March 31, 1931: Legendary college football coach Knute Rockne of Notre Dame killed in airliner crashMarch 3, 1931: "The Star-Spangled Banner" officially designated as the United States national anthemMarch 26, 1931; March 22, 1931, television co-stars Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner born
Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his reformation and the granting of civil liberties in the U.S.S.R. through his program of glasnost; in Privolnoye, Russian SFSR (d. 2022)
Eighteen people died in a collision between two river steamers on the Danube river near Belgrade during a storm.[11][12]
Three earthquakes shook a sparsely populated area in the Balkans along the borders of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece. Twenty villages suffered damage but only one person was confirmed dead.[11]
Born:Atsuko Ikeda, Japanese princess who later renounced her privileges with the Imperial House of Japan in 1952 in order to marry a commoner; at the Tokyo Imperial Palace as the fourth daughter of Emperor Hirohito and the empress consort Nagako
The day after initial quakes in the Balkans, the area was hit again with a much stronger, 6.9 magnitude earthquake.[14] and 35 people were killed in Yugoslavia alone and thousands were left homeless.[15][16]
Born:Neil Postman, author, media theorist and cultural critic, in New York City (d. 2003)
Monday, March 9, 1931
The sentencing in the Menshevik Trial was handed down. All the defendants were given prison terms of 5 to 10 years.[17]
At least 300 people were killed when the Chinese cargo liner Ta Chi caught fire and sank in the Yangtze river near Wusong, while another 200 survived.[20]
Villages in Savoie near the French Alps were evacuated due to a massive landslide from the Bauges.[21][22] The French village of Le Châtelard was saved when the landslide split into three great rivers of earth that bypassed it. The Interior Ministry sent an emergency fund to assist villagers left homeless by the landslide.[22]
The German People's Party announced its withdrawal from the coalition government of Thuringia, saying they could no longer work with the Nazi Party as coalition partners due to constant attacks from them.[23][24]
Saturday, March 14, 1931
The Prince of Wales opened a British trade exposition in Buenos Aires. He addressed the crowd of 2,000 in Spanish and then pressed a gold button opening the exhibition's gates.[25]
A riot broke out at Joliet Prison, the maximum security penitentiary in the U.S. state of Illinois. One inmate was killed and four others, including a guard, were injured.[26]
Ernst Henning, a German Communist Party member of the Hamburg city council, was murdered by three Nazis.[27][28]
Died:Varick Frissell, 27 or 28, American filmmaker (killed in the SS Viking explosion)
Monday, March 16, 1931
Communists in Germany stormed Nazi Party headquarters in Altona, Hamburg and killed a Nazi in retaliation for the murder of Ernst Henning. The Nazi leadership officially condemned the Henning murder and, on the NSDAP Party's instruction, the three killers gave themselves up to police.[28]
Tuesday, March 17, 1931
Four bombs exploded in an open street near the Belgrade railway station where many government buildings stood. An army explosive expert called in to investigate a suspicious package after the first three went off was killed.[31]
Communists in Berlin held an illegal demonstration protesting the Ernst Henning murder until police dispersed them with clubs. In Magdeburg, thirty arrests were made in fighting between communists and Nazis.[35]
Britain warned Austria not to proceed with its customs agreement with Germany, saying it infringed on the 1922 reconstruction protocol in which Austria agreed to give equal tariff treatment to all countries.[39]
The Indian revolutionaries Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were hanged in Lahore for assassinating a British police commissioner in 1928 and throwing a bomb into the legislative assembly in 1929.[41]
King Alfonso XIII of Spain restored the country's constitutional guarantees ahead of municipal elections scheduled for April 12.[42]
Tuesday, March 24, 1931
A regiment of the Peruvian military mutinied in Lima and tried to attack the government palace, but the revolt was put down by the following morning.[43]
The Japanese House of Peers, for the second time, blocked legislation that would have given women the right to vote.[44]
Died:Ida B. Wells, 68, African-American journalist, editor and activist, co-founder of the NAACP
Thursday, March 26, 1931
An international conference of 48 nations opened in Rome to discuss the problem of low grain prices. Many countries were displeased by the Soviet Union's practise of harvesting vast amounts of grain and then dumping the surplus on the world market.[38][47][48]
Swissair, the national airline for Switzerland, was founded as S.A. Suisse pour la Navigation Aérienne/Schweizerische Luftverkehr AG.
A Soviet delegate at the international wheat conference said that Russia would continue exporting as much surplus grain as it pleased and would listen to the proposals of other nations, but would make no commitment to accept them.[48]
In an attempt to reduce political violence, Germany's President Paul von Hindenburg used Article 48 to pass an emergency decree curtailing freedoms of speech and assembly, as well as privacy rights.[49]
Died:Ban Johnson (Byron Bancroft Johnson), 66, American baseball executive and first president of the American League from 1901 to 1927, just hours after the death of his successor, Ernest Barnard
Sunday, March 29, 1931
The Indian National Congress unanimously voted to accept nothing from the British Empire short of complete independence for India.[50]
Germany had its quietest Sunday in months following Hindenburg's decree of the previous day.[51]
Born:
Aleksei Gubarev, Soviet Russian cosmonaut on Soyuz 17 and Soyuz 28; in Gvardeitsi, Borsky District, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (d. 2015)
Alfred Hugenberg bitterly attacked Germany's President Hindenburg's emergency decree, saying it was enforced only to prevent Der Stahlhelm from winning a referendum demanding the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag. The cabinet of Heinrich Brüning countered with a statement accusing the Nationalists of "seeking to undermine the public's confidence in President von Hindenburg", adding, "To demand a repeal of the decree is a personal attack on the president."[52]
At the Rome wheat conference, Austrian Agriculture Minister Engelbert Dollfuss blamed Prohibition in the United States for the world's agricultural problems, saying, "If the United States would drop Prohibition so that the American farmers could raise hops to make beer, then the strain of wheat crops would be relieved and the United States would drop out of the wheat exporting category to the relief of the entire world."[53]
