addition to an army funding bill, the amendment had passed the United States Senate, 43–20 and the United States House of Representatives, 161–137. The amendment would not be repealed until 1934.
• Liquidation of the Electric Vehicle Company, founded in 1897 by Isaac Rice, then transformed by Samuel Insull into the largest American operator of taxicabs, began when Insull shut down operations of its 109 cars in Chicago following a drivers' strike. Two months later, Boston's 250 car fleet would be idled, and the other cities followed.
• A column of Russian troops in China was defeated in battle by Chinese defenders at Mukden, with 20 men killed and 30 wounded on the Russian side.

  March 3, 1901 (Sunday)

• The Insular Government of the Philippine Islands was established by the United States Congress with the passage of the "Spooner Amendment" that had been sponsored by Senator John Coit Spooner of Wisconsin. Effective July 4, the U.S. military government of the Philippines gave way to a civilian government.
• Yaa Asantewaa, the Queen of the Ashanti Empire, was arrested by British troops, bringing to an end the War of the Golden Stool that had started on March 28, 1900. She was found at the small village of Sreso Tinpomu, south of Kumasi. She would be exiled to the island of Mahé in the Seychelles off the east coast of Africa, and would die at the age of 90 in 1921.
• The National Bureau of Standards was established in the United States on the last day of operations for the 56th United States Congress.
• Parkfield, California, which lies along the southern Calaveras Fault, a branch of the larger San Andreas Fault, was struck by 6.4 magnitude earthquake, the third in less than 50 years; tremors of at least 6.0 had already shaken Parkfield on January 9, 1857, and February 2, 1881, and would strike again on March 10, 1922, January 8, 1934, and June 28, 1966.
• Born: Claude Choules, British Royal Navy officer and the last surviving combat veteran of World War I; in Pershore, Worcestershire, England. Choules began training in the Royal Navy at the age of 14.

  March 4, 1901 (Monday)

• William McKinley began his second term as President of the United States, and Theodore Roosevelt was sworn into the then-unimportant job of Vice President of the United States. It marked the first time in 28 years that an incumbent president had been sworn in for a second consecutive term. After four Southern states had disenfranchised African-American voters during McKinley's first term, when he was pursuing reconciliation between North and South after the end of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era, McKinley announced in his second inaugural address, "We are reunited. Sectionalism has disappeared. Division on public questions can no longer be traced on the war maps of 1861. These old differences less and less disturb the judgment."
• Born:
• *Charles Goren, American bridge player, wrote a nationally syndicated column about the game, "Goren on Bridge"; in Philadelphia
• *Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Malagasy-French poet; in Antananarivo, French Madagascar

  March 5, 1901 (Tuesday)

• Sixteen Irish members of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom were ordered to leave during a debate over matters affecting Great Britain, and all refused. After the resolution for their closure from a debate on the education budget had passed, 220–117, Chairman Balfour House asked them to retire to the lobby. P. A. McHugh responded, "We will not divide," and was cheered by his Irish colleagues. The Speaker of the House then directed the Sergeant-at-Arms to remove the non-compliant members of parliament; first to go was Eugene Crean, from Cork, who fought with the six officers but was finally subdued. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, at about 12:30, policemen were called into the building. Taken, in addition to Crean and McHugh were members Michael Flavin, James Gilhooly, Thomas McGovern, John Cullinan, Patrick O'Brien, William Lundon, William Abraham, Patrick Doogan, Anthony Donelan, Patrick White and Jeremiah Jordan. The Times of London wrote, "Drastic punishment must be meted out to this offense which is all the more unpardonable because clearly deliberate."
• The United States Department of the Treasury announced that the amount of its reserve of gold was higher than ever before in the Department's history, with $489,412,158 of gold bullion in its possession. At the official price at the time of $20.67 per ounce, the figure represented 23,677,414 ounces of gold; the 2015 reported U.S. gold reserve of was 8133.5 metric tons or 286,900,771 ounces.
• Died: Bir Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, Nepalese state leader, 48, 11th Prime Minister of Nepal, who had guided modernization and reforms in the Buddhist kingdom

  March 6, 1901 (Wednesday)

• Acting on an intelligence report that had been brought to his camp, Colonel Frederick Funston embarked on a mission to capture the leader of the Philippine opposition, Emilio Aguinaldo. Funston and his group of 88 men departed from Manila Bay on the to reach a deserted location on Luzon, about from Palanan, where Aguinaldo had been seen. Funston's commander, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr., told him, "Funston, this is a desperate undertaking. I fear that I shall never see you again."
• During a visit to Bremen, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was struck in the face by a sharp iron object thrown at him in an apparent assassination attempt. The assailant, identified as Deidrich Weiland, was adjudged to be insane. The Kaiser was riding in a coach to the railway station when the incident happened at 10:10 pm, and the object thrown "afterward proved to be a fishplate". The German Emperor was left with a deep wound, long, below his left eye; the Chief of the Naval Ministry would note later, "On the temple or in the eye the blow could have been devastating. The wonder of it is that our All-Gracious Lord felt neither the object flying at him nor, in the rain, the copiously flowing blood; it was those around him who drew his attention to it at first." Despite rumors in the press that the Kaiser had sunk into a depression, he would say in a speech at month's end, "nothing is more false than to pretend that my sanity has suffered in some way. I am exactly the same as I was; I have become neither elegiac nor melancholic... everything stays the same."
• After Marcelo Azcárraga Palmero resigned, Práxedes Mateo Sagasta became the Prime Minister of Spain for the seventh time in thirty years. Sagasta had also been the Premier in 1872, 1874, 1881–1883, 1885–1890, 1892–1895, and 1897–1899. He would serve for the seventh, and final, time for 21 months, ending on December 6, 1902.
• In Dohnavur, in the Madras division of British India, a seven-year-old girl named Preena was able to find sanctuary at a Christian mission, after escaping from being sold into prostitution. She told missionary Amy Carmichael about the human trafficking that prevailed throughout the area and the practice of "temple prostitution"; in some Hindu temples where Perumal was worshipped as an incarnation of Vishnu, young girls were kept captive for the purpose. Carmichael would create a sanctuary and school, the Dohnavur Fellowship, to protect as many youngsters as possible from a similar fate. She would become known locally as Ammai, a variation of both "Amy" and of Amma, the Tamil language word for "mother", and would be credited with rescuing over 1,000 children from traffickers. Her 1932 book about the mission, The Gold Cord, would become a bestseller.
• Born: Robert Hall, Australian economist, chief economic advisor to the British government from 1947 to 1961; in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: John Jabez Edwin Mayall, 87, British portrait photographer, known for his portraits of the royal family taken in 1860

  March 7, 1901 (Thursday)

• A grand jury in Anderson County, South Carolina, indicted four leading citizens in Anderson "and a score of guards" after finding that they had been operating a slavery system. County Judge Benet had asked for an investigation, and the investigators determined that many African Americans had been seized while traveling, sent to stockade prison camps for felons, and then put to work for local landowners.
• The state of Texas formally adopted Lupinus subcarnosus, the sandyland bluebonnet, as its official flower.