Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  King’s conclusions on Hitler, for his diary, were that he was “really one who truly loves his fellowmen, and his country, and would make any sacrifice for their good.… He feels himself a deliverer of his people from tyranny.” King made allowance for Hitler’s disadvantaged youth and imprisonment: “It is truly marvelous what he has attained unto himself through his self-education. He reminded me quite a little of Cardin in his quiet way.” Hitler had “the face of a calm passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest.… There is a liquid quality about [Hitler’s eyes] which indicate keen perception and profound sympathy.” After the end of the interview and Hitler’s presentation to King of a framed and autographed photograph of himself, one of Hitler’s aides told King how many Germans regarded Hitler as a god, but that Hitler discouraged that and only wished to be thought a humble and ordinary man.62

  Mackenzie King was an intelligent and, up to a point, a worldly man, but he was completely deceived and hoodwinked by the German leader, who must, with his entourage, have reflected on the conversation – King’s book about himself and pretense to knowing Germany and so forth – with considerable mirth. King did not know his limitations; fortunately, the West had more exalted office-holders in larger and more powerful countries who would eventually handle relations with Germany. Hitler and his coterie must have been deeply gratified by the success of the snow job they conducted on a fairly close associate, if not confidant, of the American and British leaders. For an embarrassingly long time, King cherished not only this idolatrous image of the German dictator, but professed to find in him a fellow spiritualist and a kindred follower of “the worship of the highest purity in a mother.… I believe the world will yet come to see a very great man in Hitler.”63 Not even Chamberlain and his entourage were much overpowered by Hitler as an individual. Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s special representative, thought him “a draper’s assistant,” and recalled, “I didn’t like his eyes; I didn’t like his mouth. In fact, there wasn’t very much I did like about him.” The foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, at first meeting, almost handed him his hat.64 It was in this beatific, almost gelatinous, haze of unfounded optimism that Mackenzie King somnambulated into the year of Munich, the apotheosis of appeasement.

  6. Mackenzie King IV: The Descent to War, 1938–1940

  In Canada, as the shattered official Opposition staggered back to its feet and dusted itself off and took stock of the political rubble about it, the opposition to the federal government from the largest and most activist provinces increased. The conventional Liberal wisdom holds that Hepburn, Aberhart, and Duplessis were birds of a feather, wild men, opportunists, quacks, or degenerates, demagogues all, assaulting in their bumptious and barbarous ways the citadel of Liberal federal good government. This is inaccurate, and the three were far from identical apart from their reservations about King’s attitude to the federal-provincial distribution of powers. Hepburn and Duplessis and their predecessors going back twenty years had chafed under the federal government’s refusal to authorize exports of hydroelectric power. King had seriously irritated Duplessis by refusing authority for the sale of electricity from a Quebec power company to the Aluminum Company of America in Pittsburgh. Hepburn had had similar problems, and in 1937 had legislated a provincial right to sell power to the United States from the provincially owned Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. In a different category was William Aberhart’s attempt to regulate and direct, by provincial executive order, the conduct of banking in Alberta, to enact the Social Credit redirection of the earnings of lending and deposit-taking institutions to people of modest incomes. It was clearly a trespass in the British North America Act jurisdiction of federally chartered banking. And in yet another category was Duplessis’s response to considerable anti-communist agitation following the revelation of the massacre of priests and nuns in the Spanish Civil War, which was to pass a law authorizing the provincial attorney general, who was Duplessis himself, to close (“padlock”) a building used for the dissemination of (undefined) communist propaganda. The act, generally known as the Padlock Law, did not authorize the detention of anyone or the seizure of real property, just the closure of buildings and confiscation of designated communist propaganda. It was a gesture, a play to the ultra-Catholic gallery, and was not acted on for four months, until November 9, 1937, when the offices of the communist newspaper Clarté were locked, as was the home of the communist leader in Quebec, Jean Peron, and some allegedly subversive literature was trundled away, all to popping flashbulbs. It was a shabby business, to be sure, though no one was prosecuted and nothing of value was seized. But it led to immense agitation for the federal government to exercise its right of disavowal of the Padlock Law, as there was consideration of the same drastic measure in respect of Hepburn’s electricity and Aberhart’s banking legislation.

  King and Lapointe had no difficulty striking down Aberhart’s foray into banking as ultra vires to the provincial Legislature. They let Hepburn’s legislation go without comment. With Duplessis, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society and other Quebec Catholic organizations crowded the federal justice minister’s anterooms as insistently as did the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, headed by McGill law dean Frank R. Scott (co-author of the 1932 Regina Manifesto advocating nationalization of banks and transport and strict regulation of the private sector), and a long queue of reform and labour groups. Left and right awaited Lapointe and King’s decision, which had to be made by July 8, 1938. The draconian measure of disavowal was not resorted to; Lapointe sagely noted that the majority of those demanding disavowal were from outside Quebec. The government had one MP in Alberta, fifty-six in Ontario, and sixty in Quebec; slapping Aberhart around was fun, especially when his measure was clearly unconstitutional, but overruling Hepburn could be dangerous, and attacking Duplessis on an issue like this in the middle of the Spanish Civil War could be a mortal error. Electoralism has its rights. Aberhart had a following in rural Alberta before it was a rich province. Hepburn was a fuse burning at both ends. But Duplessis was replacing Bourassa as Quebec’s principal spokesman, and he would be in power fifteen years after Aberhart and Hepburn were gone. He would redefine federalism, and King and Lapointe saw him coming and were wary of what he could do in years that they would not live to see.

  At a Congrès de la Langue Française in Quebec City in June 1937, the very capable and bilingual governor general, Lord Tweedsmuir, extolled the virtues of French, and nationalist academic clergyman Lionel Groulx gave a virtually separatist speech that greatly irritated Cardinal Villeneuve, but Tweedsmuir credited Duplessis in a letter to King with a “very courageous speech” attacking separatism.65

  In response to the financial embarrassment of several of the provinces staggering under the weight of depression welfare and support payments and programs, King set up in 1937 the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, better known as the Rowell-Sirois Commission (after Ontario Supreme Court justice and former Liberal Unionist cabinet member Newton Rowell and prominent Quebec notary Joseph Sirois), to investigate fiscal and spending reforms to modernize Confederation. It would report in 1940.

  In March 1938, as Göring had presaged to King, Hitler annexed his native Austria. There had been a contentious meeting between Hitler and the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, an irresolute, pious little mouse of a man who was terrorized almost into insensibility by the Hitler King did not see, one who irrigated his chin screaming threats at his Austrian analogue while shaking his fist over Schuschnigg’s head. When the Austrian escaped Hitler’s presence and announced a referendum, this was seen by Hitler as an intolerable provocation, and Germany invaded Austria in overwhelming strength, to no resistance and a delirious welcome, which left little doubt that the majority wished Austria to be subsumed seamlessly into Hitler’s absolute Teutonic and martial dictatorship. Hitler gave a fiery speech from a balcony of the Imperial Hotel (where, twenty-five years before, he had swept the steps and floors for the comings and goings of the grandees of
the Habsburg capital) to delirious cries of Nazi fidelity from the crowd packed beneath him. Britain and France declined even to protest. Mussolini, who had prevented Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1934, approved it in 1938. Germany was on the march.

  Mackenzie King, like much of the rest of the world, lived through the Czech and Sudeten crisis in extreme tension. Franklin D. Roosevelt had started his subtle campaign to stiffen resistance to the dictators in Chicago in October 1937, when he told a huge audience that aggressive states should be “quarantined,” which he only loosely defined. He followed up when receiving an honorary degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, on August 18, 1938, saying that “the Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.” It had been unthinkable that the United States would tolerate a foreign attack upon Canada, but it was a welcome formalization, and a fine turn of the historic wheel when an American takeover threat had once been a frequent and justified fear, requiring steady massaging of the British to encourage their deterrence of the Americans. King replied a few days later that Canada would assure that “our country is made as immune from attack or possible invasion as … can reasonably be expected … and that enemy forces should not be able to pursue their way by land, sea, or air to the United States across Canadian territory.”66

  King was one of those who took up Roosevelt’s phrase about “not standing idly by” and began to apply it a bit randomly. Thus, when Hitler raised a mighty war cry about restoring the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia to the Reich and breaking up the state of Czechoslovakia, King, who was suffering an attack of sciatica as the Sudeten crisis reached its peak in late September 1938, wanted to issue a statement that “Canada will not stand idly by and see modern civilization ruthlessly destroyed.” King thought that “the issue [of a Canadian commitment] is one of the great moral issues of the world.”67 This was his usual rather narcissistic perspective on world affairs, as his proposed declaration would not have much enlightened anyone, and it is not obvious what possessed him to attach such world-shaking moral significance to what Canada did, but it was unusual for him to wish to get out in front on such an issue, especially so grandiloquently. It was a difficult problem even morally, because the British and French and Canadians could not go to war to prevent Sudetenlanders from becoming German if that was what they wished to do (as they apparently did). But Hitler had no business giving ultimatums, seeking to crush the rather successful and thoroughly democratic state of Czechoslovakia and threatening to plunge all Europe into war.

  Chamberlain made three visits to Germany in September 1938, the last announced as he was bringing the House of Commons and the world, by special radio connection, up to date on Hitler’s threat to mobilize, with the parliamentary galleries full, including the dowager Queen Mary and the son of the U.S. ambassador, the twenty-one-year-old John F. Kennedy. (The world would not hold its breath again in a war crisis until Kennedy ably led the United States through the Cuban missile crisis twenty-four years later.) As Chamberlain was reaching the end of his summary on September 28, 1938, Hitler’s reply to his latest message came in and was handed down the treasury bench to him. The prime minister paused to read it; there was absolute silence for almost five minutes of nearly unendurable tension, and then Chamberlain told the House that Hitler had postponed his order of mobilization and had invited him, French premier Édouard Daladier, and Mussolini to confer with him the following day at Munich. He said, “I will go to see what I can do as a last resort.” An emotional scene ensued as even Queen Mary, who was far from a tactile person, clutched the hands and forearms of those around her in relief. Czechoslovakia was dismembered, and Chamberlain returned to London from Munich quoting Disraeli’s “peace with honour” after his great victory at Bismarck’s Congress of Berlin in 1878, which Chamberlain remembered as a child. Chamberlain should not have raised hopes so high and been so triumphalist, and should not have acquiesced in the subsequent assaults on the stricken Czechs by Poland and Hungary. Winston Churchill led a small parliamentary opposition, claiming, “You had to choose between war and shame. You chose shame and you will get war.” (At Chamberlain’s first visit to Hitler, at Berchtesgaden on September 14, King was a little swift out of the starting blocks to praise Chamberlain: “It is well … for the world that [Chamberlain] was born in to it. His name will go down in history as one of the greatest men that ever lived – a great conciliator.”68) Hitler soon turned on Poland, singling it out like a lion selecting an antelope and then making blood-curdling speeches threatening war and terrorizing the target country. Roosevelt privately doubted that the Munich Agreement would hold; Stalin gave up on the British and French and began thinking of composing his differences with Hitler, who, even as he took aim at Poland, also set his gaze on the rump state of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czechs he had promised not to assault further.

  In the meantime, on November 7, 1938, a Polish Jew in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan, shot and killed the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris, and under the incitements of German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo chiefs Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the infamous Kristallnacht, the night of shattered glass, occurred, in which scores of Jews were killed, thousands injured, and two hundred synagogues burned. Exactly forty years later, the distinguished Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt, said at the Cologne synagogue, “We meet at the place and on the anniversary of the beginning of our national descent into hell.” Germany would take almost all Europe and much of the world with it into hell. Roosevelt withdrew his ambassador from Berlin, and Hitler withdrew his from Washington before he could be expelled. (The ambassador, the very capable Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, competent despite being Ribbentrop’s brother-in-law, warned Hitler that Roosevelt would take a third term as president and use his position as commander-in-chief to provoke a naval war with Germany.) A few days later, Roosevelt gave a filmed and internationally broadcast address which included the passage “There can be no peace if the reign of law is to be replaced by the recurrent sanctification of sheer force. There can be no peace if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the threat of war. There can be no peace if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the dispersion all over the world of millions of helpless wanderers with no place to lay their heads.”69

  King was no philo-Semite; he was concerned lest Jews become his neighbours at his country home at Kingsmere, Quebec. He referred to black-skinned people as “darkies,” was no torchbearer for complete social integration or explicit notions of racial equality, and was not initially much concerned at Nazi anti-Semitism. But he was a sincere Christian, and he was jolted out of moral complacency by the pogroms of Kristallnacht. He wrote, “The sorrows which the Jews have to bear at this time are almost beyond comprehension.… Something will have to be done by our country.”70 He was no swifter than usual determining what would be done, but the thought was there. Quebec especially, including Lapointe more than Duplessis, opposed Jewish immigration, and King declined to accept any, even though the Canadian Jewish community undertook to provide entirely for up to ten thousand immigrants. Roosevelt called for a conference on Jewish immigration on March 25, 1938, which led to the Évian Conference, where a number of Latin American countries and the Danes, Dutch, and Australians responded quite generously, but the rest of the Western democracies, including Canada and the United States, did not. The same night Roosevelt spoke, Hitler addressed a large crowd in Königsberg and, as usual, quickly exposed the flabby underside of Western democratic posturing. He hoped that “those who have such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews] will be generous enough to convert this sympathy to practical aid.” He was prepared to evacuate the Jews to these solicitous countries “on luxury liners.” In the end, Roosevelt did fairly well for the Jews, taking over 120,000 refugees despite political unpopularity; he
did much of it after war had begun but before the United States was involved. King, like most Canadians (and Americans), sympathized but didn’t feel moved or able to do much, although his conscience stirred him at the end of November 1938 to urge the cabinet to see the issue “from the way in which this nation will be judged in years to come.” He expressed his faith in “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men” and the moral requirement to be “the conscience of the nation” and not just do what was “politically most expedient.”71 Lapointe and the other Quebec ministers would not be moved, and King declined to force the issue. It was a shameful response, but at least King had the decency to know it and repent it, and Hitler performed a minor service in exposing the cowardice and hypocrisy of many Western liberals.

  A particularly contemptible and heart-rending example of the problem, in which Canada played a discreditable cameo role, was furnished by the unhappy episode of the St. Louis, a German ship that sailed from Hamburg in May 1939 with 937 passengers, mainly Jews who had bought visas for landing in Cuba. When the ship arrived in Cuba, it was discovered that the Cubans had retroactively revoked the visas to enter their country. The captain, Gustav Schröder, was a heroic champion of his passengers. He even allowed them to put a bed sheet over a statue of Hitler in the dining room while they performed Friday religious services. The problem apparently was that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York refused to pay the customary bribes to the Cuban admission authorities. The St. Louis cruised northwards, and Canada, because of the fierce agitation of King’s French-Canadian ministers, followed the American lead in not letting it in. The Americans at least lobbied others to admit them. Captain Schröder refused to bring his ship home until he had found a port for his passengers. (He was eventually declared a righteous gentile and is remembered at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.) Finally, he disembarked his passengers at Antwerp, from where some were accepted into Belgium, some into the Netherlands, some into France, and 288 into Britain. Of the 937, 22 were accepted into Cuba, and subsequently about 250 perished in the Holocaust, but the rest survived. The United States at least admitted almost a quarter of Germany’s Jews. Canada’s record was contemptible. The time was at hand for Mackenzie King not to “stand idly by” and to highlight the “great moral issue of the world” of Canada’s proposed action to prevent “modern civilization” from being “ruthlessly destroyed,” but he was not over-prompt to recognize it. That was what all the world’s leaders had to contemplate as 1938 limped to an end.