May 1901

May 1, 1901 (Wednesday)

• Prince Itō Hirobumi resigned as Prime Minister of Japan, along with almost all of his cabinet, after the Finance Minister, Viscount Watanabe Kunitake, announced that his department would have to postpone public works projects indefinitely. The only member of the cabinet not to quit was the Minister of War, Baron Kodama Gentarō.
• The Pan-American Exposition opened in Buffalo, New York.
• William McKinley became the first President of the United States to tour the Deep South, speaking at Mississippi before stopping for the night at New Orleans.
• Born:
• * Sterling Allen Brown, African-American poet and folklorist, in Washington, D.C.
• * Hotsumi Ozaki, Japanese journalist and spy for the Soviet Union during World War II, in Shiba, Tokyo
• Died:
• * Rousseau Owen Crump, 57, U.S. Representative for Michigan since 1895
• * Lewis Waterman, 64, American inventor, created the first practical fountain pen and founded the Waterman Pen Company

  May 2, 1901 (Thursday)

• In Scotland, the Glasgow International Exhibition opened.
• Refined crude oil was delivered by pipeline for the first time to the Eastern seaboard in the United States, as the Standard Oil Company's "United States Pipe Line" began operation. Construction of the line, which started at the oil fields in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and ran to Philadelphia, took nine years to complete.
• In Berlin, the musical score for the ballet Aschenbrödel, which Johann Strauss had been working on when he died in 1899, was performed for the first time, after being completed and modified by composer Josef Bayer. On the same day in Berlin, another ballet whose score Bayer had composed, Die Braut von Korea, closed after a four-year run; Gustav Mahler would describe it as "one of the most stupid ballets ever to have been staged".
• Two future members of the Baseball Hall of Fame played key roles in the first forfeited baseball game in American League history, as the Chicago White Stockings hosted the Detroit Tigers. Chicago had a 5–2 lead going into the final inning, but Detroit scored five runs in the ninth; with rain clouds gathering, Chicago pitcher Clark Griffith tried to stall the game down "hoping that rain would wipe out the top of the inning, and the game's score would revert to the eight inning, resulting in a Sox win." "But their delays were so palpable and so clumsily done," the Chicago Tribune would report the next day, "that everyone could see the purpose." Umpire Tom Connolly ordered a forfeit, and Detroit was declared a 9–0 winner under baseball rules.
• Born: Willi Bredel, East German author

  May 3, 1901 (Friday)

• A massive fire destroyed 148 city blocks in Jacksonville, Florida, over an area of 455 acres and burning 2,361 buildings. At 12:39 p.m., the 36-member city fire department was notified that a fire had broken out at the American Fiber Company at the corner of Davis Street and Union Street. Sparks had ignited a pile of Spanish moss to be used as stuffing, and the fire then spread to the adjacent W. W. Cleveland & Son mattress factory. Destroyed in the blaze were the Duval Country Courthouse, the Jacksonville City Hall, the Windsor Hotel and St. James Hotel, as well as "the city armory, the opera-house, the leading churches of the city, the convent, acres of residences and scores of wholesale and retail business houses." The city would be rebuilt and within two and a half years, thousands of new buildings would be erected; over the next decade, the amount of cargo being handled by the Port of Jacksonville had increased to five times what it had been at the time of the fire.
• An upheaval in the stock market, known as the Panic of 1901 started as E. H. Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific Railroad, began his attempt to acquire majority ownership of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, and directed his broker, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. to buy as much as possible.
• Civil government was established in Manila after years of American occupation.
• Born: Hugo Friedhofer, American film score composer, Academy Award winner for the music for The Best Years of Our Lives, in San Francisco

  May 4, 1901 (Saturday)

• The Caste War of Yucatán, the decades-long resistance of the Maya peoples against the Mexican government, ended as General Ignacio Bravo marched his troops into the Mayan capital at Noh Cah Balam and set up his new headquarters.
• Italy rejected a request from the Ottoman government to help prevent the settlement of foreign Jews in Palestine, at the time a part of Turkish territory.

  May 5, 1901 (Sunday)

• Arriving earlier than expected, the royal yacht RMS Ophir reached Australia with the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall on board. The yacht dropped anchor a mile from the shore at Mornington, Victoria at 12:30 p.m., escorted by HMS Juno and followed by a line of other British warships.
• The United States began its withdrawal of forces from Beijing, after a year of occupation that followed the Boxer Rebellion. The troops of the cavalry and artillery of the U.S. 9th Infantry marched out of the Chinese capital toward Tianjin after being dismissed by Major General Adna Chaffee.
• In Lahore Vishnu Digambar Paluskar established as the first publicly supported school of Indian classical music on the subcontinent, the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya.
• The government of the Ottoman Empire began seizing all overseas correspondence directed to post offices operated by embassies in Constantinople, declaring that any mails had to go through the nation's post office. After protests from the ambassadors, Foreign Minister Tewfik Pasha would relent and apologize to the various diplomats.
• On his 28th birthday, Leon Czolgosz attended a lecture by anarchist Emma Goldman in Cleveland, where she spoke on the subject "Modern Phases of Anarchism". Czolgosz, an unemployed steelworker, would say later that the speech by Goldman "set me on fire". On September 6, Czolgosz would travel to Buffalo, New York and fatally shoot U.S. President William McKinley.
• Born: Blind Willie McTell, influential African-American blues guitarist and singer, in Thomson, Georgia ; 24 years after McTell's death, Bob Dylan would record the song Blind Willie McTell
• Died:
• * Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, 77, Indian entrepreneur and textile manufacturer
• * Axel Wilhelm Eriksson, 64, Swedish settler and trader in South West Africa
• * Mariano Ignacio Prado, 75, Peruvian state leader, 27th President of Peru

  May 6, 1901 (Monday)

• The British Ministry of War announced that nearly 15,000 British officers and troops had died in the Second Boer War against South African forces, with 14,264 enlisted men and 714 officers as casualties.
• The House of Commons of the United Kingdom voted 333 to 227 to approve a tax on the sale of coal.
• Gorkhapatra, the oldest still running Nepali newspaper was started on this day. The newspaper was distributed weekly then.

  May 7, 1901 (Tuesday)

• Russian painter Ilya Repin began work on his painting Torzhestvennoi Zasedanie Gosudarstvennogo Sovieta 7 Maya 1901 Goda, commissioned by the Russian State Council to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its first session in 1801. The large work is housed at the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.
• Allis-Chalmers, a manufacturer of agricultural, industrial, mining and construction machinery, was incorporated. Created by a merger of a steam engine and mill equipment producer, the Edward P. Allis Company, and two companies owned by Thomas Chalmers, the new corporation quickly acquired the engine making products of the Dickson Manufacturing Company, and then purchase additional companies; it would sell off most of its lines in 1985.
• German troops routed the Chinese cavalry in a battle at Kalgan in the Hebei Province of China.
• Born: Gary Cooper, American film actor, known for leading film roles in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and The Pride of the Yankees, recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actor for Sergeant York and High Noon, as Frank James Cooper in Helena, Montana

  May 8, 1901 (Wednesday)

• The Australian Labor Party was created, initially with the name "Federal Parliamentary Labor Party", under the leadership of Chris Watson of New South Wales.
• The largest plunge in prices on the New York Stock Exchange took place as panicked investors began selling shares of all stock except for Northern Pacific Railway, which jumped from $143.50 to $200 a share. "Many fortunes that had been made in the last six months by men who never before had a dollar," it was noted the next day, "were in some cases wholly wiped out as a result of the crash, and in others so considerably reduced that little remains."
• The Boston Americans played their first ever home game, a contest at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, a stadium that featured "just a single entrance ". The home team beat the Philadelphia Athletics. Exactly one hundred years later, Boston would win its May 8, 2001, home game by the same margin, defeating the Seattle Mariners, 12–4.

  May 9, 1901 (Thursday)

• The Panic of 1901 reached its height on what was described as "Blue Thursday", with the price of Northern Pacific Railway skyrocketing and the prices of other stocks plummeting. In the course of two hours, NP stock rose from $170 a share to $1,000. Banks shipped tens of millions of dollars of cash to New York City because of the demand for money to meet broker accounts. The frenzy would spread over to other markets, as prices fell on the London Stock Exchange As an historian would write later, E. H. Harriman and J. P. Morgan "had contracted for more stock than could be bought or borrowed" and as other brokers began purchasing, the price of a share of Northern Pacific soared from $150 to over $700 by Thursday. As brokers throughout Wall Street were faced with bankruptcy for committing themselves to buying stock that was would be worth much less than what they had agreed to pay, Jacob Schiff suggested the truce that ultimately canceled most of the trades and defused the panic.
• The very first Parliament of Australia opened in Melbourne, with the Duke of Cornwall and York formally declaring the beginning of the session. The initial meeting was held at the Royal Exhibition Building, before temporarily moving to the building that housed the parliament for the State of Victoria while a separate Melbourne site could be constructed for federal business. Melbourne would serve as the capital of Australia until 1927, when the seat of government would move to Canberra.
• The British Brothers' League was chartered in London with the slogan "England for the English", and with the goal of restricting immigration of foreigners into the British Isles. The group would disband after the passage of the Aliens Act in 1905.
• Seven-year old South African Lizzie van Zyl, who had been imprisoned in a British concentration camp in Bloemfontein, died from starvation and typhoid fever. A photo of Lizzie taken before her death would become a symbol of the abuses by British authorities during the Second Boer War, and would be used by activist Emily Hobhouse in bringing attention to the problem.