March 1921


The following events occurred in March 1921:

March 1, 1921 (Tuesday)

March 2, 1921 (Wednesday)

March 3, 1921 (Thursday)

March 4, 1921 (Friday)

March 5, 1921 (Saturday)

March 6, 1921 (Sunday)

March 7, 1921 (Monday)

March 8, 1921 (Tuesday)

March 9, 1921 (Wednesday)

  • The two college basketball teams with the best win–loss record that played against each other during the 1920–1921 season, the 18 and 1 University of Pennsylvania Quakers and the 12 and 2 Penn State Nittany Lions faced each other at Weightman Hall on the Penn campus in Philadelphia. The game went into overtime after the teams were tied, 17 to 17, at the end of regulation. In extra time, the Lions' Horace "Pip" Koehler was fouled as he shot a successful field goal and, under the rules of the day, the designated free throw shooter, Wilson, was allowed two free throws even if the goal counted. Though Penn's Bill Grave made one long shot seconds later to close the gap to 21 to 19, the Penn State defense was able to prevent any more scoring to win the game. Nevertheless, the Helms Foundation would retroactively name Pennsylvania, which would win its last three games for a 21 and 2 record and had defeated most of its opponents by double digits, the best team of the season.

March 10, 1921 (Thursday)

March 11, 1921 (Friday)

March 12, 1921 (Saturday)

March 13, 1921 (Sunday)

March 14, 1921 (Monday)

  • The play A Bill of Divorcement, written by Clemence Dane as a West End theatre production, premiered in at St Martin's Theatre in London for the first of 402 performances. Lady Dane's futuristic social commentary, set 12 years in the future in a time when women would be allowed to file divorce proceedings, included in the program "The action passes on Christmas Day, 1933. The audience is asked to imagine that the recommendations of the Majority Report of the Royal Commission on Divorce v. Matrimonial Causes have become the law of the land."
  • Died: Patrick Moran, Thomas Whelan, Frank Flood, Patrick Doyle, Thomas Bryan and Bernard Ryan, all members of the Irish Republican Army, executed in prison in Dublin after being convicted of treason against the crown in a court martial. A crowd of 20,000 people gathered outside the prison walls to pray for the men.

March 15, 1921 (Tuesday)

  • Former Ottoman Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, the leader of the Young Turks party and identified as a war criminal by the Allied Commission, was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian student in reprisal for the 1916 genocide. Talaat, one of the three leaders of the Young Turk Movement, had been walking with his wife when the assassin, who had been following the couple, tapped him on the shoulder, claimed to be a friend, and then shot both of them with a revolver. Shot through the head, Talaat died instantly. The assassin, Soghomon Tehlirian, was seized by witnesses until police could arrive.

March 16, 1921 (Wednesday)

  • The Treaty of Moscow was signed between the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the Soviet Union.
  • The 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party adjourned with the adoption of numerous closing resolutions. Grigory Zinoviev, a protege of Vladimir Lenin, was made a full member of the party's Politburo and became the chief rival to Joseph Stalin for control of the Party after Lenin's death.
  • The Bolshevik government in the Armenian SSR was overthrown in Yerevan.
  • The Allied Reparations Commission demanded that Germany pay one billion gold marks by March 23, and 12 billion marks by May 1, as its first installment of reparation payments. Germany responded on March 23 that it could not afford to pay the installment even if it felt it was owed.
  • The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed as the United Kingdom became the first western nation to decide to begin commercial relations with the Bolshevik government.
  • The Soviet Union recognized the government of the Republic of Turkey and recognized Istanbul as the capital.
  • The U.S. government issued an order forbidding U.S. armed forces personnel from wearing their military uniforms while participating in the St. Patrick's Day scheduled the next day in Boston. The troops were celebrating Evacuation Day at the same time that American supporters of Irish independence were celebrating St. Patrick.
  • Baseball team owner Charles Comiskey sent formal notices of unconditional release to the eight former Chicago White Sox players charged in the "Black Sox Scandal." Comiskey had indefinitely suspended the eight men on September 26. By 1921, only two of the players were still under contract with the White Sox for 1921— Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver.

March 17, 1921 (Thursday)

  • The Kronstadt rebellion was suppressed by the Soviet government as the 60,000 troops of the Seventh Red Army retook control of the fortress at 2:00 in the afternoon. The surviving members of the remaining garrison of about 10,000 Soviet Navy sailors and 5,000 soldiers either surrendered or fled towards the border with Finland. Roughly 800 soldiers arrived in Helsinki by the end of the day. Before evacuating to safety, the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee destroyed the Soviet Navy warships Petropavlovsk and Sebastopol.
  • Bonar Law resigned as Leader of the Opposition in the British House of Commons.
  • Organized crime mob enforcer Albert Anastasia was convicted of the murder of a longshoreman, George Turino, and sentenced to be executed at the Sing Sing State Prison in Ossining, New York. Due to a legal technicality, however, the conviction would be reversed and Anastasia won the right to a new trial in 1922. Before he could be tried again, four of the original prosecution witnesses would disappear, and Anastasia would be released from prison.
  • Radio station 9JR began broadcasting in the railroad junction town of Tuscola, Illinois, initially with the concept of broadcasting current grain price information to subscribing customers.
  • Negotiators for the Bolshevik Soviet government and the Menshevik Georgian government negotiated a ceasefire effectively clearing the way for the Soviet Army to take over the rest of Georgia while allowing the government leaders to safely evacuate to France. Georgia's Defense Minister Grigol Lordkipanidze and Soviet Communist representative Avel Enukidze concluded the agreement in Kutaisi.
  • The parliament of Poland adopted a new Constitution, to take effect on June 1 and to formally declare Poland to be a republic governed by a president.
  • Died: Frank W. Gunsaulus, 65, American Congregationalist minister and educator who founded the Armour Institute in 1893 by persuading meatpacking magnate Philip Danforth Armour, Sr. to donate the money. Armour Institute would merge with Lewis Institute in 1940 to create the Illinois Institute of Technology

March 18, 1921 (Friday)

March 19, 1921 (Saturday)

  • The Crossbarry ambush, the largest battle of the Irish War of Independence by number of participants, took place near Crossbarry, County Cork as Tom Barry and 103 IRA volunteers fought their way out of being surrounded by a force of 1,200 British troops.
  • In Chicago, a dust explosion at the world's largest grain elevator killed at least four Armour Company employees, shattered windows within a five-mile radius from the intersection of 122nd Street and Torrence Avenue, and caused damage estimated at $10,000,000 including the destruction of 7.5 million bushels of corn. The grain elevator itself, owned by the Northwestern Terminal Company, was destroyed within seconds.
  • Born: Tommy Cooper, Welsh comedian and magician who died on live television during a performance; in Caerphilly, Glamorgan, Wales

March 20, 1921 (Sunday)

  • A plebiscite was held in Upper Silesia on whether to join Poland or remain part of Germany. From the German point of view, the outcome of the vote was considered critical because the loss of the territory would make it more difficult to meet the Allied Reparations Commission terms and lead to the collapse of the nation's industrial economy. The New York Times noted at the time that the fate "of the whole of Upper Silesia is not actually decided by the plebiscite. That is the task of the Supreme Council, which in making a decision has to have regard not only to the voice of the population, but also the geographical and economic conditions of administration. The plebiscite results present them with a puzzle requiring all their wit and ingenuity to solve." Based on the results of individual towns and villages, the Council provided for most of Silesia to remain part of Germany, though the eastern section went to Poland and a southwestern section already ceded to Czechoslovakia.

March 21, 1921 (Monday)

March 22, 1921 (Tuesday)

  • The U.S. Navy airship A-5597 departed the Pensacola Naval Air Station on a training mission and sent its last report a few hours later from a point 20 miles off shore from St. Andrews Bay. The crew was not seen again, although the wreckage of the gondola was found on April 8.
  • U.S. president Harding called a special session of Congress for April 11.
  • A court in Germany convicted two American bounty hunters of false arrest in their attempt to pick up fugitive American Grover Bergdoll. Germany released the two men on March 31.
  • The Turkish National Movement adopted "İstiklal Marşı" as Turkey's national anthem.
  • Died: E. W. Hornung, 54, English author, creator of the "A.J. Raffles" series of novels

March 23, 1921 (Wednesday)

March 24, 1921 (Thursday)

  • In an event "said to be unprecedented in Federal prison annals," convicted Socialist politician Eugene V. Debs was released temporarily from the federal prison in Atlanta to travel, unguarded, to Washington DC, so that he could present his case for a presidential pardon to U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty. The furlough from prison, granted by the federal prison warden with the permission of President Harding and Daugherty, allowed Debs to travel "on his own personal recognizance and on his word that he would come direct to Washington and return to prison immediately after the conference." After arriving by train at 10:00 in the morning, dressed in a regular suit, Debs conferred privately with the Attorney General for a little more than three hours, then left "at 3:30 o'clock with the understanding that he would return at once to Atlanta." Debs reported back to the Atlanta federal prison the next afternoon, where he still had seven years remaining on a ten-year sentence. In December, Harding granted Debs a presidential pardon.
  • The Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921 was given royal assent and took effect immediately, providing for special tribunals to be set up by the British Secretary of State for criminal investigations.
  • Thirty-one people were killed and 100 injured when a nitroglycerin bomb exploded in Milan at the Kursaal Diana, where a crowd of theatre goers was watching a performance of the operetta Die blaue Mazur by Franz Lehár.
  • Rioting by German Communists in Eisleben and in Hettstadt killed 30 people near Hamburg. The Communist uprising was halted entirely by March 26.
  • Born:
  • *Franciszek Blachnicki, Polish Roman Catholic priest and founder of the Light-Life Movement; in Rybnik, Second Polish Republic
  • *Karl-Wilhelm Hofmann, German Luftwaffe fighter ace with 44 shootdowns in World War II; in Reichelsheim, Weimar Republic
  • *Sam McAughtry, Northern Irish writer; in Belfast, Ireland
  • Died: James Gibbons, 86, American Catholic prelate, served as the Archbishop of Baltimore, the second American to ever be selected as Roman Catholic Cardinal

March 25, 1921 (Friday)

  • The U.S. Navy tugboat USS Conestoga departed for sea for the last time, leaving the Mare Island Naval Base north of San Francisco with a crew of 56 on a voyage to San Diego. The wreckage of the ship would be discovered 88 years later west of California and the U.S. Navy would confirm that USS Conestoga had been found on March 25, 2016, the 95th anniversary of its disappearance.
  • U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes replied to a March 22 request by the Soviet Union for a trade agreement, stating that the U.S. would not resume relations until "a regime of productive order" was established in Moscow. Secretary Hughes commented that the U.S. government "views with deep sympathy and grave concern the plight of the people of Russia" but added that "It is manifest to this Government that in existing circumstances there is no assurance for the development of trade." Hughes added that "if fundamental changes are contemplated, involving due regard for the protection of persons and property and the establishment of conditions essential to the maintenance of commerce, this Government will be glad to have convincing evidence of the consummation of such changes, and until this evidence is supplied this Government is unable to perceive that there is any proper basis for considering trade relations."

March 26, 1921 (Saturday)

March 27, 1921 (Sunday)

March 28, 1921 (Monday)

March 29, 1921 (Tuesday)

March 30, 1921 (Wednesday)

March 31, 1921 (Thursday)