by Conrad Black
Mackenzie King was naturally delighted with the outcome of the London conference and was happy to carry the small nationalist torch in Canada, but also covered his right flank with ringing assurances of the centrality of the monarchy in Canadian national life. It was the now familiar King formula: he was taking jurisdiction and status for Canada from the British and pleasing the nationalists while singing “God Save the King” in more stentorian voice even than the Canadian Tories, who were reduced to complaining of King’s decision to compound the heresy of the legation in Washington with the appointment of ministers to France and Japan.
There were impressive ceremonies on July 1, 1927, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Confederation. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York – the future kings Edward VIII and George VI – visited, as did Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and most impressively the world’s greatest newsmaker in the 1920s, American aviator Charles Lindbergh. Mackenzie King inserted himself heavily into proceedings in ornate gold-braided swallow-tail coat. His addresses were broadcast internationally, and he announced in his diary that he had reached audiences over a greater surface of the world than had ever been reached before (which was untrue, both King George V and Pope Benedict XV had exceeded him). He also engaged in his customary hyperbole in his diary in matters involving himself when he wrote that the day “was the beginning of Canada’s place in the world, as a world power.” Inevitably, King regarded the laying of wreaths at the foot of the new statue of Laurier (facing the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa) as “a proud moment, almost a great spiritual triumph.”32
The following day, by the intervention of Vincent Massey, Charles Lindbergh arrived. Lindbergh had electrified the world with his solo flight across the Atlantic from New York to Paris, and King found him “a more beautiful character” than he had ever seen; “like a young God who had appeared from the skies in human form – all that could be desired in youthful appearance, in manner, in charm, in character, as noble a type of the highest manhood as I have ever seen.” There was a series of tremendous entertainments for Lindbergh, and he came to Laurier House for the night. Exceptionally, the prime minister allowed himself a few glasses of champagne. Lindbergh completely won over his host by claiming kinship and demonstrating considerable knowledge of King’s grandfather and namesake. A pilot who had accompanied Lindbergh from the United States, a Lieutenant Thad Johnson, had crashed in an air show manoeuvre over Ottawa, and King ordered a state funeral for him on Parliament Hill, with the parliamentary flag lowered. An honour guard of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police conducted the casket to Union Station, across from Parliament Hill, as Lindbergh himself flew low overhead and threw down flowers on the funeral train.
Even allowing for Kingsian exaggeration, Canada was adding a cubit to its stature, and Mackenzie King was showing himself very adept at playing a mediating role in the Commonwealth and tastefully calling attention to Canada in ways that his predecessors had not attempted. This was a mighty celebration of the diamond jubilee of a confederation which, when launched in 1867, was greeted with indifference or skepticism by most foreign observers, including most of those in the British and American governments.
Canadians were by now turning up as military, scientific, and ideological adventurers in unsuspected places. General Gordon Guggisberg (1869–1930) of Galt, Ontario, served as a military surveyor in Singapore and Nigeria and was a very progressive governor of the Gold Coast (Ghana), and was ahead of his time in believing in racial equality and governing accordingly, in Ghana and in 1928–1929, British Guiana, and is publicly revered in Ghana still. Dr. Norman Bethune (1890–1939) of Gravenhurst, Ontario, was a surgeon in the Royal Navy in World War I, and provided free medical care to poor people in Montreal before becoming a communist and serving with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then the Chinese Communists in China. He was the medical chief for the Chinese Eighth Route Army in the Sino-Japanese War, but he died of blood poisoning, having cut his finger performing an emergency operation in the field and was gratefully eulogized by Communist leader Mao Tse-tung, and is still well remembered in China. Frederick Grant Banting (1891–1941) of Alliston, Ontario, served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in World War I and then in hospitals and laboratories in Toronto, and with Charles Best and J.J.R. MacLeod, pioneered in the development and general application of insulin, and, with MacLeod, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1923. He and Best pursued valuable medical research at the Banting and Best Institute in Toronto, and he died in an air crash in 1941 on his way to England to work on improved pressurization for military aircrews.
In policy matters, King passed the pension he had promised Woodsworth as part of his survival plan after the 1925 election, and none of the provincial premiers dared to fail to pay their share of the modest pension. The third Dominion-Provincial Conference was held in 1927 (Laurier and Borden had each hosted one), and the alliance between Quebec and Ontario – which became a feature of federal-provincial affairs and in fact the principal opposition to the federal government in place of the official federal Opposition – was much in evidence. It was an unlikely match between the Low Church Protestant Orangeman Howard Ferguson and the patrician nephew of a cardinal, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau. While this tandem irritated King and strained relations with the federal Liberal Party in Quebec, it effectively ended systematic discrimination against Roman Catholic and French-language education in Ontario. Ferguson had been the minister of education when Regulation 17, which curtailed French education in Ontario far beneath what the British North America Act had promised, had been introduced in 1912. Ferguson now softened the official stance, and French and Catholic education were henceforth more generously facilitated. King left it to Lapointe to lead in jurisdictional matters, as he wanted no part of an argument with Taschereau (though he couldn’t abide Ferguson and in his diary in 1930 called him “a skunk”33). King was pleased that the conference avoided spectacular fireworks and didn’t really accomplish much. The latter feature would often be replicated in such conferences in the future, but the first precedent of a placid session would frequently not be followed.
In 1927, Lapointe had visited Geneva and demonstrated the wide serviceability of his organizational and parliamentary talents by arranging the election of Canada to a three-year term on the Council of the League of Nations. This was a considerable feather in Canada’s cap (and certainly in Lapointe’s), but King was uneasy about being dragged into European quarrels, even in these halcyon days. They had one of their rare arguments, and it became so heated that Lapointe threatened to resign, a thought so doom-laden for King’s political future that he conceded the point at once to his chief associate. (Canadian interveners at the League of Nations “were inclined to confine themselves to sonorous sentiments about the duties of man, the excellent way in which the two Canadian races got along with each other, and the blessings of peace, so much so that ‘the Canadian speech’ came to be received each year with a certain amused boredom.”34) King quickly became slightly intoxicated with the international circuit, however, an enthusiasm mitigated only by the “sacrifice” of giving up his farm at Kingsmere for the summer of 1928 to attend at Geneva as one of the six vice chairmen of the session. He and Lapointe travelled in style on the splendid new Île de France, the first of the great postwar liners, and King went to Paris to sign the asinine Kellogg-Briand Pact, which purported to “outlaw war as an instrument of national policy,” a move enforced exclusively by moral suasion. It was another example of the United States prevailing on the nations of the world to join it in substituting psychology and theology for foreign policy, as the successor gesture to the Washington Naval Treaty, so the Americans, or at least the Republicans, could prove to themselves that they could advance the cause of peace outside the League of Nations as well as they could inside it, a self-serving fiction, as the next fifteen years would tragically prove. To be fair to King, he never attached much credence to the Kellogg-Briand Pact (between the U.S. secretary of state and th
e French foreign minister), but he liked it because it required nothing of Canada and might result in the United States becoming more active in the world, which he sensibly realized was absolutely necessary to the security of the democracies.
The highlight of this trip to Europe was King’s cordial visit with the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, who only six years into his dictatorship was behaving responsibly and showing none of the Ruritanian absurdity and imitative bellicosity that he would inflict on the world in the 1930s and early 1940s. King found Mussolini somewhat sad, but decisive, well-informed, courteous, solicitous, and with a certain likeable softness of manner. He did not like the manifestations of dictatorial authority observable in the arbitrary power of the Italian police (who stopped his car), but Mussolini had cleaned “up the government and House of Representatives filled with communists … cleaned the streets of beggars and the houses of harlots … [which caused King to be] filled with admiration.”35
Just out of government after five years as chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill crossed Canada in the summer of 1929 on a speaking and book-promoting tour and was much impressed with the scale of activity and the beauty of the country. From the glories of Banff and Lake Louise, with the majestic mountains and emerald lakes, he wrote his wife, on August 27, on the stationery of the Banff Springs Hotel,
I am greatly attracted to this country. Immense developments are going forward. There are fortunes to be made in many directions. The tide is flowing strongly. I have made up my mind that if Neville [Chamberlain] is made leader of the Conservative Party, or anyone else of that kind, I clear out of politics and see if I cannot make you and the kittens a little more comfortable before I die. Only one goal still attracts me and if that were barred I should quit the dreary field for pastures new.… “There’s mighty lands beyond the seas.” However the time to take decisions is not yet.36
Of course, that is not how it worked out, but it indicates how inspiring Canada was in the golden summer of 1929.
Canada, like the rest of the world, sleepwalked over the financial cliff and into the grim depression of the 1930s, which would only end with the resumption of the world struggle begun in the Great War, with armed forces in greater numbers, more fanatical combatant regimes, and more destructive weapons. There is no evidence that any serious person in the prosperous summer of 1929 foresaw what was coming in the next decade, though some had misgivings about the fact that the boom in equities (the stock market) vastly exceeded other economic indicators and was largely financed by debt. People bought shares, but most of the purchase price was a balance of sale secured by the stock that had been purchased; if a downturn began, the shares would be sold to liquidate the debt and the expanding cascade of stock being dumped would broaden, deepen, and accelerate the stock market plunge. This was what happened starting on October 29, 1929. This was the famous Wall Street Crash, and the pattern emerged of terrible market collapses followed by plateaus, and of political and financial leaders, who knew nothing about the complicated interaction of arithmetic and public psychology that determined supply and demand, solemnly announcing that the worst was over. The new American president, Herbert Hoover – who had been commerce secretary for eight years under the good-time Charlie Warren Harding and the reassuringly silent and inert Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Harding on his death from a coronary in 1923 – kicked off this sequence of falsely optimistic pep rallies with the assurance that “the economy is fundamentally sound.” It wasn’t, and his policy prescription was the worst that could have been found, in an era when economics was a much less understood and academically examined subject than it has become. Hoover championed higher taxes, higher tariffs, and a smaller money supply, a perfect equivalent to pouring gasoline on the fire of economic contraction.
In 1920, the United States had wished for something entirely different from the mighty intellect and burning idealist Woodrow Wilson, and that is what it got in the amiable philistine Harding. The 1920s were a decade of boisterous dances, the speakeasy (to circumvent the gangster-tainted lunacy of Prohibition), the burgeoning talking-film and radio industries, the stock ticker, and the retrospectively mocking spectacle of statesmen bustling to conferences about German war reparations and Allied war loans that would never be paid or repaid, and collective security that would crumble and be contemptuously trampled in the dust. The whole world would be aflame with war and ancient centres of civilization given over to genocidal atrocities on an unheard of scale and smashed to rubble. The pulsating optimism of 1929 became what the British writer W.H. Auden, expressing the guilt of a generation for the squandering of the postwar opportunity, welcomed a decade later, in 1939, as the end of “a low, dishonest decade.” Auden then almost welcomed the purifying punishment of the terrible war just getting under way, to chastise the world for its venality and cowardice and bring the stern peace and disillusioned stability of the Old Testament and an end to the narcissistic frivolity and systematic evil that had hijacked the world and threatened every traditional notion of civilization.
The era of the pariah states, Germany and Russia, formidable geopolitical countries and distinguished cultures absenting themselves meekly from the senior councils of the world and leaving them to the grey and weak men of France and Britain – while America worshipped the golden calf and the stock ticker, guzzled illegal liquor, and shrank foreign policy to pretentious charades like the naval disarmament treaty and Kellogg-Briand – all of it was coming to a prolonged and horrible end. As always, Canada was not important enough in the world to be responsible for the colossal policy failures that doomed the world, and had abstained from the more deranged practices whose reckoning was at hand, but was much influenced by the terrible Samsonian thrashings and lurchings of the great powers and would try conscientiously to take care of itself and do what was sensible. And, as always, it would do a good job of that. The magnetic pull of the United States continued to be heavy through the 1920s: about 1,160,000 Canadians, most of them new arrivals from Europe, moved on to the United States, though Canadian population growth had been substantial, rising to about 10.4 million. Canada was progressing, but it was a swim upriver when the United States remained more attractive to immigrants.37
There were very few national leaders who had come through the 1920s and would make it through the 1930s, and none in the democratic world who, having managed that remarkable feat, would then have a good war and a good peace in the 1940s; none except William Lyon Mackenzie King. There would be painful setbacks and not a moment of panache or flair, but King would come through, and his generally unappreciative country would come through with him. Since he did not foresee what was coming any better than those who would not survive it, even with the collaboration of his seers and conjurers, he would intuit and manoeuvre his way through instinctively. A terrible era was upon the world when the premium would be on survival. By that criterion, Canada had exactly the right man.
In the early days of the economic decline, King did not understand the extent of it and completely misjudged the political implications. He concluded that it was better to go for an election in 1930 than to stretch his term to 1931, as matters might get worse. But uncharacteristically, especially for the author of Industry and Humanity, who passionately (in so far as that adverb could ever be applied to his activities) admired and wished to help people of modest means, he did nothing to appear sympathetic to the early victims of the economic depression. He considered a visit from Winnipeg’s mayor, Ralph Webb, who asked for federal help with the rising cost of unemployment relief, to be “clearly a Tory device to stir up propaganda against the government [and put it in] an embarrassing position.”38 Some opposition MPs had the effrontery to quote in Parliament from Industry and Humanity (which was rivalled only by Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Stalin’s The Foundations of Leninism as the most densely written work of any of the world’s political leaders of the 1930s, though King’s tenor and content were certainly a good deal more peaceable and benign). His first line
of defence was a typical recourse to constitutional niceties, akin to “Parliament will decide”: that unemployment was a provincial and municipal responsibility. He was slow to grasp that the crisis was quickly getting beyond the utility of such evasions. In Parliament on April 3, 1930, he said he did not think conditions were sufficiently serious to require direct federal assistance, that furthermore, “we have other uses for our money,” and, most insouciantly, that he “would not give a single cent to any Tory [provincial] government.” These were inexplicable lapses and completely out of character for such a cautious leader and one so genuinely interested in the working and agrarian classes and the lower middle class. While he himself had fairly rich (and good) taste in art and wardrobe, he had the demeanour and consistency of a bourgeois, and extended intellectual and professional sympathy for and interest in the economically vulnerable.
At an election meeting in Edmonton in May, when heckled by some people claiming to be unemployed, he said that “some people are unemployed because they don’t want to work,” and accused one of his tormentors of being “a slacker.”39 He eventually realized he had made some oratorical mistakes, but typically claimed he had been taken out of context and eventually explained to John Diefenbaker and to his future assistant and prominent Liberal cabinet minister in the 1950s and 1960s, J.W. Pickersgill, that he made the comment on the advice of his Ontario provincial adversary, Premier Howard Ferguson, given at a luncheon where King had several drinks just before his speech (this was unusual and these are lame excuses; he certainly was not intoxicated, did not have a high regard for Ferguson, and must simply not have been thinking).*40
King still did not realize the gravity of the economic problems and devised the tactic of proposing Imperial preference. President Hoover and the Republican leaders in Congress were calling for tariff increases, and King thought he had discovered an alternate market to the United States with the bonus that “we will take the flag once more out of the Tory hands.”41 He thought he could replicate Macdonald’s folkloric campaign of 1891 for the “old flag, the old policy, the old leader.” But the policy was new, the leader wasn’t old – and even when he was old, he was not a galvanizing figure like Sir John A. – and the flag had nothing to do with it. There were four hundred thousand unemployed, and there was no interference in the politics of Canada in 1930 as there had been forty years before to provoke Macdonald.† King’s political genius was never an intuition of popular taste; it was to steer between contrary buffeting trends while holding to the centre and always adding personnel and voting blocs to his centrist-liberal core. He had brought Saskatchewan’s premier, Charles Dunning, in as minister of finance, though he disliked him personally, and both leaders of the Progressives, Thomas Crerar as minister of railways and canals in 1929 (after eight years of cajolery) and Robert Forke as minister of immigration and colonization from 1926 to 1929, when King put him in the Senate. He thought the Prairies were secure, not because he had any piercing insight into the views of the inhabitants, but because he had recruited their most talented and popular politicians to his team, as Lapointe was for Quebec. King’s mastery was one of cautious pursuit of the sensible course buttressed by recruitment of the strongest local faction and fiefdom heads; it didn’t have much to do with his own vision of the country and the world, though his perceptions in these areas were often astute.