November 1923

November 1, 1923 (Thursday)

• Imprisoned steel industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach signed an agreement with the French government establishing conditions under which the Krupp mines in the Ruhr would resume work. Krupp was released from prison 14 days later.
• The governments of Estonia and Latvia signed a mutual defense treaty and military alliance. Latvia renounced all claims it had made on Ruhnu island in the Gulf of Riga.
• The Finnish airline Finnair was founded by Bruno Lucander under the name "Aero Osakeyhtiö", abbreviated to Aero O/Y. Lucander's sole aircraft at first was a single-engine Junkers F.13 seaplane, used for flying a route between Helsinki and Tallinn. In 1947, the company would be renamed Finnish Airlines, shortened to Finnair in 1949.
• Born:
• *Victoria de los Ángeles, Spanish singer; in Barcelona, Spain
• *Gordon R. Dickson, Canadian science fiction writer; in Edmonton, Canada
• Died: Bill Lovett, 29, Irish-American gangster and retired leader of New York's White Hand Gang; murdered while sleeping in an abandoned store at 25 Bridge Street in Brooklyn, after a night of drinking at Sand's Saloon

  November 2, 1923 (Friday)

• Silent film star Margaret Gibson was arrested at her home in Los Angeles on federal charges of operating a blackmail and extortion ring, charges that were later dropped. She performed under her own name from 1913 to 1917, and later as Patricia Palmer from 1918 to 1929.
• U.S. Navy Lieutenant Harold J. Brow set a new flight airspeed record at the Mineola airfield on New York's Long Island, becoming the first person to fly faster than 400 kilometers per hour and the first of more than 250 miles per hour. Brow, competing against Navy Lieutenant Alford J. Williams, averaged over a three-kilometer course.
• Three Socialist members of the Gustav Stresemann cabinet resigned in protest of the government's refusal to curb the powers of the dictatorial regime in Bavaria.
• The Reichsbank issued a 100 trillion-mark banknote.
• David Lloyd George gave a final speech at the Metropolitan Opera House as he ended his tour of North America. Lloyd George defended the Treaty of Versailles as "the best treaty that could have been negotiated under the circumstances at that time" and said it was not the treaty that was responsible for the present problems of Europe, but "the completeness of the victory. It was the most complete victory that has almost ever been won in wars between great nations. Germany-Austria were shattered, demoralized, disarmed, prostrated; we left them like broken backed creatures on the road for any chariot to run over." He added that Europe must be given "the conviction that right is supreme over force. Who is to do it? There are only two countries on Earth which can establish that conviction, and those are the United States of America and the British Empire. Unless it is done, I do not know what is going to happen."
• Born:
• *Cesare Rubini, Italian professional basketball player and coach, won 15 national championships from 1950 to 1972 as the coach of Olimpia Milano; in Trieste, Kingdom of Italy
• *Dr. Charles Kamalam Job, Indian surgeon and medical researcher in the study of leprosy; in Palliyadi, Madras Province, British India
• Died:
• *Lim Chin Tsong, 56, Chinese-Burmese businessman and philanthropist
• *Stevan Aleksić, 46, Serbian Romanian painter

  November 3, 1923 (Saturday)

• Crown Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden married Louise Mountbatten at St James's Palace.
• U.S. Army Captain Harold Kullberg performed the first arrest in the United States for violation of air traffic rules. While flying, Kullberg noticed a plane that was stunt flying over Akron, Ohio. When the plane landed at Stowe airfield, Kullberg did as well and arrested pilot Howard Calvert and passenger Frank O'Neill.
• The New York Renaissance the first all-black professional basketball team, commonly called "The Rens", played its first game, defeating the "Collegiate Five", a group of white former college basketball players, 28 to 22. The game took place at the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom in the Harlem section of New York City.
• German President Friedrich Ebert refused the request of General Hans von Seeckt for dictatorial powers in law enforcement in Bavaria.
• In Australia, two people were killed, and 150 injured in rioting as a result of the Victorian Police strike in Melbourne.
• Born:
• *Violetta Prokhorova Elvin, Russian prima ballerina and actress; as Violetta Prokhorova, in Moscow, Russian SFSR
• *Tomás Ó Fiaich, Northern Irish Catholic prelate, Archbishop of Armagh and a Cardinal from 1979 until his death; in Cullyhanna, County Armagh, Northern Ireland
• *Moreno de Souza, Portuguese Jesuit priest in the Portugal's Goa colony, translator of the Holy Bible into the Konkani language; in Pilerne, Goa, Portuguese India

  November 4, 1923 (Sunday)

• Nationalist groups including monarchists and Nazis paraded in Munich during a memorial ceremony for war dead in which a corner stone was laid for a new monument. Crown Prince Rupprecht, Otto von Lossow and Eugen von Knilling were among those in attendance. Adolf Hitler plotted to use this occasion to launch a putsch by kidnapping the Bavarian leaders and declaring a revolution from the reviewing stand, but he abandoned the plan after seeing the large police presence on the scene.
• The Australian government issued an appeal to fit men of military age to enroll as special constables as the Victorian Police strike entered its fourth full day. The strike gradually petered out with the hiring of these Specials.
• United States Navy Lieutenant Alford J. Williams broke the flight airspeed record just two days after it has been set, flying at at Mineola.
• Born:
• *John Powell, British physicist who created the EMI brain scanner and body scanner; in Islip, Oxfordshire, England
• *Freddy Heineken, Dutch billionaire who built the Heineken International beer brewing company into a worldwide organization; as Alfred Henry Heineken, in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• *Eugene Sledge, U.S. Marine and later a historian whose combat experiences were chronicled in the PBS documentary The War, and the HBO drama series The Pacific; in Mobile, Alabama, United States

  November 5, 1923 (Monday)

• A plebiscite on prohibition was held in the Canadian province of Alberta on whether to retain the 1916 prohibition of sales of liquor. Voters opted overwhelmingly in favor of the sale of liquor by government-licensed stores, with 57.7% of the vote.
• Voters in the Scottish town of Falkirk, Stirlingshire, opted overwhelmingly in favor of the local sale of liquor as the first of 26 Scot towns to vote on the issue.
• Representatives of Germany and the Soviet Union signed an extension of the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo that had been made with the Russian SFSR alone. The new agreement extended the same terms between Germany and the other members of the U.S.S.R., the Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, Armenian SSR, Georgian SSR, and the Azerbaijani SSR.
• A mob of poor and unemployed Berliners stormed the Grenadierstrasse and attacked Jews whom they blamed for the high prices of food.
• The trial of Maurice Conradi, who had assassinated Soviet peace conference delegate Vatslav Vorovsky on May 10, began in Switzerland at Lausanne.
• Prominent Ku Klux Klan figure William S. Coburn was shot dead in his office in Atlanta by a member of a rival Klan faction.

  November 6, 1923 (Tuesday)

• A coal mine explosion killed 27 miners of the Raleigh-Wyoming Coal Company in Glen Rogers, West Virginia. Another 36 survived because the mine had been equipped with the most modern ventilation system available at that time.
• A least 18 striking workers, and 14 soldiers, were killed in a riot in Kraków in Poland. The uprising started when a policeman fired into a crowd of demonstrators as they entered Main Market Square.
• Born: Nizoramo Zaripova, Soviet Tajik feminist and acting head of state of the Tadzhik SSR in 1984; in Pusheni, Uzbek SSR

  November 7, 1923 (Wednesday)

• The Imperial Conference approved a protectionist tariff plan that would give favorable treatment to Empire goods.
• The Imperial Conference also accepted, in modified form, an American plan to thwart rum-running by British vessels. It would give the United States authority to search and seize British ships suspected of containing contraband alcohol within a certain proximity to American shores, while British ships in return would be allowed to bring liquor to American ports under seal when intended for outbound consumption.
• Heavyweight boxer Billy Miske, despite being terminally ill with kidney disease, fought his final bout, ending in an upset of Bill Brennan with a fourth round knockout. Both Miske and Brennan had fought championship bouts with Jack Dempsey in 1920. Miske died less than eight weeks after his retirement from the ring.

  November 8, 1923 (Thursday)

• The Beer Hall Putsch began in Munich as Adolf Hitler and 603 members of his Nazi Party's Storm Troopers surrounded a large beer hall, Der Bürgerbräukeller, where Bavaria's State Commissioner Gustav Ritter von Kahr was making a speech to 3,000 people. Hitler announced that the Bavarian government of Eugen von Knilling had been deposed and that General Erich Ludendorff would form a new government.
• The Imperial Conference ended with an agreement that Dominions would be allowed to sign their own treaties with foreign countries.
• Born:
• *Jack Kilby, American electrical engineer and 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his role in inventing the first integrated circuit, as well as the handheld calculator and the thermal printer; in Jefferson City, Missouri, United States
• *Józef Hen, Polish novelist, playwright and screenwriter; as Józef Henryk Cukier, in Warsaw, Poland
• Died:
• *John Davey, 77, English-born American agriculture specialist, environmentalist and pioneer of tree surgery
• *Fusakichi Omori, 55, Japanese seismologist who formulated Omori's law for the prediction of the timing of aftershocks following an initial earthquake; died of a brain tumor