May 1912

May 23, 1912: Imperator, world's largest ocean liner, launched

May 14, 1912: Denmark's King Frederik VIII dies during German visit

May 18, 1912: USS Texas, largest U.S. warship, launched

May 24, 1912: Piltdown Man hoax continues with delivery of skull fragments

May 18, 1912: The Kongo, largest Japanese battleship, launched

The following events occurred in May 1912:

May 1, 1912 (Wednesday)

• The United States Baseball League, an 8-team challenger to the National League and American League, played its first game, with New York and the visiting team from Reading, Pennsylvania, playing to a 10-10 tie before a crowd of 2,500. Other games played on opening day were Richmond 2, Washington 0; Pittsburgh 11, Cleveland 7; and Chicago 5, Cincinnati 0.^[1] After teams dropped out, the season, which was set to run until September 21,^[2] ended on June 26.^[3]
• Congressman Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama won the Democratic primary in Georgia, defeating New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson.^[4]
• Born:
  • Otto Kretschmer, the most successful U-Boat commander in World War II, in Neisse, German Empire (now Nysa, Poland). Kretschmer's U-23 and U-99 sank 47 ships in the first 18 months of the war. (d. 1998)
  • Winthrop Rockefeller, multimillionaire native of New York City who served as the 37th Governor of Arkansas (1967–71) (d. 1973)

May 2, 1912 (Thursday)

• The "Symphony for Negro Music" was performed at Carnegie Hall by the all-black Clef Club Orchestra, with 125 singers and musicians led by conductor James Reese Europe, and marked the most prestigious event for African-American musicians up to that time.^[5]
• Italian Army Captain Alberto Margenhi Marengoon made the first nighttime reconnaissance flight in history, using an airplane to assess Turkish troop strength near Benghazi.^[6]

May 3, 1912 (Friday)

• Ahmed al-Hiba, outraged at the Sultan's signing of a treaty to make Morocco a French protectorate, declared himself "Imam al-Mujahideen" (leader of the uprising) and began inciting rebellions throughout the North African nation.^[7]
• The 59 unidentified bodies recovered from the Titanic, by the CS Mackay-Bennett, were buried at three cemeteries in Halifax.^[8]
• Born:
  • May Sarton, American poet and novelist, in Wondelgem, Belgium (d. 1995)
  • Sam DeCavalcante, leader of the DeCavalcante crime family, in Brooklyn (d. 1997)
  • Virgil Fox, American organist, in Princeton, Illinois (d. 1980)

May 4, 1912 (Saturday)

• The Battle of Rhodes began as Rhodes, largest of the Dodecanese islands that had historically been a part of Greece, was captured by Italy from Turkey.^[9]
• The seamen of the RMS Olympic were found guilty of mutiny, but no penalty was imposed.^[10]
• Died: Nettie Stevens, 50, American biologist and geneticist

May 5, 1912 (Sunday)

• The first competitive events of the 1912 Summer Olympics took place in Stockholm, Sweden, with lawn tennis being played until May 12. Most of the competition took place between June 29 and July 22, with the opening ceremonies being held on July 6.^[11]
• Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and later the leading daily paper for the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991, published its first issue. Founded by Vladimir Lenin, and published daily in Saint Petersburg, at that time the capital of the Russian Empire. Pravda (Russian for "The Truth") served as the leading newspaper for the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991. The first issue carried the date "22 April 1912" (22 Апрель 1912),^[12] in that Russia was still using the Julian Calendar, which was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. The paper would later carry the slogan "Newspaper founded 5 May 1912 by V. I. Lenin".^[13]
• The first issue of Our Sunday Visitor, was introduced in Roman Catholic churches in the United States. The 35,000 copies of the first issue sold for one cent apiece.^[14]
• Born: Adolf Ottman, Anne-Marie Ottman, Emma Ottman and Elisabeth Ottman, the longest-lived quadruplets to date, in Munich, Germany. All four were 79 years, 316 days old when Adolf became the first to pass away on March 17, 1992.^[15]

May 6, 1912 (Monday)

• The will of John Jacob Astor, who died in the Titanic disaster, was probated. His $150,000,000 estate (worth more than $3.3 billion in 2012)^[16] was left to his 22-year-old son, Vincent Astor.^[17]
• The cable ship Minia brought 17 more bodies from the Titanic to Halifax. Only one of the persons had drowned, and the others had died of the cold.^[18]
• Born: Bill Quinn, American actor whose career spanned eight decades; in New York City (d. 1994)

May 7, 1912 (Tuesday)

• A machine gun was fired from an airplane for the first time, in a test conducted near the College Park, Maryland, airfield by the U.S. Army. Charles deForest Chandler, chief of the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps, was able to fire a 28-pound Lewis Gun to hit targets on the ground, while Lt. Thomas D. Milling piloted the Wright biplane.^[19]
• Born: Ma Sicong, Chinese composer and musician known as "The King of Violinists" in his native land, in Haifeng County. In 1967, he and his family escaped to Hong Kong during China's Cultural Revolution (d. 1987)

May 8, 1912 (Wednesday)

• Pascual Orozco, who had helped in the revolution that made Francisco I. Madero the President of Mexico six months earlier, then led a second revolution against Madero, ordered his 6,000 insurrectionists to fight against Madero's troops at the state of Coahuila. Reports of the day described the oncoming clash as "the greatest body of rebels and government troops that has ever come together...in what is expected to be the turning point of the revolution".^[20]

May 9, 1912 (Thursday)

• British Royal Navy Commander Charles R. Samson became the first pilot to take a plane into the air off of a ship in motion, when he flew his airplane off of the HMS Hibernia, which was moving at a speed of 10 knots
  
  ^[21]
• At Royal Albert Hall in London, a crowd of 7,000 turned out for the last public appearance of William Booth, founder of The Salvation Army. Booth would die on August 20.^[22]
• Born: Pedro Armendáriz, film actor in Mexico, Italy, France and the U.S; in Mexico City (d. 1963)

May 10, 1912 (Friday)

• The revolution in Paraguay was defeated after government troops overcame rebels led by former President Albino Jara, who was fatally wounded in the battle.^[23]
• Glenn L. Martin broke the existing record for a flight over water in an airplane, traveling 38 miles, from Newport Beach, California to Catalina Island, in 37 minutes. He then flew back, against the wind, in 51 minutes.^[24]

May 11, 1912 (Saturday)

• W. B. Atwater, a salesman for the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, persuaded the Japanese Navy to begin developing its own air corps. Atwater impressed the Minister of the Navy, Adm. Saitō Makoto, by taking aloft a Curtiss hydroplane from the ocean, in the first water takeoff ever seen in the Orient. On the third and final flight, Atwater took one of the Japanese officers with him as a passenger, then dropped a message to the Minister Saito. Japan bought four Curtiss Triads. "From this slight beginning," author Walter J. Boyne would note later, "grew the naval air force that twenty-nine years later would strike at Pearl Harbor." ^[25]
• Born:
  • Foster Brooks, American actor and comedian known for portraying a drunken man; in Louisville (d. 2001)
  • Saadat Hassan Manto, Pakistani short story writer in the Urdu language, in Samrala, Punjab, British India (d. 1955)

May 12, 1912 (Sunday)

• Bulgaria and Serbia signed a mutual defense treaty, with Bulgaria pledging 200,000 men to defend Serbia against an attack by Austria-Hungary, while Serbia agreed to send 200,000 to protect against a Bulgarian invasion by Romania, and each pledging to assist the other in a fight against the Ottoman Empire.^[26]
• Born: Archibald Cox, American prosecutor during the Watergate scandal; in Plainfield, New Jersey (d. 2004)

May 13, 1912 (Monday)

• The U.S. House of Representatives voted 237-39 to send the proposed Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the 48 states for ratification. The amendment, which provided for U.S. Senators to be elected directly by popular vote, rather than by the state legislatures, followed 86 years worth of rejections. In 1894, 1898, 1900 and 1902, the House had approved an amendment and the Senate had rejected it.^[27] The Amendment would be ratified by April 8, 1913, after Connecticut became the 36th of 48 states to give its approval.^[28]
• The remains of three people, who had been able to escape the sinking RMS Titanic in a lifeboat, but died while awaiting rescue, were located by another White Star Line steamer, RMS Oceanic.^[29][30] Passenger Thomson Beattie and two of the ship's firemen (who could not be identified) had managed to get into one of the collapsible lifeboats, but drifted for a month after the ship sank, dying from hypothermia or thirst along the way.^[31]
• Three bodies of Titanic victims, recovered by the Canadian Government Ship Montmagny, were brought to Louisbourg and shipped to Halifax via the Sydney and Louisburg Railway.^[32]
• The first jury trial ever conducted in China began in Shanghai.^[33]
• Italian ships captured more islands from Turkey, seizing Piskopi, Nisero, Kalismo, Leno and Patmos.^[10]
• Born: Gil Evans, Canadian jazz composer, as Ian Ernest Gilmore Green, in Toronto (d. 1988)

May 14, 1912 (Tuesday)

King Christian X

• Frederik VIII, the King of Denmark since 1906, collapsed and died while taking an evening stroll while on vacation in Germany. Found alone, and with no identification, the 68-year old monarch was taken as a "John Doe" to a morgue in a local hospital before his fellow travelers realized he was missing.^[34]
• Saved from the Titanic, a silent film produced by the Eclair Film Company and starring Dorothy Gibson, was released in the United States. Coming out on the one-month anniversary of the day RMS Titanic struck the iceberg, it was the first disaster film, and the first to use special effects, interspersing film of the RMS Olympic with models "sometimes resembling a toy boat in a bathtub" ^[35] to recreate the sinking. Ms. Gibson, at the time the most famous movie star in America, actually had been a passenger on the ship when it began to sink, and literally had been "saved from the Titanic".
• China's legislature rejected the six power railroad loan agreement.^[33]
• In the California presidential primaries, Theodore Roosevelt won all 26 of the Republican delegates, defeating U.S. President Taft in all 58 counties. Former House Speaker Champ Clark won the Democratic delegates, defeating Woodrow Wilson by a 2-1 ratio. Women, though not allowed to vote in national elections, were able to participate in the primaries.^[36]
• Died:
  • Albino Jara, 35, former President of Paraguay
  • August Strindberg, 63, Swedish author and painter

May 15, 1912 (Wednesday)

Batting king (.367) Ty Cobb

• Crown Prince Christian, brother of King Haakon VII of Norway, was proclaimed as King Christian X of Denmark.^[33]
• Count Karl von Stürgkh, the Austrian Prime Minister within Austria-Hungary, stepped down due to sudden blindness caused by "an affection of the retina resulting from overwork", and was temporarily succeeded by the Interior Minister, Baron von Heinold.^[37]
• Detroit Tigers baseball star Ty Cobb, angry after being taunted by New York Highlanders (later the Yankees) fan Claude Lueker at Hilltop Park, charged into the stands and punched and kicked the his tormentor.^[38] Lueker, who was "a cripple, who lost one hand and three fingers of the other", said that when someone yelled "Don't kick him, he has no hands", Cobb replied "I don't care if he has no feet!" ^[39] Cobb would be suspended by the American League for ten days, leading to a sympathy strike by his teammates on May 18.^[40]
• Born:
  • Alexis Kagame, Rwandan philosopher, in Kiyanza, German East Africa (now part of Kigali, Rwanda (d. 1981)
  • Arthur Berger, American composer, in New York City (d. 2003)

May 16, 1912 (Thursday)

• Two small boys who had survived the sinking of the Titanic were reunited with their mother after having been identified. Michel Navratil, Jr., 3, and Edmond Navratil, 2, had been placed into a lifeboat by their father.^[41] Michel would be the last male survivor of the disaster, dying on January 31, 2001^[42]
• Born: Studs Terkel, American writer and broadcaster, in New York City (d. 2008)

May 17, 1912 (Friday)

• The opera Don Quichotte, by Massenet, opened in London.^[10]
• The Socialist Party nominated Eugene V. Debs for President and Emil Seidel for Vice-President.^[10]
• Born: Ace Parker, American NFL Hall of Famer, and MLB player; in Portsmouth, Virginia (d. 2013)

May 18, 1912 (Saturday)

• The Detroit Tigers baseball team walked out on strike only five minutes after the start of their game against the Philadelphia Athletics. The Tigers departed to protest the suspension of Ty Cobb three days earlier. Rather than forfeit the game, Tigers' manager Hughie Jennings recruited eight volunteers from the Philadelphia crowd to fill in for the day. Earning $25 apiece, "the nine sorry sheep who were masquerading in borrowed Tiger skins" lost the game, 24-2.^[43]
• Shree Pundalik, the first multi-reel motion picture, was released in India. It preceded by a few months the first American full-length feature, Queen Elizabeth.^[44]
• The USS Texas and the Japanese battleship Kongo, the two largest navy ships up to that time, were launched on the same day.^[10]
• Suit was filed in New York to break up the "Coffee Trust".^[10]
• Born:
  • Perry Como, American singer, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania (d. 2001)
  • Walter Sisulu, South African anti-apartheid activist, in Ngcobo (d. 2003)

May 19, 1912 (Sunday)

• Julia Clark of Great Britain became only the third woman in history to receive an airplane pilot's license. On June 17, she would become the first woman to be killed while piloting an airplane.^[45]

May 20, 1912 (Monday)

• General Jose de Jesus Monteagudo suspended constitutional rights in suppressing an uprising by black Cubans, and massacred 3,000 of the insurgents, as well as executing their leaders. Carlos Moore, author of Cuba, the Blacks, and Africa estimated that between 15,000 and 35,000 black Cubans were killed when including those who were lynched or shot.^[46]
• Félix Fuchs of Belgium became the Governor-General of the Belgian Congo.^[47]
• Nexhip Draga and Hasan Prishtina met with ethnic Albanian rebels at Junik to plan an uprising against the Ottoman Empire.^[48]
• Born:
  • Wilfrid Sellars, American philosopher, in Ann Arbor, Michigan (d. 1989)
  • J. L. Carr, English novelist, in Thirsk, North Yorkshire (d. 1994)

May 21, 1912 (Tuesday)

• The Reichstag overwhelmingly passed a law expanding the German Navy.^[49] The expansion called for three more battleships and two more light cruisers.^[50]
• Sand Springs, Oklahoma was incorporated.^[51]
• Born: Monty Stratton, American baseball player, in Wagner, Texas (d. 1982)

May 22, 1912 (Wednesday)

• The United States Marines entered into military aviation, as 2nd Lieutenant Alfred A. Cunningham reported for flight training at the Navy Aviation Center.^[52]
• Count István Tisza, formerly the Prime Minister for the Hungarian side of Austria-Hungary, was elected President of the Hungarian Chamber of Deputies after a fight between the legislators. Reportedly, "all the inkpots and other articles that could be used as missiles were removed from the chamber before the voting began", and the Socialist Union party members walked out after fistfights broke out.^[53]
• Massachusetts became the first state to ratify the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as the state Senate voted 30-0 in favor of direct election of U.S. Senators, after the House had approved the measure by acclamation.^[54]
• The steamer Algerine recovered the body of Titanic saloon steward James McGrady.^[55]
• Born: Herbert C. Brown, English-born chemist, 1979 Nobel Prize laureate, as Herbert Brovarnik, in London (d. 2004)

May 23, 1912 (Thursday)

• The Hamburg-America Line's SS Imperator was launched from the Vulcan Shipyards Hamburg as the world's largest ship. Kaiser Wilhelm II himself christened the new ship, and almost suffered a serious injury in the process. As the ship moved down into the water, a large block of wood fell from the side, "missing the kaiser's head by only a few inches".^[56]
• For the first time since the 10th century the three Scandinavian Kings came together. Brothers Christian X of Denmark and Haakon VII of Norway were at Roskilde for the funeral of their father, the late Frederick VIII of Denmark, and were joined by Gustaf V of Sweden.^[57]

Haakon, Christian and Gustaf

• President Taft dispatched the U.S. Marines to Cuba to protect Americans there during racial warfare.^[58]
• Born:
  • Jean Françaix, French composer, in Paris (d. 1997)
  • John Payne, American film actor, in Roanoke, Virginia (d. 1989)

May 24, 1912 (Friday)

• Charles Dawson brought the first five skull fragments of the Piltdown man to the British Museum. Dawson's "missing link" would be proven to be a hoax in 1953.^[59]
• Died: Heinrich Friedrich Weber, 68, German physicist

May 25, 1912 (Saturday)

• In Tyler, Texas, Dan Davis, an African-American who had confessed to raping and then slitting the throat of a young white woman on May 13, was burned at the stake after a mob of 2,000 people overpowered his jailers. Davis's executioners had brought "several wagon loads of wood" to the town's public square and tied him to a rail. After Davis said, "I am guilty," he was set ablaze.^[60]

May 26, 1912 (Sunday)

• Born: János Kádár, dictator of the People's Republic of Hungary and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1956-1988; as János Csermanek in Fiume, Austria-Hungary (now Rijeka, Croatia) (d. 1989)
• Born: Jay Silverheels, Canadian Mohawk Indian who portrayed Tonto on the Lone Ranger TV series, as Harold J. Smith, at the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario (d. 1980)

May 27, 1912 (Monday)

• A fire at a movie theater in Villa Real in Spain killed 80 people.^[61]
• James Duncan of the United States set the first internationally recognized record for the discus throw, with a distance of 156 ft 1 ¹⁄₄ in (47.581 m).^[62]
• Born:
  • Sam Snead, American professional golfer, in Ashwood, Virginia (d. 2002)
  • John Cheever, American novelist and short story writer, in Quincy, Massachusetts (d. 1982)
  • Cedric Phatudi, Chief Minister of Lebowa, a semi-independent bantustan in South Africa from 1973 to 1987; in Mphahlele (d. 1987)

May 28, 1912 (Tuesday)

• Born: Patrick White, English-born Australian writer, 1973 Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1990), in Knightsbridge

May 29, 1912 (Wednesday)

• L'après-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), a ballet choreographed and performed by Vaslav Nijinsky, premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Inspired by a poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé, and using the music of Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, the ballet shocked the French audience. As the Faun, Nijinsky was booed as he closed the ballet with "vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of heavy shamelessness"; he would revise the ending under threat of intervention by Paris police.^[63]

May 30, 1912 (Thursday)

• In the second running of the Indianapolis 500, Ralph DePalma was less than two laps away from victory when his Mercedes developed engine trouble on Lap 198. DePalma had led all the way, and was six laps ahead of the nearest competitor, Joe Dawson, who completed the race in 6 hours, 21 minutes and 8 seconds.^[64]
• The first contingent of U.S. Marines, dispatched to Cuba, landed at Daiquirí.^[65]
• 

  Wilbur Wright
• Born:
  • Julius Axelrod, American biochemist, 1970 Nobel Prize laureate, in New York City (d. 2004)
  • Joseph Stein, American playwright, in New York City (d. 2010)
• Died: Wilbur Wright, 45, the older of the two Wright Brothers who invented the airplane, died of typhoid fever at his home in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur had become ill on May 4 while on a business trip to Boston. On December 17, 1903, Wilbur became the second man in history to pilot an airplane, after his brother Orville made the first flight.^[66]

May 31, 1912 (Friday)

• An experiment at Wichita Falls, Texas, to "make rain", after two weeks of drought, failed. Six thousand pounts of dynamite seemed to work at first, as cloudy skies and occasional flashes of lighting swept into the area, but without precipitation.^[67]
• Born:
  • Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, American politician, who represented Washington state from 1941-53 as U.S. Representative, and from 1953 until his death as U.S. Senator, in Everett, Washington (d. 1983)
  • Alfred Deller, English countertenor, in Margate (d. 1979)
  • Chien-Shiung Wu, sometimes called "The First Lady of Physics" or "The Chinese Marie Curie", nuclear physicist who assisted in the Manhattan Project; in Taicang (d. 1997)

References