2

Asian Apprenticeship

In 1907, the year before King resigned as deputy minister of labour to stand for parliament, he became involved in the challenge posed by mounting opposition in British Columbia to immigration from Asia, a problem with imperial implications that was becoming acute, especially with a national election pending. In the absence of a diplomatic service, King, as deputy minister and after June 1909 as minister of labour, played an unexpected and heady role in trilateral discussions at the most senior levels among the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom over the increasingly vexed question of migrants from Japan and China and, in Canada’s case, from India as well.

Avner Offer, in his incongruously titled The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation, gives a detailed analysis of King’s involvement in the prewar Asian immigration controversies. He rightly places King’s sudden and unexpected introduction to the world of diplomacy in the context of the evolving imperial transformation of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan and, more specifically, the growing opposition on the west coast of North America to Asian migration. “By the turn of the century the demand for exclusion was about five decades old and the principle well and truly established that Asians were not acceptable. Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia had all enacted legislation to restrict or prevent the entry of non-whites and all of them discriminated against Asiatic residents already in place by denying them some rights, subjecting them to special taxes, denying them some forms of legal protection and preventing male residents from acquiring wives from overseas.”1

King’s diplomatic apprenticeship took place against this background as well as that of accelerating economic growth and imperial thinking in all three countries. The United States had expanded territorially after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, which resulted in American sovereignty over Texas. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, it had become an even greater imperial power with the acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and several Caribbean and Pacific islands including Hawaii, as well as suzerainty over Cuba. Japan emerged as a major regional if not yet a world power, the first Asian country to be so recognized. The United Kingdom was attempting to respond to emerging nationalist movements in India that challenged the over-stretched Raj. India also expressed discontent over the exclusion in one part of the British Empire of people from another part, a violation of the principle of equality under the crown. With Australasia even less welcoming to Asian migrants than Canada, it was an additional problem that the Raj did not need.

London had for more than a decade valued its 1894 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation and its more recent and comprehensive alliance of 1902 with the rising maritime power of Japan. Japan had defeated the armed might of Russia in 1905, for racists an astonishing victory of yellow people over white.

Ever since the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, and more so since the Russian naval defeat at Tsushima, Japan had been a cornerstone of British strategy. Japan’s presence in the Far East held in check the other European powers in the region, especially Russia and Germany. It made it possible for Britain to withdraw its naval forces to face the German threat. Britain’s big trade with China, the security of Hong Kong, India, Ceylon, Malaya and Australia, all came to rest on the understanding with Japan. And while the alliance neutralized the Russian threat to India, the Japanese example stimulated the yearning for independence there. It placed the United States and Britain at odds in the Far East, and gave rise to tensions in India, in Russia, in China and in Australia.

King was so innocent of strategy that, on arrival in Britain in March 1908, he was astonished to discover that there was an Anglo-German naval rivalry.2

In Canada, King came to recognize that the increasing demand in British Columbia for the exclusion of Asian immigrants was not simply a worrisome local or partisan problem. It had broad imperial dimensions, as well as implications for Canada-United States relations. From 1854 the United Province of Canada, eager to attract settlers, especially qualified farmers, had sent immigration agents to Europe, but certainly not to Asia. “Coolies” from China had played an indispensable if ill-rewarded role in the hazardous construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Rockies, but were neither invited to bring their families nor to stay. From India came mainly Sikhs, among them Indian army veterans of the Soudan campaigns, in search of a better life in another part of the British Empire; they were subjects of the Queen as much as Canadians were. But it was Japanese immigrants (some making their way indirectly to the United States via Hawaii and Canada) who gave the greatest concern on both sides of the border. Along the Pacific coast they were seen as working hard for little money and living frugally, leaving white workers convinced that their own standard of living and that of their families would be undermined by the arrival of yet more “cheap peoples.” No one in Canada attempted to answer the question put by a Canadian observer of the exclusion of Asian immigrants. “It cannot be his colour, for we admit the Negro; it cannot be his religion, for we admit the Doukhobour and the Mormon; it cannot be his morals, for we have no standard gauge for morality; it cannot be his untruthfulness; it cannot be his disregard for law and order. If, then, he is sober, industrious, law-abiding, thrifty, what more would we have?”3

That was not the way that Robert Macpherson, the Liberal member of parliament for Vancouver City, saw the question. In August he wrote to Laurier, “I would like very much to keep this country White and I would also like to keep it Liberal, but it is impossible to keep either one of the two unless the Japs are peremptorily told that they must carry out their understanding with your government.”⁴ Laurier replied, “The Japanese has adopted European civilisation, has shown that he can whip European soldiers, has a navy equal man-for-man to the best afloat [i.e., the Royal Navy] and will not submit to being kicked and treated with contempt as his brother from China still meekly submits to.”⁵ Hamar Greenwood, King’s classmate at the University of Toronto, now at Westminster as an MP and parliamentary private secretary to Winston Churchill, then undersecretary for the colonies, cautioned in a widely reported speech to the Empire Club in Toronto that “It is impossible to treat the subjects of the Mikado … in any way that will humiliate them … We have to change our whole idea of inferior races … You can deal as you like with the Chinaman for he is a patient fellow. He has no great government behind him … I believe in a white Canada … in strengthening the white portions of the Empire. But … you must not forget that you have an imperial responsibility.”6

For Canada, the imperial dimensions of which Greenwood spoke complicated unrest over Asian immigration on the west coast. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation of 1894 had included a reciprocal provision for the movement and residence of nationals between the two countries, emigration from Japan to the United Kingdom not being seen as a real or potential problem. Dominions were free to subscribe or not to the treaty. Certainly Australia and New Zealand did not do so, but Laurier, in search of trans-Pacific markets for western grain, did, with the added provision that Canada was free to restrict Japanese immigration to Canada along the lines of a restrictive provision in a contemporary United States-Japan trade agreement. That Laurier and others in central and eastern Canada saw trade advantages arising from the treaty did nothing to lessen the fear of the “Yellow Peril” on the Pacific coast where it had become the paramount political issue. British Columbia premier Sir Richard McBride called for “Mongolian exclusion.” Robert Borden, the leader of the opposition in Ottawa, declared that “the Conservative Party stands for a white Canada,” a sentiment shared by another future Conservative prime minister, the Calgary MP R.B. Bennett: “We must not allow our shores to be overrun by Asiatics and become dominated by an alien race.”⁷ Even the more measured Laurier, with his eye on the pending election, was reluctant to surrender whatever standing the Liberal Party still had in BC. “I have very little hope of any good coming to this country from Asiatic immigration of any kind.” Mackenzie King, MP, shared his leader’s misgivings about Liberal fortunes on the west coast, readily agreeing that Canada should remain a white man’s country.

In the western United States there was yet stronger opposition to immigration from Japan. King’s unexpected foray into foreign affairs began with a visit to Ottawa in January 1907 by Elihu Root, the secretary of state and former secretary of war in President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. Given each dominion’s responsibility for its own immigration policies and procedures, Root went to Ottawa rather than to London to explore how Canada and the United States might best collaborate to reduce or eliminate local political and racial agitation against Japanese immigration. He recognized that there was no practicable way for the United States to close to Asian immigrants the decidedly porous US frontier with Canada, so he called on its good neighbour to join in denying entry to North America of all Asian immigrants. That heavy-handed proposal left Laurier in the invidious position of trying to deal concurrently with political tensions in British Columbia, London’s imperial priorities with Japan and India, and Root’s loaded questions.

While the prime minister reflected on the approaching election, violence in British Columbia became increasingly likely, prompted in part by the Asiatic Exclusion League of California, which had become active in the province. On 7 September, before Laurier had decided what to do, the anti-immigration agitation in Vancouver culminated in a rowdy demonstration that became a riot. Both Ottawa and London viewed this violence with consternation. The prime minister’s immediate public response was to portray it as essentially a labour and not a racial problem (it did, in fact, begin as a labour march that got out of control).

Hamar Greenwood, who fortuitously had been in Vancouver directly before the riot, promptly set out the parallel concerns of the foreign and colonial offices in his Empire Club speech in Toronto on 13 September. There was no mistaking his message: the immigration problem on the west coast was not only a Canadian problem; it was an imperial problem. “Owing to the overwhelming defeat of Russia by an Oriental power, the sudden rise of Japan and, following that, the Oriental immigration question on the Pacific Coast, the Dominion suddenly came within the arena of foreign politics, and to-day you have the danger zone of the world, insofar as our own Empire is concerned, shifted from the Northwest Frontier of India … to the Pacific Coast of this Dominion.” Senator Robert Jaffray, the owner of the Globe, followed Greenwood: “As Britishers … the people on the Pacific Coast must do what they could to make Canada a white man’s country, but it was not by riot or lawlessness that they would succeed in doing so.”8

Six weeks after the riot, King, as deputy minister of labour, was sent by Laurier to Vancouver as a one-man royal commission to recommend compensation for Japanese victims of the violence and vandalism (larger Chinese claims were dealt with later) and, less formally, to gain with a Japanese consul a first-hand impression of the post-riot situation.* The British ambassador in Washington and the governor general sent their own reports to London and the mob violence received coverage in the newspapers of Britain, Japan, and the United States. For King the riot and his successful commission in Vancouver were to mark the beginning of a three-year involvement in Asian emigration to North America (not merely to Canada) and, more broadly, the place of Canada in an evolving British Empire.*

Following King’s return to Ottawa from Vancouver, Laurier’s next step was to send Rodolphe Lemieux, Mulock’s successor as postmaster general and minister of labour (and hence King’s minister), to Tokyo in mid-October to seek a commitment from Japan that it would restrict the flow of its immigrants to Canada, a practice that would be compatible with the priorities of both Canada and the British Empire. As the order-in-council of 12 October 1907 appointing Lemieux stated, he was “to discuss the situation with His Majesty’s Ambassador at Tokyo and Japanese authorities, with the object, by friendly means, of preventing recurrence of such causes as might disturb happy relations which have … existed between the subjects of the King in Canada and elsewhere, and the subjects of the Emperor of Japan.”⁹ Lemieux succeeded in concluding such a gentlemen’s agreement on 23 December 1907. Benefiting from the indispensable counsel, comprehension, and contacts of the experienced British ambassador, Lemieux was assured in writing, before his return to Ottawa in mid-January 1908, that the number of Japanese immigrants to Canada would not exceed four hundred annually. The Japanese government undertook to enforce the limit itself rather than suffer the humiliation of seeing Japanese applicants excluded by white countries.

At the same time, President Theodore Roosevelt, the belligerent “Rough Rider” of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and a pronounced admirer of Japanese prowess – describing Japan in a message to Congress “as one of the greatest of civilized nations” – canvassed behind the scenes the prospects for a trilateral approach to the vexed question of Asian migration that would somehow defuse the situation in the Pacific coast states and at the same time reduce the possibility of a bilateral clash with Japan. In California, anti-immigration agitation and legislation, fuelled in large part by labour unions, included controversial school segregation of students of Japanese background. Roosevelt dispatched his secretary of labor to the west coast. He recommended that Japan curtail its emigration in return for California restoring unrestricted school admission.

At this point Roosevelt came up with the surprising idea that Britain could solve the Japanese immigration problem for him. He had a curiously ambivalent attitude toward Britain. In 1898, at the time of the Spanish-American War, he had declared that “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America [including Canada?].” Ten years later, although fully conscious that Britain and Japan had become allies (reaffirmed by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902), Roosevelt was reputed to be too proud to be seen seeking British support in what he regarded as a difficulty that United States power alone should be able to resolve, while at the same time convinced that Britain might more readily settle the immigration problem by virtue of being Japan’s ally.

William Howard Taft, the secretary of war and later successor to Roosevelt as president, was on his second Pacific tour when Lemieux was disembarking in Tokyo. Taft reported to Roosevelt that the Japanese minister of war had described to him how, on a visit to Vancouver ten years, before he had foreseen labour tensions. The Canadian foreign minister had told him “how the very serious situation in Vancouver, BC, made it necessary for them to take further steps to prevent additional immigration into that country.” Assuming erroneously that Britain was responsible for Canadian immigration practices, Taft advised Roosevelt to leave the problem to Britain, Japan’s ally, to resolve. Roosevelt had the United States ambassador to Japan contact Lemieux in Tokyo to propose that Britain, Canada, and the United States join in a “common cause,” a proposal that Lemieux courteously suggested should be discussed not with him but with London as well as Ottawa.

Lemieux having in effect declined Roosevelt’s idea of Canada initiating a trilateral approach to Japan, the president, aware of the riot in Vancouver some months before, pondered how he might employ a Canadian as interlocutor with both Japan and Britain for his own ends, despite the fact that the United States and Britain had earlier encountered difficulties over settling the Venezuelan/British Guiana border and the creation of the Republic of Panama to permit the US construction of a canal (completed in 1914). A Harvard friend suggested to Roosevelt that he invite King to call when he would be in Washington in January 1908. Against the background of war talk in Washington and his decision to transfer the navy’s battle fleet from its home waters in the Atlantic to the Pacific, the president came to see King as a possible interlocuteur valable with the British government.

Laurier and King were not wholly surprised at Roosevelt’s unlikely approach. Lemieux had alerted them by telegram from Tokyo of the US ambassador’s query. King, although a public servant and not a responsible minister as Lemieux was, was well informed of the details of his minister’s visit to Japan. Despite his lingering dissatisfaction with the flaccid performance of Britain in the Alaska boundary settlement of 1903 and his understandable suspicions of American intentions, Laurier agreed to King’s acceptance of the invitation from the president. Perhaps Laurier had in mind the desirability of appearing cooperative when he was himself pondering the negotiation of a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States, but MacGregor Dawson, in his biography of King, later regarded his selection with some skepticism. “Even the most charitable could never have described King as an expert. The truth was that the [embryonic] Canadian [foreign] service did not contain anyone to challenge King’s knowledge, such as it was … although doubtless there were a number of immigration officials who had some familiarity with Far Eastern relations. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king” (pun perhaps intended).10

Elihu Root, the US secretary of state who had raised the immigration exclusion question in Ottawa one year before, suggested that zones be created for Asian immigrants in various parts of the world with suitable climates, but King could not ignore the ethical aspect. “Of course there was to be considered the doctrine of our common humanity … but … we might well say that the peace of the family was sometimes best kept … by brothers and their families not sharing the one household. Mr Root said: ‘In regard to brotherhood, because I recognize my neighbour as a brother, I am not thereby obliged to allow him to come into my yard and do what he wishes with my property, to plant his seeds in my garden and take what he can out of my soil.’”¹¹

For the next three months, King, with Laurier’s reluctant accord, was placed in contact with the highest levels of government in both London and Washington. According to King’s detailed diary entries, Roosevelt clearly stated his goals during three visits to Washington. Not too subtly, he had said at their first meeting that if by chance “you were going to England I would give you some strong messages to take to Sir Edward Grey [the foreign secretary]. I would have you tell him that … he could do much for the cause of peace, not that we want to ask the help of the British, but the Japanese must learn that they will have to keep their people in their own country. Britain is her ally, a word … might go far … I decided to send the fleet into the Pacific [for the first time]; it may help them [the Japanese] to understand that we want a definite arrangement.”12

Convinced that Japan was not observing its earlier “gentlemen’s agreement” with the United States to limit emigration, Roosevelt had decided to dispatch the “Great White Fleet” of sixteen battlewagons around the world – from the Atlantic into the Pacific via Cape Horn – as one part of his determined effort to stop Asian immigration once and for all. He also speculated for King that if Britain did not act with the United States in promoting a settlement, he anticipated a threat to the unity of Canada in that the states west of the Rockies might join with British Columbia to form an independent republic of the Pacific (that Roosevelt would, apparently with a straight face, advance the idea that the three Pacific states might successfully secede from the Union only forty years after one of the bloodiest civil wars in history was remarkably imaginative). With Japan, Roosevelt declared that he would “deal politely, be conciliatory, but carry a big stick.” The Great White Fleet, despite British reservations, was later received enthusiastically in an Australia chronically uneasy over its isolation and courteously in a Japan secure in the conviction that impossibly long lines of communication would render a conflict with the United States unlikely.*

The mood in Washington, King reported to the governor general and to Laurier on his return to Ottawa, was that a US war with Japan had suddenly become possible. “The whole tone of the President’s talk … was that we must have absolutely what we are demanding or war … be prepared for war and be ready for it on a moment’s notice … [Root] fears the possibility of war in the immediate future. There will be war for sure if the Japanese do not see what this country wishes done and do it quickly.”¹³ Although he did not say so explicitly, was Roosevelt threatening war with a British ally and hence, if it came to war, expecting Britain to stand clear? King recorded Roosevelt as saying, “You should impress upon the British that there is a common interest in this matter. If the Japanese recognize that there is a common interest, there will be peace.”14 Or was Roosevelt saying that if the British government failed to press its ally Japan to stop immigration to North America, he for his part would do nothing to hinder the separation of British Columbia from the Canadian confederation and with the support of the three Pacific coast states see it become a new state of the Union?

In January 1902 when Britain and Japan had negotiated a military alliance to supplement their commercial treaty of 1894, Britain had proposed a provision that if either signatory was attacked by one other country [e.g., the United States] the other signatory would maintain a benevolent neutrality, but if attacked by two, the other signatory would declare war in support of its ally. In the wake of the 1905 Russo-Japanese treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (presided over by Roosevelt), Britain and Japan amended their alliance to specify that either would come to the other’s assistance if attacked by one other nation. Far-fetched though it now seems, Roosevelt may have worried that this revision could conceivably require Britain to line up with its valued Japanese ally against an unprovoked attack by the United States. He told King that “it was hard to say what purpose may not be in the brain of those little yellow men. [That Japan] is heading for war appears to be certain.”¹⁵ The security of British assets in the Asia-Pacific region, he implied, had come to rest upon good relations among Japan, Britain, and the United States, who could soon be at odds.

Laurier was unimpressed with what he dismissed as Roosevelt’s “flam” (as in flimflam), but he recognized that it was in Canada’s own interests to send King back to Washington to explore further the president’s far-fetched idea of having a Canadian civil servant act for the United States at ministerial-level discussions with Britain amid the threatening unrest on the Pacific coast of North America. More incredibly, King, on his second visit to Washington, realized that Roosevelt would not hesitate to distort the truth to make it appear that it was Canada and not the United States that was seeking the involvement of London to resolve a US problem with Japan. And that incredible invention is what in fact Roosevelt attempted to pursue. The sardonic comment of Lord Grey, the governor general, in keeping London informed, was apposite: “up comes [to Ottawa] a letter in which the President tells Sir Wilfrid Laurier that he will be glad to come to the assistance of Canada! The whole story would be laughable if it were not an interesting illustration of American methods.”16 The other Grey – Sir Edward, the foreign secretary – also dismissed any idea of a Japanese threat. “He pointed out that a war between Japan and the United States was logistically almost impossible and that North America was well beyond the military reach of Japan. Japan had no designs on North America. More positively, the [Anglo-Japanese] alliance was based on the tacit British understanding that Japan would have a free hand … in Korea and Manchuria.”¹⁷

Nevertheless, King warned Lord Grey and Laurier that “if war broke out between the United States and Japan, the residents of Vancouver … would turn to the United States for protection.” Indeed, King suspected that “one of Roosevelt’s designs in fanning up the tension with Japan was to detach British Columbia and bring it over into the United States.”¹⁸ He told John Morley, the secretary of state for India, that “Nothing would suit the purposes of the Americans better … than some trouble should break out in Vancouver [over Japanese immigration] at the time the American fleet reached San Francisco … it would demonstrate that the whole problem of Oriental immigration was one in which the interests of the two countries [were] the same.” He also described how “There were people in British Columbia only too interested in creating the impression that because of the distance … Ottawa did not appreciate the situation on the Pacific coast and were indifferent to it.” Further, “there were other persons who were [convinced] that there was no use of the people of British Columbia looking to Ottawa for help, that the Anglo-Japanese alliance made it impossible for them [the British] to take any action.”¹⁹

In later years King remained convinced that all US presidents sought to possess Canada. Theodore Roosevelt had said that he wanted to banish “the English flag” from North America. In his mind, could Japanese intransigence, matched by the arrival of the US battle fleet in the Pacific, be a sufficient platform for anti-immigration advocates on both sides of the border to seek a permanent solution through the US acquisition of the immigration staging post of British Columbia?

After King had made a third and final visit to the belligerent Roosevelt, Laurier agreed, again without enthusiasm, that, as the president had requested, he would make King available to go to London in early March 1908 to discuss various matters, including implicitly the approaches to Canada that the United States had made in both Tokyo and Washington to involve Britain in the problem of restricting Japanese immigration to North America. In addition, Laurier took the occasion to instruct him to tell the British government that the immigration of Indians to Canada “must be stopped. If Britain did not arrange to keep the Indians out of Canada, Canada would be forced to do it herself.”20 In his own musings about the exclusion of Asian immigrants, King asked himself, “as one who believed in Christian teachings, whether a nation which called itself Christian could take a stand on [i.e., support] a question of restriction.” That fundamental question King evaded by rationalizing support for exclusion on economic grounds. “So far as the labouring classes were concerned the question was an economic question and not a race question … the standard of living of our people would be seriously menaced by the competition of persons of a lower standard.”²¹

Such thinking prompted King to speculate on Canada’s need for a navy to protect its shores from, inter alia, unwanted immigrants and to demonstrate thereby to the United States that it was capable of controlling its own borders. Foreshadowing the difficult naval debates that were to become acrimonious over the next five years, King concluded, “We might as well face this situation squarely … by [either] contributions to the British Government or by the beginning of a navy of our own … [but] I do not mean that we would act in any way independently of the British.”²²

From the middle of March 1908, King spent a month in London seeing Balfour, Grey, Elgin, Churchill, and a host of other MPs, including Amery and Greenwood, and less enthusiastically the octogenarian high commissioner, Lord Strathcona.* Offstage King was especially pleased to see again Violet Markham, the affluent Liberal social reformer whom he had met three years before during her visit to Governor General Lord Grey (who was something of a mentor for King). Thereafter she frequently gave him advice and money, although on this occasion she deplored the Anglo-Japanese alliance and “Japan ever having defeated Russia, that it was the defeat of a white people by a yellow.”²³

The British government responded surprisingly readily to King’s request for restrictions on Indian migration to Canada, although it did so with a certain unease arising from the fact that the would-be migrants would see themselves as British subjects seeking to join other British subjects overseas. Drawing on his own convictions, King added more optimistically that “Laurier recognized the obligations and responsibilities of Empire, as well as its advantages … all being of one household, we should endeavour to quietly settle our differences among ourselves … the outsider [the United States] need not have anything whatever to do with it.”24 Later King went further: “I am beginning to see the essential need of Canada shaping her policy from a national view-point … Let her remain part of the Empire … [but] let her become a nation or other nations [i.e., the United States] will rob her of this right.”²⁵ He remained deeply suspicious of Roosevelt’s real purpose in exaggerating Japan’s intentions: he wanted “to detach British Columbia and to bring it over into the United States.” He told Laurier that a war between Japan and the United States “would be the beginning of the disruption of the Canadian Dominion.”²⁶

King speculated for his various British interlocutors on just how far Roosevelt would use the war scare to curtail immigration from Japan. Lord Bryce, the wise and patient British ambassador, soon reported that the Japanese were already moving to defuse the situation. In the case of Canada, they were continuing their undertaking to Lemieux. In the case of the United States, they were now fully implementing their existing “gentlemen’s agreement,” leading to a sharp decline in arrivals by the end of 1908. At that point, the problem of Japanese immigrants having been, at least for the time being, resolved, Roosevelt promptly lost interest in Laurier, King, and Canada. King returned from London pleased with himself, but he also recorded his admiration for the British ministers and officials who had received him so sympathetically and so candidly, as they themselves anticipated the renewal in 1911 of their 1894 Treaty of Navigation and Commerce with Japan.²⁷

Racial opposition to Asian immigration, however, lingered on the west coast of Canada. As late as 1914, Prime Minister Robert Borden saw continuing partisan profit in declaring his dissatisfaction with what he termed the limited measures taken by the Laurier government to exclude Asian immigrants. The Conservative member for Vancouver City, H.H. Stevens, who had won the seat from the Liberals, stated, “We cannot allow indiscriminate immigration from the Orient and hope to build up a nation … on the foundations upon which we have commenced our national life.”²⁸ Borden instructed the acting high commissioner in London (Strathcona having recently died in office) to inform both the colonial and foreign secretaries “that public opinion in this country will not tolerate immigration from Asiatic countries and that even more drastic measures and regulations will if necessary be provided in order to prevent an influx.”29 Within a few months, the First World War, in which Japan became a valued ally of the United Kingdom, ended Borden’s threat of drastic measures.

What is one to make of all the racial agitation that formed the extraordinary advent of King’s long and cherished involvement in foreign affairs? Certainly it is odd that he never appears to have referred to it and specifically to Theodore Roosevelt in later life – but then again there was always much that was odd about King. The present author makes no claim to have read the forty thousand or more pages of his diary that follow his encounters with Theodore Roosevelt, but a canter through them leaves the impression that even during the extended periods that he spent in the United States between 1911 and 1919, King made no journal comments about him. Why? Perhaps he reflected that in the aftermath of Liberal defeat in the September 1911 “reciprocity election,” it would be the better part of wisdom not to dwell on the fact that Roosevelt had lied to Laurier and to the British, as well as to himself. But given the remarkable and heterogeneous revelations that King habitually included elsewhere in his diary, both about himself and others, diplomatic reticence is hardly a convincing explanation. King was always eager to consort with the high and mighty in the United States as well as in Britain and was later notably diffident to Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin. Perhaps he simply concluded that to be candid about the Rough Rider even in the privacy of his diary might be impolitic, although he remained remarkably candid about others.

If King’s prewar devotion to the British Empire needed any reinforcing – which it did not – the extraordinary experience with Theodore Roosevelt would have stimulated it. Asian immigration being of little or no interest to French Canada, King did not need on this occasion to look over his shoulder at Quebec, as Borden would later put it. Throughout, he praised the governor general and British ministers and officials and he happily recorded in his diary their praise for him and his satisfaction at his debut in international affairs. Certainly against the pre-First World War emergence of the United State as an imperial power and the postwar confusions of the Paris Peace Conference, the episode remains, as it were, a bubble in time. It is an odd episode left dangling in the prewar relations of the three countries.

King’s diary for the decade between his election to parliament in 1908 and the end of the First World War in 1918 has a more impersonal, a more arm’s length air about it than it has for the more prolific and emotional later years. More specifically, his detailed diary of his unlikely visits to Roosevelt and his related trips to Britain read like paraphrases of official reports, a civil servant’s record for later reference. Much of the spontaneity, candour, and personal revelations that mark his postwar diary are not yet present. There are even fewer adoring references to his mother and messages from the Great Beyond, intensified only in later years.

Long before 1918, however, King repeatedly recognized that he had been ordained by God to be prime minister of Canada with a direct and significant role in solving the world’s many problems. Amid such imaginings – which only grew in time – King has been seen by some apologists as being influenced by the heyday of occultism, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, culminating in the grief of families everywhere during and after the First World War.

In any event, why King displayed unwonted reticence in his diary about Theodore Roosevelt and his machinations may be left to the reader’s speculation, but two transcendent elements in his prewar, anglophile thinking are central to any understanding of his later international excursions. The first is that he was a confirmed, life-long liberal imperialist. Certainly not a tory imperialist, but a liberal imperialist who believed that a British Empire was a good thing. It was where Canada belonged, although largely in response to Quebec he would occasionally add that imperial centralists, more numerous in his imaginings than in reality, had to be watched. For all his twists and turnings, he ended his life as he had begun it, an ardent, if politically prudent, monarchist and imperial advocate.

The second abiding element in King’s pre-First World War thinking was his lifelong skepticism – to put it at a minimum – about the intentions of the United States toward Canada. When in late 1935 he hurried to complete Bennett’s negotiation of a trade agreement with the United States, he assured his American interlocutors that if he had to choose between a British path and an American in international relations, he would choose the American, a claim which was all nonsense. Forty years after Theodore Roosevelt had lied in portraying Canada rather than the United States as seeking the assistance of Britain in resolving Asian immigration problems, King retained a fundamental conviction that the United States wanted to take over Canada. How much better it was to be a dominion in the British Empire!

In his immigration debut, King had won the support of the governor general and of many Liberals, pre-eminently Laurier himself. On his return from London in April 1908 he secured, with “the Unseen Hand of God as his guide,” the Liberal nomination in Waterloo North (which included his birthplace, Berlin). Five months later, on 21 September 1908, he resigned as deputy minister of labour and in the election of 26 October 1908 became the Liberal member for his home constituency. His mother, employing rather unusual syntax, shared her delight with him: “you are going on with a work that your grandfather strove hard to throw the best part of his life into, and now you will have the advantage of a more enlightened people to deal with … ‘My political career’ has a ring about it that rouses all my nature and [I] … trust I may be spared to see [you] gain the love of your followers, and in fact to see you as a regular Gladstone.”30

Upon his election in Waterloo North, King hastened to ask Laurier to make him minister of labour with his own separate department, but Laurier wisely afforded him time to prove himself in the peculiar environment of the House of Commons. Much of the seven months from King’s election to his appointment as minister of labour on 2 June 1909, was, however, spent outside Canada. According to the British embassy in Washington, the United States was not yet done with King. Curiously, Washington, not London, had before the Canadian election sought his appointment as a British Empire delegate to a conference in Shanghai of the International Opium Commission. King had seen something of the opium trade at the time of the riot in Vancouver two years before, but that fleeting encounter was hardly enough to explain Washington’s request for his participation in the Shanghai conference. In any event, Laurier again concurred.

Only six weeks after being elected a member of parliament, King was away from the House of Commons from early December 1908 to May 1909. During those five months, he again saw in London many senior parliamentarians and officials, including the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, whom he had called on in March as well as in 1906. As was the case later in Calcutta (Delhi did not become the capital of India until 1912), King’s visit to London could be seen as a “goodwill mission” in recognition that the various interests of the United States, Canada, and Britain had been successfully resolved by the restrictive actions of the governments of Japan and India in stopping immigration to North America (as for China, in 1903 Canada had imposed an impossibly high head tax on would-be immigrants). In Japan after the Shanghai opium conference, King reviewed the all but total emigration restrictions with the Canadian trade commissioner in Yokohama, W.T.R. Preston (who had been chief immigration agent in London), although he had earlier advocated to his minister, Lemieux, the continuation of a “modest” degree of Japanese immigration to Canada. He also carefully recorded his gratitude, as Lemieux had already done, for the unfailing assistance of the British ambassador with whom he shared his conviction that the root cause of the anti-Asian immigration sentiment in British Columbia was not racist but economic or even climatic. “So far as the labouring classes were concerned, the question was an economic question and not a race question … The economic conditions of which it was the outcome were the standard of living of our people which would be seriously menaced by the competition of people of a lower standard.”31 To a senior member of the Chinese government, he explained in a wonderfully self-serving manner that the exclusion of the Chinese would really help to make China “the greater industrial power of the future.”³²

The Shanghai conference of the International Opium Commission achieved little during its three-week duration, but King came away from it with two general conclusions: first, that he had a useful – perhaps even unique – role to play as interlocutor between Britain and the United States and, second, that conference diplomacy was not at all to his liking. Better to have “a policy of each nation negotiating its own settlements … with countries concerned,”³³ an attitude that he was to pursue in his “good will” visits to Peking and Tokyo in April, and to replicate at the League of Nations twenty-five years later.

With the suspension of his involvement in international affairs in 1909 and his defeat in the election of 1911, King’s focus for the next decade was on North America. Strangely, as noted above, he does not appear to have referred subsequently in his journal to his unique encounters with Theodore Roosevelt, notable though his comings and goings to Washington and London were. Possibly in time he concluded, rightly, that those events clearly belonged to another era, distinct from the very different postwar world in which he would make his way toward the prime ministership.*

Following his travels in Asia, King was made a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George upon the recommendation of Lord Grey – to his own gratification and to the envy of older and longer serving senior public servants. He had made a name for himself in Ottawa and even in London during his eight years as deputy minister of labour. In his two years as minister of labour between his return from Asia and his defeat in the election of 1911, King advisedly concentrated on domestic matters, including legislation intended to ameliorate working conditions by, for example, limiting the workday to eight hours. Other measures included improved technical education and methods of settling labour disputes through conciliatory conversations. Against that background, he told his diary at the time, “God has a great work for me in this Dominion, maybe at some time to be its Prime Minister.”34 Accordingly he stayed away from two major issues in parliament that did have international implications but were unpopular in his constituency of Waterloo North. Laurier’s initiative, foreshadowed as early as the 1902 imperial conference, to create a Canadian navy (rather than make a direct financial contribution to the overstretched Royal Navy as Australia and New Zealand had done) was seen by many voters in Quebec – and Waterloo North – as carrying with it the potential to embroil Canada in overseas conflicts. Two years before, King had recognized the need for naval protection of Canada’s long shoreline, but for domestic reasons he prudently kept out of the 1910 naval controversy, speaking about the Liberal approach only in 1913.

The second major issue leading up to the 1911 election was a proposed reciprocity trade agreement with the United States, seen as having the potential to lead to free trade benefiting Canadian farmers but not vulnerable manufacturers. Laurier’s bilateral trade initiative would define the election of 1911, but King took little part in the increasingly heated debates during which, in much of English Canada, Laurier was accused of abandoning the motherland for the scarlet woman to the south. Since Waterloo North was home to a number of small manufacturers, King adopted, when forced to it, a position that was convoluted and vaguely protectionist – and ambiguous and occasionally contradictory, as would frequently be the case in the future.

*As deputy minister of labour, King arranged for the publication of his twenty-two page report on the damages to Japanese property and his eighteen-page report on damages to Chinese property by the King’s Printer in 1908 (Henderson, W.L. Mackenzie King, 78).

*King’s seventy-nine-page Harvard doctoral thesis of 1909 was entitled “Oriental Immigration to Canada.”

*In one of their conversations, Roosevelt asked King, “If the population of the country [Australia] is not increasing … how can it defend itself against the blackbird and the yellow skin?” His solution? If “she cannot get the peoples of the northern part of Europe, [she should] take Italians or … bring in Portuguese, but bring in white races and people the land with them” (King diary, 31 January 1908. See also Heere, “Japan and the British World 1904–14.”).

*King had become wary of what he saw as Churchill’s self-centred nature: “It is Churchill rather than the movement with which he is identified that is the mainspring of his conduct” (Dawson, William Lyon Mackenzie King, 162).

*King recalled in October 1935 for the newly arrived Japanese minister to Canada some of the officials he had met during his visit to Tokyo in 1909, but he made no reference to Theodore Roosevelt (King diary, 24 October 1935). He did, however, record that on returning to office in 1935, he had inherited “a serious tariff conflict” with Japan, which prompted him to describe Canada’s relations with Japan as being “commercial in character but … at one time of sufficient acuteness to take on political implications” (21 May 1937, DCER, 6: 154). It is also possible that in proposing himself to the governor general in 1938 as the leader of a British Empire peace mission to Japan, he envisaged contacting officials whom he had met thirty years before. Finally, King may have had in mind his 1909 visit to Japan when, in reviewing in 1945 the terrifying potency of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he took some consolation in observing to his diary that “it is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white men of Europe” (King diary, 9 August 1945).