10

King and Abyssinia: The End

As the Abyssinian fiasco was playing itself out in Geneva, Hitler exploited that distraction by reoccupying the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized by the treaties of Versailles and Locarno, on 7 March 1936. Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Berlin, had months before learned what was coming and had so reported and it is difficult to believe that the M15 agents in the German embassy in London or the M16 agents in Germany itself had not signalled in advance Hitler’s intentions. Yet many in London, including King Edward VIII, regarded the reoccupation of the Rhineland with indifference or even with understanding, as an expression of self-determination in the face of the folly of Versailles. After all, Germany was reoccupying its own territory, recovering its own backyard, as some said, so ill advisedly taken from it by the Treaty of Versailles. Publicly, the British and French governments acted as if they were surprised by the “reprehensible” German reoccupation, but they must have realized that Hitler had taken note of the undermining of the League of Nations, the souring of relations between Britain and France, and the general enmity toward Italy over Abyssinia. Albert Speer, one of Hitler’s close collaborators, understood that “Hitler concluded that both England and France were loath to take any risks and anxious to avoid any danger.”1 Their governments had proved themselves weak and indecisive. For a variety of reasons, including doubts (which were unfounded) about the ability of the large French army to counter the smaller German units (who reportedly were intentionally sent into the Rhineland without ammunition), Britain failed to act, and a decidedly uneasy France, with a cabinet divided, would not act without Britain. Harold Nicolson was not alone in fearing that if Britain and France did push Germany back out of the Rhineland, Hitler might be replaced by a communist government. There was, in short, no inclination in either war-weary country to march against Germany over the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The appeasement of Hitler was seen as a more promising route.

December 1935 had marked the end of Abyssinia and, except on paper, the effective end of the League of Nations. Nevertheless King saw the sudden German reoccupation of the Rhineland as basically a challenge for Britain and France to address, despite the fact that the dominions were signatories of the Treaty of Versailles. Abyssinia was a sideshow, a far away country inhabited by uncivilized blacks about which no one knew or cared very much. But the reoccupation of the Rhineland raised more troubling questions, carrying with it the seeds of a possible direct confrontation between the enemies of the First World War, only eighteen years past. If worse came to worst, Britain would have to support France. And to King’s especial unease, if direct fighting did occur between Britain and Germany, the Canadian parliament would no doubt decide by a pronounced majority to join in. Even the arch isolationist Skelton reluctantly acknowledged this. But such a decision would be deeply opposed in much of Quebec, dividing the country along the familiar lines of those who would fight alongside Britain and those who wanted nothing to do with another European or second world war. King therefore concluded that it would be best for Britain and France to accept the Rhineland reoccupation and, in a favourite phrase of his, act conciliatorily rather than confrontationally. In those uncertain days, he had modestly recorded in his diary that he himself “would be happy beyond words were I called upon to intervene in the European situation. It would be the greatest joy of my life – but it seems too great a mission to expect.”2

On 13 March 1936, six days after Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, King made a rare foreign affairs statement to the House of Commons, a rotund declaration of doing nothing: “We [should] wait until we are more fully informed than we are … before attempting to pronounce more definitely upon the position which we … shall take with regard to European affairs.”³ Three days later Chamberlain shared with the House of Commons his belief that public opinion in Britain draws “a clear distinction between the action of Signor Mussolini in resorting to aggressive war and waging it beyond his frontiers and … the actions of Herr Hitler … [which] have taken place within the frontiers of the German Reich.”⁴

The fact that King’s government was not “fully informed” was largely of his own doing: he had neither spent the money necessary to build an effective foreign service nor would he accept proffered British information. His evasions and procrastination left Massey, among others, in a state of mounting frustration. A telegram from Ottawa of 1 May 1936 had forbidden Massey’s participation in consultations with the Foreign Office or Dominions Office. Despite his undeniable past work as president of the Liberal Federation, King had come to envy his cosmopolitan and sophisticated character and mistrust what he regarded as his excessive anglophilia. In a bitter diary entry, Massey saw King as “condemning me unheard without any effort to ascertain the facts … Ottawa is apparently panic-stricken and seeks to protect itself by an ostrich-like policy of not even wanting to know what is going on. I agree with the principles of Dominion autonomy in all things as much as any other Canadian, but not in my experience has there been the slightest risk of its being violated.”5 King had, if anything, become even more opposed to any public or parliamentary discussion of external affairs. He replied to Thomas Vien, a Liberal MP from Quebec and future speaker of the Senate, who had sought a foreign affairs debate, that the public interest required as little discussion as possible. Not surprisingly, Hume Wrong, a senior foreign service officer in the Department of External Affairs, observed that King’s instructions to his department amounted to “say nothing and do nothing.”

On 9 May 1936, two days after the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, Italy formally annexed Abyssinia. King Victor Emmanuel thereupon became emperor of Abyssinia and Marshal Badoglio duke of Addis Ababa. By then the British cabinet had convinced itself that no good purpose was served by continuing economic sanctions against Italy, foreshadowing yet later failures at appeasement. For King, however, the universe was unfolding as it should. Since the domestic contretemps over Riddell’s initiative regarding additional sanctions, he had come to wish that the League of Nations could simply be “gotten out of the way” for reasons of Canadian unity. Certainly public debate would lead nowhere; his policy remained to “keep Canada united, and avoid controversies.”⁶

Any lingering idea that the League could provide collective security against an aggressor was now gone. The end result of the Abyssinian crisis was the worst possible. The League had not stopped the aggression and Mussolini was alienated from Britain and France, who had failed in their muddled attempts to appease him in the hope that he might join them rather than Germany in any foreseeable European conflict. Yet King considered the attempt to appease Italy through the Hoare-Laval agreement the right policy. Of the Italian seizure of Abyssinia and its many adverse if not fatal implications for collective security, King continued to say publicly as little as possible. At the time, Chamberlain, in a requiescat, got it right: the Hoare-Laval crisis demonstrated the League’s inadequacies and destroyed its ability to be a force for good.

Riddell saw things equally clearly. In his 1947 memoir, World Security by Conference, he recalled his conclusion at the time. “Eight and one-half months after I had tried to give sanctions new life, they were declared officially dead. With the failure of sanctions, the last chance of averting World War II had gone forever.”7 Even more eloquently and trenchantly, Churchill in retrospect said the same thing. “Mussolini would never have dared to come to grips with a resolute British Government … Germany could as yet give no effective help. If ever there was an opportunity of striking a decisive blow in a generous cause with the minimum of risk, it was here and now. The fact that the nerve of the British Government was not equal to the occasion can only be excused in their sincere love of peace. Actually it played a part in leading to an infinitely more terrible war. Mussolini’s bluff succeeded, and an important spectator drew far-reaching conclusions from the fact. Hitler had long resolved upon war for German aggrandizement … In Japan, also, there were pensive spectators.”⁸

By July 1937 the Japanese warlords were no longer spectators; they began a full-scale invasion of China. A three-front war in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Asia, the worst possible prospect for Britain and France, appeared increasingly likely. But Mackenzie King in his diary appears disengaged. Despite his travels of three decades before, he seldom refers to Asia. At the Foreign Office, however, the worst was feared. The permanent undersecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, wrote in 1939, with something of traditional Foreign Office understatement, “We cannot … provide China with arms and munitions. It seems that the Americans are unlikely to join in economic action against Japan (which without U.S. co-operation, would be worse than useless). As regards active operations against Japan … these are ruled out, owing to the situation in Europe. If Germany, Italy and Japan attack us simultaneously, we should have to do what we can, but we should probably be rather on the defensive in the Far East.”⁹

Following the sorry dénouement of the Abyssinian imbroglio came the death of King George V and the ascent to the throne in January 1936 of King Edward VIII. Although the new king of Britain was also monarch of Canada, and the Statute of Westminster stipulated that accession to the imperial throne required the consent of the dominions, the Canadian prime minister, with great satisfaction, left to his British counterpart the resolution – eventually by abdication – of the crisis arising from the extramarital affair between the new monarch and the American Wallis Simpson, who had been divorced from her first husband but not yet from her second. Wary of a constitutional wrangle that might be viewed differently in English and French Canada, King did not respond to Woodsworth’s repeated questions about whether Canada did or did not have a say in the controversial matter of the succession to the throne. Nor did he respond, when in London in September, to the suggestion of Baldwin and Geoffrey Dawson (the editor of the Times and a friend of Chamberlain and Halifax), among others, that he, in his audience with Edward VIII, tell him that the people of Canada were deeply disturbed by his liaison with Mrs Simpson.*

In Berlin the accession of Edward VIII (who spoke German, his mother being German) was welcomed. From the funeral of George V, the visiting Duke von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, an old Etonian who was president of the German-English Society in Berlin, reported that the new king, his cousin, saw an Anglo-German alliance as an urgent necessity and a guiding principle for British foreign policy. Twenty-five years later, the then Duke of Windsor told the press that his cousin’s 1936 account of his admiration for Nazi Germany gave “a generally false impression,”¹⁰ but he offered no explanation why he felt the need to modify his phrase “false impression” by “generally.”

Edward VIII, Sachsen–Coburg reported to Berlin, was ready to meet Hitler, whether Prime Minister Baldwin approved or not. Additionally, at the funeral of George V, Edward had told the Soviet foreign minister and the ambassador, “As to the League of Nations, [he] had some doubts; he was afraid that the League might spread war all over Europe as a result of its efforts. There was the sense that Edward regretted the failure of the Hoare-Laval plan.” After the funeral, they went to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the immensely cheerful Top Hat.¹¹ Edward VIII’s attitude toward Nazi Germany, and that of his brother, the Duke of Kent (“who took drugs and was voraciously bisexual”¹²), was seen in Berlin as decidedly positive. A senior official from the Foreign Ministry lamented to Mackenzie King during his visit to Berlin that George VI did not seem so well disposed toward Germany as his brothers.* Certainly the friendly attitude of Edward VIII had given more respectability to Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Wallis Simpson, whom both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and M15 kept under discreet surveillance, appeared even better disposed toward Germany. Rumours began to spread that she was concurrently the paramour of Hitler’s new ambassador in London, Joachim Ribbentrop, who sent her roses daily. The United States ambassador, in a letter to Roosevelt, added another rumour: “‘Many people here suspected that Mrs Simpson was actually in German pay … [but] I think this is unlikely.’ But though not in German pay … she was wittingly or unwittingly a tool of German policy.”¹³

Amidst the Abyssinian imbroglio, Mackenzie King developed a sequence of four foreign policy steps. It was to be such a carefully balanced sequence of external affairs initiatives that it would, he hoped, foster support for the Liberal Party in both English and French Canada. The first step would be to schedule what could not be put off any longer – a foreign affairs debate in the House of Commons during the last days of the spring 1936 session (thereby helping to ensure its brevity). To the House, King would describe in broad terms his antagonism toward the collective security provisions of the League of Nations, arising from his long-standing rejection of any obligation that its members join in eventual military sanctions against an aggressor. That explicit rejection would please Quebec and isolationists, pacifists, and continentalists in a Canada distant from the turmoil of Europe.

The second step would be to go to London to consult the British government about foreign policy, despite his past rejections of such consultations. Then he would feel better equipped to continue on to Geneva to make much the same speech to the League Assembly that he had made to the House of Commons in Ottawa. As he explained in a letter to Giorgia de Cousandier, “I have felt the whole European situation was so critical and the position of the League so uncertain, that I ought not to leave exclusively to others the representation of our country.”14 If his speech to the League went well, no one in Quebec or elsewhere could then accuse him of being less candid with its membership than he had been with his fellow Canadians during the brief House of Commons debate.

The third step would be to be seen by all Canadians as doing everything possible to convince Hitler, face to face, that Germany’s own interests lay in peace, not war. Believing that he had been divinely ordained to do so, he would continue on from Geneva to Berlin to point the Führer in the right direction, after clearing with London in advance what he would say. That would demonstrate to Canadian voters as nothing else would that their prime minister was a man of peace.

Only after achieving the above three stages would King embark on his fourth and final step: a degree of rearmament, however modest it might be compared to the current British initiative. With his denunciation of collective security through the League, he anticipated a restoration of some sort of balance of power in Europe. That should help to quiet those English-Canadian voters who were becoming so concerned with the alarums and excursions of the dictators that they were beginning to press strongly for the early refurbishment of the armed forces that were sorely depleted, particularly in the wake of Bennett’s repeated cuts in government spending during the worst years of the depression.

Neither Bennett nor King had, during the long economic depression, done anything to reverse the disrepair that had been the lot of the armed forces from the immediate postwar years, but King, on coming to office in 1935, was well aware of the impact that newspaper editorials and especially articles by George Drew, an artillery veteran and a vocal Ontario Conservative advocate of rearmament, were having in English Canada. Drew’s Canada in the Great War, a pamphlet decrying American claims to have won the war, was widely popular. A future premier of Ontario and later leader of the opposition in Ottawa, he was a great favourite of the publisher Colonel J.B. Maclean. Drew wrote in Maclean’s Magazine on 5 May, “Canadian defence forces are inefficiently organized, are badly equipped, and have only little opportunity for carrying out training that could fit them for modern conditions of warfare.” King mistrusted him as an outspoken partisan, but he also recognized that his repeated advocacy of rearmament in Maclean’s and its sister publication the Financial Post was finding support among a growing number of influential English Canadian voters.

King, however, remained cautious about advocating rearmament. In planning the first step in his four-part progression, a foreign affairs debate in the House of Commons, he was keenly aware of Quebec’s opposition to spending taxpayers’ money on armaments at the cost of social programmes. Early in the 1936 parliamentary session there were brief exchanges in the House of Commons about the League, including the debilitating impact on it of Italy’s seizure of Abyssinia. In these brief exchanges, Bennett from the opposition front bench appeared supportive of the League, but he tempered his remarks by the tacit recognition that if the Conservative Party hoped to form a government again it had to win at least a modicum of seats in Quebec. The third party in the House, the new socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), had no expectation of making any headway in Quebec, but it was the party of arch-isolationists and pacifists who, if for different reasons from those of Quebec, had been even more opposed to military sanctions. Opposition to military sanctions was in fact one of the very few subjects on which all three parties agreed. The exchanges in the House, including King’s statements, were nevertheless frequently contradictory and inconsequential, being centred, as the CCF’s Tommy Douglas said, on “the confusing subject of sanctions.”15

That Douglas and other members of parliament, not limited to the CCF, found the subject of League sanctions confusing is not to be wondered at. No one on the front benches of either the government or the opposition was wholly confident about what to say publicly about the League in light of Quebec’s well-known rejection of any economic sanctions that could possibly lead to military sanctions. Lapointe had made it clear that for Quebec it was yes to the League of Nations and to the autonomous status of Canada reflected therein, but no to the sanctions envisaged in its Covenant. That being so, the House spent much of its time going over the so-called Riddell incident, further reviewing the precise hour of despatch and receipt of various transatlantic telegrams, many in cumbersome cypher, with King defending his repudiation of Riddell’s initiative (although not its substance). By contrast, Bennett extolled Riddell. Perhaps recalling Riddell’s responsible stance in the Cahan incident, he told the House of Commons, “I have known no one in all my experience who was more careful not to take action without having authority to do so.”16

On 11 February, in the debate on the Speech from the Throne, King spoke for three hours about external affairs, revealing the degree to which, in the face of Quebec’s discontents, he had reversed himself about the League of Nations. Three months earlier, he had stated that his government was ready to “take the necessary steps to secure the effective application of the economic sanctions against Italy … [and is] prepared to co-operate fully in the endeavour.”¹⁷ Now, sounding like Beaudry, he told the House of Commons that when the story became known “he would not be surprised if it was shown the whole of Europe would be aflame today were it not for the action taken by Canada.”¹⁸ As for the disavowal of Riddell’s initiative, he piously explained that it was “only because we are most anxious not to take any step which might possibly embarrass the situation in Europe or which might appear even remotely to indicate an exception on the part of Canada to what was being done by other parts of the British Empire [i.e., the United Kingdom itself].” In short, English Canadians should understand that the disavowal of Riddell had in fact been for the benefit of the British Empire.

Lapointe, in defending his role in the whole sorry affair, summed up his position as no to a Canadian initiative and yes to League economic sanctions (which he knew were going nowhere in the wake of the Hoare-Laval agreement). “It was not properly the repudiation of any man: it was the repudiation of what was being stated everywhere in the world that it was Canada that was proposing this oil sanction, when so many countries were disquieted and did not know what to do about it. We merely said that we had not given any instructions to that effect, that this was not a Canadian proposal, that Canada was quite willing to have the same responsibility as the other countries to join in any collective action.” Lapointe also took the occasion to deprecate unspecified attempts to pillory him because of his French Canadian race and Roman Catholic religion.¹⁹

What the press gallery made of all this and other exchanges in the House is reflected in two examples from Vancouver. The Province reported the prime minister’s claim that by repudiating Riddell’s initiative, he had prevented a European conflagration and had maintained the unity of the British Empire. The other Vancouver newspaper, the Sun, concentrated more favourably on Hitler. “Canadians who do not allow themselves to be swayed by a personal dislike of Hitler [recognize that] Canada is only a spectator. There are not enough moral principles at stake to induce her to become otherwise … Whatever morality lies in the scales seems to be on Germany’s side of the balance.”20

Perhaps the last word can be left to Sir Robert Borden who on 5 May 1936 wrote, “The Italians have overrun Ethiopia … all Italy is rapturously acclaiming victory; the Germans delighted; the British Government is disconcerted; the British people are exasperated. At first Japan, then Germany and now Italy have flouted the League of Nations; it is apparent that its usefulness has reached the vanishing point. In Great Britain there is a proposal that the League should continue, but under a Covenant that does not include punitive measures for disregard of its obligations. Lewd fellows of the base sort who have been delighted to deride the League will now rejoice in its failure and will sharpen their dull wits for still more derisive contempt.” Borden, a year from his death, did not confirm whether he included King as one of the dull wits.²¹

Recognition that the League was all but finished had spread through all three parties in the House of Commons, although the pacifist Woodsworth of the CCF still hoped that something might be resurrected from the wreckage. “The whole of the Treaty of Versailles needs to be revised, and the control of the League and even perhaps the formation of the League needs to be fundamentally recast.”²² Presumably unknown to each other, Woodsworth and King, exact contemporaries, had both spent part of the summer of 1900 in Germany. Woodsworth recorded his impression that “a fine company of German soldiers … gives a lively appearance to a crowd.” By the 1930s, he had become the leading socialist thinker and the pre-eminent pacifist in the House of Commons. His patent integrity as well as intelligence was such that he became the most effective and frequent critic of King’s several foreign policies – or lack of them – as the Second World War approached.

King had given to the House of Commons on 11 February what he considered his definitive statement on l’affaire Riddell. A long debate on the Department of External Affairs estimates on 18 June represented an additional step in his four-part foreign affairs progression, yet his performance was in the end little more than sanctimonious posturing, anything but a clear analysis of the challenge that now faced Canada as a member of what King, with heavy humour, began to call the “League of Notions.” With Italy’s annexation of Abyssinia, King felt ready in mid-June to share with the House of Commons at least indirectly what he intended to say to the League Assembly in September in Geneva. Less than a week before the end of the parliamentary session, he continued to base himself on his press statement of the previous 29 October. He first attempted to explain why external affairs debates in the House would have been premature and would have merely complicated a difficult, even dangerous, situation. He then offered a convoluted and wordy finis to Canada’s career at the League and particularly his government’s role after assuming office in October 1935, almost a year before. He made much – or tried to make much – of Canada’s real or supposed support of the League in the past fifteen years (including, although he did not say so, the six Tory years of Meighen and Bennett).

Although King’s long statement was infused with what Bennett had once called Skelton’s “epigrammatic idiosyncrasies,” he was clear about one thing: it was “imperative to correct this serious misapprehension” about a Canadian initiative in support of League sanctions – especially oil – against Italy. King attempted yet again to explain away his disavowal of Riddell’s initiative. Canada had implemented the initial sanctions policy endorsed by the League (he did not mention that this had been done by Bennett in the first instance), and although an oil sanction could have led to war, Canada would nevertheless have joined in enforcing it if other members of the League had “generally supported it.” Canada would not, however, take the initiative of proposing “such a pretentious question” when Britain and perhaps France would have to sustain it with arms if necessary. Having thereby reassured at the same time Quebec, pacifists, isolationists, continentalists, and, incidentally, profascists, King simply denied that Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia had left the League in tatters. After all, it should never be assumed that “all that can be done is to meet force by force,” although he was himself notably thin on what else could be done to conciliate the two dictators. He nevertheless went on to describe the League as “that indispensable agency” where “the statesmen of great countries are forced to come in the open and defend in public, before a world forum, the policies of their governments.” The fact that the League could in reality force no statesman from great countries or small, especially from non-member countries – Germany, Japan, the United States, Italy, Brazil, and, until 1934, Soviet Russia – to come to Geneva was a fact King simply ignored. And as for member states, the League had not required Britain and France to defend before it the perfidy of the Hoare-Laval proposal. The purple prose of King’s peroration was equally meaningless: “We must utilize constructively the League of Nations.”23 What King meant by utilizing the League constructively he did not say. As someone who had become intent on “getting the League out of the way,” he did not explain to the House why he at the same time described the League as “that indispensable agency.” Perhaps he believed that even on such thin gruel he could retain the support of Dafoe and Rowell and other League advocates in English Canada without jeopardizing Liberal support in Quebec.

As in his statements to the House in February, King said no word in June against Mussolini’s defiance of the League over Abyssinia. He did briefly regret Italy’s use of modern weapons – which had included mustard gas dropped from aircraft – against Abyssinian warriors, some armed only with spears, but he did not mention Mussolini by name.

As King had intended, it being late in the session, there was no time for an extended debate. Woodsworth was scathingly accurate: “After waiting for months we have heard what our foreign policy is supposed to be and we find that we have not any. We are just going around in a circle; we have no foreign policy.”24 There was little public reaction to King’s long speech, although Dafoe (a Liberal “because there are less sons of bitches in the Liberal Party than in the Tory”) deplored in the Winnipeg Free Press King’s attitude, which “amounts to the rejection by Canada of the League … With assurances of the most distinguished consideration, [it] was ushered out into the darkness by Mr Mackenzie King.”²⁵

With the League rendered completely powerless, Bennett concluded that there remained only one route to the maintenance of peace: “the greatest assurance we have for the maintenance of our peace lies in the strengthening of every tie that binds the commonwealth of nations, the members of the British empire.”²⁶ In fact, King was himself covertly, and as usual ambiguously, moving in that direction, the only direction that remained open to him, having turned his back on the isolationism of the United States and Quebec, the pacifism of the CCF, and the continentalism of Skelton and his ilk. He was not, however, yet ready to risk the Liberal predominance in Quebec with overt support for additional ties with the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Vincent Massey was now attending frequent meetings in London of the high commissioners with the Dominions Secretary to discuss the current status of the continuing but limited League economic sanctions against Italy. King asked him to go to Geneva on Dominion Day 1936 to join with representatives of other member states in terminating these sanctions. Massey explained, “While deeply regretting the failure of the joint attempt to protect a weak fellow-member of the League, there appeared to be no practical alternative for Canada … but to support the discontinuance of sanctions.”27 At the same time, President Roosevelt paid the first state visit to Canada of a president in office, in Quebec during the last days of July, but nothing is known about whether King discussed with Roosevelt any League matters. Roosevelt, as head of state, was the guest of the Canadian head of state, the governor general, but King was an active participant in a day of friendship, good will, peace, and the blessing of all.

While King was elaborating his approach to the all but defunct League of Nations during the summer and autumn of 1936, Berlin rather than Geneva became the focus of international attention. Reflecting the mounting prominence of Germany in Europe, the most spectacular event that summer was the Olympic Games in Berlin. The International Olympic Committee had awarded the games to Germany almost two years before Hitler became chancellor, and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, knew a good thing when he saw it. He easily convinced Hitler to make a supreme effort to exploit the games to show what the Nazis had achieved in a few short years in the regeneration of Germany and its industrial and military potential. In Canada as elsewhere protests were held against the Olympic Games being held in Nazi Germany at all, but they were dismissed as coming from socialists, communists, organized labour, Jews, and other troublemakers. The blatant and brutal racism of the Nazis, whitewashed as much as possible by German officials, was not much criticized; it was the protestors who were portrayed as the spoilsports. In the opening parade at the winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and again at the summer Olympics in Berlin, the Canadian teams, in their red and white maple leaf uniforms, left the impression with their stiff-armed salutes that they were uncertain whether they were giving the Nazi salute “as a gesture of friendship” or whether they were giving what some chose to call the “Olympic salute.”

Hitler’s pleasure at Germany winning the most gold medals at the games was palpable, but tempered by the triumphs of a non-Aryan, a superb black American athlete, Jesse Owens, who was even-handed in his criticism of the racism that he encountered both in Germany and in his native United States. The German performance was saluted by the Toronto Globe, which surprisingly attempted to explain away even Nazi press censorship. Matthew Halton of the Toronto Star had a different impression. He was appalled by the blind fanaticism reflected there. Whenever Hitler arrived at the Olympic stadium – which seated more than 100,000 spectators – “the world becomes for a few moments nothing but a sea of outstretched arms and a crashing roar of ‘Heil! Heil! Heil!’ and when you turn this way and that, examining men’s eyes, you see in them something like mystic hysteria – a glazed, holy look as of men hearing voices.”28

Toward the end of the Olympic Games in Berlin, weeks before King embarked for Europe, his minister of trade and commerce, William Euler, led a trade delegation to Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Britain. Euler, of German descent, was the former mayor of Kitchener and a newspaper publisher who had strongly opposed conscription in the First World War. He represented the German immigrant area where the Deutscher Bund Canada had been founded two years before. King may have known of Euler’s request to the German consul general in Ottawa to arrange for him to call on the Führer during his visit to Germany (Euler, like King, did not want to be seen as using the good offices of the British ambassador in Berlin), but there is only one brief reference in King’s diaries to his trade minister’s enthusiastic visit to Hitler. King remained wary of Euler and his explanations of anti-Semitism in Germany: “Many Jews in Germany were newcomers and Marxists.”* The German reaction to them was “no different than the Canadian to those of German heritage during the First World War.”²⁹

In his description to Canadian Press of his half-hour with the chancellor in Berlin on 6 August 1936, Euler described enthusiastically how “Hitler allowed me to ask numerous questions about the international situation. He answered me very carefully and with reasoned argument about the ‘shackles of Versailles.’ He expressed an earnest desire for peace and described his fear of Bolshevism.”³⁰ Euler, although a minister of the crown, evidently felt enfranchised to discuss with Hitler “the international situation” and the freeing of Germany from the shackles of Versailles, although he may not have first cleared his visit to Hitler with the secretary of state for external affairs (i.e., Mackenzie King) or what he intended to say to him or, on his return, what he had said, although he must have known that his prime minister was sailing for Europe in a week or so after his own return to Ottawa. Dana Wilgress, a senior officer in the Department of Trade and Commerce who accompanied Euler, came away with a less optimistic impression of Nazi Germany. “We were driven in a government car to the Olympic Games … It was an impressive and at the same time a frightening sight. All that I saw in Berlin … convinced me that Germany was preparing to go to war.”31

During his crossing to Europe in mid-September 1936, King had ample time, if so inclined, to reflect on Walter Allward’s magnificent Vimy war memorial and its unveiling by the recently crowned King Edward VIII, before 8,000 veterans and their families. He did not record whether he regretted his decision to absent himself on 16 July, despite welcoming any occasion to be with his sovereign. But then King seldom recorded regret at any of his actions, relying if necessary on reassurances from the Great Beyond. He rationalized to his diary that he was right not to go to Vimy and to send a French Canadian (Lapointe) instead because he was “fatigued.”³² King was never comfortable at events with veterans and it is also possible that he may not have wanted to take a lead in the Vimy ceremonies celebrating victory over Germany only ten days before Euler’s visit to the Führer and three months before his own. Paradoxically it was Hitler who visited the Vimy memorial in June 1940, not the fatigued Canadian prime minister in 1936.

On his voyage to Europe, King must have learned something from the ship’s wireless news bulletins of a visit to Hitler by another Empire statesman, the former British prime minister David Lloyd George. Yet he makes no mention in his diary of the two meetings between Lloyd George and Hitler that preceded by only a few weeks what he assumed would be his own meeting.

Lloyd George was bowled over by Hitler: “We got on like a house on fire.” Even before he met Hitler, he had told Ribbentrop (whom Hitler had appointed a few weeks before ambassador to the Court of St James), “it was most fortunate for Germany that she had found a leader in Hitler,” then adding the ultimate blasphemy that he was “the resurrection and the life.” On 4 September, after the first of two meetings, Lloyd George, having dismissed Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, as a jackal and a little swine, hailed Hitler “as a very great and wonderful leader … the Saviour of Germany.”³³ Following a second meeting on 15 September, Lloyd George let himself go in an article in Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. Hitler was “the greatest living German … a born leader, yes, and statesman, a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, the George Washington of his country.” Britain’s wartime prime minister summed up the conclusions of his visit in one sentence: “The Germans have definitely made up their minds never to quarrel with us again.” In his praise of Hitler, he appears in fact to have himself in mind: “I only wish that we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of office in our own country today” (deeply frustrated at being long out of office, Lloyd George held Prime Minister Baldwin in open contempt.)34* According to Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, Megan Lloyd George, who accompanied her father, had facetiously given an approximation of the Nazi stiff arm salute with a “Heil Hitler!” to which Lloyd George replied, “Certainly Heil Hitler! I say it too, for he is really a great man.”³⁵ Churchill thought this was all nonsense. He later offered a different summation about the visit of his former cabinet colleague to Hitler: “All those Englishmen who visited the German Führer in those years were embarrassed or compromised. No one was more completely misled than Mr Lloyd George whose rapturous accounts of his conversations make odd reading … Unless the terms are equal it is better to keep away.”³⁶

At the League of Nations Assembly in the summer of 1936, sanctions against the aggressor Italy were abandoned. Not knowing what else to do, the League invited member states to suggest how the Covenant might be revised to reflect what, if anything, they were in fact willing to do in the face of aggression. In response to a letter from Newton Rowell, King asked him what he thought. Rowell replied:

[The League] can never provide any real degree of security against aggression unless sanctions are maintained, and behind the obligation, there is the will to enforce the sanctions … It is only by the due administration of justice, backed up by an adequate police force that the rule of law has been established and can be maintained in any country … it is only by a similar process, although necessarily under very different conditions, that the rule of law in international affairs can be gradually established and international crime and anarchy suppressed. I therefore always have been and still am in favour of sanctions – universal, so far as economic are concerned, necessarily regional as far as military operations are concerned, although recognizing the obligation of all to come to the defence of any member who is attacked by an aggressor state when carrying out a mandate of the League in imposing economic sanctions … I look upon the use of force to restrain an aggressor, not as war, but as a purely police measure and as the best possible means of avoiding war … had the members of the League lived up to their obligations under Article 16, Italy would not now be the conqueror of Abyssinia and Germany would have hesitated long before she re-occupied the Rhineland. Successful aggression breeds new aggression.37

Nothing that Rowell said was to King’s liking. It contradicted directly the stand that he had taken in Quebec at Lapointe’s adamant urging. He used none of it in his flaccid statements to the House of Commons and the League Assembly.

There is no evidence that King, before leaving Ottawa for Europe, had sought briefings from officials in the minute Department of External Affairs, other than perhaps from Skelton. But even he was beginning to be looked upon by King as too dogmatic in his isolationism. To help offset English Canadian misgivings, King would have benefited from reading an extensive memorandum that Burgon Bickersteth, the British-born warden of Hart House at the University of Toronto and something of a protégé of Vincent Massey, had prepared for British prime minister and family friend Stanley Baldwin, upon his return to Toronto from Europe. His lengthy report dwelt, inter alia, on the progress of Nazism, the sorry state of the churches, opposition of ordinary people to rearmament, military training, attitudes to recovery of the former German colonies, the opinions of the army, and feelings toward Britain.³⁸ There is no record that King ever read Bickersteth’s report (which, if it had come via Massey, he would likely have dismissed as tainted), but en route to Geneva, he told Malcolm MacDonald, the dominions secretary, that many Canadians said that “we should keep out of the quarrel between Germany and France, wash our hands of it, and leave the Germans and French to kill each other if they want to.”³⁹ On his arrival in Geneva, he invited the counsel of Eden, telling him that “Canada’s wish … was that Great Britain would keep out of any European war altogether.”⁴⁰ After all, as King told his journal, “It is what we prevent, rather than what we do, that counts most in Government.”⁴¹

In his speech to the League of Nations Assembly on 29 September, King repeated much of what he had said in the House of Commons in June, although in even more elaborate and circumlocutory terms. He repeated his regret at the lack of universality in the membership of the League – as if the Assembly itself could do anything about that – and in light of the rejection of collective security, repeated that it should limit itself to conciliation. He piously advised the Assembly that its “emphasis should be placed on conciliation rather than coercion … automatic commitments to the application of force is not a practical policy.” The League, he fondly hoped, was to be resuscitated by talk alone. He remained as convinced as he had been in 1918 when he had published his tediously verbose Industry and Humanity that talk could settle anything. As Lester Pearson said of King, “if he insisted on pushing his polices of caution and non-commitment at Geneva to the point of timid isolation, as he did, his abiding preoccupation with Canadian unity was behind every move – or, more accurately, every refusal to move … King’s temperament and instinct preferred the process of consultation and conciliation to immediate decisions leading to decisive results. Collective talking was preferable to collective action.”42 Speaking over the heads of the League Assembly, King repeated yet again, mainly for Quebec voters, “We will not necessarily become involved in any war in other parts of the British Empire … Any decision on the part of Canada to participate in war will have to be taken by the Parliament or people of Canada.”⁴³ That banality did not sound like what he had said in London, but different audiences got different messages. The Toronto press was not impressed with King’s performance in Geneva. The Globe was clear that “No one can be accused of distortion of his text … who sees it as a step toward isolation … A direct assertion of Canada’s determination to work with Britain and the rest of the Empire for the preservation of peace would have set the trouble-making nations thinking. The Prime Minister neglected a ready-made opportunity.” The Mail and Empire was even more direct in its criticism. “Liberal coldness to Great Britain is again weakening the Empire and encouraging the Empire’s enemies. This in spite of the fact that Canada depends for its defence almost entirely upon the British taxpayer. Is this course honourable? Is it remotely decent? Is it calculated to preserve peace?”⁴⁴

Having told the “League of Notions” what he thought of it and having himself no constructive idea of what to do about it, King turned his mind to what he assumed would be his imminent trip from Geneva to Berlin. To reconfirm that the British government had no objection to his visit to Hitler, King spoke with Eden in Geneva, telling him that he had “for some time” been considering a visit to Germany (although not adding the corollary that at the same time he had been “divinely ordained” to bring peace to Europe). Having repeatedly eschewed in the past any idea of a common imperial foreign policy, he now informed Eden that he would speak to Hitler on behalf of the whole British Empire. He would let him know that some of his policies were costing him friends, hastily adding, however, “that was not so far as Canada, for example, and other parts of the Empire were concerned … [they had no] thought of continued enmity towards Germany but a desire to have friendly relations all around.”45 What if anything Eden made of King’s claim to be expounding to Hitler a common foreign policy for the British Commonwealth is unknown, but he did offer to have the British Embassy in Berlin facilitate his visit. The ambassador was always ready to help those dominions without representation in Germany (only the independent-minded South Africa and the Irish Free State had legations). Eden himself had growing reservations about the course of aggression and violence that Hitler was following. The previous year he had recorded how on a visit to Berlin he had been “unfavourably impressed by Hitler’s personality … He appeared negative to me, certainly not compelling … rather shifty.”⁴⁶ But before Munich Eden was never clearly anti-appeasement; hence he told King that he supposed his visit could do no harm.

With that vaguely reassuring endorsement, King was ready to travel to Berlin from Geneva by the end of September 1936. But first he arranged to meet Giorgia de Cousandier in Milan. No doubt they discussed the League and Abyssinia and, perhaps, as he had said in his letter to her of two months before, the way in which goodwill could be restored “between the people of the British Empire [for whom King again saw himself as speaking] and Italy.”* Upon returning to Geneva, however, King learned from the British embassy in Berlin, via London, that Hitler was unable to receive him during the autumn. He was disappointed but, in his own mind at least, he simply postponed his visit to the summer of the following year, 1937. He then spent a week in Paris where he saw Leon Blum, the Popular Front prime minister who was deeply uneasy at the unpredictability of Hitler’s aggressive tendencies. King returned to London to consult with ministers about what, if anything, was to be done about the League and Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland and thereby his repudiation of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno. King did not differ from those who spoke placidly about Germany reoccupying its own backyard. He placed a special emphasis on doing nothing, justifying his inaction by insisting that Canada was simply a more difficult country to govern than most.

King rejected out of hand a suggestion from Massey in London that he use a planted question in the House of Commons in Ottawa to create an opportunity to set forth the government’s attitude toward the reoccupation of the Rhineland. With some exasperation (Massey constantly annoyed him), King replied that a planted question “would only serve to provoke controversy from one end of Canada to the other.”47 Similarly, King told Grant Dexter of the Winnipeg Free Press that foreign affairs had to be downplayed since they were the principal threat to national unity.⁴⁸

King remained consistent in his efforts to avoid public discussion of external affairs, both within parliament and without, convinced that amidst the deepening deterioration in Europe, “the least that is said means the least stirring up in the Commons and the Press and in the minds of the people.” He continued to believe that foreign policy controversies were not for the minds of the people, at least not for the minds of a people preoccupied with the aftermath of the economic depression.⁴⁹ One neophyte backbencher, Paul Martin, who aspired to contribute to foreign policy debates, recalled that in the years leading up to the declaration of war in September 1939, “most Liberal MPs uncritically accepted King’s every opinion on foreign affairs.”⁵⁰ Martin, however, “saw clearly that the League of Nations was … an ineffective operation not because the idea was wrong, but because of the failure of its members to live up to their obligations. And Canada was one of those that did not.” But the prime minister, by limiting the opportunities for debate, was not going to have a young backbencher talking like that in the House of Commons. John Diefenbaker, the future Conservative prime minister, had it about right when he later said of King that he “considered foreign policy to be his own prerogative, and he did not like to have our external relations discussed in Parliament. Those debates that did take place … tended to be extremely general in context, and they were few and far between.”51 For King it was better to say nothing about the dictators and hope for the best.

Yet while still in London during the last fortnight of October, King must have heard something of the growing unease there about the dictators. Neville Chamberlain, who was to succeed Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937, described Hitler as half-mad and a lunatic and Goebbels as having a vulgar, common little mind. The Foreign Office, headed by Sir Robert Vansittart, had never been in any doubt that Hitler was “a half-mad, ridiculously dangerous demagogue.”⁵² Vansittart’s brother-in-law, Sir Eric Phipps, the ambassador in Berlin, saw Hitler as a “psychopathic gangster.” Others in London, however, regarded Hitler as not such a bad fellow. From the generally pro-fascist “Cliveden Set,” Philip Kerr (as Lord Lothian, sent by Chamberlain as British ambassador to the United States on the eve of the Second World War) disagreed with Phipps. For him Hitler was “a visionary rather than a gangster.” Lord Londonderry, the former secretary of the state for air, matched Lloyd George’s admiration for the anti-communist Führer, a view which he freely expressed to anyone in either Britain or Germany who would listen to him or read his several pro-fascist tracts. But a parliamentary colleague characterized him “as not really equipped for thinking … Londonderry took himself very seriously and that was in a sense a tragedy, because others didn’t take him at all seriously.”⁵³ His writings, such as Ourselves and Germany, were dismissed by many as “Londonderry Herrs,” but he and others in the upper reaches of British society did give a sort of spurious respectability to domestic pro-fascism. The German ambassador duly reported to Berlin that “the attitude of the City, in spite of Jewish influence, was against warmongering.” He also mentioned individual pro-Germans: “Lord Londonderry … as well as Lloyd George and Snowden, Lothian and the Anglo-German Fellowship [of Lord Mount Temple], and finally the wise and noble ruler of the British Empire [King Edward VIII].”⁵⁴ On 27 October, after an audience with Edward VIII, King recorded in his diary that “He … said to me that he meant to keep England out of war at all costs … I said that nothing could be worse than war; that to avoid it one should be prepared to incur almost any sacrifice.”⁵⁵ This interview with his sovereign was for King further confirmation of what he had written in his diary four days before. “What has been told to me to-day has been a revelation as to how close one can be brought to the very summit of affairs … There is no doubt that the voice of the Prime Minister of Canada is very far reaching in the affairs of the British Empire.”56

His visit to Hitler postponed, King also called on Baldwin, whom he had met at imperial conferences as early as 1923. The exhausted and sickly prime minister had just seen Britain through the upheaval of the abdication of King Edward VIII and the unexpected succession to the throne of his brother as King George VI. Baldwin’s limited view of the growing threat of Germany was based in part on his understanding of Hitler’s ambition to win Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. “If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.”⁵⁷ King, a believer in the merits of personal diplomacy, joined others in London in urging Baldwin to visit Hitler as he himself proposed to do. Baldwin, although convinced that Mussolini and Hitler “were lunatics,”⁵⁸ declared himself not averse, but did not do so in the months that remained before Chamberlain succeeded him as prime minister.

From his conversations with Baldwin and others, although certainly not with Vincent Massey, who made him so uncomfortable, King would have been aware of the British government’s decision – dangerously late in Churchill’s view – to accelerate its programme of rearmament centred on the widespread fear that “the bomber always gets through.” The year before, Hitler, again disregarding the Treaty of Versailles, had created a peacetime army of thirty-six divisions, introduced conscription, and confirmed the existence of a banned Luftwaffe. The British response to this and much else – the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Berlin-Rome axis, the Spanish Civil War, and the German-Japanese anti-comintern agreement – first took the form of seemingly endless memoranda passing among committees of the cabinet and the chiefs of staff (who remained preoccupied by the dreaded possibility of a three-front war), but did eventually resolve into decisions to provide more funds for the renewal and expansion of the armed forces and yet more importantly of defence industries. The repeated delays in reaching these decisions, strongly opposed by Labour, were partly the result of fiscal constraints and partly of profound popular opposition to rearmament (the “Peace Ballot” of June having confirmed the degree of public fear of a second world war).

Chamberlain as chancellor of the exchequer, reluctant though he was to divert funds from social programmes, ensured that the increased defence spending was largely on the Royal Air Force (RAF), represented publicly as a defensive rather than an offensive arm. Baldwin added to King that Canada could play a vital part in the expansion of the RAF by the joint flying training over the vast empty skies of Canada and the supply of certain equipment. Chamberlain was not optimistic about Canada’s response. Sounding like his late father, he had concluded at the 1936 imperial conference that “One of our greatest difficulties has been to keep the Dominions in step. Since the Statute of Westminster they have become extraordinarily touchy about their status and are always on the look out to see that we don’t attempt to speak for them or assume that they will take the same view as we do. On this occasion we took immense pains to spare their susceptibilities and to keep them informed of the constant changes in the situation.”59

Concurrently in Canada, the few Nazi supporters, having garnered little political support, came to the not very surprising conclusion that they would achieve greater status, visibility, and impact if they were to form one national organization. Adrien Arcand in Montreal and Joseph Farr in Toronto and, to a lesser extent, William Whittaker in Winnipeg began to collaborate, having identified synergies that a single national organization might achieve. Arcand, conscious of the benefits of fascist cooperation worldwide, was exchanging greetings with fascist parties in Britain, France, the United States, Belgium, Brazil, South Africa, Portugal, Australia, Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), Sweden, Paraguay, the Netherlands, Spain, and Argentina (he praised the military dictatorship in Japan for being opposed to communists and Jews). In that long list of correspondents, he remained loyal to his first love, Mussolini’s Italy, but his ties were especially strong with fascists in Britain, France, and the United States. Paradoxically, a surprisingly fervent supporter of the British Empire, Arcand never wavered in his necessarily distant attempts to help conciliate Britain and Germany. His admiration for Oswald Mosley never faltered. His cooperation with fascists in the United States had begun with Karl Ludecke’s visit in 1932, the year before Hitler became chancellor. During Ludecke’s second visit to Montreal in 1933, Arcand, supported by Senator Blondin, attempted in vain to arrange a meeting for Ludecke with Prime Minister Bennett. Perhaps Arcand’s choice of words in praise of Bennett on the occasion of the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa the previous year had not helped. He had welcomed Bennett to the conference as part of the “fight against Jews and communists in the name of a vigorous British Empire.”⁶⁰

Arcand never succeeded in his attempts to win recognition from politicians of whatever level. His efforts were amateurish and futile. He flirted briefly with the isolationist, anti-British mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, and the premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, who was too wily to be caught up in Arcand’s extremism. And Senator Blondin remained primarily interested in how many, if any, votes Arcand could deliver to the Conservative Party. The resounding Liberal victory in the election of 1935 ended any truck, however slight, that fascists had through him with a mainstream political party.

Arcand was, however, encouraged by the visits to Montreal of Henry Beament, Mosley’s chief operating officer in the British Union of Fascists, and from Céline, the nom de plume of the prominent French nihilistic and anti-Semitic physician, journalist, and novelist Louis-Ferdinand des Touches. He was especially gratified to receive an invitation to join the platform party of leading American Nazis at a mass rally at the New York Hippodrome on 30 October 1937, where the New York Police Band entertained the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic audience estimated at 10,000. Later Arcand joined the other speakers and leading American Nazis at a dinner at the Harvard Club (where King and Roosevelt were both members). He pledged the collaboration of Canadian Nazis with American, resulting in coverage of Canadian Nazis in both the popular Life magazine and the more thoughtful Foreign Affairs.

In measured terms in Foreign Affairs, the anonymous author “S” (Frank Scott of McGill University) described for a mainly American audience how at a time when fascism was making notable progress in Latin America, it was also doing so in Quebec. “The most French and Catholic province in the Dominion … has been the scene of a number of incidents which bear all the marks of fascist inspiration.” Strongly anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and supporters of a corporate state though they were, the members of Arcand’s National Socialist Christian Party were not so numerous as to present a threat to civil order, but they nevertheless represented a worrisome element in Quebec and, by extension, Canada.61 Life magazine, as was to be expected, was more sensational, describing the founding rally of the National Unity Party at Massey Hall in Toronto as “a fine display of rabble rousing and Jew-baiting … Arcand is something new in North America with his violent social prejudices and his militarized battalion of 3,000 men … It is a sinister fact that by day Fascist Arcand, as press agent, edits the official paper of Quebec’s premier Maurice Duplessis, a rabid Red baiter in his own right. By night Arcand is busy with his Fascism … Yet for Canadians as a whole, Fascism is still a minor matter. Five times as many people attended an anti-Fascist rally in Toronto as listened to M. Arcand. Only in French-speaking Quebec, with one of the lowest standards of living in the Dominion, has it yet raised a commanding voice.”62 T.D. Bouchard, the long-time mayor of St-Hyacinthe and member of the Quebec legislature and later a senator, recorded both graphically and woefully the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic agitation in his hometown.⁶³

A cette époque, Hitler était au sommet de sa popularité et comptait, dans la métropole, des partisans. Ceux-ci avaient réussi à recruter, à Saint-Hyacinthe, des adeptes de l’hitlérisme. Ils étaient, naturellement, au nombre de mes ennemis. Je favorisais alors l’adoption d’un règlement accordant une subvention aux propriétaries d’une manufacture de vêtements, pour leur permettre d’agrandir leur établissement dans le but de donner du travail à un plus grand nombre d’ouvriers. Ces industriels étaient des Israélites. La nuit qui précéda la présentation de cette mesure au conseil, les Chemises brunes garnirent les glaces des vitrines de nos magasins situés en plein quartier commercial, de placards invitant les citoyens a s’insurger contre ce projet conçu par le maire pour “judaïser notre ville française.” Ces appels à l’anti-sémitisme reçurent l’accueil qu’ils méritaient; il n’y eut que quatorze fanatiques, sur une population de quatorze mille âmes, qui désapprouverent notre règlement …

Hitler était à l’apogée de sa puissance et ses adeptes au pays extériorisaient leur sentiment en faveur d’un régime dictatorial. Durant la nuit de Noël 1936, dans la chapelle du Collège des Frères du Sacré-Coeur, des fascistes de Saint-Hyacinthe, vêtus de leur uniforme de parade, s’étaient approches de la Sainte Table, au moment de la communion, en formation militaire. L’occasion était mal choisie pour s’affirmer de la sorte car, depuis quelques mois déjà des rumeurs de guerre nous parvenaient d’Europe.

Mackenzie King, intending to visit Hitler in 1936 as the third stage in his four-part external affairs project, had hoped to demonstrate thereby to the electorate that he had made every effort to promote permanent peace in Europe, but when Hitler indicated that the autumn of 1936 was inconvenient, King decided not to delay his parallel fourth stage, modest rearmament, while rescheduling his visit to Hitler for the summer of 1937. Chamberlain, and possibly even King himself, increasingly took the position that a policy of appeasement would always fail in this imperfect world without military power to back it. The Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom had put the point clearly in1935: “By all means talk with Hitler and come to agreements and compromises. But talk to him with a rifle in your hand or he will pay no regard to your wishes.”64

On New Year’s Day 1937, King stood at attention in front of his radio as it played “God Save the King.” Thus inspired, he pondered whether a strengthened Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) could be publicly presented as the leading element in an entirely defensive defence policy, a possible way around the problems inherent in the expansion of the Canadian army, which would be looked on with suspicion if not hostility in Quebec, where army divisions were seen as carrying in their knapsacks the possibility, sooner or later, of conscription. He concluded that the expansion of the RCAF, however modest, might do something to satisfy those English Canadians who were increasingly uneasy at the deplorable state of their armed forces, and might not wholly alienate Quebec. The rub was that the expansion of the air force and even the trifling support for the other two services cost money that could, in the eyes of the CCF as well, be better spent on social programmes.

From Quebec, Chubby Power, the minister of health, explained: “in 1937 the clouds of war, hovering over Europe and becoming daily more menacing … the Minister of National Defence, Ian Mackenzie, felt that it was his duty to bring before the cabinet for support greatly increased estimates for national defence, especially to augment the infant air service. Immediately there was an outcry, both from Quebec and from a number of people strongly antagonistic to these estimates.” Mackenzie responded, “There is no idea whatever of sending a single Canadian soldier overseas in any expeditionary force and there is not a single cent providing for that in the estimates. They are for the direct defence of Canada and for the defence of Canadian neutrality” (my italics). Lapointe added, “we are not committed. We shall decide when the time comes … I trust the circumstances will justify Canada in remaining outside any conflict.”⁶⁵ Mackenzie tabled estimates that were modestly increased from $15 million in fiscal year 1935–36 to $19 million in 1936–37. In hindsight it was a ludicrously small increase, but by doing little for the army and navy and favouring the air force, King could recommend the estimates to the House “as a Canadian defence policy for the direct defence of our Canadian shores and our Canadian homes.” To include three “Canadians” in a single sentence would have led at least some members to infer rightly that King wanted them to recognize that there were no overseas commitments foreshadowed in the modestly augmented defence budget of December 1936. Skelton, ever the isolationist and even neutralist, argued with King against the small increase on the grounds that the Department of National Defence was covertly planning an overseas expeditionary force.

Even before the debate on the defence estimates in February 1937, the CCF had moved that “In the event of war, Canada should remain strictly neutral regardless of who [sic] the belligerents may be.”66 The debate was unusual in that no Conservative members participated, the partisan theory being that “Opposition speeches in favour of a Commonwealth defence policy would make it easier for the dissident Liberals [French Canadian members unhappy about the increased estimates] to support the Government’s more limited Canadian defence policy. Silence might force the Liberal divisions into the open.”⁶⁷ King knew very well the basic problem: “French Canada … thinks there is some conspiracy to have Canada drawn into Imperial wars.”⁶⁸ Lapointe, who did not speak in the debate other than for one brief interjection, made certain that, for the ears of Quebec, Hansard included it. The increased estimates being for the defence of Canada only, “Canadian soldiers cannot be sent to the battlefields of Europe.” A CCF amendment condemning the increased defence spending was readily defeated by a combination of Liberals and Conservatives. King was highly gratified. “One thing is certain. The right course has been steered, just enough has been done and not too much. We have kept the unity of the Party, and the unity of the country which, after all, is the important thing.”⁶⁹ Thereafter King kept repeating that there was no overseas service foreseen for the marginally increased forces, only domestic defence. Many members, for whatever reasons, swallowed that sophistry. To be sure, there were from time to time a few growls and grumbles about even this modest defence spending, but since they were generally made in French (there were no interpreters either in the House of Commons or in the Liberal caucus), King was content with his Quebec lieutenant’s reassurance that if the emphasis was kept on domestic defence (whatever exactly that was), the discontents of Quebec could be contained. Unlike Ian Mackenzie, King made no reference to “Canadian neutrality,” but in a long statement to the House on 25 January 1937, he stressed yet again that any decision about going to war would be for parliament to decide.

In the debates of defence estimates on 18 February 1937, the CCF, not Quebec members, took the lead in arguing that government spending should not be on the armed forces but, as Canada was beginning to emerge from the depression, on social services. CCF member M.J. Coldwell suspected that the army was receiving more money than the government publicly acknowledged. “We are told by the Prime Minister that if war should come, Canada would decide. But, taking these estimates at face value, it seems to me that some sort of decision has already been made.”70 Mackenzie duly repeated that the forces “were entirely for the protection of Canadian shores.” But no one appears to have questioned how a soldier or airman, once fully trained, was not as qualified for overseas service as domestic. Later, sounding as convoluted as his prime minister, Mackenzie elaborated: “In maintaining the essential principles of Canadian unity … the prevailing sentiment of public opinion … today would not be in favour of committing the Canadian people to automatic responsibilities in regard to any centralized or coordinated scheme or plan of defence.”⁷¹

In the debates, the Conservatives, keeping their eye on their still depleted fortunes in Quebec, were careful in what they said in favour of increased defence spending. It was the anti-military, even pacifist, CCF that made an issue over the votes for cadet training, stores, bases, the Royal Military College, exchange of officers with the United Kingdom, ratio of officers to men, etc., etc., despite the fact that the total army permanent force was only a little over 4,000. Throughout the defence debates, no one, including the prime minister, ever suggested that the armed forces might do well to be more welcoming to and accommodating of French-speaking volunteers. And French-Canadian members of parliament took little direct part in the defence debates: that was an English-Canadian vocation and, in any case, there was no translation service. They relied, with good reason, on Lapointe to ensure that on fundamental issues their voice was heard loudly and clearly by the prime minister and the cabinet. The CCF took the occasion to include another broadside about how King had defined Canada’s position on the Abyssinian crisis, this time by the pacifist Agnes Macphail (the first woman member of parliament): “If there were anything necessary to stop Italy in Abyssinia, it would be the application of oil sanctions. This Government repudiated the suggestion supposed to have been made by Canada’s representative at Geneva. Could there be anything more calculated to give assurance to Italy that Canada was not with the League than this attitude with respect to the application of sanctions? It was a matter of giving comfort to the enemy, and I say in doing so that Canada sabotaged the League.” To this unrelenting broadside King contented himself by saying that an oil sanction was merely “a suggestion of a committee of the League.” For some reason, he concluded the debate by reading to the House from Hamlet (a copy of which, he said, he happened to find in his pocket) the advice of Polonius to his son, Laertes, which includes “give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act … give every man thine ear, but few thy voice” (act 1, scene 3).

With the adoption of the defence estimates, King now felt better equipped to proceed to London for almost two months to revel in the pageantry of the coronation of King George VI, to be followed by the 1937 imperial conference and by his postponed visit to Germany. But first, in early March, when parliament was still in session, he took another fortnight holiday in the United States, this time at Virginia Beach. Overnight at the White House was the high point of his holiday, although Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and possibly others, regarded it as primarily an opportunity for the president to enlist “the American” as an advocate of tariff reductions, especially of imperial preferences, at the pending imperial conference.* Roosevelt and King also discussed King’s vague idea of a reconstructed League of Nations, which at least Italy might be enticed to rejoin, as well as the president’s equally vague idea of a universal conference for peace. (Churchill always regretted that Chamberlain had rejected this idea out of hand). On his return to Ottawa, King wrote to Roosevelt underscoring his “desire to co-operate in every way towards furthering the peace of the world”⁷² and offering to promote the common interests of the British Empire and the United States.

That was King’s message to Roosevelt. But with the British ambassador in Washington he had left a quite different impression. King incongruously employed terms that might be welcome to American interlocutors, but hardly to the British ambassador, who reported that he had said “that Canada was resolved to maintain neutrality in any war at any price, and that on no account would she be dragged into any hostilities … [an] attitude that corresponded very closely to that generally adopted in America.”73 If King did say that – and it is highly unlikely that the ambassador would have misunderstood him – it remains a puzzling statement. If he really did say that his government was resolved to maintain neutrality in any war at any price, he was directly contradicting himself. From 1923 he had repeatedly affirmed to the British government that if “a great and clear call of duty comes, Canada will respond, whether or not the United States responds.” Perhaps he had concluded that by presenting himself to the British ambassador as a neutralist, he could somehow enhance the chances of the United States and the United Kingdom each recognizing him as a valued interlocutor between them (they of course did not need him, being perfectly capable of speaking in the same tongue to each other). Intentionally or otherwise, King seems to have gotten his signals crossed.

While King was moving cautiously toward rebuilding Canada’s armed forces, guerilla resistance continued in Ethiopia. In 1938, Britain and France recognized the king of Italy as the emperor of Abyssinia, and not until June 1940, when Mussolini declared war on France and Great Britain, did the Ethiopian Free Forces begin to receive the military assistance that enabled them to re-enter Addis Ababa in May 1941.

*That same evening, Massey gave an after-theatre reception for the visiting prime minister. King shared a taxi to Massey’s residence with a young woman who he learned the next day was “a famous young movie star,” Ingrid Bergman.

*The degree to which the Duke of Windsor and his brother the Duke of Kent were disposed to Hitler’s regime remains unclear, the Royal Archives having been exempted from the British Freedom of Information Act of 2000. More specifically, information about the abdication crisis and about the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Hitler in 1937 remains closed. However, stills from a home cinema film of the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as young children and their mother, the future Queen Elizabeth, in a garden at Balmoral giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute following the example of their uncle, the future Edward VIII, have somehow become public (Guardian, 18 July, and Daily Telegraph, 19 July 2015).

*Pierre Berton, in The Great Depression, related that “In 1937 Euler was guest of honour on German Day in Kitchener. Euler agreed with other speakers who deprecated stories and articles critical of Germany and which instead of healing sores [tend] to keep up hatreds. The Minister declared that he sometimes thought that the publication of such propaganda should be made a criminal offence for newspapers” (464).

*The dislike was reciprocal. Baldwin once described Lloyd George as having “no bowels, no principles, no heart and no friends.”

*King did not see Cousandier again until Paris in August 1946, when he was immensely gratified that she had translated into Italian Emil Ludwig’s recently published sycophantic Mackenzie King: A Portrait Sketch. Near destitute at the end of the war, she pleaded with him to arrange for her a much-coveted clerical appointment as a local employee at the proposed Canadian Legation in Rome. For whatever reason, the coveted job did not materialize. King was, however, still writing to her, and to Julia Grant in Washington, from his deathbed in Ottawa in 1950.

*The Canadian public certainly had no idea of what the visit was about. Typically in an Ottawa press conference King was obfuscation itself. “He told the assembled reporters he was off to Washington to see FDR. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ a Quebec scribe asked. ‘To discuss the situation,’ King replied. ‘What situation?’ the reporter inquired. ‘Matters of mutual interest’ King answered. And that was the extent of it” (Levin, King, 267).