by Conrad Black
It is easy to mock the swift evolution of the Canadian leader’s views, from rhapsodizing about Hitler’s “profound sympathy” to seeing him as one who would “ruthlessly crush” civilization, in just fifteen months. If he was not as clear-sighted as Roosevelt and Churchill, he was well ahead of Chamberlain and even Lord Halifax. With a little perspective, it is easy to see the deadly roller coaster the world was on. Even so decent and moderate a man as Robert Borden spoke of the Germans as “barbarous” in 1918, and almost all the hard-liners of 1918 in Britain and France and Canada craved peace at any affordable price in the mid-1930s. And within a few months of Munich and its disappointments, most were resigned to the inevitability and the practical and moral need for war: a Manichaean finishing of the terrible task begun in 1914. It was impossible to negotiate or compromise with the enemies of civilization; they had to be destroyed or they would destroy civilization and impose a new Dark Age. Incredibly, and almost instantly, the culture of Goethe and Beethoven had been completely seduced by the severe, crisply uniformed discipline, the mighty pagan festivals, the Wagnerian folk mythos, and the uncontradicted demagogy of a satanic leader. The German people consented to a complete surrender of free will and the gift of the life of all Germany to their führer’s disposition in the cause of the Fatherland; and the West was dividing between Hitler’s sympathizers and those who were grimly prepared to die to prevent his triumph. King was not the most astute judge of onrushing events or supreme personalities, but he was in a class of his own as a survivor, an epochal chameleon, fitting in and holding his position no matter how the world turned and what upheavals beset and uprooted others. Like a magic visitor from another world, he looked impassively and expressed his astonishment in his diary, his prayers, and his exchanges with the spirits in his upstairs room. His methods are susceptible to skepticism or even derision, but his almost uninterrupted objective success is not.
On January 16, 1939, King abruptly declared, to the chagrin of Lapointe and his own entourage, including Skelton and his chief secretary, Jack Pickersgill, that “if England is at war we are at war and liable to attack.… I do not say that we will always be attacked, [or] that we would take part in all the wars of England.” This time, King was right and his collaborators mistaken; it was time to prepare the country for the impending facts and to close the book on Raoul Dandurand’s outworn parable about a fireproof house far from danger. On January 19, King wrote a rather obsequious letter to Hitler, fancying that he might influence the course of world history, but also, very sensibly, urging, “regardless of what others may wish, or say, or do, you will … see the resolve not to let anything imperil or destroy what you have already accomplished.” It was a prophetic exhortation.
On March 15, the elephantine vice chancellor Göring chased the Czechoslovak president, Emil Hácha, around a desk in his Berlin office whence Hácha had been summoned, demanding he sign a request for the military occupation by Germany of Bohemia. Hácha fainted, but when he was revived, he semi-consciously signed the paper and the German army occupied Bohemia and Moravia at once, encountering no resistance but a clearly frigid reception from the Czechs. This was the turning point. Ernest Lapointe now recognized that war was inevitable and that King had been correct in what he had said on January 19. King, however, was more concerned about being taken for granted by Chamberlain, and on March 30 he gave one of his monotonous monologues about how Parliament would decide and each set of circumstances would be examined on its facts; all conscient Canadians could recite the formula like a catechism by now, having heard it for almost twenty years. Lapointe followed King with his own speech stating that King was correct of course, that in a war with a belligerent Germany, Canada would have, as a moral duty of a sovereign state and not by being dragged by Imperial apron strings, to join the fight for humanity, but that he would not be associated with a government that tried to impose conscription. This was intended, and taken, as a pledge by the King-Lapointe government that there would not be conscription. Between them, six months in advance of events, King and Lapointe had found the formula for national unity in a war that suddenly seemed imminent. Roosevelt was improvising with genius to assist the democracies and break a tradition as old as the republic and seek a third term. Stalin was craftily preparing for a change of direction that would astound the world. But apart from Hitler, whose course was clear and being pursued relentlessly, the leader who had now most carefully prepared for the gathering crisis was King.
The next day, Chamberlain made the most fatal and unnecessary of all his many tragic errors: he unilaterally guaranteed the borders of Poland and Romania, dragging France, and, as he assumed, the Commonwealth, with him, to audible groans of irritation and demurral from Laurier House and muffled sounds of incredulity from the White House. It was obvious that Britain and France were not strong enough to contain Germany in Europe. Britain could probably defend its home islands, as it had by far the most powerful navy in the world except for the United States (whose parity it had accepted at the Washington Conference, quite unnecessarily), and it had a serious air force. But no reputable military analyst could imagine that a Germany now fortified by snapping up Austria and the Czechs, and led by a mad but brilliant warlord instead of the neurotic and erratic kaiser, if it was not at war in the east, could be held on the Rhine by France, however effective the heavily fortified Maginot Line, along France’s eastern frontier (an engineering marvel but a misconceived dedication of resources in the emerging era of air and mechanized war). The only powers who could resurrect the balance in Europe were the United States and the U.S.S.R. Roosevelt would do what he could, but the United States had not repudiated Wilson and ducked out of the League of Nations in order to go back to war in Europe. Stalin was all that was left, and the way to entice him was not to guaranty Poland, a shabby anti-Semitic dictatorship that had no call on the loyalty of the British, much less the Canadians, or even the French, despite the role France played in protecting Poland from the Bolsheviks (including the gallant Verdun veteran Captain Charles de Gaulle) in 1920 and 1921.
On May 17, 1939, at Wolfe’s Cove in Quebec, Their Imperial Britannic Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth descended the gangplank of the Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Australia (built originally as the Hamburg America Line Tirpitz and requisitioned in 1916 as a royal yacht by Kaiser Wilhelm II to receive the surrender of Allied navies that never happened). They were starting a one-month tour of Canada with a side trip of a few days to the United States. It was the first time a reigning British monarch had visited either country and was generally seen as a visit to raise morale and Commonwealth solidarity in Canada on the eve of war, and, in the United States, to make the most important try at British royal diplomacy since Edward VII’s 1903 visit to Paris to seal the Entente Cordiale. Roosevelt had invited the king and queen when informed by Mackenzie King that they were coming to Canada, because he was trying to outmanoeuvre the isolationists in his country and promote closer Anglo-American relations. Roosevelt had been rebuffed by Chamberlain, who declined an invitation to visit the United States and responded so brusquely to the president’s invitation to a summit conference of the great powers on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the First World War (rewriting the permanent undersecretary’s draft to make it haughtier) that his reply, along with his determination to make further overtures to Mussolini to draw him away from Hitler, provoked Anthony Eden’s abrupt resignation as foreign secretary in February 1938.
There had been fears that the monarchs might not be well-received in Quebec, but Lapointe, Duplessis, and Camillien Houde, in his fourth term as mayor of Montreal, were united in their wish that the king and queen be treated with respect. Quebec’s primate and archbishop, the formidable Cardinal Villeneuve, called upon the Roman Catholic population to receive the exalted visitors with “respect and rejoicing.”72 The mystique of the British Crown was immense, and nowhere more so than in Quebec, given the battles fought there in its name. Mackenzie King and Lapointe
met the king and queen in their Windsor uniforms with ostrich-plumed hats. Duplessis, in his address of greeting at the Legislative Assembly, said that “never shall we cease to consider the Throne as the bulwark of our democratic institutions and our constitutional liberties.”73 King claimed that Duplessis “had nothing intelligent to say all day.” That was a bit rich, given some of King’s gems, such as his parting “God, I believe, has chosen you for a work which no other persons in the world can perform, and I believe you can.”74 Houde helped arrange a mighty welcome in Montreal, and the entire visit to Canada and the United States, nowhere more than in Quebec, was an immense success. King even surpassed Duplessis in his deference to the monarchs. He had them to lunch at Laurier House, and the queen and King’s Irish terrier, Pat, took to each other. King showed his guests his library and the portrait of his mother reading John Morley’s The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, a light always on her, and recorded in his diary that he “was prepared to lay my life at their feet in helping to further great causes which they had at heart.”75 King accompanied them on the rest of their trip. He was convinced that when the King’s Plate, Canada’s premier horse race, was won by George McCullagh, the owner of the anti–Mackenzie King Toronto Globe and Mail, the race had been fixed by the Jockey Club.76
King was delighted that Roosevelt had requested that he, and not the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, be the king and queen’s accompanying minister in the United States. They went to Washington and New York and to the president’s home at Hyde Park, about eighty miles north of New York City. They were received everywhere very generously and made an excellent impression on Americans, who saw them as a completely unpretentious and attractive young couple and infinitely closer to American notions of government and society than the goose-stepping, precisely drilled, and uniformed masses of the Nazi dictatorship of Germany. It was, as Roosevelt had intended, an eye-opener for the American people, steeped in the mythology of the excesses of George III. Roosevelt took the king and queen on his yacht to George Washington’s home and grave at Mount Vernon (the first time the British royal standard and U.S. presidential standard had flown on the same vessel), and to a picnic at Hyde Park, where they ate hot dogs. FDR drove them himself to the little railway station near his home in the automobile made specially (by Henry Ford) for him with all the controls on the steering column to accommodate the fact that his legs were incapacitated by polio. Crowds on both banks of the Hudson sang “Auld Lang Syne,” and as the king and queen (and Mackenzie King) departed, the president called out, “Good luck; all the luck in the world.” George VI and Elizabeth returned to Britain on the magnificent forty-three-thousand-ton Canadian Pacific flagship Empress of Britain, one of the world’s great liners (and the greatest international bearer of Canada’s presence there has ever been), and ten weeks later Britain was at war.
Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a non-aggression pact on August 25, and the photograph of King’s friend Ribbentrop shaking hands with Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, startled the world. The British delegation that Chamberlain had finally sent to Moscow to try to improve relations with the Kremlin was still cooling its heels in the British embassy, having made little progress. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland in overwhelming strength on land and in the air. Great Britain and France honoured their guaranty to Poland and declared war on Germany on September 3, Chamberlain telling the world that “everything that I have worked for, hoped for, [and] believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins,” not an altogether uplifting call to arms. Winston Churchill, after ten years out of office, returned to government as first lord of the admiralty, the position he had held twenty-five years before at the outbreak of the First World War. King had known him well in the 1920s, and their relations were not cordial.
The United States recognized Canada as a neutral power as King summoned Parliament to decide Canada’s response to the European crisis, with no suspense about the outcome, but emphasizing that Canada would decide for itself whether it was at war or peace. On September 4, as King recorded in his diary, his shaving lather curled up like the swan in Wagner’s Siegfried, putting King in mind of Hitler, whom, he wrote, “like Siegfried has gone out to court death – hoping for the Valhalla – an immortality to be joined by death.”77 There were times, and this was one of them, when King’s culture, and his otherworldly speculations, produced analyses that would have eluded less esoterically romantic statesmen. No one will ever know what exactly were Hitler’s motivations, but King’s Wagnerian idea is as believable as any. Later that day, King was driven to Kingsmere where, with his friend Joan Patterson, he attended upon the spirits, who revealed that King’s father advised that Hitler had been shot dead by a Pole. When this turned out not to be the case, King concluded that he had been the victim of a “lying spirit,” a concept that must have made such consultations doubly hazardous.78
Parliament convened in special session on September 7, and that evening King met his cabinet and promised that there would be no conscription for overseas service, that he would resign first. He addressed Parliament the next day and was quite eloquent: “We stand for the defence of Canada; we stand for the cooperation of this country at the side of Great Britain.” He suggested that a Nazi attack was likely, since no other territory could possibly be as tempting to the German desire for natural resources and Lebensraum (room to live): “No … the ambition of this dictator is not Poland.… Where is he creeping to? … There is no other portion of the earth’s surface that contains such wealth as is buried here.”79 He neglected to hint how he thought Hitler would convey his invading army to Canadian shores (especially as the path across the ocean would be blocked by the world’s two greatest navies, deployed by Churchill and Roosevelt). Lapointe spoke immediately after King, as was customary, and said that “by doing nothing, by being neutral, we actually would be taking the side of Adolf Hitler.”80 He said that as most Canadians wanted to go to war to assist Britain, failure to do so to please a small group of (he implied) crypto-fascist isolationists would subvert democracy and incite civil, as opposed to foreign, war. Lapointe promised that there would be no conscription for overseas service, though there would be a voluntary expeditionary force. Canada declared war on Germany on September 10, with only a few Quebec MPs and J.S. Woodsworth, a pacifist, who retired as leader of the CCF on casting his negative vote, voting against. That night, King wrote of the faithful Pat, who abandoned his own bed to sleep with his master, after sharing some Ovaltine with him, “He seems completely conscious of what is going on.”81
Germany overran Poland, and the last resistance ended with the surrender of heroic Warsaw on September 27. The Soviet Union attacked, in accord with secret clauses in the non-aggression pact, in mid-month and occupied the eastern third of Poland almost without opposition, and seized Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia as well. These four countries had enjoyed just twenty years of self-government in many generations.
It was a smooth entry into war for Canada, but an unsuspected challenge arose on September 24 when Maurice Duplessis abruptly dissolved the Quebec Legislative Assembly for new elections on October 25. He was overwrought and generally intoxicated and was certainly drunk when he made the announcement at the LaSalle Academy in Trois-Rivières, where he imputed to King not only the intention to impose conscription but to subsume the government of Quebec into English Canada and to assimilate all French Canadians. It was, without naming the Durham Report, a Brobdingnagian leap backwards toward it. American neutrality legislation barred the American financial market to Quebec, which had just been denied a forty-million-dollar loan by the Bank of Canada (somewhat capriciously). The War Measures Act severely restricted Duplessis’s executive authority, and censors would now edit what was in the newspapers and on radio. Instead of adjusting to an immense international emergency and radically new conditions, and speaking in the higher interest of Quebec and Canada, as he should have, and as a later version of him would do, Duplessis
suffered an explosion of infantile rage, lost his judgment, acted under the influence of alcohol, and made the one terrible mistake of his career.
His imputation of motives to King was outrageous. Lapointe, Cardin, and Charles Gavan (“Chubby”) Power, the three elected Quebec federal ministers (along with Senator Dandurand), conferred and agreed on both the need to act and the opportunity. They took the position that they unconditionally guaranteed that there would not be conscription for overseas service, and that although the previous world war had led to conscription for overseas service, that was under the Conservatives and the injustice would not be repeated. They said that if Duplessis were re-elected on the defamatory and almost treasonable basis that he was seeking a renewal of Quebec’s confidence, they would all resign (including the venerable Dandurand, then seventy-nine) and leave Quebec defenceless against those who would impose conscription on the country and dispatch the sons of Quebec to foreign war. The full resources of the federal Liberal Party were thrown into the battle; Duplessis’s sources of funds evaporated; monied elements from across Canada contributed to the campaign of the provincial Liberal leaders, Joseph-Adélard Godbout and Télesphore-Damien Bouchard, powerful and progressive orators, and bankrolled a massive election tour by Lapointe, Cardin, Power, and many of the federal Liberal MPs. Potential financial supporters of Duplessis’s Union Nationale were warned of being blacklisted by the federal government with all its emergency powers. Duplessis’s conservative base was frightened off, and his former nationalist allies whom he had disembarked after the 1936 election did not rally to him. The only newspaper in the province that supported him was Henri Bourassa’s Le Devoir, which assured its readers that King would impose conscription. The bifurcation between the grandsons of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau, comrades in rebellion of a century before, could not be more radical. Le Devoir wrote, “With Godbout, Quebec would be a branch-plant of Ottawa; Quebec couldn’t live, think, or breathe.” The Liberal Le Soleil wrote, “What a satisfaction it would be for Hitler if a Nazi party triumphed in French Canada.” Lapointe, Cardin, Power, Godbout, Bouchard, and the other Liberals endlessly incanted that a vote for Duplessis was a vote for conscription and for Hitler. Maurice Duplessis was crushed by an insupportable weight of men and events that he had unwittingly brought down on himself.
