March 6, 1902: Real Madrid F.C. founded in SpainMarch 1, 1902: Alves elected President of BrazilMarch 10, 1902: Thomas Edison's monopoly on motion pictures ended
MajorLittleton W. T. Waller, and the surviving members of his battalion of U.S. Marines and Filipino civilian assistants, returned to base at Cavite on the island of Luzon, after completing their disastrous march across Samar in the American territory of the Philippines. Major Waller was court martialed on March 17 on charges of murder in the execution of 11 Filipinos, but would be acquitted on April 7.
American bandit Harry Longabaugh, popularly known as "The Sundance Kid" as partner in crime with Butch Cassidy, began his return to the United States a year after having fled to Argentina. Longabaugh and his girlfriend Etta Place, boarded the ship SS Soldier Prince in Buenos Aires. They would arrive in New York City on April 3 and remain until July 10.[4]
Born: Allalou (pen name for Ali Sellali), "The Father of Algerian Theatre", Algerian playwright; in Algiers (d. 1992)
Ten months after ironworkers had gone on strike in San Francisco, the walkout was settled. Although the demand for a nine-hour workday was not agreed to, the ironworkers received some concessions.[5]
Neil Bryant (Cornelius O'Neill), 72, American minstrel show performer who continued the "Bryant's Minstrels" show into the early 80s after the death of founder Dan Bryant.
The U.S. steamer Waesland collided with the British steamer Harmonides off the coast of Anglesey, United Kingdom and sank; two passengers were killed.[7]
Real Madrid played its first match of soccer football, an intra-squad game between two teams composed of club members. "Club B" beat "Club A", 6 to 0. After reorganization of the squads, a second match was played later in the day with "Club A" winning, 1 to 0, over "Club B".[11]
Austrian classical music composer Gustav Mahler married pianist and composer Alma Schindler.[12] The two had two children (including sculptor Anna Mahler) and remained together until Mahler's death in 1911.
Debreceni VSC, one of the most successful soccer football teams in Hungary, was founded in the Austro-Hungarian city of Debrecen as Egyetértés Futball Club. It would later be renamed for the Debrecen Railway as Debreceni Vasutas Sport Club.
In Monte Carlo in Monaco, Dr. Ernest Guglielminetti made the first paving of a road (from Monaco to the French city of Nice) with his invention of tar-bound macadam, the spraying of tar onto roads already "Macadamized" by paving with crushed stone, as the first effective method of holding down the amount of dust stirred up by motorized vehicles. [15]
The cargo ship Reporter was wrecked in San Francisco Bay when it crashed into the wreckage of the King Philip, which had been destroyed 24 years earlier on January 25, 1878.
The Frick Building, built at the behest of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At 20 stories and 330 feet (100 m) high, it was the tallest building in the city of Pittsburgh and would remain so for more than 55 years until surpassed by the 25-story (and 3 feet taller) Hilton Hotel in 1959.
Five remaining members of the crew of the barge Wadena, and seven of their eight rescuers from the Monmoy Station, were drowned in a storm when the rescue barge was capsized by a wave off of the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts.[16]
The Populist Party, which had been a major American third party to rival the Republicans and Democrats during the 1890s, disbanded by merging back to the Democratic Party.[18] At its height in 1897, the Populists had 22 seats in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate.
American lawyer Albert T. Patrick was convicted of the 1900 murder of one of his clients and sentenced to executed in the electric chair at New York's Sing Sing maximum security penitentiary. Patrick's appeal delayed the carrying out of the death penalty and his sentence would be commuted in 1906 by the Governor to life imprisonment, followed by a pardon in 1912 by another New York governor. The former death row inmate would return to the practice of law but be disbarred in 1930.
Died:Cecil Rhodes, 48, a British businessman who was one of the wealthiest men in the world, died from heart disease. He had moved to southern Africa because of his health problems, and built his fortune as the owner of the mines of the British South Africa Company and served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. His company established the southern African territory of Rhodesia (which later became Zimbabwe and Zambia). In his will, he funded the Rhodes Scholarship that has provided scholarships to the University of Oxford for thousands of international students.[25]
Delegates to the constitutional convention for a new state constitution for Virginia voted to adopt three provisions to deter African-American voting. In addition to a poll tax of $1.50 starting in 1904, existing voters were to be subjected to a "literacy test" of reading, understanding and explaining a section. American Civil War veterans, however, were exempt from the test, as were their sons, setting an example of a "grandfather clause" that would be emulated by other southern states.[18]
Died:Georg Herbert Münster, 81, Germany's ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1873 to 1885, and France from 1885 to 1900 (b. 1820)
March 29, 1902 (Saturday)
Although U.S. senators were elected by their state senates rather than by the public prior to 1913, the party nominees for the state senate to choose from were chosen in a party primary election. In Arkansas, incumbent U.S. Senator James Kimbrough Jones lost to his challenger for the Democratic Party nomination, white supremacist and former GovernorJames Paul Clarke.[18]
