July 1927

July 20, 1927: Five-year-old Prince Michael proclaimed King of Romania

July 29, 1927: Russian Orthodox Church leader orders oath of allegiance to the Soviet government

July 24, 1927: The Menin Gate dedicated

The following events occurred in July 1927:

July 1, 1927 (Friday)

• The first coast-to-coast radio network hookup in Canada was made for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Dominion.^[1]
• The airplane America, along with Commander Richard E. Byrd and its crew, Bert Acosta, George O. Noville and Bert Balchen, crashed into the sea as they attempted to duplicate Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris. fortunately, the aviators were within 200 meters of the beach at Ver-sur-Mer when their plane ran out of fuel at 5:45 am, and they survived the ordeal.^[2]
• Born: Chandra Shekhar Singh, 8th Prime Minister of India (1990–91), in Ibrahimpatti

July 2, 1927 (Saturday)

• Jane Eads, reporter for the Chicago Herald and Examiner became the first airline passenger, completing a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, on a Boeing Air Transport Model 40 that flew.^[3] The airline would later become United Airlines.
• Henri Cochet won the Wimbledon finals over fellow Frenchman Jean Borotra after losing the first two sets, 4-6 and 4-6, then won the next two 6-3, 6-4, and took the match 7-5. The day before, Cochet had made the finals by defeating Bill Tilden in the same come from behind fashion, losing the first 2 sets and winning the other three. Helen Wills became the first American player in 20 years to win the women's singles, beating Spanish champion Lili de Alvarez in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4.^[4]
• Lord Norman, Governor of the Bank of England and Hjalmar Schacht of the German Reichsbank met at Long Island with U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury Ogden Mills to make plans to boost the American and world economies.^[5]
• Niels Bohr began working on his description of space-time in quantum and wave mechanics,^[6]
• The Western film The Last Outlaw starring Gary Cooper was released.
• Died, Harry Franklin, pioneering movie director

July 3, 1927 (Sunday)

• Satchel Paige made his Negro Leagues debut, pitching for the Birmingham Black Barons in a game at Detroit. After 21 years, Paige would, at 42, become the oldest rookie in Major League Baseball, joining the Cleveland Indians in 1948 after the integration of baseball. At 59, he made his final appearance, pitching for the Kansas City A's.^[7]
• Born: Ken Russell, British film director, in Southampton (Women in Love, Altered States) (d. 2011)

July 4, 1927 (Monday)

• Sukarno (born Kusno Sosrodihardjo) founded the Perserikatan Nasional Indonesia, seeking independence from the Netherlands. In 1945, he would become the first President of Indonesia.^[8]
• The Lockheed Vega, first airplane manufactured by the Lockheed Corporation, made its inaugural flight, with Eddie Belande taking the plane up from Mines Field in Los Angeles.^[9]
• Joseph Goebbels published the first issue of the Nazi newspaper, Der Angriff, which promoted Goebbels' views until its last issue in April 1945.^[10]
• Born: Neil Simon, American playwright, in the Bronx, New York; and Gina Lollobrigida, Italian and American film actress, in Subiaco, Italy; and

July 5, 1927 (Tuesday)

• The Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (VfR, or Association for Space Travel) was founded at the Goldenes Zepter tavern in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) by various German rocket scientists including Hermann Oberth, Walter Hohmann, Johannes Winkler,^[11]
• Northwest Airlines, which would become one of the largest airlines in the United States before being merged into Delta Air Lines in 2010, began passenger service when businessman Byron Webster bought a ticket to fly from Minneapolis to Chicago. The plane took more than 12 hours to complete its journey, after stops in the Wisconsin cities of LaCrosse, Madison and Milwaukee, and Webster arrived in Chicago the next morning at 2:30.^[12]
• The S.S. Presidente Saavedra, the only ship of the Bolivian Naval Force, sank in the harbor outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, after springing a leak.^[13]
• Died: Albrecht Kossel, 73, German physician and 1910 Nobel Prize laureate
• Born: Thomas J. Fleming, American author, in Jersey City, NJ

July 6, 1927 (Wednesday)

• The Church of England's governing assembly voted 517-133 in favor of the proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer.^[14]
• The song "My Blue Heaven" was recorded for the first time, by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, and became one of the year's top-selling records.^[15]
• Born: Janet Leigh, American film actress, as Jeanette Morrison, in Merced, California (d. 2004); Pat Paulsen, American comedian and perennial presidential candidate, in South Bend, Washington (d. 1997); and Alan Freeman, British disc jockey, in Melbourne, Australia (d. 2006)

July 7, 1927 (Thursday)

• Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz first presented his discovery of cerebral angiography areterial encephelography in a paper presented at the Societe de Neurologie in Paris. Moniz had discovered a safe method of detecting brain tumors by injecting contrast into the cervical carotid artery.^[16]
• In his weekly magazine, The Dearborn Independent, auto manufacturer Henry Ford published an apology, widely reprinted, for his anti-Semitic views. The missive was part of a settlement of a libel lawsuit brought by Aaron Sapiro.^[17]
• Under pressure from the victorious Allies of World War I, Germany's Reichstag voted 390-44 to pass a law prohibiting the import or export of war materials.^[18]
• Born: Doc Severinsen, American bandleader, in Arlington, Oregon
• Died: Gösta Mittag-Leffler, 81, Swedish mathematician

July 8, 1927 (Friday)

• Charles Lindbergh inaugurated the Transcontinental Air Transport airline with the first passenger flight from New York to Los Angeles. The trip would take 48 hours.^[19]
• Ban Johnson, founder of the American League and its President since 1901, was forced to resign by the owners of the eight teams.^[20]
• Died: Max Hoffman, 58, German General who led the attack on Russia in World War I

July 9, 1927 (Saturday)

• Torrential rains in Germany swelled the Elbe River and led to flash floods that killed hundreds in Saxony. In the village of Berggießhübel, 93 people drowned when a 7 foot high wave swept through the town. At least 200 people were reported to have died.^[21]
• The Federal Trade Commission outlawed the practice of "block booking" by film distributors, issuing a cease and desist order to Paramount Pictures. Until the FTC order, Paramount required cinemas to rent films as part of a block of movies, usually with the arrangement that a popular film had to be accepted along with several less attractive releases.^[22]
• Died: John Drew, Jr., 73, American stage actor; and Gregory Kelly, 36, American stage actor and husband of actress Ruth Gordon, who outlived him by 58 years.

July 10, 1927 (Sunday)

• Irish Vice-President and Minister of Justice Kevin O'Higgins was shot while walking to mid-day mass at Blackrock. O'Higgins, described as "the Irish Mussolini" and "probably the most respected and at the same time the most hated man in Ireland", had given his bodyguard the day off. A car pulled up beside him and three gunmen jumped out and began firing. Reportedly, he was shot six times, but remained conscious for several hours after being taken back to his home.^[23] In response to his murder, the Irish Dail passed repressive legislation that effectively barred the Irish Republican Army from running candidates for office.^[24]
• General José Sanjurjo declared the pacification of Spanish Morocco and the end of the Moroccan War after 18 years.^[25]
• Born: David Dinkins, first African-American Mayor of New York City (1990–93), in Trenton, New Jersey

July 11, 1927 (Monday)

• The very first 7-Eleven convenience store opened, on Edgefield and 12th Streets in Dallas, Texas, on 7/11/1927, with the new concept of staying open from 7:00 am to 11:00pm.^[26]
• Striking at 2:10 in the afternoon, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in Palestine killed more than 200 people. Though initial reports set a higher death toll,^[27] a later report by the British Secretary of State for the Colonies put the death toll at 200 in Palestine and another 8 in Trans-Jordan.^[28] Hardest hit were Nablus, Ramallah and Lydda. The River Jordan dried up, and remained that way for 21 hours.^[29]
• More than a century after her death, a sealed box, owned by Joanna Southcott and said to contain her final prophecies, was opened at Westminster.^[30] Inside the container was a pistol, a nightcap, some coins and other personal belongings, but nothing mysterious.^[31]
• African-American singer and actress Ethel Waters made her Broadway debut, appearing in the production Africana.^[32]
• Born: Theodore H. Maiman, American inventor and physicist who developed the laser, patented in 1960; in Los Angeles

July 12, 1927 (Tuesday)

• Chen Duxiu, who had been the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, resigned from that position. In 1925, he had been succeeded as chairman by Mao Zedong.^[33]
• The convention to create the International Relief Union was adopted at the League of Nations by the 43 states in attendance, and entered into force on December 27, 1932. Intended as a unified organization for disaster relief, the I.R.U. had only limited success in assisting the International Red Cross.^[34]

July 13, 1927 (Wednesday)

• French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, who was also the Finance Minister, received a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies and an endorsement of his call to not add further spending to the budget. Informing the legislators that "Messieurs, the whole fate of French finances rests on your decision," Poincaré won his point by a margin of 347 to 200.^[35]
• Born: Simone Veil, President of the European Parliament (1979–1982), and former French Minister of Health, as Simone Jacob, in Nice

July 14, 1927 (Thursday)

• The government of Czechoslovakia created the autonomous Slovak Province (Slovenska Krajina) in response to demands by the Slovak People's Party.^[36]
• Born: Peggy Parish, American author who created the Amelia Bedelia series of books, in Manning, South Carolina (d. 1988); and John Chancellor, American news anchorman, in Chicago, anchorman and later commentator for NBC Nightly News from 1970 to 1993.
• Gillian Brooke Anderson was born in Kenya.

July 15, 1927 (Friday)

• July Revolt of 1927: Protesters in Vienna, angry over the acquittal of three accused murderers, marched on the Palace of Justice (Justizpalast), where the trial had taken place. Police chief Johannes Schober ordered his men to fire into the crow, and 84 people were killed, while the court building burned to the ground.^[37][38]
• In Greece, the government issued decrees directed against the Macedonian minority of Slavic descent. The new rules banned use of Macedonian language and decreed that Cyrillic inscriptions were to be removed from churches.^[39]
• Born: Ann Jellicoe, British playwright, in Middlesbrough
• Died: Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth), 69, Irish politician

July 16, 1927 (Saturday)

• Battle of Ocotal: at 1:15 a.m., several hundred Nicaraguan rebels, led by Augusto César Sandino, attacked a barracks at Ocotal, occupied by 38 U.S. Marines and 47 Nicaraguan civil guards. USMC Captain Gilbert Hatfield and his men withstood three charges. At mid-morning, rescue came from Major Ross E. Rowell, who had gotten word of the attack and led "the first dive-bombing campaign in history".^[40] At battle's end, 300 rebels and one U.S. Marine had been killed.^[41]
• Cartoonist Theodor Geisel, 23, was published for the first time under the nom de plume inspired by his mother's maiden name, "Seuss", in the July 16, 1927, Saturday Evening Post, effectively beginning his career as illustrator and author Dr. Seuss.^[42]
• Germany's Reichstag passed comprehensive unemployment insurance and maternity leave laws, by a margin of 356-47.^[43]

July 17, 1927 (Sunday)

• In furtherance of the Turkish nationalist movement, Turkey directed the relocation of 1,400 members of the Kurdish minority from their homes in the southeast, to the far west. This was followed by deportation of Armenian and Syriac people from the same area.^[44]

July 18, 1927 (Monday)

• Ty Cobb got his 4,000th hit (and would finish with 4,191) playing for the Philadelphia A's at Detroit against his former team, the Tigers. As one commentator noted fifty years later, "the event went almost unnoticed".^[45] On the same day, future Hall of Famer Mel Ott hit his first home run, an inside the park homer,^[46]
• Born: Kurt Masur, East German conductor, and later conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra; in Brieg (now Brzeg, Poland)

July 19, 1927 (Tuesday)

• A version of the flag of Spain, with a coat of arms against a yellow field between two red stripes, was adopted for the first time.^[47]
• Pan American Airways, which would grow to become one of the world's largest airlines before its bankruptcy in 1991, was awarded its first flight route, signing the contract to transport American mail between Key West and Havana. Flights began on October 19, meeting the three-month deadline called for in the agreement.^[48]
• Died: Sheikh Amadou Bamba, 74, Senegalese Muslim religious leader and founder of the Murid Order; and Zhao Shiyan, Chinese Communist official, who was executed after being captured by Nationalist forces

July 20, 1927 (Wednesday)

• The French Olympic Committee, lacking funds, voted not to send a team to the 1928 games scheduled for Amsterdam. French perfume magnate François Coty would come to the team's rescue by loaning one million francs to the Committee.^[49]
• Germany and Japan established closer ties by the signing of a trade treaty in Tokyo between the two nations, by Ambassador Wilhelm Solf and Prime Minister Tanaka.^[50]
• Born: Leon C. Hirsch, American inventor of the Auto Suture surgical stapler, and founder of United States Surgical Corporation; and Barbara Bergmann, American economist; both in the Bronx.
• Died: King Ferdinand of Romania, 72, who had ruled since 1914, died at 2:15 am at his palace in Sinaia after a battle with cancer. At 6:00 pm, his 5-year-old grandson, Michael was proclaimed as the new monarch, with a regency council, headed by Prince Nicholas, acting on the boy king's behalf.^[51]

July 21, 1927 (Thursday)

• Before a crowd of 90,000 at New York's Yankee Stadium, former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, 32, fought with Jack Sharkey to determine who would be the challenger in a September bout against champion Gene Tunney. Sharkey was winning after six rounds. As the 7th began, Dempsey struck two low body blows to Sharkey, who turned toward referee Jack O'Sullivan to complain of a foul. When Sharkey turned his head, Dempsey struck him in the jaw with a short left hook and knocked him out.^[52]
• The Ford Motor Company took steps toward the creation of Fordlândia, by spending $8,000,000 to buy 1,000,000 hectares (2,470,000 acres or 3,861 square miles) of land in Brazil's Pará State, in return for a 50-year tax exemption and full legal jurisdiction rights.^[53]
• The day after his father's death, and the proclamation of his six-year-old son as King of Romania, former Crown Prince Carol, who had renounced his right of succession two years earlier, proclaimed from his villa near Paris that he planned to claim the throne.^[54]

July 22, 1927 (Friday)

• The merger of three clubs (Roman FC, SS Alba-Audace and Fortitudo-Pro Roma SGS) created the Italian soccer football team A.S. Roma, league champion in 1942, 1983 and 2001

July 23, 1927 (Saturday)

• The first regular radio broadcasts in India began as the Indian Broadcasting Company went on the air in Mumbai (Bombay). A second station began operations on August 26 in Kolkata (Calcutta). The privately owned company was bought in 1930 by the publicly funded Indiam Broadcasting Service, now All India Radio.^[55]
• Born: Elliot See, American astronaut who was killed in a plane crash three months before he would have commanded the Gemini 9 mission (d.1966)
• Died: Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, 62, British officer whose orders to army troops to fire into a crowd of civilians resulted in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919

July 24, 1927 (Sunday)

• The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing was dedicated in Ypres, Belgium, as a monument to nearly 90,000 soldiers of the British Empire who went missing in action in the three Battles of Ypres in World War I. The names of 54,900 soldiers who were missing in action were engraved on the available space, and another 34,888 were inscribed at a memorial at the nearby Tyne Cot cemetery. The Last Post continues to be sounded each evening at 8:00 pm at the monument.^[56]
• Died: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 35, Japanese short story writer, by suicide; and Maurice E. Crumpacker, U.S. Congressman (R-Oregon), by suicide.^[57]

July 25, 1927 (Monday)

• Centralized traffic control, now in use on railroads worldwide, was first implemented. The system for remote control of railroad signals from a central location was invented by Sedgwick N. Wight, and first used for a 40-mile stretch of the New York Central Railroad between Walbridge and Berwick, Ohio.^[58]
• July 25, 1927, is the date of the "Tanaka Memorial", purported to be a report by the Prime Minister of Japan, Baron Tanaka Giichi, to the Emperor Hirohito, summarizing a plan for world conquest that had been devised during a conference from June 27 to July 7. "The document," notes one observer, "has never been found and is generally assumed to have been a Chinese forgery, if it ever existed." ^[59]

July 26, 1927 (Tuesday)

• Born: Danny La Rue, British comedian and impressionist, as Daniel Carroll in Cork, Ireland (d. 2009)
• Died: June Mathis, 38, American screenwriter (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

July 27, 1927 (Wednesday)

• Soviet emissary Mikhail Borodin and 30 people left Wuhan in five cars and five trucks to return to the USSR in a two-month overland trip, after General Feng Yuxiang was bribed to guarantee him safe passage—twelve days after Chinese Communists were expelled. Borodin had had a bounty of US$29,000 for his capture, and had hidden in the home of Nationalist official and future Chinese Premier T.V. Soong.^[60] Borodin finally returned to Moscow on October 6.^[61]
• The President and Mrs. Coolidge escaped serious injury after a panicked team of horses charged toward their open car, then veered away after coming within 20 feet. The horses panicked during a re-enactment of Custer's Last Stand, and charged through the crowd and out of the amphitheatre where 10,000 had assembled. Miraculously, nobody was hurt in the incident.^[62]
• Born: Yuri Denisyuk, Soviet physicist who helped develop the science of holography, in Sochi (d. 2006); and Dawid Rubinowicz, Polish victim of the Holocaust whose diaries were published 18 years after his death on September 22, 1942 at the Treblinka extermination camp; in Kielce.

July 28, 1927 (Thursday)

• Twenty-seven people, 16 of them children, died when the excursion boat The Favorite, capsized in Lake Michigan, one-half mile after departing Lincoln Park.^[63]
• Born: John Ashbery, American poet, in Rochester, New York. In 1976, he won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his published poetry in Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

July 29, 1927 (Friday)

• The Metropolitan Sergei Stragorodsky, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1925, issued the "Civil Fatherland Declaration", declaring that the clergy should swear allegiance to the Soviet government.^[64]
• The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 came into effect in the United Kingdom after receiving Royal Assent. The law put criminal penalties on secondary action (including "sympathy strikes").^[65]
• Born: Harry Mulisch, Netherlands noveleist (The Assault), in Haarlem (d. 2010); and Horace Ward, African-American federal judge who, as a student, filed suit to challenge the segregation of the University of Georgia; in LaGrange, Georgia.

July 30, 1927 (Saturday)

• The last flight of the U.S. Air Mail Service took place, a year after the agency had begun phasing out in favor of the Postmaster General contracting with independent carriers. The AMS had delivered mail since May 15, 1918.^[66]
• Two future Kings arrived in Quebec, along with British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to honor Canada's Diamond Jubilee. First and second in line for the throne were the Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VIII, and the Duke of York, who would be King George VI. The party arrived at Quebec at 9:40 am on the liner RMS Empress of Australia to begin a month-long tour of the Dominion.^[67]
• Born: Victor Wong, Chinese-American character actor (3 Ninjas film series), in San Francisco (d. 2001)

July 31, 1927 (Sunday)

• The Madison suburb of Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin was incorporated from a merger of Shorewood and College Hills.^[68]
• Died: Sir Harry Johnston, 69, British explorer of Africa during the 19th century; and Walter Travis, 65, Australian-born golfer who won the U.S. Amateur championship 1900-01 and 1903, in the pre-professional era.

References