Today -100: February 29, 1920: Of treaties, women’s suffrage, arks, trapehooters, and anthills

Woodrow Wilson stomps on a move by some Democratic senators to accept the Lodge reservations to the peace treaty. He says if the reservations are attached, he will refuse to deposit the treaty. Can a president veto a ratified treaty? Or do amendments turn it into a different treaty?

Everyone in Ireland hates hates hates Lloyd George’s Home Rule Bill.

Oklahoma ratifies the women’s suffrage Amendment, following a squabble over whether there should be a referendum. 33 down, 3 to go.

The Japanese government, afraid the Diet will vote to expand the franchise, asks the emperor to dissolve it. He does so.

Pres. Wilson ignores demands from railroad and other unions that he veto the bill returning railroad lines to private ownership. They particularly object to a board to establish wages which would have representatives of the companies, the workers, and the general public. The unions think the latter will side with the owners; Wilson says people hostile to labor shouldn’t be appointed. That’s totally reassuring, I’m sure.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer says there will soon be more Soviet Arks carrying deportees to Russia. He alternates, in a speech to the Women’s Democratic Political League, between saying that there is absolutely no threat from Red Radicals, and that the situation is very serious indeed. He claims that thousands of propagandists had been sent to the US by the Soviets to teach the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat “in a land that had no proletariat.” He insists that the bomb thrown at his house was not aimed at him, but was an attempt to destroy the US government, presumably because he thinks no one could possibly have anything against him personally.

Columbia University European history professor Charles Downer Hazen has a long book review of John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which was published in December, but whose US edition is just out, I believe. The review is a bit of a hazen, calling it “a very angry book.”

Thanks to a misspelling in the NYT Index, I’ve just  spent way too much time trying to figure out what a trapehooter might be. Someone who hoots trapes, presumably.

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