May 1901


The following events occurred in May 1901:

May 1, 1901 (Wednesday)

May 2, 1901 (Thursday)

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)

May 6, 1901 (Monday)

May 7, 1901 (Tuesday)

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)

May 10, 1901 (Friday)

  • One day after Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany ordered the recall of Imperial German Navy battleships from China, in an order from Foreign Secretary Oswald von Richthofen to the ambassador in Beijing, Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow attempted to reverse the decision. Noting that "the removal of the armored squadron while the greater part of Your Majesty's expeditionary force is still on Chinese soil" was "highly questionable militarily", von Bülow warned that "as soon as Your Majesty's expeditionary troops lose the armored battleships which are their strongest support, the Russians would cause them difficulties... I venture to ask Your Majesty, with the deepest respect, to agree to postpone the withdrawal of the fleet at the present moment."
  • Jagadish Chandra Bose, physicist and biologist from India, addressed a gathering at the Royal Institution in London and presented experiments to demonstrate his conclusion that plants had reactions similar to feelings, reacting to external stimuli.
  • Following the panic of the day before, stocks on Wall Street showed a resurgence and "not a single Stock Exchange house was forced to close its doors or suspend business... The panic clearly was over."Born: J. D. Bernal, Irish physicist and philosopher, in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland

May 11, 1901 (Saturday)

  • Sir Harry Johnston, a biologist and the British Commissioner of Uganda, cabled London to announce that the remains of an animal, long thought to be extinct, were on their way to the British Museum and that the "okapi" continued to exist. Described as "a giraffe-like creature which is closely akin to the ox in size" the okapi was rediscovered by European zoologists in the forests of what is now the Semuliki National Park.
  • Professor Charles Peabody, an archaeologist from Harvard University, became the first scholar to discover the variety of music that would become known as "Delta blues". Although he had arrived in Coahoma County, Mississippi, to oversee the excavation of a Choctaw Indian burial mound, his more important finding was the folk songs that the African-American work crew was singing while doing the excavation "and the mesmerizing power of their music continued to haunt Peabody's imagination long after he returned to Cambridge". He would publish his observations under the title "Notes on Negro Music" in the Journal of American Folklore, popularizing the genre.Born: Rose Ausländer, German poet

May 12, 1901 (Sunday)

May 13, 1901 (Monday)

  • In the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill defied his fellow Conservative Party members of parliament by speaking out against a proposal to increase the size and the budget of the British Army. "Has the wealth of the country doubled? Has the population doubled? Have the armies of Europe doubled? Is there no poverty at home? Has the English Channel dried up and we are no longer an island?" In the decades that followed, the words of the young politician, 26 years old at the time and in his first year in Commons, would frequently be re-quoted. Noting the effect that changing technology had on the nature of war, Churchill observed, "In former years, when wars arose from individual causes... when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed, when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors." Noting that "Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets", Churchill prophesied that "The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings." The Parliament would favor the increased military expenditure anyway, in what one historian would later describe as "the jettisoning of Pax Britannica by Britain herself" Born: Witold Pilecki, Polish resistance leader

May 14, 1901 (Tuesday)

May 15, 1901 (Wednesday)

May 16, 1901 (Thursday)

May 17, 1901 (Friday)

  • Theodor Herzl, the founder and President of the Zionist Organization, was granted an audience by Sultan Hamid of the Ottoman Empire, in a two-hour meeting at Constantinople. The Sultan acknowledged that "his Empire was wide open to Jewish refugees and, among the non-Muslims, they were his most reliable subjects." Herzl presented his proposal for the Sultan to grant an Imperial Charter to allow the colonization of Palestine for a Jewish state, in return for Jewish financiers assuming the responsibility to pay off of the Empire's debts. As Herzl would recount later, he told the Sultan, "His Majesty is the lion, perhaps I am Androcles, and maybe there is a thorn that has to be pulled out." Although the Sultan was intrigued by Herzl's idea, which would have led to the creation of the State of Israel 47 years earlier than its May 17, 1948, founding, the Charter was not granted.
  • Former National League baseball star Nap Lajoie was given the go-ahead to play in the rival American League after a court in Philadelphia denied a request for an injunction based on a reserve clause in the older league's contract. Lajoie had played for the NL's Philadelphia Phillies for four seasons, but after the 1900 season, he signed a contract for more money with the AL's Philadelphia Athletics. The day after the decision, Lajoie began playing in the American League and became the new circuit's first superstar.
  • Major General Chaffee issued his farewell order to the U.S. 9th Infantry Regiment, bringing an end to the American military presence in China. Evacuation would be completed from Beijing by May 23.Born: Werner Egk, German composer

May 18, 1901 (Saturday) (Sunday)

May 19, 1901 (Sunday)

May 20, 1901 (Monday)

  • The Duke of Cornwall and York, son of King Edward VII and the heir to the British throne, arrived in Brisbane during his tour of Australia.
  • At Alexandrovsky, near Saint Petersburg, Russian police fought with a group of 3,500 protesters at the Obuchoff Iron Works. After 12 of the police were injured, Russian soldiers fired into the crowd, killing 40 people and wounding 150 others.
  • U.S. Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt declared the formal opening of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Roosevelt noted that "The century upon which we have just entered must inevitably be one of tremendous triumph or of tremendous failure for the whole human race, because, to an infinitely greater extent than ever before, humanity is knit together in all its parts for weal or for woe."Born:
  • * Max Euwe, Dutch chess player
  • * Doris Fleeson, American journalist Died: Johannes Minckwitz, 58, German chess player, from injuries sustained after he stepped into the path of an oncoming train near Biebrich, Germany

May 21, 1901 (Tuesday)

May 22, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • Ahmed ʻUrabi Pasha, who led the Egyptian rebellion against the British in 1882 and had been banished to British Ceylon, was pardoned by the British government.
  • Five hundred Boer prisoners of war arrived in India, to be relocated to a POW camp in Ahmednagar.
  • Queen Yaa Asantewaa, who had led the Ashanti War against the British colonial government in Ghana in 1900 was sent into exile along with 15 other rebel leaders and their dependents, and would live for the rest of her life on the other side of Africa, on the Seychelles Islands.
  • Sir Thomas Lipton and his seven guests, including King Edward of the United Kingdom, were sailing in Lipton's yacht, Shamrock II, in the strait of The Solent off the coast of the Isle of Wight, when a storm suddenly struck. The spars, masts and sails of the yacht were destroyed, effectively preventing the management of the sails, but Lipton was able to bring the monarch back to safety.
  • Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt was the victim of an elaborate practical joke staged by the organizers of the Pan-American Exposition. The future President was asked to lead dignitaries to visit an old log cabin behind the fairgrounds, and "as he stooped to enter the cabin door there was a terrific warwhoop and two Indians in full war paint and feathers leaped up from the darkness and seized Colonel Roosevelt. Instantly there was a tremendous tumult of warwhoops and the report of many guns," the press noted the next day. The two "attackers" were well-known Oglala Sioux leaders, American Horse and Jack Red Cloud. When Roosevelt realized that it was a prank, he laughed and said, "By Jove, this is a rum on me."Born: Clarissa Scott Delany, African-American poet and educator Died: Gaetano Bresci, 31, the anarchist who assassinated King Umberto of Italy, hanged himself in his cell at the San Stefano Prison. After his arrest at the assassination scene on July 29, 1900, Bresci was sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty in Italy. According to an American commentator, however, his suicide "was the result of a series of tortures inflicted by order of the government, with the intention of driving him to end his life" and that "From the hour of his conviction those in charge of the prisoner sought by every method known to make him inflict the extreme penalty for his crime."

May 23, 1901 (Thursday)

  • The Keloet volcano on the island of Java erupted, killing hundreds of people.
  • France announced "the opening of the French Soudan" "to European traffic" after a successful navigation of the Niger River by Captain Eugène Lenfant. The French captain led a mission of taking flat-bottomed boats with 60 tons of provisions to French troops at Gaya, Niger.
  • In another one of the great comebacks of baseball history, the Cleveland Blues defeated the Washington Senators despite being down 13–5 with two men out near the end of the final inning. After Bill Hoffer and Ollie Pickering were struck out by Washington pitcher Casey Patten, Jack McCarthy came up to bat, and hit a single that began a rally that saw nine consecutive runs scored.
  • For the first time in any major league baseball game, a player was intentionally walked despite the bases being loaded. Nap Lajoie of the Philadelphia Athletics, the biggest star of the new American League was in Chicago for a game against the Chicago White Stockings. Going into the ninth inning, Chicago had an 11–5 lead, but there were no outs and men on first, second and third base when Lajoie came up to bat against pitcher Zaza Harvey; so, Clark Griffith, who the team manager and one of the pitchers, substituted himself for Harvey. Reasoning that Lajoie could bring in four scores with a home run, Griffith decided instead to throw four bad pitches so that only one run would score from Lajoie's time at bat, and Philadelphia's Phil Geier advanced from third base to home. Three of the next four batters were forced out, and Chicago won, 11–9. Intentional walks with the bases loaded would happen only two more times in the 115 seasons that followed, happening on July 23, 1944.
  • The first Canadian Patriotic Fund Association, intended for relief of Canadian veterans and the families of Canadians killed in the Second Boer War, was incorporated. Born:
  • * Charles W. Morris, American philosopher and pioneer in the field of semiotics, in Denver
  • * Edmund Rubbra, English classical composer, in Northampton, England Died: Charles Boysset, 84, the oldest member of France's Chamber of Deputies, after 52 years in office.

May 24, 1901 (Friday)

May 25, 1901 (Saturday)

May 26, 1901 (Sunday)

  • The government of Imperial China announced that it had reached an agreement with the members of the Eight-Nation Alliance on the indemnity to be paid by China for damages arising from the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Economists at the time estimated that it would take China 39 years to pay the reparations amount of 450 million taels along with four percent annual interest, and that China would have to raise 23,000,000 taels in tax revenues each year in order to avoid default.

May 27, 1901 (Monday)

  • The United States Supreme Court decided the first of the "Insular Cases" that arose from questions over the status of the first overseas territories captured by the U.S. in a war against a foreign power. DeLima v. Bidwell and Downes v. Bidwell were both lawsuits over the status of Puerto Rico, ceded to the United States by Spain following the Spanish–American War, but the decision would apply to all territories, including the Philippines. The cases arose when the State of New York continued to collect a tariffs and duties on a "foreign import" after the cession; as Justice Brown described it in the 5–4 majority opinion in DeLima, the question was "whether Porto Rico was a 'foreign country' at the time the sugars were shipped", and more specifically, "whether a country which had been ceded to us, the cession accepted, possession delivered and the island occupied and administered without interference by Spain or any other power, was a foreign country or domestic territory". The Court concluded "that... Porto Rico was not a foreign country within the meaning of the tariff laws, but a territory of the United States, that the duties were illegally exacted, and that the plaintiffs are entitled to recover them back." In the Downes case, however, the Court concluded that although Puerto Rico was not a foreign nation, it "is a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States within the revenue clauses of the Constitution... and that the plaintiff cannot recover back the duties exacted in this case." The Court also ruled that "the guarantee against deprivation of life, liberty and property without due process of law is fundamental and hence applicable in all the possessions of the United States", but added that "in the case of Porto Rico and the Philippines... there is an implied denial of the right of the inhabitants to American citizenship until Congress by further action shall signify its assent thereto."
  • In New Jersey, the Edison Storage Battery Company was founded.
  • Twenty-one coal miners in the Richland Mining Company's underground excavation near Dayton, Tennessee, were killed by two simultaneous explosions that resulted from poor placement of black powder charges. Because the person doing the coal firing used too much of the powder, the explosion "blew outward in a long flame" which "ignited coal dust particles suspended in a mine atmosphere, resulting in an instantaneous flash fire through the entire length of the mine", then caused massive sections of the roof to collapse.
  • Boer troops captured the British outpost of the Midland Mounted Rifles, taking 41 British troops prisoner on their way to Maraisburg, South Africa.Died: Artur Hazelius, 77, Swedish scholar and creator of the Nordic Museum

May 28, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, represented by Alfred L. Marriott on behalf of William Knox D'Arcy, signed an agreement with the Shah of Iran, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, with APOC receiving exclusive rights to drill for oil within almost all of Iran except for the five northern provinces bordering Russia, a 480,000 square mile area. The lease, binding for the next sixty years, was made in exchange for 40,000 British pounds and a royalty to Iran of 16% of the profits.
  • Kaiser Wilhelm ordered that the number of German troops in China be reduced, and summoned the commanding general, Count Alfred von Waldersee, back to Berlin.
  • Fighting in British Somaliland against the "Mad Mullah", British forces cut off his base of supplies and captured 5,000 head of cattle used to supply the Mullah's forces.
  • The Cuban Constitutional Convention voted 15–14 to accept the terms of the Platt Amendment passed by the United States Congress, allowing the United States to exercise protectorate control over Cuba, but with fewer amendments. Even then, however, President William McKinley refused to accept the Cuban resolution because it still contained qualifiers, so a third vote would be held on June 12.

May 29, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • Fifty-one British Army soldiers and six officers of the Seventh Battalion of Imperial Yeomanry were killed, and another 122 wounded, near the South African town of Vlakfontein, in an attack on Brigadier General Henry Dixon's brigade by Boer General Jan Kemp. Kemp's cavalry of 500 burghers had charged the British column, using a new technique where the soldiers fired their rifles from horseback.
  • The opera Manru, written by Polish Ignacy Jan Paderewski, was performed for the first time, with the premiere at the Royal Opera in Dresden.
  • The world's foremost automobile race, the James Gordon Bennett Cup, was won by Henri Fournier, who completed the distance from Paris to Bourdeaux in less than nine hours, crossing the finish line in a time of 8:44:44. Fournier had been a distant third until the two race leaders, Fernand Charron and Alfred Levegh, collided at Orléans and were forced to withdraw.

May 30, 1901 (Thursday)

May 31, 1901 (Friday)

  • Bulgaria amended its election law to disenfranchise the Muslim members of the Romani minority, and people classified as nomads, despite constitutional guarantees of equal voting rights.
  • Detective Edward Henry began work at London's Scotland Yard as the new Assistant Commissioner, and began the process of implementing his Henry Classification System of fingerprints to create the first Central Fingerprint Branch by July.
  • Bechstein Hall, the leading international venue for performances of chamber music because of its acoustics, held its first concert, with Ferruccio Busoni on the piano and Eugène Ysaÿe on the violin inaugurating the London facility.
  • A Baptist minister from Pittsburg, Texas, Burrell Cannon, was granted U.S. Patent No. 62,509 for the key component to what he called the Ezekiel Airship. Cannon proposed four of the wheels as propellers for a heavier-than-air flying machine, and sold $20,000 worth of stock in the Ezekiel Airship Manufacturing Company to potential investors. "If it is true that he actually flew the craft," an author would note later, "then he beat the Wright Brothers by more than two years." However, the airship itself would never be patented, nor do any blueprints survive, and the model would be accidentally destroyed while it was being shipped in a railroad car. On June 23, newspapers in the United States carried a drawing of the airship and announced that "The first product of the Ezekiel Airship company will take its trial spin July 1".
  • Five people were lynched by a mob in Lookout, California, after being arrested for petty theft. At 2:00 in the morning, Calvin Hall was visiting the local hotel where his three sons, Frank, James and Martin, were being held in custody along with a friend, B. D. Yantis, when "a mob of fifty persons" overpowered the two constables guarding the group, then took the Hall family and Yantis to a bridge over the Pit River. Frank was put to death even before the group reached the main bridge, and the mob hanged the other four shortly afterward.Born: Alfredo Antonini, Italian-born American conductor and composer, in Milan