by Conrad Black
So ended the greatest war in history. Sixteen million people had perished and twenty-one million were wounded, including, among the major combatants: 3,300,000 Russians killed and 4,950,000 wounded; 2,920,000 Turks killed and 400,000 wounded; 2,470,000 Germans killed and 4,250,000 wounded; 1,700,000 French killed and 4,270,000 wounded (in a population of a little over 40,000,000); 1,570,000 Austro-Hungarians killed and 3,600,000 wounded; 1,240,000 Italians killed and 950,000 wounded; 1,000,000 British killed and 1,660,000 wounded; 117,000 Americans killed and 206,000 wounded (but about half the dead from the influenza pandemic at the end of the war); and 67,000 Canadians dead and 150,000 wounded. (The Australians had 90 per cent as many casualties as Canada with only 60 per cent of Canada’s population, both amazing figures for countries not under direct threat and almost all of whose casualties were volunteers.)
The world had been remade, but not very durably. Foch called it when he said, as the terms were revealed, “This is not peace; it is a twenty-year ceasefire.” He was out only by four months and probably assumed the United States would ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and this was already in doubt. Despite the sorrows and exertions and internal strains, Canada had earned the respect of all in terrible combat and had come as close as a serious participant in such a horrible massacre could come to having a good war, an astonishing progress from the rickety Confederation of just fifty years before. Much of the Western World was now a charnel house, crowded with destitute, mutilated, and traumatized survivors. In every sense, to the victors now went the spoils.
William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950), leader of the federal opposition 1919–1921, 1926, 1930–1935, and prime minister of Canada 1921–1926, 1926–1930, 1935–1948. Eccentric and over-cautious but a very astute and skilled navigator of decades of economic and international crises, he held the country together through the conscription debates and plebiscite of 1942–1944, and led a war effort that impressed the world.
* Phrase of Laurier’s in the 1904 election and after.
* Shaughnessy (1853–1923), a meticulously efficient administrator, had worked with Van Horne in the United States and complemented his imaginative and visionary qualities. The son of Irish immigrants to Milwaukee, he would follow George Stephen (Lord Mount Stephen) and Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona) to the House of Lords, and was considered for the position of head of the Irish Free State when it was set up in 1922.
* Strathcona was into the prolonged final phase of his astonishing career, having accepted the position of high commissioner in London following Tupper. He was governor and principal shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company, president of the Bank of Montreal, still a very prominent director of Canadian Pacific, chairman of the Burmah and the Anglo-Persian oil companies, chancellor of McGill University, and would continue in the high commission, very effective and influential, to his death in 1914, aged ninety-three, just before the end of the pre-war world in which he had flourished, from his start as a poor Scottish immigrant, through twenty-five years as a factor in the far north, through Parliament, the Riel Rebellion, the desperate birth of the Canadian Pacific Railway, for which he drove the last spike, to the culmination of his career as one of the great industrial barons and philanthropists of the Golden Age.
* Sproule (1843–1917) was an MP from 1878 to 1915 and then a senator. He opposed any non-British immigration and any toleration of Roman Catholic schools. He made Mackenzie Bowell, a former occupant of the same position in the Orange Order, seem an angelic champion of ecumenism. Canada was not as worldly a place as its two first re-elected prime ministers would indicate; Sproule would be Speaker of the House of Commons from 1911 to 1915.
* There had been periodic revivals of discussion of Newfoundland joining Canada; it came close in 1895 and was back as an idea just before the war. The time would come, but not until after another war.
† Some discussions to settle some of the Mexican violence had taken place at Niagara Falls, Ontario, but the Canadian government was only involved as a facilitator.
* Russia had been invaded in the Far East and through the White Sea by a variety of foreigners for a variety of motives, as the civil war between the Bolsheviks and White Russians proceeded.
* Clemenceau is sometimes credited with originating the statement, but it expressed the views of both men, and by now, of almost all their countrymen.
* This was after Romania was persuaded by the British and the French to declare war on Germany, an act of national suicide.
* On March 5, Sir Arthur Currie gave Borden his history of the last hundred days of the war. Borden recorded that he was “extremely proud of it. During that time, the Canadians fought against forty-seven divisions of the German Army; all these divisions were defeated, and fifteen were destroyed.” This was slightly misleading, as Canada only had four divisions, but their record was a splendid one.
CHAPTER 6
King and the Art of Cunning Caution Between the Wars, 1919–1940
1. The Retirement of Borden and the King-Meighen Rivalry, 1919–1921
When Sir Wilfrid Laurier died, William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950) was a resident of the United States, a close friend and adviser to John D. Rockefeller Jr., and under offer from Andrew Carnegie to take over his philanthropies at the then high salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year and likely to write his biography also, for one hundred thousand dollars. Rockefeller was miffed at this effort to raid his industrial adviser and friend and matched Carnegie’s salary offer. Though diffident, devious, and unprepossessing, King, at forty-four, had been extremely successful. Laurier’s biographer Joseph Schull wrote of King, a bit tartly, “That chubby Joan of Arc, with the voices of destiny and duty always harping at one ear and the voice of the Rockefellers at the other, was hardly the stuff of heroes. His bank account grew and he watched it with anxious eyes. He still yearned for a soul-mate and shied like a wary faun from each prospective woman.”1 Laurier had written him, “No man in Canada has your chances, today. The thing is for me to bring you forward all I can.”2 King was a very hard-working, completely humourless, deeply and mystically religious man whose faith was accentuated by extreme ancestor veneration (his mother and grandfather), a social Christian who yet admired honourably earned wealth and disdained socialism. He was in some respects the man of the new era, an expert in industrial relations who had (largely) written a turgid and ponderous volume on the way forward in postwar industrial relations, Industry and Humanity. He could hold himself out as something of an intellectual, not only as an industrial relations expert, but as a five-time university graduate (in law and arts, from the University of Toronto, Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, the University of Chicago, where he worked in Jane Addams’s settlement home Hull House, and Harvard, where his doctoral thesis was on oriental immigration to Canada, which he opposed, as “Canada should remain a white man’s country.”) Ever the politician, at Toronto, as an undergraduate, he fomented a students’ strike in 1895 whose real object was to secure him a teaching position. In this he was unsuccessful, but he worked closely with William Mulock, the vice chancellor, who was trying to undermine the chancellor, former Liberal leader Edward Blake. (Mulock rewarded King by making him a deputy minister in Ottawa just five years later.) He possessed great, focused ambition and a talent at devious self-insinuation, all thoroughly disguised and accentuated by his perpetual affectation of the utmost sanctimony.
He was, in his caution, his lack of spontaneity, and his endless manoeuvring and obscurantism, the anti-hero. But as time would prove, he possessed the ingredients for astonishing political success: he knew only a little of French and not much of Quebec, except that it was necessary as a whole-hearted participant to make Canada work and assure the country a sufficiently interesting future to lift it to complete independence from the British and the Americans. In this, he was a true federalist, a true nationalist, whose head would never be turned by the attentions of Canada’s senior allies, and he would be vastly more subjected to them than
any past or future Canadian leader, except perhaps Brian Mulroney in his close relations with President Reagan and the senior President Bush. And he was a true Liberal; he came back to Canada and loyally ran in the 1917 election in a hopeless cause in York North for Sir Wilfrid. He was acceptable to Quebec because he had remained absolutely loyal to Laurier and opposed conscription, and to English Canada he was just adequately plausible as the postwar man who would work for industrial peace and progress and would be a modernizer, a technocrat, and even, in his very odd way, a visionary. William Fielding was his natural rival and in some respects the logical successor to Laurier, but he had deserted Sir Wilfrid on the issue of Alberta and Saskatchewan schools and on conscription and stood as a Liberal Unionist candidate in 1917, though he did not join the government when he was elected. But Fielding was seventy-one, was completely unacceptable to Quebec, and if the country and the Liberal Party did not know King well enough, they knew Fielding too well. It had been such a terrible war, even for Canada, there was a natural desire to turn the page and reach for the leaders of tomorrow rather than those who had distinguished themselves in the recent past. This was unlike the Second World War, which, even though it lasted longer, was a war of movement, led and won by dynamic men who acted decisively, and never seemed simply mired in slaughter for years on end. King was unexciting, but he appeared to be the best available, and he claimed, with stentorian fervour, from the moment of Sir Wilfrid’s last breath if not before, to be his indisputable heir and chosen successor. Lady Laurier inconveniently confirmed to King that, on the eve of his death, her husband had said that Fielding was the man to unite the Liberals, so King rested his claim to the succession on his own uncorroborated recollections of conversations with the late leader.
King’s chief backers were Peter Charles Larkin (1855–1930), the fantastically successful son of a Montreal bricklayer, who founded and built the Salada Tea Company, one of the greatest tea suppliers and marketers in the world; and the publisher of the Toronto Star, Joseph Atkinson (1865–1948). These were the days of discreet campaigns, and King went to England to maintain the appearance of indifference as he worked up comparative labour and related studies, but he returned in time for the first Liberal convention in August 1919, where he participated effectively in platform committees about labour and social issues and gave a strong keynote speech projecting the Liberal commitment to people of modest means. King’s opponents called him a busboy of the Rockefellers and a shirker and absentee during the Great War, but his supporters made much of the fact that he had stuck with Laurier and come back from the comfortable fold of the Rockefellers to run in a lost cause in 1917.
The piously idiosyncratic King spent the day of the leadership vote, August 7, meditating and praying as delegates chose between him; William Fielding; former railroads and canals minister George Perry Graham (1859–1943); and the acting party leader, Daniel Duncan McKenzie (1859–1927) of Nova Scotia. King was put across by Quebec, and by Ernest Lapointe in particular, and the combination of the two men would dominate the public life of the country for the next twenty-two years. King won on the fourth ballot, with 476 to Fielding’s 438. On achieving the victory, he thought of his parents and grandparents and of Sir Wilfrid: “I thought: it is right, it is the call of duty.… I have sought nothing.” (His selection was far from a draft.) “It has come from God. The dear loved ones know and are about.… It is to His work I am called, and to it I dedicate my life.… The people want clean and honest government; ideals in politics, a larger measure of social reform. I am unknown to the people as yet, but they will soon know and will recognize. The Liberal Party will yet rejoice in its entirety at the confidence they have placed in me. They have chosen better than they knew.” (This at least was probably accurate.) “May God keep me ever near His side and guide me aright.”3 This was to prove a formidable intellectual and psychological armament: King was always convinced of his proximity to God and of his virtue, and to his task he brought a relentless cunning, never compromised by overconfidence and in difficult times made desperately imaginative by the conviction that he was fighting for his life and for God’s will.
Prime Minister Robert Borden was very aware of the dangers of having no French Canadians in his government and toured about Quebec in July and August conferring with dignitaries and trying to recruit some, especially Sir Lomer Gouin, who doubted that he could be elected as a Unionist.4 He proceeded to Saint John, New Brunswick, to greet the arriving Prince of Wales and accompanied him on the battle cruiser Renown to Quebec. Borden’s car was stoned by angry crowds at Chaudière Junction, but otherwise he was indifferently received by the population in Quebec. Mackenzie King’s elevation as Liberal leader is referred to in Borden’s memoirs with the reflection that in the summer of 1917 King “was ready to join the proposed Union government.” Borden didn’t identify the source of that intelligence, and it was very unlikely, as King was not in Parliament and knew that his political future lay in clinging to Laurier like a limpet. He first enters the prime minister’s memoirs in his new role when, “as usual, he spoke eloquently and well” in thanking the Prince of Wales for his speech in Ottawa on August 29. The chief subject of discussion at this time, much considered by the cabinet, was whether it would affront the sensibilities of the conservative Christians of Canada if the Prince of Wales played a private game of golf for his own exercise on a Sunday.
All remaining unallocated land within fifteen miles of any railway was reserved for returning servicemen, and the Soldier Settlement Board was established to acquire land for entitled veterans and assist them financially in setting up farms. Forty-three thousand servicemen took advantage of the opportunity.5
The government accepted independent recommendations that were only enacted in 1923 to unify and refinance and nationalize the Grand Trunk, Grand Trunk Pacific, Canadian Northern, National Transcontinental, and Intercolonial railways into the twenty-two-thousand-mile Canadian National Railway. The consolidation left a good deal of grumbling in British financial circles.
The Great War had radically altered the balance of British and American economic and commercial power in Canada. In 1914, 22 per cent of foreign investment in Canada was British and 23 per cent was American. By 1922, the majority was American. Imports by Canada from the United States were 250 per cent of British in 1901; in 1918, they were ten times as great. Canadian exports to the United States increased from less than half the total in Britain in 1901 to 80 per cent of exports in Britain in 1918.6
In the autumn of 1919 and through to the spring of 1920, there was back and forth between Ottawa and London about the establishment of a Canadian minister in Washington. The British approved this from the beginning but also stipulated the need for what the colonial secretary Lord Milner called, in a cable to Borden on October 28, 1919, “well-balanced protection of Imperial and Canadian interests.” This would require having the Canadian minister operate out of the British embassy. Borden went along with this, but the line between Canada as an Imperial entity and as a completely sovereign country was clearly becoming blurred. No one could accuse the Canadians, especially with Borden at their head, of rushing the fences of sovereignty, but they were drawing close to them.7 Yet the Washington appointment was only filled in 1927.
Borden spent much of October and November convalescing in Virginia from acute fatigue. By November, the whole issue of American ratification of the Peace Treaty, and specifically of the League of Nations, had bubbled up, and on the urgent request of Lord Grey, former foreign secretary and now British ambassador in Washington, Borden agreed that in the event of a dispute between a member country and any of the dominions, India, or Great Britain, the British Empire bloc of six would abstain from voting in the League. This addressed a specific concern raised by some of the isolationists in the U.S. Senate. It was part of the energetic effort the British and their Imperial confreres made to ease the United States into the world and into the collective security system. President Wilson had not taken Senate opi
nion into account. The Senate has to ratify foreign treaties with a majority of two-thirds, and the opposition Republicans held the majority of Senate seats. Wilson realized very late that he could have a substantial problem, and on September 4 he set out on a speaking tour to rally opinion. His health collapsed in late September and he returned to Washington, where he suffered a massive stroke on October 2. Wilson refused to compromise, the Republicans had the votes, and the Treaty of Versailles was not ratified.
On December 10, 1919, on medical advice, Borden told his senior colleagues that he believed he had to retire for health reasons, failing which “I would become a nervous wreck.”8 Borden announced his impending retirement and departed on January 4, 1920, with Admiral of the Fleet Earl Jellicoe, victor, in so far as the British were victorious, of the epochal Battle of Jutland, for a trip to South Africa to discuss Imperial naval solidarity. (In fact, they went to Havana, Jamaica, and Trinidad, and then Jan Smuts, now South African prime minister, disinvited them because he was holding an election, and they returned to Britain, all on the battle cruiser New Zealand.) Borden had a month of London society, from the king and Lloyd George down, and returned to Halifax on February 28, and then went to New York and descended into the Carolinas by train, where he stayed until May. Borden recorded that in his absence, “extraordinary ideas akin to anarchy and insanity manifested themselves among some electors,”9 and was somewhat aggrieved at his inability to have “a year’s uninterrupted holiday,” an unheard of concept for the head of government of any jurisdiction. He returned to Ottawa on May 12, 1920.