JOHN ENGLISH
Craig Brown is one of very few Canadian historians to address directly the subject of political leadership, and his analysis of Canadian leadership during the First World War is unsurpassed. In his 1980 article, ‘Fishwives, Plutocrats, Sirens and Other Curious Creatures: Questions about Political Leadership in Canada,’ Brown stressed that ‘perceptions of political leadership are like images in a hall of mirrors. They are partial, shifting, transitory.’1 Writing at the early dawn of postmodernism and five years after the appearance of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Brown considered the ways in which we construct our memory of what wartime leadership was. In his biography of Sir Robert Borden, of which the second volume was also published in 1980, Brown placed Borden far more at the centre of wartime political leadership than contemporary and historical analyses had suggested. The limits of Borden’s choices and the sources of his commitment became much better understood.
Leadership is a rare topic among historians. The best-known recent work is by a political scientist; most titles about leadership are about leadership in business. Leaders, of course, are the elite; and the language of leadership – der Führer, il Duce, Beloved Helmsman – has been academically unfashionable, even risible.2 The literary memory of the First World War is of leaders disgracefully distant from those who died in the trenches. Fussell wrote in the 1970s that ‘one powerful legacy of [British General Douglas] Haig’s performance is the conviction among the imaginative and intelligent today of the unredeemable defectiveness of all civil and military leaders.’3 Failure of leadership in the First World War has remained a dominant theme. Summarizing the twentieth century in the early 1990s, Eric Hobsbawm suggested that the ‘great ministers or diplomats of the past’ such as Talleyrand or Bismarck would have wondered why their successors had not settled the war before ‘it destroyed the world of 1914.’4 Talleyrand was at the centre of restoring an earlier world after the Napoleonic wars, but the leaders of 1919 neither restored an earlier world nor created a new world based upon collective security and international institutions.
Borden himself left texts that condemned other wartime leaders. He told the Imperial War Cabinet that British war leadership was appalling and that incompetent officers remained while the talented in lower ranks received no recognition, a legacy of aristocratic tradition that amounted ‘to scrapping the brains of the nation in the greatest struggle in history.’ British Prime Minister David Lloyd George privately agreed with Borden, but such agreement did not cause Borden to relent in his criticisms. In midsummer 1918 Borden turned upon Lloyd George at Sunday tea and said: ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want to tell you that, if ever there is a repetition of the battle of Passchendaele, not a Canadian soldier will leave the shores of Canada as long as the Canadian people entrust the government of their country to my hands.’ Nevertheless, Borden expressed no doubts about the war’s purposes and criticized those who did. He thought South African Jan Christian Smuts’s musings about the need for a peace short of victory were dangerously flawed and believed the German war machine had to be completely smashed. He dissented strongly from American President Woodrow Wilson’s view that the dominion prime ministers lacked the will to pursue war to its full end and strongly criticized Wilson’s own faint-heartedness.5
Hobsbawm and many others, such as British historian Niall Ferguson, have agreed with Smuts’s view that war to the ‘full end’ was ‘fatal to us too.’6 Borden and many other wartime leaders have been easy targets, uttering, as they so often did, phrases about duty, honour, and democracy while the modern age, with its ironic, discontinuous, and anti-traditional ways, was successfully storming the heights of western life. In photographs of wartime and later, Borden seems to belong to an earlier age: he wears Edwardian suits and watch chains and parts his hair in the middle. In his post-war Letters to Limbo, a curious set of letters to an imaginary newspaper editor, what Fussell termed the high diction that died in the trenches abounds. Warfare is still strife, actions are still deeds, and the young girls on a Toronto-Ottawa train ‘rent the air with instrument and voice, producing a vile cacophony to the vast disturbance and indignation of the other passengers.’7 In Letters to Limbo and elsewhere he extolled the poetic excellence of Audrey Alexandra Brown and sought to advance her career. Brown was, David Staines writes, ‘the last important representative of romantic poetry in Canada, deeply indebted to the English Romantic poets, especially Keats.’ Her best-known poem, which Borden deeply admired, was ‘Laodamia,’ which revealed her attraction to ‘a legendary past,’ ‘colourful descriptions,’ ‘musical cadences,’ and ‘ornate’ verse. It was a world far from Graves, Sassoon, and Pound, and so was Robert Borden.8 In his sketch of Canada’s ‘Bigwigs’ in 1934, Charles Vining wrote that Borden was ‘an extremely distinguished old gentleman who lives in Ottawa and tries not to notice what is going on there.’9 The world had seemingly moved beyond him.
Yet, Vining noted, Borden had been the sole allied leader to last through the war and by 1934 had become ‘a chief architect of national independence’ and, furthermore, ‘probably the only Canadian who would be publicly acceptable as Governor-General.’10 Jonathan Vance’s Death So Noble, a study of memory and war in Canada, hints why Borden was the only acceptable Canadian governor general in 1934. Canadians in mid-Depression shared a view of the war that was dominated by ‘the successful defence of Ypres in 1915, the capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917 … the triumphant Hundred Days that preceded the Armistice of 1918,’ and, above all, by the belief that the war had made the nation. Others, such as Frank Underhill and Will Bird, recalled the generals’ stupidities, the divisions between the French and the English, the Military Voters Act, the internment of aliens, and the angry veterans in 1919. Those memories were not shared at memorial services in the interwar years or in myriad other interwar remembrances. Here, one looked to the past to find an example for a better future: ‘Painful and costly, the war had nevertheless conferred more than it wrenched away because it took Canada a few steps farther along the road to its destiny. If only everyone would realize this fact, the myth of the war could become a constructive force of unparalleled power. It would create a new nation, pure in its essence and secure from internal divisions.’ For those who remembered the war most, Robert Borden represented these memories.11
Author of disunity yet creator of independence, an expression of Canadian commitment but the deliverer of the young to slaughter: such contradictory images swirl around Borden and his colleagues. What did leadership mean to Borden in his own times? How has what Brown termed shifting and transitory perception created those images and obscured what Borden and those around him deemed political leadership to be. Who were leaders and followers? What was the context in which they interacted? Finally, what was the language they shared?
Sir Robert Borden, March 1918 (W.I. Topley, National Archives of Canada, PA28128)
In analysing the failure of British war leadership, Borden pointed to the distance between leaders and followers. He believed that Canada was different. He even suggested to the Imperial War Cabinet that Canadians should undertake the training of the newly arrived American troops because Canadians, like Americans, did not have an aristocracy that placed birth over merit.12 He attributed the success of the Canadian Corps to the lack of a professional military caste closely linked with a hereditary elite. Wilson’s early use of ‘democracy’ had resonance for Borden, and he and Loring Christie, his legal and international affairs adviser, wrestled intellectually with the problems of democratic legitimacy and public opinion in Canada and internationally. In this democratic spirit in January 1918 Borden decided that hereditary titles were ‘entirely incompatible with our institutions’ and told the governor general, the Duke of Devonshire, that they should be abolished.13 The democratic tide in wartime extended the vote to women for the 1917 election (albeit in a perverse form in the Military Voters and Wartime Elections acts). The Borden government introduced war profit taxes and income taxes on the wealthy. Moreover, there were restrictions on luxuries that sought to assure the appearance of equal sacrifice and obligation. Conscription itself fitted well into equality of sacrifice. The justifications for conscription derived from the age of democratic revolution, the ‘people’s armies’ that fought for democracy in those times, and from Borden’s sense of British Canadian democracy. Arthur Currie was no artistocrat but a general for a democratic people’s army.
The rhetoric of British Canadian democracy became increasingly majoritarian as the war progressed. When one looks at the character of wartime leadership in Canada, the British-Canadian background of the political leaders of Canada’s war effort is striking. Elected in 1911, the Conservative government of Robert Borden concentrated decision-making among a few, partly by choice and partly by circumstance. Although the Conservatives had success in Quebec in the 1911 election, Borden’s decision to proceed with the Naval Bill without holding a referendum, as the Quebec nationalistes believed he had promised to do, weakened the francophone voice within the cabinet. By 1913 the cabinet did not have a strong francophone member; by 1 April 1918 francophone representation in the cabinet consisted of one senator, the postmaster general. That senator, Pierre-Edouard Blondin, was one of two Roman Catholics in the cabinet of fourteen. Although women voted in 1917, no woman was elected and none was a member of cabinet. There were no members of German, Ukrainian, Jewish, or Asian origin in the Unionist caucus. The British Protestant Churches – Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican – accounted for the religious affiliation of 83 per cent of Unionist members but of only 45 per cent of Canadians. Almost 39 per cent of Canadians were Roman Catholic, but only 3 per cent (five members) of the Union Government caucus were.14
There were three Unionist members of German background, but one (W.A. Griesbach) was an Anglican and the others (J.J. Merner and James Bowman) were Methodists. The sole Unionist French Canadian, J.L. Chabot of Ottawa, listed himself as an ‘imperialist.’15 There were 403,417 Canadians who identified themselves as German in the 1911 census, and 44,036 who were ‘Austrians,’ about 6.2 per cent of the population. In the 1908 federal election, ‘Germans’ tended to vote Conservative in eastern Canada, although the negative correlation for Germans and Conservative Party support in the west was not strong. In 1917, however, those ‘Germans’ who could vote went strongly against the Union Government and the Conservative Party bore the animus for several generations. In that election, Brodie and Jenson found that the correlation of party vote and ethnicity was by far the most pronounced in Canadian history, with those of British background overwhelmingly Unionist and those of French background overwhelmingly Liberal.16 The Canadian government, then, was democratically elected but unrepresentative in character.
In looking at Canada in 1917, one sees a situation similar to modern democracies where government excludes significant minorities, especially when identity questions are fundamental to political definition and discourse. Leadership in a society such as Israel (approximately 18 per cent Arab), Estonia (30 per cent Russian) or Malaysia (32 per cent Chinese) asserts the primacy of the majority because of security, ideological, or religious concerns. Dissident views are reflected in minority legislative factions, but leadership groups tend to be exclusive. Minorities are fragmented while the majority tends to be coherent, especially when challenged. Relationships with minority groups exist but are informal and intermittent. In wartime, the intermittent becomes even more irregular. The focus intensifies on the central purpose, and leadership resides in definition of that purpose. ‘Leaders and followers,’ James MacGregor Burns writes, ‘are locked into relationships that are closely influenced by particular local, parochial, regional, and cultural forces. In the progression of both leaders and followers through stages of needs, values, and morality, leaders find a broadening and deepening base from which they can reach out to widening social collectivities to establish and embrace “higher” values and principles.’17
In the winter of 1917 the base was disintegrating for Borden and his government as voluntary recruitment collapsed. The result was a crisis of legitimacy. The first wave of volunteers had been British born; the next wave came overwhelmingly from urban centres, particularly in Ontario, Manitoba, and English Quebec. Recruitment figures were reflected in the Victory Loan Campaigns of 1917–18, in which Ontarians gave over $220 per capita, Manitoba almost $170, but no other province more than $120. As indicated in the Historical Atlas of Canada, ‘untapped manpower’ (eligible male population between eighteen and forty-five) was greater than 50 per cent in all provinces except Manitoba; in Quebec it was over three-quarters of the population.18 The Census of Canada of 1951 traced where those who had served lived after the wars. Although many veterans did not return to their pre-war homes, the patterns of veteran settlement, a sample of which is shown in table 4.1, are highly revealing.
Canada’s wartime leaders knew these numbers well. They knew where they were followed and where they did not lead. Following historians of Victorian Britain, Bruce Curtis has emphasized how fundamental the impact of statistics was upon state formation in Canada in the nineteenth century.19 Similarly, statistics about enlistment stirred controversy in both wars and shaped leadership perceptions. Reading Robert Borden’s diary and correspondence in wartime, one is struck by how much of the rapidly expanded state structure was beyond his purview, how agendas overflowed, how options and different opinions narrowed, and how much numbers came to matter. Following the failure of national registration, which revealed differences among areas and peoples, Borden asked his minister of militia in April about the state of recruitment for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Edward Kemp replied precisely in numbers that bore enormous political weight: ‘voluntary enlistment has about reached its limit. Enlistment overseas for March seven thousand and sixty three … Thirty five thousand will be shipped during April.’ This news came just as 3,598 Canadians died in their magnificent victory at Vimy Ridge. Borden had been in Britain since February at the Imperial War Conference, where the sense of crisis was profound and the distance from the complexities of Canadian population and politics great. The numbers and the setting made conscription seemingly unavoidable.20
Table 4.1
Postwar patterns of veteran settlement*
|
||||
War |
Census subdivision** |
Number served |
Ethnicity |
|
|
||||
First World War |
Beauce pop. 54,973 |
44 |
99% French |
|
|
Sherbrooke pop. 62,166 |
476 |
83% French |
|
|
Wellington pop. 66,930 |
1,653 |
79% British |
|
|
Russell pop. 17,666 |
97 |
81% French |
|
|
||||
*Figures include those who served in non-Canadian forces. Populations are for 1951. Figures for Second World War veterans are proportional to those for First World War veterans.
**Beauce is in rural Quebec and Russell in rural Ontario. Sherbrooke in Quebec and Wellington (Guelph) are urban ridings with smaller cities.
Source: Ninth Census of Canada, 1951, Vol. 1, Population (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1953).
Borden had told Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper in December 1916, after Tupper had encouraged adoption of conscription: ‘We have more than two and a half millions of French Canadians in Canada and I realize that the feeling between them and the English people is intensely bitter at present. The vision of the French Canadian is very limited. He is not well informed and he is in a condition of extreme exasperation by reason of fancied wrongs supposed to be inflicted upon his compatriots in other provinces, especially Ontario.’21 When commitment and service increasingly redefined democratic participation, Kemp’s numbers trumped ‘two and a half millions.’ The passing of the wartime franchise acts and the restructuring of Canadian parties reflected that redefinition. It also drew upon arguments made by women that their war service entitled them to the franchise, upon older arguments in Britain and Canada for the respectability of the ‘working man’ and their right to the franchise, and on even earlier arguments for recognition of the new bourgeoisie in more effective legislative fora. Democracy was still fresh in 1917, and its novelty made it a pliable substance.
The First World War was a calamity. In a classic study of calamity and its impact, Piotr Sorokin, who knew war and revolution well, described the various effects of a calamity: decrease in rationality, increased emotionality, and a focus on the calamity that paradoxically makes choices about dealing with it more difficult. Studies of stress have found, most unexpectedly, that when other factors were held constant, ‘intellectually stimulating leaders increased the felt stress … among subordinates.’ Such leaders may contribute to stress among followers. Consultation is valued in non-crisis situations but less so in times of crisis.22
The ‘felt stress’ in 1917 was uneven across Canada. In those centres where sons were more often at the front, anger, denial and emotionality were pervasive. In those where enlistment was low, anger was surely present, but its direction was different. In such a setting, consultation becomes difficult and may contribute to stress. In a recent study, Ian Miller strongly argues that the city of Toronto knew well the brutal conditions of war and the possibility that friends and family who enlisted would die. The population of the city was literate; it read its daily newspapers that reported the battles and the deaths in great and grisly detail. Why, Miller asks, did Canada’s women and men, well informed of the dangers their relatives and friends faced, intensify their support for the war in 1917?23 What did stress mean in such a setting?
In 1917 in Toronto the University of Toronto sponsored four lectures on ‘The Federation of Canada’ given by history Professor George Wrong, editor Sir John Willison, legal scholar Zebulon Lash, and university President Robert Falconer. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of Canadian confederation. The lecturers could not imagine their nation’s death in that dreadful winter. As Benedict Anderson has observed, a nation’s biography is fashioned ‘up time,’ which is marked by deaths that, ‘in a curious inversion of conventional genealogy, start from an originary present.’ Thus the Second World War begat the First World War and the ancestor of the State of Israel is the Warsaw uprising. And so the Great War begat Confederation for these Toronto lecturers, and its reality completed Confederation’s meaning.
George Wrong’s historical work concentrated on French Canada, and his work reflected his experience as a summer sojourner at the elite anglophone resort of Murray Bay, downriver from Quebec. For Wrong, Carl Berger writes, ‘all that was admirable and permanent in Quebec society lay in the small rural villages like St Augustin, not in the provincial capital or the burgeoning industrial cities.’24 These villages had charmed him when he wrote about them in his pre-war historical writings; the charm of their traditional ways faded in wartime. In his 1917 lecture he talked about the physiocrats who taught that nature was all-sufficing. Since 1867 the influence of Darwin had changed minds: ‘Society … does not consist of fixed orders, each content and moving permanently in is own sphere.’ He had come to realize, as had others, that ‘only that has survived which was in vital harmony with the spirit and conditions of a new society.’ Those on the happy Quebec manors, ‘a garden of calm delight where all is beautiful,’ would pass away in ‘the scene of ceaseless struggle in which victory is to the strong.’ Strength resided in empire, and Canada must play its full and recognized part. Those who shirked the struggle would not endure: ‘our successful men are those who were free to adjust themselves to what they found in the country and to conquer conditions by learning to know them.’25
George Wrong’s oldest son died at the Somme on Dominion Day 1916. He told his listeners in early 1917 that he despised the word Dominion and favoured Kingdom of Canada because ‘Kingdom’ would express Canada’s ‘exact relation to the British Crown and also the equality of status with the mother country which it is now so desirable to foster.’26 Thus, Confederation gained meaning with equality of status. So did his son’s death. Another son, Hume, was a lieutenant in the British army. In May 1917 he wrote to his brother, Murray: ‘It really looks now as though there was going to be something approaching a rebellion in Quebec. In any case, there is bound to be bloodshed, in rioting if not in organized revolt. I would welcome a little military activity in Quebec. My C.O. and I have arranged a little punitive expedition to consist of a string of cars armoured with boiler plate and armed with Lewis guns. It would be the greatest sport in the world to fight against an enemy which was without artillery or machine-guns. And I should delight in catching Lavergne or Bourassa.’27 Darwinian struggle rather than the happy Quebec manor was now the crucible of nationhood.
Today, George Wrong told his University of Toronto listeners, we find ‘only that has survived which was in vital harmony with the spirit and conditions of a new society.’28 The isolated villages and priests along the St Lawrence River were to become the detritus of history. Canada’s vastness, once to be celebrated, had become its liability. It was ‘the penalty of vastness that it is both difficult to create a common public opinion in Canada, and when the opinion exists, difficult so to concentrate it as to make effective at the national capital.’ War had remade his past and nation.
Wrong’s son had died; his other son also might die. He saw his vision of bonne entente, based upon the enduring patterns of the Quebec parish, shatter. The gentle priests had become the disciples of Bourassa. His home province of Ontario disappointed him too. He lamented in 1917 that the ‘wealthy class’ in Canada had not yet shown ‘the taste for country sports,’ or ‘a vital and intelligent interest in the problems of agriculture and the raising of stock,’ as had the ‘wealthy class’ in Britain. We had learned, he proclaimed, ‘that a country of small landowners is very likely not to till its land to advantage.’ He had long ago left the small farm, where his father had failed to make a living, and the Elgin County grammar school, where he had learned to read and spell. He had married Edward Blake’s daughter, had sent his children to Oxford, where he had once spent some summer months that indelibly marked his own ways. In ‘Humewood,’ his Jarvis Street mansion, his Scottish maid put on the oil lamp, his students sat at dinner as servants piled up cutlery around them, while he lamented ‘the type of speech one [now] hears in law courts and lecture rooms.’ Later, he would lie in front of the fire, occasionally taking snuff, and frivolously comment as his wife read Trollope. When his son fell at the Somme, what did he say to his brother from the back concessions whose accent he deplored and whose ways he now despised? What did he say to his wife? He had learned to be costive, to shield emotion, and to pile up cultural capital around his self.29 The war was peeling away those careful constructions, leaf by leaf.
The British prime minister’s brilliant son Raymond Asquith also fell at the Somme. The prime minister had last seen him when he visited the front with Haig, and when they shook hands, Haig noticed that the prime minister trembled. The bad news came after dinner on 15 September. When told, Asquith put his hands over his face and ‘walked into an empty room and sat in silence.’ When Robert Borden saw Asquith soon after, he was uncharacteristically giddy, and Borden regretted that ‘he did not cultivate a greater abstinence in the use of wines.’ Asquith wrote long and infatuated letters to Venetia Stanley and Sylvia Henley, which he crammed with state and personal secrets. His ‘temperament,’ to use a contemporary term, had failed.30
Others ‘failed,’ too. Mackenzie King went to a psychiatrist. Annie Pearson, described by her son Lester as a strong person, was ‘broken in spirit’ in 1917 and asked her husband to write to the minister of overseas militia to ask that Lester be allowed to return on furlough. Family friend Sam Hughes had granted favours before, but now Hughes was gone, along with ‘special favours.’ Lester went to Oxford, where he took special training under Robert Graves, although Graves himself collapsed that summer.31 Hughes became increasingly erratic as he sat on the backbenches. Borden was frequently exhausted and had to drop all activities, even though his doctor told him that he was physically well. When Borden was absent, the stress was evident in the cabinet. Sir Thomas White fretted in the spring of 1917; in early 1918 he told Borden he must resign. Earlier he had been a pillar: ‘Borden often came to White’s door when he needed a few minutes away from his work. Without asking, White knew what was required. Off the two would go for a brisk walk around the Parliamentary Library. Nothing was said of budgets or soldiers. Instead, the weary politicians exchange recollections of their favourite stanzas of poetry.32 Anger, stress, fear, and emotionality drove those most affected to fragments of memory and the construction of shells of familiar material. In that construction, Borden was a more appropriate craftsman than other more ‘intellectually stimulating’ alternatives. His familiarity resassured when assurance was most needed.
Fussell emphasizes how high diction perished with the battles of the First World War. Rupert Brooke’s romantic language and vision died with him, and other warriors, such as Owen and Graves, robbed war of romance, and their words and vision were the rich seeds of modernism. In wartime and, as Vance has shown, in post-war remembrance, Canada’s leaders and the soldiers’ kin clung to traditional forms of expression. In the cities, the churches, the newspapers, and the memorial services English Canadians read and heard ‘familiar stanzas.’ There were, of course, the magnificent Christian hymns that called on Christian soldiers to march forward and assured grieving parents that death lacked its sting. When Borden announced that he intended to introduce conscription, he brought a message from the Canadian men in European hospitals, from men ‘who have come back from the very valley of the shadow of death. And there was a call to us from those who have passed beyond the shadow into the light of perfect day, a call to us that their sacrifice shall not be in vain.’ As in McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields,’ Borden asks that we take up the dead soldiers’ quarrel with the foe. From their failing hands, the torch must be grasped.
Wounded soldiers voting at a Canadian hospital near Arras, France (William Rider-Rider, National Archives of Canada, PA3488)
By the 1970s such rhetoric had passed as in a dream, a very bad dream. For Fussell, McCrae’s images and words were ‘a propaganda argument,’ like the rhetoric of the scurrilous patriot, Horatio Bottomley.33 Isaac Rosenberg’s, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches,’ in Fussell’s view the best war poem, also employs the literary traditions of pastoral poetry but looks ‘forward’ in its informality, insouciant ironic idiom and its ‘ordinary’ talk.34 Yet in wartime and post-war remembrance in English Canada, one heard McCrae, not Rosenberg. The language of the conscription debates and of the armistice was never informal and was deliberately distinct from ‘ordinary’ talk. That language endured into peacetime and even into the next war as not only Churchill drew upon King Hal at Agincourt, but also Mackenzie King based wartime discourse upon Christian image and Victorian rhetoric. Sandra Gwyn, in Tapestry of War, describes how the First World War transformed Canadian lives, but interestingly, she finds that few of her subjects could ‘easily have lived in our own times.’ The most likely in Gwyn’s view was the heroic ambulance driver, Grace MacPherson Livingston. Yet her rebellion lay in her insistence that she march with the men in the post-war Armistice parades where McCrae and the Book of Ecclesiastes shaped the setting.35
Language is fundamental to leadership. In his study of the mutiny on the Bounty, Greg Dening points out that Bligh was not a violent captain, as myth and film have it. Language was at the centre of Bligh’s inability to command and his inability to understand the metaphors of captaincy. Dening argues that ‘Bligh’s bad language was the ambiguous language of his command. It was bad, not so much because it was intemperate or abusive, but because it was ambiguous, because men could not read in it a right relationship to his authority.’36 Borden’s critics, historians and contemporaries, could point to incidents or facts that illustrated weakness and error, ranging from bad rifles to misspent millions. His language, however, was not ambiguous. It was familiar, and in a setting where so much was unfamiliar and incredible (who in August 1914 would have believed half a million Canadians would fight such a war?), he took from religious and political tradition those images and phrases that his listeners recognized. The language of service was linked to conscription, and a political act that was novel and a war that was incredible were encapsulated within traditional and meaningful frames.
These frames were seen through a glass darkly in Russell and were probably ‘bad’ in Beauce. Because they were so rich in the detail of British-Canadian Protestantism, the alienation of francophone Canadians from empire and Britishness became deeper. In Wellington County and other British-Canadian fastnesses, the language endured in public and private representations of wartime experience. It became increasingly obsolete in other settings, such as the university classroom and the literary clubs.
Hew Strachan’s recent history of the opening of the First World War has underlined how leaders faced difficult choices and how their responses were largely rational amid a growing sense of calamity. Similarly, George Cassar, in his study of Asquith as a war leader, though recognizing his increasing eccentricity, argues that history has dealt too harshly with his wartime leadership. Forgotten in the criticism of his frivolous letters and leisurely style was the fact that he ‘brought the country into the war without civil disturbance or political schism, a feat which in the beginning had seemed impossible.’ Moreover, Cassar argues, his ‘high states-manship and imperturbability’ inspired confidence when Britons learned in the terrible spring and summer of 1915 that the war’s outcome was uncertain.37
In the 1930s Borden, as Vining has noted, had become ‘a chief architect of national independence,’ at a time when that creation was, in various meanings, a potential source of national consensus. When a later generation of Canadian historians turned to the politics of war itself, however, they found in that past the source of disunity. A.M. Willms, in a 1956 article, ‘Conscription, 1917: A Brief for the Defence,’ did not convince historians writing in the next decades. During the 1960s Quebec moved into the centre of Canadian politics, and Vietnam made any notion of the ‘lovely war’ of 1914 thoroughly risible. When J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, two Canadian military historians, published their extensive study of Canadian conscription in 1977, the year after the election of René Lévesque, they chose as their title and theme ‘Broken Promises.’ René Lévesque accepted their interpretation in the manifesto he issued for the referendum on separation in 1980 in which the conscription crisis was principal supporting evidence for the argument that Quebec needed independence.38
Craig Brown published his second volume of the Borden biography in 1980, and his article on leadership appeared in the same year, when Canada’s future seemed so much in doubt. His statement that perceptions of leadership are partial, shifting, and transitory has particular relevance for a twenty-first-century assessment of Borden’s leadership. Brown himself shifted the focus with his analysis of war aims, Borden’s attachment to the Canadian commitment, and the nature of that commitment as it was understood by the cabinet of the day. He did not excuse the manipulation of the franchise, but he did present the framework within which decisions were made in 1916 and 1917. A sense that those in a later period might see Borden’s work differently pervades his analysis. We are now seeing studies of wartime leadership and followership by a generation born after Vietnam and educated after the national crisis of the 1970s. In recent works Jonathan Vance and Ian Miller concentrate upon English Canada and the war and follow paths where the thickets of national and international politics had overgrown direct contact with the experience of wartime leadership. Granatstein, in this volume and elsewhere, has also said that his analysis of conscription in the 1970s reflected those times, particularly the national unity crisis.
In their centenary history of Canada’s transformation in the first part of the twentieth century, Brown and Ramsay Cook claimed that the election of 1917 was the greatest triumph of British-Canadian nationalism, but it was its last. British-Canadian nationalism in mid-war was indeed triumphant. Moreover, it was profoundly dangerous in a nation where those of non-British background constituted over 40 per cent of the population and where many of British background themselves did not share the particular expression of British-Canadian nationalism so strongly expressed in English Canada’s urban centres. Conscription was a response to a real military need, but even more, it became a symbol of Canadian commitment and a product of the fear, expressed in Wrong’s lecture, that Canada was not a nation.
‘What If?’ has recently fascinated military historians.39 What would have been the consequences had Borden not introduced conscription in the spring of 1917? Surely the result would have been a sullen majority and a rebellion that stirred even darker forces than those that appeared in the 1917 election. Surely those Toronto boardrooms and private clubs where British-Canadian nationalism flourished would have seen plots to bring in a Canadian Lloyd George to smash the opposition. In Montreal and even Quebec City, where the boardrooms and clubs had few who spoke or understood Quebec’s majority language (except the staff and servants), would not the potential for conflict have been so much greater? What would have happened with the Canadian Expeditionary Force if conscription had not been imposed and the Canadian Corps had fallen far below full strength? Hume Wrong ended his vicious dream of machine gunning French Canadians with the comment: ‘Still let us hope for peace – and conscription.’40 What if there had been no conscription? Would Canada have known peace?
The First World War was a calamity that coincided with a period of extraordinary change in North American history. In such times, a leader who seemed stolid, who lacked Lloyd George’s oratorical fire, and who lacked partisanship suited Canada well. His language was traditional and his view of war romantic, but these characteristics were shared by most soldiers and their families. A language of modernity would have been alien in Canada. Canada had neither an Easter Rebellion, nor a Khaki election, nor the Black and Tans. Borden managed conscription in a fashion that brought a sense that Canada had paid down the price for equality within the empire. The ‘equality of sacrifice,’ the compelling and chilling phrase that fuelled the call for conscription, was linked by Borden to the equality of nationhood within empire that made the war seem more of a victory than it really was. In January 1918, a month after the bitterest election in Canadian history, the Quebec legislature rejected a motion calling for Quebec secession. Premier Lomer Gouin, who had strongly opposed the Unionists in 1917, rejected with equal fervour any suggestion of secession. In May 1918 he politely turned down Borden’s request that he join his government but accepted Borden’s request that Quebec ‘be in his charge both provincially and federally’ while he was absent in Europe.41 Both Borden and Gouin knew that the nationalist furies would fade; to sustain them would be fatal.
Historians have seen Borden through the prisms appropriate to the age in which they worked. I have argued that our times are more understanding of the challenge facing him in a period when an increasingly strong-willed majority demanded harsh penalties against those who did not conform. His imperturbability smothered anger, his indecisiveness postponed conflict, and he spoke in a language that resonated with his followers. He too long ignored those who would not follow him, but he concentrated upon controlling the fury of British-Canadian nationalism at its height. It was probably his only choice in his times. That we understand Borden’s leadership better is partly the product of our own times but even more the result of Craig Brown’s biography, the finest study of Canadian wartime leadership ever written.
1 R.C. Brown, ‘Fishwives, Plutocrats, Sirens and Other Curious Creatures: Some Questions about Political Leadership in Canada,’ in R. Kenneth Carty and W. Peter Ward, eds, Entering the Eighties: Canada in Crisis (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1980), 149–60. See also, R.C. Brown, ‘“Whither are we being shoved?” Political Leadership in Canada during World War I,’ in J.L. Granatstein and R.D. Cuff, eds, War and Society in North America (Toronto: Nelson, 1971), 104–19; and R.C. Brown, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography, 2 vols (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975, 1980).
2 James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
3 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 12.
4 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 29.
5 National Archives of Canada (NAC), Borden Diary, 14 July 1918. See also Brown, Borden, 2: 137–9, 2, 140–1.
6 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
7 Fussell, Great War, 21–2; Henry Borden, ed., Letters to Limbo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 31, letter of 12 May 1933.
8 Letters to Limbo, 114, letter of 11 July 1934. David Staines, ‘Audrey Alexandra Brown,’ in Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds, Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 153.
9 R.T.L. [Charles Vining], Bigwigs: Canadians Wise and Otherwise (Toronto: Macmillan, 1935), 15.
10 Ibid., 16.
11 Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1997), 10–11, 266.
12 NAC, Imperial War Cabinet 16, 13 June 1918; Borden Papers, vol. 341.
13 NAC, Borden Papers, diary entries 2 and 15 January 1918. See Brown, Borden, 2: 133–4, for an excellent discussion of this issue.
14 Fuller detail on these figures is found in John English, The Decline of Politics: The Conservatives and the Party System, 1901–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 199–201.
15 Ibid. Interestingly, the largest religious affiliation was Presbyterian (38 per cent), an indication of the presence of the Liberals in the Unionist caucus.
16 See Janine Brodie and Jane Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada (Toronto: Methuen, 1980), 96.
17 Burns, Leadership, 429.
18 Robert Craig Brown and Donald Loveridge, ‘“Unrequited Faith”: Recruiting and the CEF, 1914–1918,’ Revue internationale d’histoire militaire 51 (1982), 53–78; Christopher Sharpe, ‘The Great War, 1914–1918,’ in William Dean, Conrad Heidenreich, Thomas McIlwraith, and John Warkentin, eds, The Concise Historical Atlas of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), plate 40.
19 Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of the Candas, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
20 NAC, Kemp Papers, Borden to Kemp, 5 April 1917, Kemp to Borden, 10 April 1917, vol. 53, f.8.
21 NAC, Borden Papers, Borden to Tupper, 2 January 1917, vol. 16.
22 P.A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity (New York: Dutton, 1943); and David Hickson and Suan Miller, ‘Concepts of Decisions: Making and Implementing Strategic Decisions in Organizations,’ in Frank Heller, ed., Decision-Making and Leadership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 134–5.
23 Ian Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
24 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing: 1900–1970 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 17.
25 George Wrong, ‘The Creation of the Federal System in Canada,’ in The Federation of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1917), 34–5.
26 Ibid., 22.
27 Quoted in J.L. Granatstein, The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935–1917 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982), 113.
28 Wrong, Federation, 32.
29 Berger, Writing of Canadian History, 8–9; Granatstein, Ottawa Men, 110–16; Wrong, Federation, 33; Vincent Massey, What’s Past Is Prologue (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963), 21–2; interview with Paul Martin, May 1979. Martin, a student of Wrong, recalled meeting Wrong’s brother in a southwestern Ontario general store in the 1930s. The brother had a Canadian country speech and was an evangelist. An astonished Martin learned quickly that the brothers had little contact.
30 George Cassar, Asquith as War Leader (London: Hambleton, 1994), 197. Borden, Letters to Limbo, 78–9.
31 E.A. Pearson to Sir George Perley, 6 June 1917. L.B. Pearson Personnel File, Dept. of National Defence, National Archives Record Centre, Job. No. 30; Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895–1926 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), chap. 3.
32 Brown, Borden, 2: 130.
33 Borden, Memoirs, 2:699. Fussell, Great War, 249–50.
34 Fussell, Great War, 250.
35 Sandra Gwyn, Tapestry of War: A Private View of Canadians in the Great War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992), 460.
36 Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre in the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 61.
37 Cassar, Asquith, 234.
38 A.M. Willms, ‘Conscription 1917: A Brief for the Defence,’ Canadian Historical Review 37 (1956), 338–56; and J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford, 1977).
39 Robert Cowley, ed., What If? (New York: Berkley, 2000). The essays on the First World War emphasize the disruption of the times and the unavoidability of war.
40 Quoted in Granatstein, Ottawa Men, 113.
41 NAC, Borden Papers, diary entries, 11 May 1918.
