March 1922


The following events occurred in March 1922:

March 1, 1922 (Wednesday)

  • Artur Bernardes of the Mineiro Republican Party won the Brazilian presidential election, defeating President Nilo Peçanha. He would be inaugurated as Brazil's 12th president on November 14.
  • The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Sweden signed a temporary commercial treaty in Stockholm. The Swedish Riksdag would later refuse to ratify it.
  • The first trainload of migrating Mennonite Christians in Canada departed from the railway station in Plum Coulee, Manitoba, after Manitoba and Saskatchewan had passed laws requiring regulating schools within their settlements. In all, 6,000 Mennonites would relocate to the Mexican state of Chihuahua to reassemble in the Colonia Manitoba north of Ciudad Cuauhtémoc.
  • Born:
  • *Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli statesman and general, served as Prime Minister of Israel from 1974 to 1977 and from 1992 to 1995; in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine
  • *William Gaines, American publisher of Mad magazine and EC Comics; in Brooklyn, New York, United States
  • *Michael Flanders, English actor and songwriter, member of comedy duo Flanders and Swann; in London, England
  • Died: Pichichi, 29, Spanish soccer football forward; died of typhus

    March 2, 1922 (Thursday)

  • Margaret Haig Thomas, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda was cleared to become the first female member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, after the Committee for Privileges and Conduct agreed with her argument that she was entitled under the law to succeed to the peerage of her father, David Alfred Thomas, 1st Viscount Rhondda, who had died in 1918.
  • Charles P. Steinmetz, German-born American electrical engineer and inventor, announced at the General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York, that he had "succeeded in producing and controlling an indoor thunderstorm" with the successful test of generators that could discharge over 100,000 volts of electricity at 10,000 amperes for 0.01 seconds.
  • All 25 crew of the Norwegian freighter Grøntoft died after the ship foundered in a North Atlantic storm about southeast of Nova Scotia. By the time the steamship Estonia arrived to the coordinates radioed from the ill-fated ship, there was no trace of the vessel, which had been carrying cargo from Galveston, Texas to Esbjerg in Denmark. According to the captain of the Estonia, as it was racing to the scene, the last message received, at 12:10 p.m., was that the crew had waited too long to lower the lifeboats and to evacuate. "The boats are smashed and some of the men were swept overboard," the telegraph operator signaled, "We are almost awash now. I may be driven out any minute. Hurry. You may not hear from me again."
  • Born:
  • *Bill Quackenbush, Canadian ice hockey defenceman, inductee to the Hockey Hall of Fame; as Hubert George Quackenbush, in Toronto, Canada
  • *David Greenglass, American machinist convicted of espionage for passing the secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union, and the chief witness against his older sister and his brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, leading to their executions in 1953; in Manhattan, New York City, United States

    March 3, 1922 (Friday)

  • Italian Fascists carried out a coup d'état in the Free State of Fiume. Riccardo Zanella, the President of Fiume, yielded after the government palace was shelled by Fascist rebels. Given three minutes to agree to surrender, Zanella yielded to the coup leader, Giovanni Giuriati.
  • Variety magazine published its first ranking of most popular films in the United States, initially based on a survey of box office receipts at movie theaters on Broadway in New York City and in other selected cities in the United States, initially as a service "for benefit of out-of-town showmen." The most popular film as of the week ending February 28, was Foolish Wives, directed by Erich von Stroheim.
  • Montreal's five-story tall City Hall, which had been built in 1891 at a cost of over one million dollars, was completely destroyed in a fire.
  • Thirteen people were killed, and 12 others injured when two trains collided with a bus at a crossing in Painesville, Ohio. The bus was struck on St. Clair Street railroad crossing by an eastbound New York Central Railroad express train. Minutes later, a westbound New York Central Railroad train crashed into the wreckage of the bus and the train.
  • Born:
  • *Duane D. Pearsall, American entrepreneur, developed the first battery-powered smoke detector for home use; in Pontiac, Michigan, United States
  • *Maurice Biraud, French film actor; in Paris, France
  • Died: Charles Robinson Rockwood, 61, American civil engineer and irrigation specialist who designed a canal system to bring development in the Colorado Desert in the Imperial Valley of southern California

    March 4, 1922 (Saturday)

  • Georgy Chicherin, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, announced a reversal of the position of the Communist government and informed food relief officials that the Soviet government would pay the international obligations that had been incurred by the Russian Empire during the rule of the tsars.
  • Babe Ruth signed a new, three-year contract with the New York Yankees, providing a base salary of $50,000 per year and a bonus of $500 for each home run hit in a game. According to the account of the negotiation, Ruth proposed to Yankees co-owner Tillinghast Huston that the terms of his contract would be based on the flip of a coin; if Ruth won the toss, he would get his demands, and if he lost, he would settle for the compromise offered by the Yankees' Jacob Ruppert. "Babe yelled 'tails,'" The New York Times reported, "and the coin so registered when it settled on the carpet in Colonel Huston's room."
  • The drama film The Cradle, starring Ethel Clayton and Charles Meredith, was released.
  • Born:
  • *Richard E. Cunha, cinematographer and film director; in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
  • *Dina Pathak, Indian actor and director; as Dina Gandhi, in Amreli, Gujarat, British India
  • *Joe Bertony, French-born Australian wartime spy and engineer, played a key role in designing the temporary works that allowed for the construction of the Sydney Opera House sails; in Corsica, France
  • Died: Bert Williams, 47, Bahamian-born American vaudeville entertainer; died after collapsing on stage at a theater in Detroit a few days earlier

    March 5, 1922 (Sunday)

  • Influential German horror film Nosferatu premiered before a group of guests who had been invited to the theater inside the Berlin Zoological Garden. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, it was released to the public ten days later at the Primus-Palast cinema in Berlin. By the time Stoker's heirs won a copyright infringement suit against director F. W. Murnau and the Prana Film studios, copies of Nosferatu had been distributed world wide and would go on to be celebrated as one of the best films of the century.
File:Will-H-Hays.jpg|100px|thumb|MPDAA director Will H. Hays