by Conrad Black
Mussolini, impressed with the success of Hitler’s bellicosity, attacked the completely unoffending kingdom of Ethiopia in 1935, and instead of responding with a risk-free reply of force, the British and French, either of which could have given Mussolini a good thrashing on land or sea, rolled over like poodles and agreed the Hoare-Laval Pact, which would have given Italy most of Ethiopia, in a gesture designed to win Italian adherence to the Anglo-French alliance. Mussolini was disposed to accept it, but he waited a few days, news of the pact leaked, and the revulsion in both Britain and France at the craven sacrifice of Ethiopia was so great that both foreign ministers, Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval, were sacked.* Mussolini continued with his war, the British and French did nothing, and the League of Nations proved itself completely ineffectual, as was foreseeable once the Americans, whose creation it was, had declined to join. The Abyssinian War came up for debate while the government was changing in Ottawa back from Bennett to King, and the permanent Canadian advisory officer in Geneva, Walter Alexander Riddell, unable to get clarification from External Affairs, assumed the Bennett policy of (theoretical) adherence to collective security continued and declared Canada to be in favour of oil sanctions on Italy. This led to great controversy in Canada, as the Imperialists and the left were anti-Italian, but appeasement was strong in isolationist areas and the French favoured a triumph of catholicizing Italy against the Protestant missions and native heathen of Ethiopia. Lapointe withdrew Canada’s support of a robust position on December 2, 1935, and Canada got in line behind the British appeasers. The Italians, who employed a form of deadly defoliant dropped from the air and did not hesitate to bomb civilians, occupied Addis Ababa in May 1936, although they never really controlled the entire country.
Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations on May 16, 1936, and movingly pointed out that his country was under occupation because he had had unlimited faith in the League, and that the great powers that were Ethiopia’s guarantors now withheld from it arms and credit and even non-military assistance. He was jeered disgracefully and interrupted by lesser officials blowing whistles distributed to them by Italy’s foreign minister, Mussolini’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. It was a disgusting, shaming spectacle. The Kellogg-Briand renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy seemed not to be working. Germany, Russia, and the United States all had leaders for the times; the vacuum was in the enfeebled leadership in London and Paris. Stronger men were already audible in both countries and would emerge, and King would work with them, as he was already with Roosevelt. The greatest drama of modern times was starting to unfold, and Canada was predestined to play a greater role in it than it had ever performed in the world before.
Mackenzie King was an appeaser by nature, a Fabian, in tactical terms, not social policy: allow the other side to commit itself, dodge, prevaricate, feint, and entice an enemy ever deeper into uncertainty, disenthralled and unengaged, before siding with allies or, at the least, allowing Parliament to decide, preferably after a Royal Commission had plumbed the depths of the issue. To a degree, it came naturally and was the vintage Canadian tactic of good-faith deliberation and negotiation, playing out the clock until the disagreeable force at issue had spent itself. King’s Senate leader from 1919 to 1942, Raoul Dandurand (1861–1942), told the League of Nations in 1925 that Canada lived “in a fireproof house far from inflammable materials.” The only country that had any capacity to threaten Canada physically was the United States, and the era when that was a possibility was long past. In his Good Neighbor policy, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that Canada got a complete pass as a friendly and successful state and as a close affiliate of the United Kingdom, as he dismantled much of American overlordship of Latin America. He sent the foreign policy official he trusted most (not a numerous group), Sumner Welles, to Cuba and repealed the Platt Amendment, which had constrained Cuban finances and authorized American intervention at any time for almost any reason. He withdrew the Marines from Haiti, and renounced many of the uneven provisions of the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty with Panama. The United States subscribed to a non-intervention pledge at the Hemispheric Conference of 1933, and Roosevelt pledged that the Marines would not be back as long as the rest of the hemisphere resisted outside influences. Roosevelt was concerned about pro-German and pro-Italian activity in Argentina and Brazil, and effectively made this exchange with those governments when he visited Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro in 1937: no heavy-handed American intervention but no penetration of the Americas by overseas powers. Roosevelt knew Canada well. He had had a summer residence at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, all his life (where he came down with polio in 1921), and was as well-disposed to Canada as his presidential cousin Theodore had been skeptical.
The problem with King’s isolationist pacifism was that if Great Britain engaged in a war with a great European power in which the future of the United Kingdom and the whole Commonwealth were threatened, English-Canadian opinion would stampede into war from under King, trying to drag the sluggish French Canadians with it. It was assumed, by King and everyone else, that in a major war, Canada would follow Britain, and Canada had practically no hand in the diplomatic niceties leading up to the European climax at the end of the 1930s, nor any military strength or strategic influence that could be deployed in the crises that marked the descent to war. All that could be said of Canada at the top table of the world’s nations, though it was not an unenviable or insignificant encomium, was that, in the event of war, it would supply about a million first-class servicemen, a prodigious volume of natural resources, and a not inconsiderable defence production to the Allied side (that is, the side that Britain was allied to). King knew nothing about the Far East, though he had an able minister, Herbert M. Marler (1876–1940), in Tokyo from 1929 to 1936. He did know the major European countries well, but had no idea what to make of Hitler and an even less clear concept of him after his visit to the German leader in 1937, in which Hitler went through his soft-spoken masquerade as a man of peace working with a small and misunderstood country to achieve fair treatment for itself. King, unlike many others, had never entertained the slightest hope that the League of Nations would prevent war after the United States declined to join it, stating in May 1936, “Collective bluffing cannot bring collective security.” (U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld quoted this in reference to the United Nations’ attitude to Saddam Hussein in 2003.)
Hitler’s first overt move to overturn the Versailles arrangements was his reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936. Roosevelt warned the French not to tolerate it, and Hitler’s move was very tentative, as his move on Austria had been two years before, which Mussolini had frustrated by advancing forces to the Brenner Pass. Roosevelt’s private view was that if France did not evict Hitler and occupy Germany up to the Rhine, in a year Germany would be stronger than France and the die would be cast in Europe.60 On his trip to the League of Nations in the summer of 1936, King urged on the General Assembly the virtues of “mediation and conciliation” rather than “punishment.” He was reflecting domestic opinion – and not only in French Canada – more than his own views, though since he considered the League incapable of effective action against an important country, even Italy, much less Germany or Japan, he saw no chance of much that was useful being accomplished.
He was reinforced in his (always) cautious optimism by his meetings with Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in London on his way home. They shared to some degree with him their plan for accommodating the dictators, whom at this point they thought they could deflect into secondary places like Ethiopia, and confining Germany simply to repossessing what was rightfully German, if the punitive clauses of Versailles were ignored, as they would now have to be, as no one had any will to enforce them except those, like the Poles, who had no power to do so. King returned satiated with the deferences that the leaders of the British government had shown him; he equated Canada’s progress in the world with its standing with the Imperi
al government, as in Laurier’s time, rather than the standing it could enjoy in the world as a fully autonomous state. (Even this was an illusion, as, while Baldwin and Chamberlain were happy enough to take King partly into their confidence, they were not prepared to entertain the thought that Canada would do anything other than what they wished if the heat really came up in Europe.)
The main foreign issue, though its implications for Canada were also important, was the status of the new king, Edward VIII. George V had died on January 20, 1936, and was widely mourned in the Empire as a solid, unpretentious, and dutiful man, neither as august as his grandmother nor as stylish as his father, but steady and dignified through very difficult times. The new king was popular as a well-travelled, elegant bachelor, but he intended to propose to an American double-divorcee, Wallis Warfield Simpson, who had two ex-husbands living. This would put the king at odds with his role as supreme governor of the Church of England, which at that time did not approve remarriage for people whose former spouses were alive, and King joined Baldwin and other Commonwealth premiers in opposing the marriage. Baldwin let it be known that if the king went ahead, he would resign and there would be an election on the issue, which would be deeply divisive. Instead of finessing it, keeping Simpson somewhat out of sight and postponing thoughts of marriage while things settled down and public and political opinion evolved, as it would have, the king abdicated, on December 11, 1936, in favour of his brother, Albert, Duke of York, who ascended the throne as King George VI. Mackenzie King supported Baldwin’s position quietly, and his only public statement, issued against the advice of Lapointe and O.D. Skelton, was so ambiguous it was incomprehensible and could not have influenced events at all. Typically, King congratulated himself in his diary on the seminal role he had played in the front rank in resolving the problem, a complete fantasy.61
By this time, the next great crisis in Europe had erupted: the Spanish Civil War, between the Republicans, who included most of the democratic groups and all of the left, who dominated the legitimist coalition (in the sense of a legitimate republic and the continued exclusion of the monarchy in a secular state), and the Nationalists, who included the armed forces, the monarchists, and all the right. It was a horrible war, as civil wars particularly are, and continued from July 1936 to April 1939. Mussolini injected tens of thousands of (not overly effective) soldiers in support of the Nationalists, and Hitler contributed air forces and supplies. Officially, there was an arms embargo, but it was extremely porous, and the Soviet Union and Mexico did not have great difficulty shipping supplies to the Republicans, and certainly no one interfered with the Germans or Italians. Even France allowed some support for both sides to go through. Portugal was mainly a conduit for the Nationalists, and both sides attracted volunteers, especially the Republicans, for whom the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion fought. This group of leftist volunteers numbered 1,546 members, of whom 721 were killed, and Canada was surpassed only by France as the foreign power with the largest number of volunteers per capita. The Nationalists eventually won, as they contained almost all the Spanish armed forces and were more amply supported by their German and Italian sponsors than were the Republicans by theirs. This installed a thirty-six-year dictatorship by quasi-fascist General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, but was succeeded in an orderly manner by a constitutional monarchy that has brought Spain fully into the modern world and served it well. Mackenzie King, like Roosevelt, ducked the war, or any hint of partisanship in the war, completely. Both men doubted that there was naturally much to choose between the fascist- and communist-led protagonists, and while the majority of Canadians and Americans sympathized with the Republicans, King and Roosevelt both pulled a large majority of their countries’ Roman Catholic voters, and the great majority of Roman Catholics strongly supported the Nationalists over the violently anti-clerical Republicans. Approximately five hundred thousand people died in the Spanish Civil War, and almost as many fled the country.
King was back in London in May 1937 for a Commonwealth Conference and the coronation of George VI. The British conference hosts made the usual plea for one Commonwealth foreign policy, namely theirs, and King responded that the autonomy of Canada was not negotiable but that Britain could count on Canada in a crisis and that he wanted his and the other Commonwealth leaders’ voices to be listened to in averting a crisis. He purported to be speaking for Roosevelt as well as himself in urging “economic appeasement,” which was taking a considerable liberty with what Roosevelt actually said. Roosevelt had suggested economic concessions, which would in fact redound to the benefit of all, and avoidance of any suggestion that Hitler was being appeased, but the president, who spoke German fluently and knew the country well, had said from the start of the Hitler regime (five weeks before he was inaugurated himself) that it would be impossible to coexist with the Nazis. He had a radically different view of the developing crisis than did Baldwin and Chamberlain (who became prime minister in May 1937), both of whom he considered to be hopeless in dealing with such a compulsively belligerent and psychotic personality as Hitler. But they did not have much regard for Roosevelt either – whom Chamberlain described as “a cad,” in a political sense – and thought they would do better with Mussolini and Hitler than trying to coordinate policy with Roosevelt and Stalin, who were in fact, in their different ways, the only leaders of the great powers, apart from Hitler, who knew what they were doing. All of this swirled over King’s head, and his antennae were fully occupied and twitching wildly as he grasped at ways to urge war-avoidance on the British as the only way to keep Canada out of war. (The British hardly needed persuasion on the point.) From the position he had, and with the objectives he pursued, King cannot be faulted for not urging a strong line backed by the implicit threat of war, in as much collaboration with Stalin and Roosevelt as was available. This was the only course which had any chance of avoiding war, and Canada was not prepared to take the Commonwealth or North American lead in rearming, nor to initiate any substantive talks with Stalin, who would have been astounded by and skeptical of any such overture, so there was not much King could do. The Commonwealth Conference of 1937 was even less productive than they usually were, but King, always family-minded, celebrated the centennial of his grandfather William Lyon Mackenzie’s and Papineau’s rebellions with reflections on what he considered to be the coruscation of Canadian autonomy. For his own purposes, this is how he viewed the Commonwealth Conference, a process which, in addition, he had convinced himself, his ancestor had initiated.
King enjoyed the coronation and went on to Germany after he had a lengthy and very cordial discussion with the German ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Mackenzie King, ever a source of surprises, seems to be the only person in history who actually liked Ribbentrop, perhaps because of the ambassador’s reminiscences about his time in Canada before the war as a champagne salesman and agent in Montreal and Ottawa. It was an amazing exchange of diplomatic whoppers: Ribbentrop claimed he might have emigrated had the Great War not broken out, and King emphasized that he was born in Berlin, Ontario, and knew the “German character at first hand.” Ribbentrop explained his führer’s sympathy for the workers, and King started spouting excerpts of Industry and Humanity. The upshot was that Ribbentrop, who became the German foreign minister the following year, arranged for an invitation for King to visit the Reich chancellor in Berlin, and this occurred on June 29, 1937. The interviews that followed with Hermann Göring, commander of the German air force and minister of economics, and with the German führer, Adolf Hitler, must rank as the most astonishing exchanges any Canadian prime minister has ever had with any foreign leaders. King had been on a carefully guided tour for two days, sitting in Hitler’s chair at the Olympic stadium and at the opera and touring the zoo, to which Canada had donated some of the animals. King gave Göring a summary of the good relations Canada enjoyed with Britain but naturally explained Canada’s independence from Britain, and Göring asked what Canada’s reaction would be to a German t
akeover of Austria. King gave his usual answer to everything more complicated than the time of day: “We would wish to examine all the circumstances surrounding the matter,” etc. King assured him that this had been his third Commonwealth Conference and that he had never seen such a will to friendly relations with Germany.
King went on to an almost ninety-minute interview with Hitler and began by putting the biography of himself written by his assistant, Norman Rogers, in front of the German leader. He showed Hitler the picture in the book of the house in which he was born in Berlin, now Kitchener, Ontario, and then told him of his previous visits to Berlin, Germany. Hitler, speaking softly, explained that Germany was arming only to get some respect from the world and gently objected to what he considered Britain’s attempt to control Germany through the League of Nations. King reassuringly defended the British and gave Hitler a summary of the English temperament, saying that even in the midst of a house fire, an Englishman would betray no emotion and only concern for decorum and his own unflappability. Hitler explained that he could not control Germany as Stalin controlled Russia, by simply shooting people, and that he could only act if public opinion supported him. King was at pains to tell Hitler how much he would enjoy Chamberlain (this would be correct, but not for the right reasons), and how he and his ministers had opposed Chamberlain but now thought highly of him.