February 1923

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The following events occurred in February 1923:

February 1, 1923 (Thursday)

  • The first nationwide "football pool" in the United Kingdom, a legal betting pool for gamblers betting money on the outcome of soccer football matches, was launched as bookmakers John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes created the Littlewood Football Pool in Liverpool. Only 35 out of 4,000 printed betting coupons were sold for the first trial of the wagering service.
  • The Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MSVN), the Italian Fascist Party's "Blackshirts" paramilitary organization, began operations as a government-supported militia. Field Marshal Emilio De Bono, a retired Italian Army general and one of the Fascist Party organizers, became the Blackshirts' first commander.
  • Mexican troops stormed the headquarters of streetcar operators that continued to hold out on strike after the majority of them had returned to work. A shootout ensued in which 14 of the strikers were reportedly killed.
  • Inflation worsened in Germany as the mark dropped to 220,000 against a British pound.
  • Died: Ernst Troeltsch, 58, German theologian

February 2, 1923 (Friday)

February 3, 1923 (Saturday)

  • A magnitude 8.3 to 8.5 earthquake struck the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Soviet Union, generating a twenty-five foot tsunami that raced across the Pacific Ocean. The quake caused a series of seven waves over the Hawaiian Islands territory, killing at least 12 people at Kahalui on the island of Maui.
  • Sovnarkom, the ruling executive body of the Soviet Union, approved plans to create a civil aviation authority for passenger air travel, which would lead to the foundation of the Soviet national airline, Aeroflot.[citation needed]
  • Born:
  • Died: Kuroki Tamemoto, 79, Japanese general

February 4, 1923 (Sunday)

February 5, 1923 (Monday)

February 6, 1923 (Tuesday)

February 7, 1923 (Wednesday)

February 8, 1923 (Thursday)

  • An explosion killed 123 miners at the Stag Canon #1 mine in Dawson, New Mexico when a train jumped its track, slammed into the supporting timbers near the mine entrance, and touched off an explosion. Some of the victims were the sons of men who were killed in a 1913 mine disaster at the same site.
  • A gas explosion killed 33 men at a mine near Cumberland, British Columbia.
  • The Irish Free State proclaimed a 10-day amnesty for rebel Irish republicans, granting them a chance to surrender without consequence, after Liam Deasy, the Deputy Chief of the Irish Republican Army, had been captured and persuaded to issue a statement urging other rebels to surrender. Richard Mulcahy, the Minister of Defence and commander-in-chief of the Free State Army, sent a notice that said. "Bearing in mind Liam Deasy's acceptance of the immediate unconditional surrender of all arms and men, the Government offers amnesty to all in arms against the Government who will surrender with their arms on or before Feb. 18."
  • Norman Albert called the first live broadcast of an ice hockey game, the third period of an Ontario Hockey League Intermediate playoff game on the Toronto station CFCA.
  • Died: W. Bourke Cockran, 69, Irish-born U.S. Congressman, died in Washington two days before he would have been inaugurated to another term. Cockran had overwhelmingly won re-election in 1922 with 70% of the vote.

February 9, 1923 (Friday)

February 10, 1923 (Saturday)

February 11, 1923 (Sunday)

  • France and Belgium announced they would bar all exports from the Ruhr region to unoccupied Germany starting at midnight.
  • An uneasy truce in the "Egan-Hogan war" between Egan's Rats and the Hogan Gang, the two main organized criminal gangs in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri, came to an end after eight months when Dint Colbeck of the Rats invaded the Hogan territory on the city's north side and killed Jacob Mackler, a lawyer for the Hogan Gang.[citation needed]
  • Born:
    • Noriko Sawada Bridges Flynn, Japanese American writer and civil rights activist (d. 2003);
    • Rosita Fornés, American-born Cuban singer and actress in film and on television in Cuba; in New York City (d. 2020)

February 12, 1923 (Monday)

February 13, 1923 (Tuesday)

  • Italy's ruling Grand Fascist Council passed a resolution stating that no member of the Fascist Party could also be a Freemason, and anyone who was a member of both had to resign from one organization or the other. The resolution stated that the Grand Council "invites all Fascisti who are also Free Masons to choose between belonging to the Fascista National Party or to Freemasonry, because the Fascisti can only recognize a discipline which is the Fascista discipline."
  • The New York Renaissance all-black professional basketball team, commonly called "The Rens", was established as a touring group that would eventually play both black and white players, and usually defeat them. The Rens would win the first World Professional Basketball Tournament, held annually from 1939 to 1948.
  • The first radio station in Wales, 5WA Cardiff, went on the air at 5:00 in the afternoon. At 9:00 that evening, Mostyn Thomas, sang "Dafydd y Garreg Wen", which was the first Welsh language song to be broadcast. 5WA Cardiff would operate until 1933.
  • Alfred E. Smith, the recently inaugurated governor of the U.S. state of New York issued pardons to the last four anarchists, whom he described as "political prisoners", still imprisoned for violating state law. The move came a few weeks after Smith had freed agitator "Big Jim" Larkin who had been convicted under the same rule against sedition. "Evidence upon which they were convicted was much the same as that urged upon the trial of Larkin," Smith said of the remaining four prisoners. "Their offense consisted of spreading literature concerning the Communist Party." He added, "They made the mistake of understanding liberty and freedom as a license. While they should not be encouraged, no good can come from their further punishment, and they undoubtedly understand by this time what is meant by the majesty and dignity of the law."
  • The U.S. Senate voted, 63 to 6, to approve the proposal of Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska to amend the U.S. Constitution to change the date for inauguration of the U.S. president and of Congress from March to January, and to have newly elected officials take office less than three months after their election, rather than 13 months. Norris's initial proposal was to change the presidential and vice-presidential inauguration from March 4 to "the third Monday in January following their election", and for U.S. Representatives and Senators to take office on the first Monday in January. The measure would fail to reach a vote in the House of Representatives, but Norris persisted and the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which sets the inauguration dates as January 20 for the president and January 3 for the Congress) would be ratified in 1933. Senator Norris had first proposed an amendment that the U.S. Senate had approved, 63 to 6, on February 13, 1923, that would have set the beginning of the new presidential and vice-presidential terms on and for Congress to be the first Monday in January but the legislation had not been voted on in the House.
  • France fined the town of Recklinghausen 100 million marks for its disobedience. The public workers of Gelsenkirchen also went on strike in response.
  • The Belgians occupied Emmerich am Rhein and Wesel, cutting the Ruhr off from the Netherlands.
  • Born:

February 14, 1923 (Wednesday)

February 15, 1923 (Thursday)

  • Charles R. Forbes, Director of the U.S. Veterans' Bureau, resigned at the request of U.S. President Warren G. Harding amid suspicions that he had been selling surplus supplies at absurdly low prices to private contractors in exchange for kickbacks. Forbes tendered his resignation while in Europe, where he had gone after being angrily confronted by President Harding in a physical altercation.
  • In order to accommodate the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees from Turkey, the government of Greece the lands[clarification needed] of the Cham Albanians, the Muslim minority in Epirus, which had been divided between Greece and Albania following the Treaty of Bucharest that ended the Second Balkan War. While the Cham Muslim families were able to keep one home and the land upon which it was built, additional dwellings were expropriated. Compensation for the value of the land was given, if at all, at the 1914 market price rather than that of 1923.[citation needed]
  • French pilot Joseph Sadi-Lecointe flew faster than any person ever before, setting a new speed record in his Nieuport-Delage NiD 42 airplane and reaching 391.304 km/h (243.145 mph) by flying the first kilometer in 9.2 seconds on a 4 km course. His average speed over the course was 377.657 km/h or 234.064 mph.
  • The first issue of the French literary magazine Europe was published.[citation needed]
  • Born:

February 16, 1923 (Friday)

  • After 32 centuries, the inner chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun was opened in Egypt near Luxor, as Howard Carter and his archaeological team broke the seal and went inside to find the sarcophagus of the boy pharaoh of Egypt. Present were 20 invited witnesses, including the expedition sponsor, George Herbert. Inside the tomb were 5,398 separate items, most prominently Tutankhamun's solid gold coffin. In the Egyptian chronology, agreed upon by the majority of Egyptologists, Tutankhamun is believed to have died in 1323 B.C.
  • The Conference of Ambassadors of the Allied Powers (the UK, France, Italy and Japan) approved the transfer of the Memel Territory, a mandate of the League of Nations, to the control of Lithuania in the aftermath of the Klaipėda Revolt and Lithuania's invasion of the area that had formerly been part of Germany. The League subsequently withdrew its peacekeeping troops. The transfer was conditioned on the negotiation of a formal international treaty, which would be signed on May 8, 1924.
  • Under pressure from dictator Benito Mussolini, the Italian Senate voted to ratify both the Washington Naval Treaty on disarmament (signed in April) and the Treaty of Santa Margherita (signed in October to settle the territorial dispute with Yugoslavia). The treaties had previously been approved by the Italian Chamber of Deputies after two days of debate, while the Italian senators debated for less than one day before voting their approval.

February 17, 1923 (Saturday)

February 18, 1923 (Sunday)

February 19, 1923 (Monday)

  • The U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, upholding a lower court determination that the definition of "white persons" did not extend to light-skinned persons who were not of European descent for purposes of naturalized U.S. citizenship. The action had been brought by Bhagat Singh Thind, a native of Punjab who had served with the U.S. Army in World War One. The Naturalization Act of 1906 limited naturalization to "free white men" and to "persons of African nativity or persons of African descent". Bhagat remained in the U.S. despite the revocation of his citizenship and would later be made a citizen when war veterans were made eligible regardless of race.
  • The Supreme Court also decided in Moore v. Dempsey[citation needed] that federal courts had the right to review the results of state criminal trials to determine whether the defendant's U.S. constitutional rights had been violated, and to reverse a state decision if the Constitution had not been followed. The 1919 conviction of 12 African American men in the U.S. state of Arkansas had been reviewed after the Court granted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus brought by one of the defense attorneys.
  • The sixth symphony of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was performed for the first time. Sibelius himself conducted the premiere by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
  • Edward Terry Sanford of Tennessee was sworn in as the new Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and would serve until his death in 1930. Sanford's entry returned the Court to its full roster of nine justices for the first time since the new term began in October.
  • The film The Gentleman from America, starring Hoot Gibson, was released.[citation needed]

February 20, 1923 (Tuesday)

February 21, 1923 (Wednesday)

February 22, 1923 (Thursday)

February 23, 1923 (Friday)

  • U.S. President Warren G. Harding established the first strategic petroleum reserve in the nation, Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 4, by Executive Order #3797.[citation needed]
  • Gene Tunney beat Harry Greb in a close match at Madison Square Garden to retake the American light heavyweight boxing championship.
  • The Declaration of the Rights of the Child, written by Eglantyne Jebb, the English social worker who founded the Save the Children organization, was published in Geneva.[citation needed] It would be adopted by the League of Nations on November 26, 1924, as the World Child Welfare Charter.
  • The Governor of the Mexican state of Yucatán sent notice to the American press, by way of a press release to all consulates in the U.S, that Yucatan's laws on divorce had been amended to make the legal dissolution of marriage easy and inexpensive. Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto advertised that a divorce by mutual consent could be had for $45 costs and a contested divorce without cause could be obtained after a 30-day period for reconciliation. The only requirement for getting the divorce was for the petitioner to live in Yucatan for 30 days before an order could become final.
  • The Freistaat Flaschenhals, literally the "Free State of the Bottleneck", was abolished by the French occupational government in the Ruhr.[citation needed] The "free state", based in Lorch am Rhein in what is now the German state of Hesse, had been established in 1919 in an area between the occupational zones of the U.S. and France.
  • Major General Henry Allen, who had been the military governor of the U.S. occupation zone in Germany and commanded the American Expeditionary Force occupation troops that had recently withdrawn, left the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein in Koblenz, ending the first U.S. occupation of European territory.
  • A fast-moving fire killed 13 residents of an 18-unit apartment building in Kansas City, Missouri, after starting in the H & H Garage on the ground floor of the structure. Another 21 were able to escape down stairways with less than 15 minutes between the sounding of the alarm and the building's destruction.
  • The King Vidor-directed drama film The Woman of Bronze was released.[citation needed]
  • Born:
  • Died:

February 24, 1923 (Saturday)

February 25, 1923 (Sunday)

February 26, 1923 (Monday)

February 27, 1923 (Tuesday)

February 28, 1923 (Wednesday)

  • The nation of Greece used the Julian calendar for the last time before adopting the Gregorian calendar, used by most of the world, the next day.[citation needed] In that the Julian calendar was 13 days behind the Gregorian, the day was noted as "February 15". The next day was March 1 rather than February 16.
  • U.S. President Harding signed the Smoot-Burton Act (officially the British War Debt Act of 1923) into law, a compromise of the United Kingdom's debt to the U.S. arising from World War One loans, setting the value at $4,604,004,128,000 with a scheduled payment of $4,128,000 for a round figure of exactly $4.6 billion dollars to be financed with British bonds.
  • The University of Kansas Jayhawks, declared retroactively by the Helms Athletic Foundation to have been the champions of the 1922-23 basketball season, played their final game of the season with a rematch against the University of Missouri Tigers, whom they had narrowly beaten earlier on January 16. Going in to the game, Kansas had a 16-1 record overall, and Missouri was at 15-2. (in conference play in the Missouri Valley Association, the teams were 15-0 and 14-1, respectively). Kansas won, 23 to 20.
  • The French occupational force in the Ruhr had all the police in Bochum and Herne transported away from their towns.
  • Born:

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