by Conrad Black
5. Mackenzie King III: The False Paradise of Appeasement, 1935–1938
Despite their lack of rapport, King and Bennett had some similar qualities: they were abstemious bachelors, lonely men, and had developed elaborate methods of reliance on themselves alone. They liked and sought female companionship and even aspired to marriage, but nothing ever worked. The fact that they were both bachelors was occasionally raised in Parliament. In the midst of a boring debate in the mid-1930s, questions were raised about Doukhobor women walking around their farms naked on hot days, and King was jocularly asked what he would do if such people interrupted a summer day by dancing on his lawn. His immediate response, which drew great laughter, was that he would send for the prime minister.56 From 1932 to 1934, Bennett had a romantic relationship with Mrs. Hazel Beatrice Colville, a twice-divorced Roman Catholic and daughter of Sir Albert Kemp, who had served with Bennett in the cabinet of Sir Robert Borden. Bennett imposed as a condition of marriage that Mrs. Colville give up alcohol, cigarettes, and Montreal’s nightlife, but she gave up Bennett instead. King had had his share of rebuffs also.
The election was finally called for October 14. King announced a strategy of extreme caution even by his standards. He was the leader of the party of straight capitalism, a balanced budget, and fiscal integrity, but also compassion and social welfare for the needy, with the usual gaps in that endlessly tedious and almost uniform affectation of being a “social liberal and a fiscal conservative.” The Liberals would run explicitly against Bennett as a one-man government that was as incompetent as it was authoritarian. King’s spirits were working overtime as the advice flooded in from mother, grandfather, Sir Wilfrid, Gladstone, and St. Luke and St. John; they were unanimous, in their table-rapping knocks as interpreted by King’s well-compensated inter-life interpreters, that King’s hour of political resurrection was at hand. King endlessly announced that the country needed “not the fist of a pugilist, but the hand of a physician.” No one could divine or excavate any precise meaning in King’s speeches, though they were fortified by the republication of Industry and Humanity, now almost as hardy a perennial as Anne of Green Gables, and the republication of a biography of himself by John Lewis from 1925, a rather bland and, to say the least, supportive volume that King and his assistant, Norman Rogers, heavily rewrote until, as King modestly allowed, it was “far from being a political pamphlet. It comes pretty nearly being a first class biography.” (That is not the general opinion of informed posterity.)
Bennett had ignored his party organization for five years and done little fundraising, and there was not much to fall back on as the election approached. “Vote for Bennett” was not a spell-binding exhortation, though they did have some clever radio advertisements in which professional actor Rupert Lucas, who played Mr. Sage, an average and sensible Canadian, gave brief, clear, withering dismissals of Mackenzie King as a cowardly, self-important, blundering, cowering nincompoop. Almost as amusing as these Conservative plugs was King’s dismissal of them as “scurrilous, insidious, and libelous.” (He meant slanderous, but was so overwrought he misspoke.) They were somewhat as he described, especially as they were not billed as Conservative advertisements, but, like all good caricatures, there was a kernel of truth in them. Vincent Massey scrambled aboard King’s private train car in Toronto in the last week of the campaign to receive a fierce dressing down for meddling, giving poor advice to Liberal candidates, and wearing down everyone’s patience with his sanctimonious claptrap about service and duty to the party and so forth, when, said King, Massey was only interested in “helping himself” and only the prospect of the high commission in London “kept him to the party.” It was a contest between two frightfully self-important and introverted men, and the clash of their histrionics is entertaining in diaries and correspondence, but there were no witnesses to it, and their association of convenience continued for a long time. King wound up his campaign at Maple Leaf Gardens before more than seventeen thousand people, where he appeared with many of his candidates and shadow ministers and was connected by radio with eight Liberal provincial premiers, from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia, all piped in live to the Gardens in an impressive political and technical tour de force. King gave a good and vigorous speech despite a collar that, he confided to his diary, was uncomfortably tight.
On the evening of October 14, William Lyon Mackenzie King enjoyed one of the greatest triumphs of his career. The Liberal Party came out of the election with 173 MPs in a Parliament of 245, up from 90 in 1930, and the Conservatives were down to 39 from 134. There were 17 members for the new Social Credit Party led by John Horne Blackmore (which replaced the United Farmers of Alberta), and 7 members for what was now J.S. Woodsworth’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), running on the “Regina Manifesto” of 1932, a blueprint for a social democratic state. H.H. Stevens’s Reconstruction Party, running 174 candidates, elected only Stevens but took 8.7 per cent of the vote. The other percentages of the popular vote were 44.7 for the Liberals, up from 44; 29.8 for the Conservatives, down from 48.3; 4 for Social Credit; and 9.3 for the CCF. (The United Farmers and Progressives had had 3.3 per cent between them in 1930.) Social Credit had just won the Alberta elections, and their leader, William Aberhart, was now the premier of that province. Blackmore (1890–1971) was the first Mormon elected to Parliament in Canada and sought the repeal of the anti-polygamy law and was a militant anti-Semite who distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from his parliamentary office. Twelve of the eighteen government ministers were defeated in their own constituencies, although Bennett and all the other party leaders were personally re-elected. It was not only a crushing victory; it fragmented the opposition and vindicated King’s unelectrifying but mortally astute strategy of pitching the Liberals – playing simultaneously on Canadian suspicion of radicalism and sympathy for the unfortunate – as the party that would keep Canada safe for the comfortable while making it more comfortable for the poor, would make Canada work for the French, and could assure the English Canadians that they would prevent the French from becoming too uncooperative or restless. King passed his hands, so accustomed to the spiritualist’s table (in the little room adjoining his commodious and well-stocked library upstairs in Laurier House), over the entire political topography of the country and always knew where to smooth out, where to knead up, where gently to level, all the depressed or inflamed points. It had not been a difficult election to win, but it was a great achievement to have won it so convincingly, with all the elements of opposition (including Stevens’s Reconstruction Party) reduced to uncoordinated regional or dogmatic clans and cliques. About a quarter of all votes were cast for a motley collection of third parties; the politics of Canada were fissiparous, but the great Liberal ark of national continuity, launched by Laurier and refloated by King, and captained, between them, for over sixty years, remained seaworthy and on course. Before retiring on election night, King knelt before the illuminated picture of his mother and prayed, as was his custom on great personally emotional occasions, thanking God for His “mercy and guidance,” and “kissed the photos of all the loved ones” (all long dead of course, and not all even known to him in life, such as Gladstone).57
King’s new government was not greatly different in composition to his previous one: Ernest Lapointe in justice and Charles Dunning in finance, but also James L. Ilsley of Nova Scotia (1894–1967) in revenue, Thomas Crerar in mines and resources, Norman Rogers in labour, Jimmy Gardiner, the just-departed premier of Saskatchewan, in agriculture, Charles Gavan Power of Quebec City in pensions and national health, and, most important, Clarence Decatur Howe, an American-born civil engineer, as minister of transport. If King enjoyed the greatest majority any prime minister of Canada had ever had, it was also true that the country was entering a lengthy era when the chief opposition to the Liberal federal government was not the blurred succession of Conservative leaders who sparred briefly with Mackenzie King and his successor, but the premiers of Quebec, Ontario, and Al
berta.
The much-battered Quebec Conservative Party, out of office since 1897 and reduced to a handful of members of the Legislative Assembly, several of them English, was relieved to be done with Arthur Sauvé when he departed in 1930 to be Bennett’s postmaster general. He was replaced by the rollicking, garrulous, rotund Camillien Houde, who would serve eight terms as mayor of Montreal and in both the provincial and federal parliaments, and enjoy immense popularity as representative of the respectable and law-abiding working class and petit bourgeois of Montreal. Houde replaced Sauvé in 1930 as Quebec Opposition leader, but was defeated by the mighty Taschereau Liberal machine in the election of 1931, and was pushed aside by the figure who would dominate the public life of Quebec for nearly thirty years, Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis (1890–1959), member of the Legislative Assembly for Trois-Rivières from 1927 to 1959. Duplessis was acting leader of the Opposition from 1931 to 1933, leader of the Quebec Conservative Party from 1933 to 1935,* and leader of an amalgamation of the Conservatives and a dissident faction of Taschereau’s Liberals called Action Libérale Nationale, which he cobbled together as the Union Nationale in the midst of the 1935 election campaign and led from its inception until his death, in 1959, during his unprecedented and unequalled fifth term as premier of Quebec. Duplessis’s genius was to manage to persuade the conservatives and nationalists to vote together, an artistic feat only one of his successors has managed. Duplessis severely shook Taschereau’s government in 1935, coming within a few seats of victory, and in 1936 convened the Public Accounts Committee, which he held in session for many weeks while he trotted out evidence of financial abuses on a serious and widespread scale across the Liberals’ thirty-nine-year term. The most damaging revelations were that the premier’s brother had been pocketing the interest on the bank account of the Legislative Assembly and, demonstrating the danger of the ridiculous in politics, the fact that the minister of colonization, Irénée Vautrin, had charged to the province approximately twenty dollars to buy himself a pair of short trousers for use when he was visiting colonization sites. “Les Culottes de Vautrin” became a lethal rallying cry for the opposition in the 1936 elections, which Duplessis won in a huge landslide, following which, he put his more radical coalition partners, who had been promising “bigger prisons and taller gallows” for the Liberals, over the side in his cabinet. “I said they could all be ministers; I didn’t say they would be ministers without portfolio.”59 Duplessis was far from an extremist, but he was an autonomist who sought the full measure of Quebec’s powers under the British North America Act. He struck the formula, which has proved durable in Quebec, of always demanding more jurisdiction but not proposing or attempting to secede.
In Ontario, Liberal Mitchell Frederick Hepburn (1896–1953), an onion farmer who left school after being falsely accused of throwing an apple at Sir Adam Beck, the head of Ontario Hydro, and knocking off his top hat, and former member of the United Farmers of Ontario, had served in the federal Liberal caucus with King from 1926 to 1930 and was elected the province’s youngest premier in 1934 (aged thirty-seven) on a populist and anti-Prohibition platform. He sold the lieutenant-governor’s residence, auctioned off the former premier’s official automobile, and courted the goodwill of the less well off, though he soon proved himself a conspicuous drinker and womanizer (faults that would also hamper Duplessis’s career, until, confined to an oxygen tent in 1942, Duplessis renounced alcohol and lived more sedately thereafter). Hepburn would be a serious thorn in the flesh for King, especially as he was a Liberal.
And in Alberta, William Aberhart (1878–1943), a long-serving school principal and evangelical Christian won the election of 1935, just ahead of the federal election. He had discovered the virtues of monetarist Major C.H. Douglas’s Social Credit movement, which sought to pay workers and farmers more to align their income more closely with the value of their production. Aberhart founded the Social Credit Party when the United Farmers of Alberta declined to support such a platform. Though without legal qualifications, he became attorney general as well. He would seek to confer greater authority on his provincial government than the British North America Act allowed, in order to give “prosperity certificates” to those of modest means. These three premiers, especially, would more than compensate for King’s ability to treat the official federal Opposition with a good deal more cavalier a disregard than he had been able to show Borden, Meighen, and Bennett in the 1920s.
Bennett retired as Conservative leader in 1937 and moved to Great Britain, where he became a viscount with the help of his childhood friend Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the London Daily Express, and he died at his home there on June 26, 1947, just short of his seventy-seventh birthday. He was the chief owner of the Eddy Match Company and was a wealthy and generally very successful man, and a generous one, who gave away more than two million dollars of his own money in his last ten years in Canada, including a good deal to poor and unemployed people who wrote him while he was prime minister. He exaggerated his ability to master an unprecedented international economic emergency, and the applicability generally of executive determination to the government of a federal state like Canada. His autocracy and forcefulness and apparent certitude were reassuring at first, but soon disappointed and then annoyed Canadians, and his changes of course seemed opportunistic and probably were, rather than, as he represented them, parts of a master plan for introducing new policies at stages of a gradually improving crisis (which was bunk), or at least flexibility before unbidden events (also a generous interpretation most of the time). Yet Bennett was far from ineffective and was certainly not lacking in good intentions. He had a number of successes and left the country some important institutions, boldly conceived, especially the CBC and the Bank of Canada. When he left office, the wholesale price index was rising and exports had increased by about 75 per cent since 1932, but the Great Depression continued.
But though intelligent and dynamic and well-motivated, Bennett didn’t really understand the nature of the country or the conditions in which it developed. He was too dazzled by the trappings of the British monarchy and Empire, knew little of the United States, and neither knew about Quebec nor was on a first-name basis with anybody who did. Canada was so complicated because of the Anglo-French relationship, competing regional interests, and its delicate relations with both the British and Americans that a high and complicated insight and intuition were necessary to govern it successfully.
Robert Borden had understood most of the international part of this, and was aware that Quebec required special handling, though he did not actually try to provide it himself and only gained office because of an unholy alliance with Bourassa that Borden himself never fully understood and held it because of the war emergency. But Bennett, though not identified with francophobic acts and policies as Meighen was, knew absolutely nothing of any of this. King, an alumnus of Chicago and Harvard and intimate of the Rockefellers, a former society tutor (of French and German) at Newport, Rhode Island, knew a great deal about the United States, and for all his shortcomings, absurdities, and quirks had an almost demiurgically acute political sensitivity, both intellectual and intuitive, which conveniently fused in a genius for political survival. He would now be put to the test of very stern times, and would pass the test in his ineffably complicated way.
In the world, the horizon had darkened unrecognizably since King left office in 1930. In Germany, the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, foaming anti-Semitic blood libels and swearing revenge on the victorious allies of the Great War, was installed as chancellor on January 30, 1933, and consolidated his position as führer, or dictator, on the death of the aged president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, in 1934. By 1935, Hitler had already begun the rearmament of Germany and had only narrowly been denied the annexation of Austria by the intervention of Mussolini in 1934. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and were steadily expanding their aggressions against China. In January 1932, the American secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, had sen
t identical notes to China and to Japan saying that the United States would not recognize any territorial adjustments achieved by force, and specifically any which narrowed what American secretaries of state had been referring to since John Hay thirty years before as the Open Door Policy to China. Of course, there had been no open door to China for decades as most of the huge country was carved up into spheres of foreign influence, and this was just another figment of the roseate imagination of American diplomats. Stimson’s position became known, rather portentously, as the Stimson Doctrine, and four days after it was proclaimed, the British announced their full faith in the word of Japan that the Open Door Policy would not be threatened. This began the bifurcation between the Western European appeasement of aggressive dictatorships and the more purposeful American approach that generally continued into the twenty-first century.
At the end of January 1932, Japan responded to the public expression of British confidence in their pacific intent by bombarding and seizing Shanghai. Stimson proposed to the British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, a joint protest to Japan, but Simon chose to act through the League of Nations. In October, the League adopted the Stimson Doctrine, and in May 1933 Japan withdrew from Shanghai, a League victory obtained by the non-League United States. In October 1932, the League’s Lytton Commission condemned Japanese aggression in China, but in a foretaste of the feeble quaverings of the appeasers, it recognized Japan’s rights in Manchuria, the status of which was immersed in the League sophistry of being an “autonomous” state under Chinese “sovereignty” but Japanese “control.” Words had already lost their meaning in the placation of aggression even before things began seriously stirring in Europe. But despite this undignified and pusillanimous accommodation, Japan abruptly withdrew from the League in March 1933. Germany followed in October 1933. The disintegration of the world had begun.