by Conrad Black
The U.S. Senate returned to the Treaty of Versailles, in light of its importance, in February 1920, but opinions had not softened on either side. Wilson was now too infirm to concentrate for more than a few minutes a day, and his wife, Edith, ran the government. If the vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, had declared Wilson incapacitated, the president would have attracted general sympathy, and Marshall and the secretary of state, Robert Lansing, would have got something through, and would have got the United States into the League, even with reservations. But Wilson forbade any public reference to his illness and seemed determined either to be sustained or to die for the cause. He was denied even this, and his career ended in tragedy and rejection.
Without official American continuance as a British and French ally, the peace would be very precarious. Britain and France, exhausted by their recent ordeal, were not fundamentally stronger than Germany and Russia, if the latter two were governed purposefully. Germany and Russia were even more dilapidated than their victorious enemies now, but in a few years it would be impossible to resurrect a balance of power in the world if Germany was in revanchist mode and at peace with Russia and the United States was disconnected from Europe.
The Allies had deployed 195,000 soldiers to Russia from 1918 to 1920, led by 70,000 Japanese, ostensibly to protect their interests, but really to seize an eastern chunk of Russia. The second largest contingent was Czechs, Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war whom the Bolshevik leaders released to return to the Western Front via Vladivostok to join the Western Allies against the Central Powers. Most of them did not embark and instead engaged in the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks. The British landed 40,000 men at Archangel and Murmansk to secure vast supplies that had been deposited there, and to assist the anti-communist White Russians in their struggle with the Bolsheviks. The United States sent 24,000 men, and there were French and Canadians and Greeks in the Caucasus as well. But the interventions were an uncoordinated shambles. The Western Powers left in 1920, having achieved nothing, and after the war the combination of Soviet military success and U.S. diplomatic pressure forced the Japanese back to their original frontiers in 1924.
Borden finally announced his retirement to his caucus on July 1 with a constructive and dignified address that was not in the least partisan or acerbic. He departed office as he had exercised it, a good, thorough, honest, and capable man, though somewhat unexciting and without the genius of national leadership of the complicated country he governed, though very amply endowed with executive competence and courage and patriotic sprit. He must be judged a successful and rather distinguished, but not a great or inspiring, prime minister. After consulting his cabinet colleagues quite intensively, as was necessary to extract a consensus, it was agreed that Arthur Meighen should succeed him, and he did, on July 10, 1920.
Arthur Meighen had just turned forty-six when he was installed as prime minister. He was five months older than Mackenzie King, and they had been at the University of Toronto together, where their relations were poor, as they remained. While they were both Presbyterians, Meighen was decisive and bold, and not subtle, either in his judgment or in his techniques as a leader. He tended to lay about him with a broadaxe, and was an effective debater and speaker, but he saw problems in essentially administrative rather than political terms. King had been returned to Parliament in a by-election in Prince Edward Island and congratulated Meighen on his election as party leader of the governing coalition (most of whose Liberal members withdrew, pointing to the end of the war and the retirement of Borden). King told his incredulous fellow members of Parliament that for him, personally, it was “a source both of pride and of pleasure” that Meighen had been elevated, a man “whose friendship [with King], through a quarter of a century, had survived the vicissitudes of time, not excepting the differences of party warfare and acrimonies of political debate.”10 This was bunk; they intensely disliked each other throughout those twenty-five years, and their mutual dislike would become much more intense in the nearly thirty years to come.
Meighen, as the leading parliamentarian after the death of Sir Wilfrid, and the chief parliamentary manager of Borden’s government, was indelibly identified in Quebec with conscription, and he was generally assumed to have little chance in the sixty-two mainly French-speaking constituencies of that province. While Henri Bourassa could hardly be said to speak for the whole province, his authenticity as a nationalist spokesman was notorious, and on Meighen’s elevation he wrote in Le Devoir, “Mr. Meighen typifies, in his person and temper, as may be gathered from the positions he took in the past and from his speeches, whatever Anglo-Saxon jingoism contains that is most brutal, exclusive, and anti-Canadian. His name is coupled to the most arbitrary and hateful measures passed by the Tory-Unionist government during the War.”11 The interplay between King and Meighen in debate was memorable, with King sanctimoniously speaking for a constituency to which Meighen was not easily accessible, and Meighen replying with savage causticity which entertained the legislators but did not win him any votes: “I am sure if any improvement of character or conduct on my part could be looked for as a result of the scolding from the Leader of the Opposition … I rise very much chastened and purified by it. I recognize the privilege of being given lessons in candour and honesty and frankness at the hands of my honourable friend.”12 (Meighen regarded King throughout their fifty-year acquaintance as an unmitigated scoundrel and hypocrite, an opinion which is not completely unjust, though the adjective is excessive.) Meighen delighted in exquisite denigrations of his opponent, such as “circuitous sinuosity.”13
Despite his forensic talents and parliamentary dexterity, Meighen was not very efficient at moving pending matters along, and he generally had a cloth ear for public opinion. He dithered on the matter of consolidating the Grand Trunk with other non–Canadian Pacific lines, and dithered on naming a Canadian minister in Washington, although two-thirds of the business of the British embassy in Washington was now conducted on behalf of Canada. At the London Empire Prime Ministers’ Conference that began on June 20, 1921, he was junior in years, and to some extent in prestige, to Lloyd George, Jan Smuts, Australia’s Billy Hughes, and even New Zealand’s William Massey (1856–1925, prime minister 1912–1925), but he spoke well and was adequately convivial. The chief issue was the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, which the British had negotiated when they had presciently seen the rise of Japan and moved to assure that Japan did not threaten British interests in the Far East. Australia and New Zealand, as Pacific countries, had the same interest, but Meighen saw it as a matter that threatened relations between the British Empire and the United States, which regarded Japan as a rival in the Pacific. Meighen faced off with Hughes, a bantam rooster, a former cow- and sheep-herder, farmer, cook, sailor, prospector, trapper, teacher, and labour organizer, and a powerful speaker.
Lord Curzon was now the British foreign secretary, and his compromise – to seek a conference with the United States, Japan, and China – was reckoned something of a victory for Meighen, as the Empire had acted in unison as Lloyd George and Smuts had proposed, and the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, a potential vexation to the United States, lapsed. Canada was always America’s most reliable advocate in Imperial circles. Out of this grew the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference. The net effect of that conference was to deprive the Western Allies (the British, French, and Americans) of twenty capital ships that would have been useful in future conflicts such as in convoy protection and support for amphibious landings in the next world war. Since the German navy had scuttled itself in Scapa Flow under the gaze of the British in 1919, and the Russians weren’t invited and didn’t have much of a navy anyway, it was an orgy of self-enfeeblement by the victorious Allied powers, compounded by the fact that the Japanese ignored the agreement’s limits, and all the powers eventually cheated on the tonnages of battleships, as even the British, Americans, and French exceeded the thirty-five-thousand-ton limit for new battleships when the time came to build them (the King George v, Washingto
n, and Richelieu classes, as well as the German Bismarck and Italian Vittorio Veneto ships). It was impossible even to verify the tonnages of huge ships that required years to construct, and arms control would become steadily more complicated as the delivery systems became smaller, and easier to hide, in the missile age. The Americans, in the Washington Naval Treaty, submersed themselves in the euphoric nonsense that they were contributing importantly to world peace without surrendering sovereignty as they would have had they subscribed to the League of Nations. Meighen was ultimately correct: it was better to stay close to the United States than to rely on the good faith of Japan.
The American Republican leaders – including the new president, Warren G. Harding; the secretary of state and previous Republican presidential candidate, Charles Evans Hughes; and influential anti-League senators such as William Edgar Borah and Henry Cabot Lodge – thought that with such gestures they could keep faith with the isolationists while usurping the clothes of the Wilson Democrats as peacemakers and internationalists. (Theodore Roosevelt had died in 1919, aged sixty. Had he lived, he would have been nominated and elected, and it would have been a different and better world with him leading the United States through the early 1920s.) Meighen returned to Canada on August 6, and greeted the new governor general, Lord Byng of Vimy, the popular former commander of the Canadian Corps in France, on August 10.
By their imposition of conscription, the Conservatives had almost made Canada a one-party state for the next two generations; the new Liberal leader – though very eccentric, not very companionable, and strangely inaccessible to public affection – would, as decades succeeded each other, and to say the least, make the most of the Conservatives’ grievous political miscalculation over conscription.
2. Mackenzie King I: A Canadian Phenomenon, 1921–1926
The political omens for the Conservatives were unpromising not only in Quebec. Meighen was a very vulnerable leader politically, as he was known in Quebec as the legislator who drafted and managed the Conscription Bill, and to the working people of the country as the man who had prosecuted and imprisoned the leaders of the general strike that had been briefly unleashed in Winnipeg in 1919, while Westerners disliked him for his support for high tariffs to favour the Eastern manufacturing industries. He was oblivious to the currents of popular opinion and imagined that the winning point in a debate before a learned forum would carry the country. He thought he could embarrass King with his inelegant straddle on tariffs, from hints of opposition to the tariff in the West, where lower prices on manufactured goods were sought, and measured support for retention of the tariff in Ontario and Quebec, which sought protection for their manufacturing jobs. King was easy to offend but almost impossible to embarrass. He waffled about a tariff for revenue, using that as a smokescreen to disguise his meaning (which wasn’t clear even after scrutiny of his laborious diary).
When the election campaign came, since Meighen had already lost Quebec and the West, the chief contest was in Ontario, where there were eighty-two constituencies. On election day, December 6, 1921, King voted early, spent much of the day praying on his knees before the portrait of his mother which he employed for idolatrous as well as decorative purposes (a light shone on it every minute of every day), and calculated the result, which came in early. The Conservatives elected only 49 MPs, most in Ontario, and Meighen was defeated in his own Manitoba constituency of Portage la Prairie. The farmers’ Progressive Party, was, if it wished it, the official Opposition with 58 MPs, and King was the prime minister-elect with 118 seats, including all 65 in Quebec and his own restored constituency of York North. From the Conservative–Liberal Unionist total of 1917, the Conservatives lost two-thirds of their seats, or 104 MPs, and almost half their popular support, which declined from 57 per cent to 30 per cent. The Liberals gained 2.3 per cent and 36 MPs, 33 of them outside Quebec, so most of the Liberals’ gains were the return of the Liberal Unionists. Most of Meighen’s losses were to the angry Progressives, who came from nowhere to take 21 per cent of the vote. Fortunes had reversed themselves dramatically: where four years before the Liberals had been split, largely on English-French lines over conscription, now the traditional Conservatives were split between agrarian reformers and free-traders, and Eastern industrial middle-class voters and protectionists. Ernest Lapointe was a deft Quebec strategist for King, and Meighen was alone and adrift in terms of political support, apart from the ancient commercial Tories of Ontario. To some degree, it must be said, Meighen was taking the bullet for Borden on the conscription issue, except that Meighen had been an even more fervent supporter of the measure than Borden had.
Three weeks before the election, Lady Laurier had died and had left her husband’s home, the three-storey yellow-brick Laurier House in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill district on Laurier Avenue East, to King. The property was in disrepair and needed about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of restoration. King’s “fairy godfather,” as he called him, the tea executive Peter Larkin, set up a forty-thousand-dollar fund for King – as he had a hundred-thousand-dollar fund for Laurier – from which King could renovate and decorate and re-furnish Sir Wilfrid’s house. King did this, including the installation of an elevator, and took up residence in January 1923. Lady Laurier’s motive in leaving the house to him was not any great affection for King, but a desire to return it to the Liberal Party which had (at the urging of Clifford Sifton in 1897) bought it for Laurier for $9,500. Larkin was rewarded for his largesse on this and other occasions with the high commission in London (succeeding Galt, Tupper, Strathcona, and Sir George Perley). Larkin went on a few years later, with Sir Herbert Holt, president of the Royal Bank of Canada and of the Montreal Light, Heat and Power Company, and others, to set up a fund of $225,000 for King, and $100,000 for Lapointe. (Such arrangements in modern times would have been political suicide.)
Once in office, King did not surprise. “There was nothing of Henry V about [him]; no one can imagine him leading his dear friends once more into the breach or closing the wall up with his Liberal dead.”14 He perfected his techniques of gradualism and compromise, and concentrated on consolidating what he held and pitching to the Progressives and other elements, always trying to strengthen the centre and add elements to his coalition. The Progressive Party leader, Thomas Crerar (1876–1975), had become a farmers’ leader through his prominence in the Manitoba Grain Growers’ Association, and was appointed to Borden’s cabinet in 1917 as a Unionist minister of agriculture and then elected to Parliament. He quit the government in 1919 in protest against Meighen’s protectionist policies. King foretold that Crerar would have no interest in being leader of the Opposition, and Crerar’s large bloc of MPs was completely unorganized and had just grown suddenly like a mushroom, with no unifying or organizing force except militant agrarian discontent. King tried hard to attract Crerar and the United Farmers premier of Ontario, Ernest Drury, to join his government, but was not quite successful on this occasion. The strong men of King’s government, apart from the deceptive and enigmatic King himself and Ernest Lapointe, were Sir Lomer Gouin, the almost Napoleonic apogee of confidence as premier of Quebec from 1905 to 1920, and William S. Fielding, back in 1921 as minister of finance, as he had been from 1896 to 1911. Given Gouin’s power in Quebec, King reluctantly prevailed on Lapointe to allow Gouin to take justice while Lapointe settled for marine and fisheries. King and Lapointe had already opened an intimate political relationship that included going together to Sir Wilfrid’s grave in Ottawa to pledge loyalty to their late chief. Gouin was a Montreal area politician. He was closely allied to Montreal’s big business interests, including Holt’s power company, while Lapointe was a Quebec City and eastern Quebec representative, where there was much more sympathy with tariff reduction and other measures that King judged necessary to win over the Progressives and solidify his countrywide majority.
King stretched his coalition by opposing an amendment that would have prevented cabinet members from being company directors, a sacrifice that would have been
intolerable to Gouin in 1922. (When he retired after fifteen years as premier of Quebec in 1920, Gouin said he would rather have been president of the Bank of Montreal, of which he had been a director while premier.) King began espousing and enacting a relatively independent foreign policy opposite Great Britain, and produced a stream of small concessions to the Western farmers. Rumours were rife that there was a serious rift between King and Gouin at the summit of the party. Gouin and Fielding opposed any softening of the tariff, any concession of federal control of their natural resources to the Western provinces, and they opposed King’s proposal to bury Sir Wilfrid’s ill-considered Grand Trunk Railway inside the newly nationalized Canadian National Railways. King showed great political acumen and infinite patience in appearing, and it was more than a semblance, the voice of executive moderation and conciliation in advocating these measures while gradually backing Gouin and Fielding into a reactionary corner. (Fielding opposed Canadian independence from Great Britain, composed his own Imperial solidarity wording for “O Canada,” and objected to the Red Ensign as a naval flag that appeared to be a communist banner. He was not really presentable in the postwar political climate.) Difficult though it is to think of Mackenzie King in these terms, it was providential that he took the Liberal leadership. Canada entering the 1920s and choosing either Meighen’s brand of reaction or Fielding’s would have made it a terminally sober country, and given it a government without much place for the French Canadians.
Another splendid opportunity was handed to King by Meighen in September 1922, when a dispute arose between Turkey and Great Britain at Chanak (Çanakkale), near the Dardanelles, where the Turkish army threatened what was designated by end-of-war arrangements as temporarily neutral territory under British control. King learned from a reporter on September 16, 1922, that the British government was publicly calling for troops from the dominions to help Britain subdue Turkey. The next day, the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, cabled King a request for the immediate dispatch of Canadian forces for deployment to Turkey for possible combat. King was understandably annoyed at this peremptory requisition from the British for the commitment of combat forces in a matter that did not really threaten Britain and the cause of which was unknown to Canada. (It was in fact traceable to ham-fisted British excess in trying to bully a proud and still formidable former adversary, now led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, probably the world’s premier statesman in the early 1920s.) There was in this British backsliding into thinking of the dominions, including India, as just a ready reserve for the satisfaction of British manpower needs, with no consultation or community of interest or policy development at all, an eerie echo of the tenacious and devious resistance to responsible government in Canada seventy-five to ninety years before. All of this had been settled. King instantly improvised a method of dealing with it that typified his genius for instinctively laying his hands on the way to reassure his followers, avoid inflaming his enemies, and sweep up the moderate centre: Canada would not go to war, in this instance or any other, without the approval of Parliament. This wasn’t betrayal of the Mother Country, was completely consistent with Canadian independence, and imposed a cooling-off period of whatever duration King selected, since only he could decide when Parliament could determine any issue. King lamented in his diary that “the fate of the Empire is … in the hands of a man like Churchill.” (Ten years later, Churchill, on a visit to Canada, acknowledged that he should not have made a public declaration without ministerial consultation.15 Ten years after that, they would be amicably shouldering mighty burdens together.)
