November 1927


The following events occurred in November 1927:

November 1, 1927 (Tuesday)

  • The first communist government in China was proclaimed by Peng Pai, encompassing the counties of Haifeng and Lufeng near Hong Kong. The "Haifeng Soviet of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers" was created three weeks later, but Nationalist Chinese troops recaptured the area four months later.
  • The first currency for the British Mandate in Palestine, the "Palestine pound", was introduced. After the creation of Israel and the independence of Jordan, and a redemption offer, the Palestine pound ceased to be legal tender after 1952.
  • Died:
  • *Florence Mills, 32, African-American performer, died of complications from an appendectomy.
  • *Karl Plauth, 31, aircraft designer and World War One ace who had downed 17 planes for Germany, was killed in a flying accident when the Junkers A 32 he was piloting failed to pull up after he made a loop.

November 2, 1927 (Wednesday)

November 3, 1927 (Thursday)

November 4, 1927 (Friday)

November 5, 1927 (Saturday)

  • The Saturday Evening Post published the article "The Seeing Eye", written by Dorothy Harrison Eustis, introducing Americans to the news from Germany about dogs trained to assist blind veterans. Morris Frank, a 20-year-old blind man in Nashville, wrote back to Eustis, who was inspired to train the first American seeing eye dog in the United States. Frank began using the dog the following April, and training of dogs began in the U.S. in February 1929.
  • A three-story building in Shanghai collapsed during a meeting of female textile workers who were gathering to form a labor union. Reportedly, the women had just elected officers when the third floor collapsed, bringing down the building.
  • Alfredo Jauregui, one of several persons convicted of the assassination in 1917 of Bolivian President José Manuel Pando, was executed by firing squad. He had been chosen, by lottery, to serve as lone conspirator to receive the death penalty.
  • The Ikhwan Revolt began in Saudi Arabia when a party of Berber tribesmen, the Ikhwan attacked and killed foreign construction workers and policemen who had been working on a police post in Busaiya.
  • Born: Kenneth Waller, English TV actor; in Huddersfield, Yorkshire,
  • Died:
  • *Marceline Orbes, 53, who, as "Marceline the Clown", was world-renowned during the late 19th and early 20th century, committed suicide
  • *Augusta Déjerine-Klumpke, 68, pioneering neurologist who had been the first woman to become a member of the Societe de Neurologie

November 6, 1927 (Sunday)

November 7, 1927 (Monday)

  • The last anti-government protests in the Soviet Union took place on the tenth anniversary of the Communist victory in Russia, when the annual parade was joined by another group of marchers demonstrating against First Secretary Joseph Stalin. Government police broke up the protests, and Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev were condemned for organizing an opposition.
  • Pope Pius XI, answering the request of an American Roman Catholic bishop, gave his blessing for marriages performed in airplanes. A spokesman for the Vatican quoted the Pope as saying, "Provided other ecclesiastical formalities are complied with, there is no reason to prohibit these marriages."
  • Born: Hiroshi Yamauchi, Japanese entrepreneur who became president of Nintendo, a playing card manufacturing company, and transformed it into a multibillion-dollar creator of video games; in Kyoto

November 8, 1927 (Tuesday)

November 9, 1927 (Wednesday)

  • An uprising broke out in Lithuania at the city of Tauragė, led by citizens dissatisfied with the regime of President Antanas Smetona. Ultimately, 209 people would be convicted of charges arising from the insurrection, and eleven executed.
  • Died: Campbell MacKenzie-Richards, 27, British test pilot for the Royal Air Force, was died after he and his observer, Harry Norman Green, parachuted out of their airplane as it was running out of gas. Green had bailed out first and landed safely in a field near East Grinstead, Sussex, but MacKenzie-Richards "was killed, his parachute falling like a stone" after he jumped from the aircraft.

November 10, 1927 (Thursday)

  • General Motors declared the largest dividend in history up to that time, paying a total of $3.75 per share on each of its 17,400,000 shares for a total of $65,250,000 to its investors. The money paid represented the regular quarterly dividend of $1.25, plus an additional $2.50."
  • The gunboat USS Panay and the submarine USS Argonaut were both launched. The Panay would be attacked and sunk by Japanese aircraft on December 12, 1937, slightly less than four years before America's entry into World War II, while the Argonaut would be sunk by the Japanese in 1943.
  • Born: Sabah, Lebanese singer and actress; as Jeanette Gergi Feghali in Beirut

November 11, 1927 (Friday)

November 12, 1927 (Saturday)

November 13, 1927 (Sunday)

  • Mindogon Mgboundoulou, father of 6-year-old Jean-Bédel Bokassa, was beaten to death after releasing persons being detained by the Compagnie Forestière de la Sangha-Oubangi. Bokassa's mother, Marie Yokowo, killed herself a week later. "t would be no exaggeration to say that learned the art of violence at an early age from some of its most seasoned practitioners", one author would note later. Bokassa would oversee the murder of thousands of his countrymen as leader of the Central African Republic.
  • An attempt was made on the life of Mexican presidential candidate, General Álvaro Obregón, by a group of Cristeros, Christian clerics who had been persecuted by the government. Two bombs were thrown at his car, and he was slightly cut by glass from the windshield. Father Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez would later be executed for the crime.

November 14, 1927 (Monday)

  • Twenty-six people in Pittsburgh were killed and 465 injured in the explosion of a natural gas storage tank. Operated by the Equitable Gas Company, the five million cubic foot gasometer, located on Reedsdale Street and Sproat Alley on Pittsburgh's North Side, erupted at 8:45 in the morning. The blast collapsed an adjacent factory building onto the 140 employees of the Pittsburgh Clay Pot Company.
  • The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party voted to expel both Trotsky and Zinoviev from membership, along with 81 of their associates. The resolution became effective on December 2, when the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU purged 93 other Party members associated with the "Trotsky-Zinoviev faction".
  • Born: McLean Stevenson, American TV actor best known as Colonel Blake in M*A*S*H; in Normal, Illinois

November 15, 1927 (Tuesday)

November 16, 1927 (Wednesday)

  • The, the second United States Navy aircraft carrier, was commissioned. After World War II, the decommissioned Saratoga would be among ships sunk in an atomic test on July 25, 1946.
  • Died:
  • *Adolph Joffe, 44, Soviet diplomat, committed suicide four days after the expulsion of his ally, Leon Trotsky, from the Communist Party.
  • *Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, 32, former middleweight boxing champion, died from complications of minor surgery for a growth above his eye. Four days earlier, he had knocked out Leo Gates in four rounds in a bout in New York.

November 17, 1927 (Thursday)

  • President Coolidge declared in a speech to the Union League of Philadelphia that America was "entering upon a new era of prosperity". Less than two years later, the stock market would crash.
  • The Mexican Supreme Court voided enforcement of a 1925 law that had abrogated a 1923 agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that had allowed drilling for oil.
  • Born: Fenella Fielding, English comedian; in London
  • Died: Moulay Youssef, 45, Sultan of Morocco since 1912, died of uremia. General Mougin, French Director of the Moroccan military, supported Prince Idris, Youssef's eldest son, as the successor, while the Grand Vizier, Mohammed El Mokri, supported Youssef's youngest son, Sidi Mohammed, who won out and was crowned Mohammed V.

November 18, 1927 (Friday)

  • U.S. President Coolidge commuted the prison sentence of Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who had been convicted of defrauding contributors in raising funds for his "Back to Africa" movement. After his release, Garvey, a native of Jamaica, was deported from the U.S. on board the ship SS Saramacca.
  • Humphrey Bogart and fellow actor Helen Menken were divorced, 18 months after their May 20, 1926, marriage, after she alleged cruelty and at least two occasions of battery. However, the two re-established their friendship even after Bogart remarried.
  • Born: Hank Ballard, American musician and songwriter best known as author of "The Twist", 1990 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; as John Henry Kendricks in Detroit

November 19, 1927 (Saturday)

  • The first Phillips 66 service station was opened, inaugurating the chain of gasoline and auto repair centers at Wichita, Kansas. The very first filling station had been opened in 1907, in Seattle, for Standard Oil Company.
  • Fifty years after its founding in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Ogden College signed an agreement with Western State Normal School and Teachers College, closing the college and turning the campus over to what would become Western Kentucky University. The original 20-year lease was extended and will now run until 2059. The college's name survives as the "Ogden College of Science and Engineering" on the WKU campus.
  • The Cap Arcona made her maiden voyage, departing Hamburg to Argentina. The German luxury liner would later be the prison for thousands of concentration camp inmates, who would die when that ship and others were bombed by the Royal Air Force on May 3, 1945.

November 20, 1927 (Sunday)

November 21, 1927 (Monday)

  • The Colorado state police opened fire with machine guns on 500 unarmed coal miners at the Columbine Mine Rocky Mountain Fuel Company in Lafayette, Colorado, during a strike, killing five of them. The incident was referred to as the "Columbine Massacre" prior to the 1999 high school shooting in Littleton, Colorado.
  • The Soviet government passed a proposal by Joseph Stalin to make it a capital crime to leave the U.S.S.R. and to refuse to return. In addition to the confiscation of a violator's property, a person convicted of "placing oneself outside the law" of the U.S.S.R. was subject to execution "24 hours after confirmation of his identity". The law was used to carry out assassinations of anyone harmful to the regime, no matter where they lived.
  • Actress Edith Luckett Robbins filed a petition for divorce against her husband, Kenneth Robbins, for desertion. The divorce was granted by a court in Trenton, New Jersey, in February. Edith then married Dr. Loyal Davis, who adopted her daughter, Ann Frances Robbins, who would take on the name Nancy Davis, later Nancy Reagan.
  • Born::
  • *Georgia Frontiere, majority owner of the NFL's St. Louis Rams, who moved the team to her hometown from Los Angeles in 1995; as Violet Frances Irwin in St. Louis
  • *Joseph Campanella, American stage and TV actor, known for soap operas; in Lewistown, Pennsylvania

November 22, 1927 (Tuesday)

  • Italy and Albania signed a mutual defense treaty, popularly called the Second Pact of Tirana, which "gave Italy de facto control over Albania as a protectorate". Italy would conquer the Balkan nation in 1939, installing its monarch as King Viktor Emanueli.
  • Detroit's National Hockey League team played its first game in Detroit, and its first home game in the United States, after spending its first year playing across the border in Windsor, Ontario. The Detroit Cougars defeated the Ottawa Senators, and after changing their name to the Falcons, would become the Detroit Red Wings in 1932.
  • The Alvin Theater opened on Broadway, with George Gershwin's musical Funny Face as its first presentation. The name was not based on anyone named Alvin, but was an amalgam of the names of producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley.
  • Died: St. Pedro Esqueda Ramirez, 40, one of the Cristeros martyrs who was executed by the Mexican government.

November 23, 1927 (Wednesday)

November 24, 1927 (Thursday)

  • The fourth annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City included a new feature — a large balloon of a popular cartoon character — that would become a tradition in the parades from 1933 onward. The first balloon, designed and constructed by Tony Sarg, was an image of Felix the Cat. It was about tall, was filled with air rather than helium, and was displayed on the back of a truck. Newspaper accounts at the time noted the day before the parade that Sarg, "renowned for his humorous and fantastic creations for children" would have an "animated puppet show which will appear on one of the nine floats in the pageant" without mention of the animation, in addition to "an enormous smoke-breathing dinosaur, sixty feet in length, attended by a bodyguard of prehistoric cavemen", and a "spectacular Robinson Crusoe-Desert Island float" preceded by "an entire forest", "lions, tigers, monkeys, giraffes and occasional cannibals" and the feature that "For the first time in the history of Broadway, trees will actually move along the street."
  • Construction worker Philo Anderson of Beaver, Utah, became entangled in rope while lowering a section of pipe on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He fell to his death.
  • On Thanksgiving Day at California's Folsom Prison, the maximum security inmates were watching a holiday program at the cell house, when the group overwhelmed the eight guards and attempted an escape. As luck would have it, the assistant turnkey had transferred the keys to the prison to another employee shortly before the outbreak. Two guards and seven prisoners died in a riot that involved one-third of the 1,200 inmates, before 300 members of the California National Guard arrived to assist 200 civil officers, bringing with them tanks and machine guns. The group released their hostages unharmed upon surrendering the next morning.
  • Born:
  • *Ahmadou Kourouma, Ivory Coast novelist; in Boundiali
  • *Emma Lou Diemer, American composer; in Kansas City, Missouri
  • *Alfredo Kraus, Spanish tenor; in Las Palmas, the Canary Islands
  • Died:
  • *Ion I. C. Brătianu, 63, Prime Minister of Romania on five occasions since 1909
  • *William H. G. Bullard, 60, U.S. Navy Admiral, radio engineer, and first chairman of the Federal Radio Commission
  • *Shushanik Kurghinian, 51, Armenian feminist writer and poet

November 25, 1927 (Friday)

November 26, 1927 (Saturday)

November 27, 1927 (Sunday)

November 28, 1927 (Monday)

November 29, 1927 (Tuesday)

  • Amānullāh Khān, King of Afghanistan, became the first Afghan monarch to depart his kingdom to travel abroad. His tour of Europe lasted until his return on June 1, 1928.
  • Born: Vin Scully, American baseball broadcaster known as "The Voice of the Dodgers"; in the Bronx

November 30, 1927 (Wednesday)

  • The Soviet Union's proposal for a General and Complete Disarmament" presented by the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations.
  • Born: Robert Guillaume, American TV actor who played the title role in Benson, and who appeared in the film The Lion King as the voice of the wise mandrill, Rafiki; as Robert P. Williams, in St. Louis