3

Leadership Manoeuvres

Countering any prolonged period of unemployment and after careful soundings, King accepted an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York to serve as a well-paid consultant on labour and, more broadly, public relations, which were not strong points in the managerial repertoire of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. King passed much of the next eight years in the United States, although he retained his personal residence in Canada and his Liberal nomination in York North (Ontario) because God, he was certain, had singled him out as a future prime minister. He was thus remote physically and mentally from the turmoil and carnage of the First World War, which had spread across Europe, and from the suffering and despair that was the price of Canada’s all-out war effort. In the United States (which did not enter the war for almost three years) he did not see, day after day, the toll in Canadian dead and wounded reported in Canadian newspapers. He was never in uniform and he had no friends in uniform who did not return (but then he had no intimate friends beyond the deceased Bert Harper, a university friend and Ottawa colleague, and later Joan Patteson, the wife of an Ottawa banker). Nor was his family involved in the war: his brother Max, a physician, was an invalid in Arizona. In short, King knew nothing at first hand of the loss and agony that the war meant to most Canadians.

King’s diary recounts little of how he understood the First World War and no perception of the dire challenges that faced Prime Minister Borden during the years of seemingly endless slaughter and the subsequent confusions, contradictions, and contrivances of the Paris Peace Conference, where the various aims of the victors were never reconciled. In struggling with questions of what place Canada should fill in the world, including in a rapidly evolving and overstretched British Commonwealth, Borden successfully sought membership for Canada in both the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the League of Nations, which were intended to ensure that there would never again be a similar holocaust. At the wartime imperial conferences and at the Paris Peace Conference he thought in depth – at least to the extent that his failing health permitted – about the confused and virtually insoluble problems left by the war and the potential of the proposed League of Nations to address them. His leadership during the war and above all during the compulsory military service crisis of 1917 won for Canada a significant place in international affairs which Canada might have retained if King, following Borden and his successor Arthur Meighen, had felt able to pursue such a role. But King did not do so. He constantly looked over his shoulder at Quebec rather than offering all Canadians leadership in recognizing the role that their country could play in the new world of collective security. Instead he spent much of his eight years out of office in the United States, thinking about labour relations instead of international relations, both wartime and postwar, which in time would mean that he would abandon the League of Nations and back into the Second World War for the wrong reasons.

When Borden’s union government was re-elected in the “khaki” election of 17 December 1917, King, now in York North, was among the many defeated Liberal candidates. With Laurier’s subsequent resignation and the leadership convention of the Liberal Party – its first – in August 1919, King, convinced that he would succeed Laurier, adopted a remarkably leisurely approach, visiting his York North constituency only twice that year and spending four months in Britain as well as more time in New York. It is a comment on the inadequacies of the other three candidates that at the convention a man could be elected leader who had passed a substantial part of the past eight years in another country – and had no war record to recommend him to English Canada. Among his preparations for the October 1919 election, King sought a journalist to compose laudatory articles or even a biography, in large part to refute criticisms that he had been an eminent “slacker” during the war who had not done his duty to Canada. He wrote to John Lewis of the Toronto Daily Star, “there would be everything to gain, and nothing to lose, were you to make something … of the constructive service which I rendered industry on this continent and through industry, the fighting armies at the front … Instead of feeling the least apologetic as to the part I played … in the way of improved relations between Capital and Labour … there were fewer men on the continent who rendered a larger service.”1

Not forty years old when the war began in August 1914, King could have volunteered for a civilian or military staff or other non-combatant job, but he never showed any inclination to do so. As the nominated Liberal candidate in North York, King had not, however, avoided entirely the most searing of wartime political controversies: the conscription crisis of 1917. Although apparently agreeing in principle with Borden that conscription was the fairest way to end the manpower crisis and, according to some observers, even offering in vain his services to Borden and his Union Government, he eventually followed Laurier in opposing the Military Service Act as a threat to national unity, a factor that he decided must take precedence over all else, including the pressing need for reinforcements for units at the front.* In the fraught election of December 1917, which reflected the deep division between English and French Canada over conscription, King was defeated in his York North constituency (the day before his mother died) where he had campaigned briefly and circumspectly. The defeat of the Liberals was not, however, the end of King’s political ambitions. His work in the United States not only rendered him affluent, especially when coupled with funds from his friends Violet Markham and Peter Larkin, but also resulted in his heavy (in all senses of the word) tome on labour relations, Industry and Humanity, published in November 1918, the last month of the war, a book he so admired that he hoped it would qualify him to be a member of parliament in the United Kingdom rather than in Canada. (His University of Toronto classmate, Hamar Greenwood, had achieved this status a decade before.)

King’s dual approach to Canada’s place in an evolving British Empire was crucial to his success in winning the Liberal leadership in 1919. Without most of Quebec’s sixty-five seats in the House of Commons, he could not have hoped to win the leadership and form a stable government. He never forgot Laurier’s pledge to the people of Quebec, and indeed to all Canadians, limiting imperial military cooperation, but it seems he had no recollection of the 1907 statement of Frederick Borden, Liberal minister of militia, that in any imperial conflict Canada was “not bound to take part if we do not wish to do so.”2 In his self-imposed struggle against real or imagined imperial centralists during the two interwar decades, King was, for his own partisan purposes, in pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp. There were, in fact, few imperial centralists in London holding any major office: the former dynamic colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain was permanently incapacitated by illness in 1906, and the influence of his disciple Alfred Milner was limited by his posting as high commissionership in distant South Africa. Fewer still were those who believed that Britain could dictate to the dominions. There were, of course, many British who, in acclaiming the substantial contribution of the dominions to Allied victory in the First World War, hoped that in any future major conflict they would again be alongside Britain. Yet King, to the gratification of Liberals in Quebec, spent inordinate amounts of time knocking down imperial centralist straw men. Robert Borden accurately summed up King’s performance at the imperial conference of 1923: “Mr King was continually looking over his shoulder at Quebec and sought evasion of responsibility in a futile and nebulous verbosity.”³ Borden’s successor, Arthur Meighen, was even more succinct about King’s approach to the imperial relationship: “he was forever bursting heroically through open doors.”⁴

In fact, the United Kingdom had long made it clear that there were few in Whitehall or Westminster who harboured any imperial centralist ambitions. Lord Carnarvon, the colonial secretary, said as early as 1870 that “Our relations to Canada have been and are political rather than colonial.”⁵ The long-serving Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, whom King’s mother had so much admired, had not wanted colonies at all. They were a financial drain and a foreign policy liability. Arthur Balfour, the Conservative prime minister in 1904, proclaimed that over the “self-governing colonies of the Empire … no office in this country has any control at all.”⁶ Seven years later, he was even more emphatic: “The most serious thing that could happen for the integrity of the British Empire is to interfere … with the absolute self-governing integrity of the colonies over the seas.”⁷ And if that was not clear enough, Balfour offered the analysis that the legislatures of the dominions “are independent Parliaments, absolutely independent, and it is our business to recognize that, and to frame the Empire upon the co-operation of absolutely independent parliaments.”⁸ The Liberal prime minister H.H. Asquith focused on foreign affairs in rejecting in 1911 an enthusiastic proposal from New Zealand, presented at the 1911 imperial conference, for an imperial council of state (the imperial centralists, such as they still were, being mainly in the dominions rather than in Whitehall or Westminster): “It would impair if not altogether destroy the authority of the Government of the United Kingdom in such matters as the conduct of foreign policy … That authority cannot be shared.” To that conference he explained, “We each of us are, and we each of us intend to remain, master of our own household.”9

The idea of a common imperial foreign policy – at least in broad terms – had resurfaced during the First World War, chiefly among the dominions themselves. For Borden, the Imperial War Cabinet provided a model for imperial consultation during the postwar years. “Ministers from six nations [of the Empire are] … responsible to their respective parliaments … Each nation has its voice upon questions of common concern, each pursues unimpaired its perfect autonomy.” With dominion and British troops serving side by side, the Canadian government stated toward the end of the war, “Our people are proud to be doing their share, but it is evident that … we should at the same time have a voice in all decisions regarding matters of common concern,” a stance that in time led to dominion participation at both the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations.¹⁰ In short, Canada would participate in the British Commonwealth, as envisaged in Resolution IX of the Imperial War Conference of Dominions and India, with an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations. What was intended in detail by this unanimous wartime resolution (e.g., what was meant by “adequate”) was left for a postwar special constitutional conference that never took place, given the demands, distortions, and difficulties of the complex Paris peace negotiations; painful economic adjustment; and a feeling that it was perhaps futile to attempt to formulate quasi-legal definitions of who in the flexible Empire was responsible for what. To be sure, when Borden, with serious if unspoken reservations, brought to the House of Commons on 2 September 1919 the Treaty of Versailles, it was the Liberal House leader who declared, “We are not a nation in the true sense of the term. We are part of a great Empire of which we are proud, and we are nothing else.” W.S. Fielding, who had been Laurier’s minister of finance, was even more outspoken in his attack on the Conservative prime minister: Conservatives, not Liberals, were attempting “to break up the British Empire.”¹¹

It was the British Foreign Office, and not the dominions, that primarily set its face against any postwar attempts to arrive at a common imperial foreign policy. A memorandum to the Liberal prime minister Lloyd George in 1920 echoed Asquith’s thoughts of 1911: “Directly the Dominions begin to have strong feelings about general foreign policy, we are up against a fundamental issue, because no [British] Government, which is responsible for foreign affairs, can possibly undertake to subordinate its views to those of other people unless they are willing to share the responsibility for, and the consequences of, policy.”12 Similarly, Lord Curzon, the Conservative foreign secretary from 1922 to 1924, who along with the Liberal Winston Churchill was seen for a time by an apparently intimidated and insecure Mackenzie King as an imperial centralist par excellence, echoed the Liberal Asquith in stating that there could be no limitations placed by the dominions on the freedom of the United Kingdom to pursue whatever foreign policy appeared to be in its own interests. If a dominion wished to join in any specific British foreign policy initiative, it was welcome to do so, but if not, it was of course free to go its own way, as Britain itself was. The idea of a common imperial foreign policy, if it ever had much substance, certainly did not reside in the Foreign Office.

Successive prime ministers and foreign secretaries made it clear that the United Kingdom could not let its foreign policy be decided by others, including the dominions. Consultation would be welcome in a cooperative empire, but at the end of the day, London alone would decide for the United Kingdom its foreign policy, as Ottawa was free to do for Canada, Canberra for Australia, etc. In the 1920s, however, King, for partisan purposes, occasionally depicted to his cabinet (but seldom to parliament) and to Quebec (but seldom to English-speaking Canada) a perfidious Albion intent upon foisting a common foreign policy on the hapless dominions. Later, as noted below, he even forbade the high commissioner in London to attend briefings at the Foreign Office: such activities might be seen in Quebec as Canada participating in an embryonic imperial council, confirming imperial centralist control.

King carefully avoided any public acknowledgment of the fact that no foreign secretary attempted to impose a common foreign policy on the dominions. Doing so would have deprived him of his self-portrayal, chiefly for the benefit of Quebec, as the Bunyan-like figure of Mr Standfast vanquishing imperial centralists in whom no virtue resided. That bizarre self-portrait made such good politics for the Liberals in Quebec that King, prompted by Lapointe, never wholly gave it up, although in the late 1930s he increasingly looked over his other shoulder at English Canada, playing down any lingering suspicions about imperial centralists as war approached (he was, however, still imaginatively detecting imperial centralists in a war-exhausted Britain until his death in 1950).

With the counsel of Ernest Lapointe, King’s early posturing and platitudes about imperial centralists paid off handsomely in Quebec. A member of parliament since 1904, Lapointe’s standing in Quebec had greatly increased as a result of his opposition to Borden’s controversial naval bill of 1911 and his even more controversial Military Service Act of 1917. By the Liberal leadership convention in August 1919, he had become something of a king maker (pun intended). He in effect delivered the Quebec vote to King in the leadership convention and again in the election of late 1921. Ever thereafter he controlled the Quebec caucus to the degree that King would write after his death in late 1941 that “but for him, I would never have been Prime Minister, nor would I have been able to hold office as I had held it through the years.”13

With its votes, Quebec clearly expressed its views on Canada’s involvement in foreign wars or imperial naval needs or, above all, the hated enactment of conscription by Conservatives slavishly committed to the British Empire. In the December 1921 election, two years after King had become leader, the Liberals took all sixty-five seats in Quebec; in 1925 they took sixty; in 1926 again sixty. In what they saw as an aberration in their defeat in the election of 1930, the Liberals still took a majority, forty of Quebec’s sixty-five seats. In the 1935 election they regained sixty of the sixty-five.

Throughout the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, King was also influenced by O.D. Skelton, a professor of political science at Queen’s University and a pronounced isolationist who saw his coveted role as undersecretary of state for external affairs as including “stiffening” his insecure minister in his real or assumed suspicions of imperial centralists, although why King appeared insecure after his elevated excursions in prewar Washington and London is unclear. King did, however, tell his diary of his great satisfaction at having become an “internationalist [with] … a wider outlook than some of my fellow-countrymen have enjoyed,” in part the result of “my post-graduate training at Chicago, Harvard and abroad, and my many visits to England, my trip to the Orient.”¹⁴

By contrast, isolationist policies and even neutrality seemed to Skelton the only route for a postwar Canada to follow. He attempted to exploit such sentiments in Quebec, varying in origin although they were, for his own ends. King, however, differed fundamentally from Skelton in never losing sight of the allegiance to the British Commonwealth that was widespread in the eight other provinces and which he himself shared. Unlike his deputy minister, King always eschewed the word “independence.” With his eye on English Canada, he habitually spoke instead of “autonomy” within the British Commonwealth of Nations. But that did not satisfy some of his critics in English Canada, who saw “autonomy without a clear statement of national foreign policy … [as] little better than a policy of drift, of indecision or isolation.”15

Skelton had convinced himself that behind every interwar British initiative – constitutional, economic, or military – lay a dark intent to introduce a consolidation of the Empire. “There can be little doubt that Skelton was almost pathological of English Tory imperialism in a manner that smacks of the rejected and irrational.”¹⁶ Vincent Massey, the Canadian high commissioner in London from 1935 to 1946, was convinced that Skelton “had a strong and lasting suspicion of British policy and an unchanging coldness towards Great Britain … he was anti-British.”¹⁷ Professor George Glazebrook of the University of Toronto was not impressed with his fellow academic: “a narrow-minded, extreme autonomist … who is nervously jealous of what he suspects as English ‘superiority.’”¹⁸ Skelton’s eventual successor as undersecretary of state for external affairs, Norman Robertson, bound for Oxford University in 1923, met King and Skelton on their way to the imperial conference of that year. He was equally unimpressed. He wrote to his parents in Vancouver that Skelton was “extremely dull and if he isn’t saturated clean through with dullness then he was also rather discourteous.” As for King, he was simply “hopelessly undistinguished.”¹⁹

King remained sensitive to political moods across the country, while Skelton concentrated on attempting to loosen those few formal ties that Canada still had with Britain and the Commonwealth, an irrational goal that some have speculated may have arisen in part from his Irish background. To gather as many votes as possible in Quebec, King in his early years as prime minister went along with a certain amount of Skelton-like rhetoric, but he was equally aware that many Canadians of British descent – he was, of course, one himself – still had strong cultural and sentimental, if not direct family ties with the United Kingdom. And English-speaking Canadians had many more votes in total than French-speaking Canadians. Accordingly, as the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s wore on, King increasingly rejected Skelton’s more extreme isolationism and even neutrality, instead offering ad nauseam his favourite paradox that loosening the ties of the dominions to Britain in fact enhanced their allegiance to a commonwealth of equals.

Of one thing King was certain: the extraordinary parliamentary influence of Quebec in the aftermath of the First World War. In the early 1920s, he had convinced himself that “Quebec dominates the House of Commons.” However, his efforts to please or at least placate Quebec opinion did not reflect either a genuine regard for French-speaking Canadians or any particular confidence in them. Like Skelton, he made no attempt to understand or discuss their motives, sentiments, and ambitions, relegating to Lapointe all things Québécois. On arrival in Ottawa in 1900 as a public servant, King had lamented that it was “a great shame that so much French should be perpetuated around here.”20 Jack Pickersgill, one of his able secretaries on loan from External Affairs in the late 1930s and later himself a Liberal cabinet minister, is only one of many who affirmed that King knew little about French Canada. “Certainly he had no affinity with French culture, a sketchy and superficial knowledge of the language, and all the Protestant intolerance of Catholicism.”²¹ On this at least Skelton and King were at one. King agreed with Skelton that “the widest possible knowledge of English” was essential for a “common Canadian consciousness [since] this is and will be overwhelmingly an English-speaking country.” No bilingualism or biculturalism for Skelton, who sought to use “good old Ernest” Lapointe not for Quebec’s but for his own isolationist ends.

King was content to leave politics in Quebec to Quebecers – and to his Quebec viceroy – but he never lost sight of the province’s all-important sixty-plus seats. His primary goal was to retain the support of Quebec by presenting himself there as something of an isolationist and to paint the Tories as unrepentant imperialists who, during the latter part of the war, had imposed compulsory military service. Or to put it another way, the difficulties in formulating a coherent foreign policy between English and French Canada were so great that it was better to have two vaguely enunciated foreign policies, one for Quebec and one for English Canada – or on occasion no foreign policy at all.

But conciliating Quebec was not King’s only electoral challenge. To complicate matters, the election of 1921 resulted in a Liberal minority government due to the unexpected success of a newly constituted agrarian party, the National Progressive Party. It drew on the recent successes of the provincial United Farmers Party in forming the governments in Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta. King sought a merger with the Progressives, but not a coalition, which he abhorred. But here, as in Quebec, foreign affairs intruded upon domestic affairs. Wary of European entanglements and committed to tariff-free trade with the United States, many of the autonomist-minded supporters of the Progressives had also been opposed to compulsory military service, which among other things they had seen as removing essential labour from their farms.

The Progressive leader, T.C. Crerar, a former conscriptionist Liberal and minister in Borden’s union government, had worked with his wartime Liberal colleague from Toronto, Newton Rowell, in attempting to chart a course that would bring the Liberals and the Progressives together, but the Progressives stood in the 1921 election as a separate party, winning sixty-four of the 245 seats in the House of Commons, as many seats – all but one – as Quebec had. With their sixty-four seats, the loosely organized National Progressive Party became the second largest party in parliament. Accordingly, they were for the moment hardly less important to King than the sixty-five seats in Quebec.

At the same time, King balanced his preoccupation with Liberal electoral fortunes in Quebec with his support for the efforts of Rodolphe Lemieux, the speaker of the House of Commons (and the negotiator of the prewar emigration agreement with Japan) to conclude an accord with France for the assignment in perpetuity of 250 acres at Vimy Ridge as the site of the principal Canadian war memorial and one of the greatest monuments of the First World War. It was politically advantageous to have a French Canadian speaker in the lead (an early manifestation of King’s mantra “Parliament will decide”), but he confided to his diary that despite continuing criticism of his lack of wartime service and his uneasy relations with veterans’ organizations, the land “would have never been acquired by Canada but for my efforts.”22

*The Ottawa journalist Grattan O’Leary, in his Recollections of People, Press and Politics, was convinced that King “offered himself for Sir Robert Borden’s Union Government in 1917 and was turned down. The story infuriated King all through his political life and he went to great lengths to lay it by the heels, probably on account of its absolute truth. I had the story from Meighen himself and there is no doubt whatever that King offered his services to Borden in 1917” (88). See also MacFarlane, Ernest Lapointe, 22.