The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  King’s new glow seemed a metaphor for the nation. A dispirited people had suddenly discovered a hidden source of energy. The realm was a-flutter with flags of every size (one man in Toronto sold two million that summer), with miles of bunting and dozens of triumphal arches, one of which, in East Angus, Quebec, had required a million cords of lumber. The tour could only help a faltering economy. There was a brisk business in items ranging from rented top hats to cardboard periscopes. Cadbury’s, the chocolate people, devised a special medal; Seagram’s distilled an expensive whiskey, Crown Royal.

  The country was eager for a return to pomp and ceremony. In Vancouver, the new CCF mayor, Dr. Lyle Telford – the same man who had signed so many passport applications for the Spanish volunteers – decided for the first time to wear his purple robes and golden chain of office. Until this moment he had felt that they would appear too pretentious in a city overrun with jobless transients.

  By the time the royal couple returned to Vancouver from a boat trip to Victoria and headed east again – this time on the tracks of the government-owned CNR – the most jaundiced American newspapermen were turning out such effusive prose that the editor of one anti-British publication thought his man was drunk. The side trip to Washington and New York, which many thought more important than the entire Canadian tour, produced an even greater gush of enthusiasm.

  George VI and Franklin Roosevelt got along swimmingly, and Mackenzie King basked in their presence as the three sat around drinks in the drawing-room at Roosevelt’s mother’s Hyde Park estate and frankly discussed world affairs. “The King,” wrote the Prime Minister, “indicated he would never wish to appoint Churchill to any office unless it was absolutely necessary in time of war. I confess I was glad to hear him say that because I think Churchill is one of the most dangerous men I have ever known.” But King, who had once thought Roosevelt a dangerous man too, would soon be luxuriating in Churchill’s shadow.

  The Prime Minister was convinced that the British Embassy was snubbing him, but the diplomatic president made a point of including him in the talks and, in the diarist’s words, “told the King repeatedly that he and I understood each other perfectly and worked together on all matters of mutual relationship.” The British, including the King, had wanted Lord Halifax as Minister in Attendance, but Roosevelt said, “Mackenzie and I know each other so well I was most anxious he should come.” Roosevelt had made much of the fact that he and King were on a first-name basis. Actually, the President was the only man in the world who called the Prime Minister “Mackenzie.”

  King himself was in a near delirium over this cosy relationship. The real significance of the side trip to the United States, however, was its salutary effect on the isolationist American press and public.

  Following a much-publicized luncheon at which Roosevelt served hot dogs, the tour returned to Canada and moved east. As the train slipped out of Quebec, George VI summoned his Prime Minister to the royal carriage to tell him how much the tour had meant to him and the Queen. Then, as King recorded, he asked “if I thought he had grasped the new idea of kingship.” The Prime Minister asked if he meant the “common touch with the people, the first hand interest in their affairs.” The King replied, “Yes, no more high hat business, the kind of thing that my father and those of his day regarded as essential, as the correct attitude. That certain things could not be done.”

  There followed an intimate and touching revelation by the King. The press was continually saying that he knew little about affairs, he said – that he could not speak, “was merely filling a place.” He turned to the Prime Minister. “You know how all of this started,” he said. Then he explained, “When my father was alive, he filled an important place; was very much before the public. My brother was equally prominent before the public. I was kept in the background. My father used to tell me that I could never do anything because I could not speak.”

  Mackenzie King was moved by this cry from the heart from a man who had never been able to master a childhood stutter and was painfully conscious of it. But as the Prime Minister noted, during this tour the stutter had diminished as the King gained new confidence.

  The crowds increased in size as the tour drew to a close. One hundred thousand people jammed Halifax, so many that some were forced to walk the streets all night, unable to find a bed. In the Nova Scotian Hotel, the King and Queen made their farewell speeches. The King trudged bravely through his, though he was close to exhaustion and it was noticed that his stutter had grown worse. The Queen told the Prime Minister that when her husband spoke it was all she could do to keep from crying. The King said he felt the same way when the Queen spoke.

  The Governor General had finally been allowed to take part on this last day, June 15. As the couple made their farewells aboard the Empress of Britain, a little bit of political jockeying took place. The Prime Minister had expected to walk off the ship last in company with the Governor General. But Tweedsmuir wanted it on record that he had been the last to leave Their Majesties. A contest of wills followed as the two manoeuvred for position. King won handily, purposely falling behind the vice-regal party and triumphantly bringing up the rear.

  With the sun shining brightly on its white prow, the Empress of Britain pulled out to sea, accompanied by an informal escort of British warships, Canadian destroyers, and the entire fishing fleet, including the famous Bluenose. The watchers on shore could see the King and Queen at the very top of the vessel, waving gallantly and, no doubt, more than a little wearily, for the last time. The Royal Tour was over. For a month it had suffused the nation in a golden glow that would be dissipated only by the darker shadows of the coming war.

  4

  War

  While the King of England was proceeding across his senior Dominion with his subjects’ plaudits ringing in his ears, another, grimmer voyage was under way across the Atlantic. By a bitter coincidence, the luxury liner St. Louis left Hamburg just one day after the royal couple reached Canada and returned to Europe just one day after they arrived back in London. It carried 907 Jews who had lost everything at the hands of the Nazis and who had learned, to their despair, that no country in the New World would give them refuge.

  They had left, full of hope, carrying entrance visas to Cuba, but at the last minute the Cuban government turned them down. They appealed to Uruguay, Paraguay, and Panama, but all their entreaties failed. Nobody wanted them. Their only hope was that the United States or Canada would take them in, but that was a forlorn expectation. The Americans sent a gunboat to prevent the ship from landing. Canada, as it always had, flatly turned down their request.

  When Mackenzie King met Roosevelt in early June, the matter was dismissed in a few sentences. It wasn’t Canada’s problem, the Prime Minister indicated in his diary. The St. Louis and its frantic passengers steamed back to Europe. England finally agreed to take in 288 refugees. France and the Low Countries, soon to be overrun by Hitler’s panzers, admitted others. Of the 907 Jews who left Germany in May, only 240 survived the war.

  But the prospect of war seemed remote and failed to dampen the revelry that attended the royal entourage that spring. The whole idea of war was anathema to Canadians. There were no hawks in Parliament and few if any in the country – only doves. There were no peace marches in those days – no chanting students carrying banners, no street demonstrations urging an end to war, no massed protests. None were needed because the entire population was firmly convinced that war was folly and peace preferable – at any price.

  The nation had breathed a collective sigh of relief after the Munich crisis. Even Hitler’s unwarranted attack in March on what was left of Czechoslovakia had not changed the general isolationism of Canadians. The unprecedented slaughter of the Great War – twenty thousand soldiers blown to bits in a single day on the Somme – had convinced politicians and proletariat that war was unthinkable. A soldier’s life in Canada was scarcely a glorious one. Some mothers even refused to let their sons join the Boy Scouts because they were opp
osed to the wearing of uniforms.

  A succession of anti-war novels such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front had bolstered that view. Beverley Nichols’s best-selling Cry Havoc! – an attack on munitions makers – had convinced his readers that the “merchants of death,” to use the common expression, were evil men. When it was suggested to Mackenzie King that more jobs could be created if the country started producing munitions, the Prime Minister was outraged. Apart from his own pacifism, he knew only too well that such a program couldn’t be sold politically.

  King blamed the Poles as much as Hitler for the war in Europe. Why had this insignificant people taken so long to reply to the Führer’s ultimatum? Why hadn’t they been prepared to meet his terms? The delay “had helped to infuriate Hitler” when everything seemed to be so close to a settlement. King was quite prepared to agree to let Germany have all its colonies back, if it meant peace.

  King was convinced there was still good in Hitler, that his actions could be explained by understanding the two-sided character of Richard Wagner, whose “life and music represented the study of good and evil” – the Christ versus the anti-Christ. The pagan (evil) side of Hitler’s Wagnerian personality, King thought, had won out over the Christian side, with its higher inspiration. “I feel very strongly that Hitler’s whole conduct is to be explained by his belief in himself as a reincarnation of some mythical or other personage – Siegfried, most probably.”

  But there had been no doubt in King’s mind for some time that if war came Canada would stand with Britain. At the same time, he and Lapointe maintained the public fiction that the government was seriously considering neutrality. When the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Maugham, arrived in late August to open the Canadian National Exhibition, he told the Prime Minister he intended to state that he had “been pleased to have assurances that Canada would be at the side of Britain in the event of war.” King was infuriated at that suggestion; it would, he said, do irreparable harm. The idea that Canada was acting at the instance of the old country, or that the government had made up its mind before Parliament was given a chance to decide on the nature of the commitment, shocked him. Maugham struck out the offending sentence but was undoubtedly mollified by King’s private assurance that the Cabinet was solidly united behind the war.

  “I could not help thinking how desperately stupid some Englishmen are in appreciating any attitude other than their own,” King wrote. “The superior way some of them have of assuming to know everything fills one with both exasperation and dismay.”

  Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. King announced a special war session of Parliament for September 7 and told his council that until Parliament met “all our measures would be for the defence of Canada.” To his annoyance, his own broadcast that evening was ignored by the Ottawa Journal, which reported both King George’s speech and Chamberlain’s. “Not a line to our country’s position and part,” King complained. “It is this aspect of Toryism that fills me with grief, dismay and contempt. Anything if it is the King of England, but no mention whatever of Canada’s own noble part or the words of her P.M.”

  Canada’s part, however, was more ambiguous than noble. King’s war plans did not call for sending a single Canadian soldier to fight in Europe. When he discovered that the Department of National Defence was ordering supplies to establish encampments to train soldiers for overseas service, he cancelled those plans. King believed, or wanted to believe, that the country’s contribution could be confined to sending supplies, munitions, and pilots to England. He was equally disturbed to learn that the defence department had been spending most of its time preparing for an expeditionary force, apparently with the connivance of Ian Mackenzie, the responsible minister. Canada was not yet committed to anything of the sort.

  King’s views did not vary greatly from the attitude expressed by the CCF in January of that year. At that time the party’s national executive had announced that it could not support any overseas adventure. Canada’s forces should be used only for the defence of her own territory. There’s no doubt that the majority of the CCF felt the same way. Of all the parties, it was the most pacifist, the most committed to neutrality. But by early September, with war almost certain, a good many CCFers, like a good many Canadians, had a change of heart. The old country was in trouble; British values, British justice, British fair play were in danger. Could Canada really stand by and let the mother of nations succumb to the German bully? The more pragmatic members of the CCF leadership found themselves stuck with what increasingly seemed to be an unworkable and eventually unpopular policy.

  Given its disparate origins – farmers, progressives, union men, Marxists, intellectuals, British Labourites, Canadian nationalists - it was not surprising that the CCF should crack in several directions on what many considered to be a matter of conscience. Woodsworth had helped to keep this uneasy partnership glued together as long as it faced the common enemy of capitalism. But what exactly was the new enemy? Hitler? The merchants of death? Or war itself?

  On September 6, the party’s national council of twenty-eight together with fourteen M.P.s met in Ottawa in a heated and racking session that would occupy two full days. Under the Gothic windows of a long committee room in the main block on Parliament Hill, the widening differences in the CCF’s approach to international affairs became painfully apparent. The party was badly divided. Its selfless leader left no doubt about his own position. James Shaver Woods worth was totally, unequivocally, and irreversibly opposed to his country’s going to war. From that rock-like stance no power could shake him. Stanley Knowles, also a confirmed pacifist, nourished like his leader on the Social Gospel, stood by him as did the Fabians, Frank Underhill and Frank Scott. The practical politicians – Abe Heaps and David Lewis were among them – saw the danger of opposing the inevitable and argued that the party must support the coming war.

  Angus MacInnis, married to Woodsworth’s daughter, supported intervention. In doing so he alienated his Marxist colleagues in British Columbia, who insisted that Canada should keep out of an “Imperialist War.” The Nova Scotians were going so far as to demand conscription for overseas service, while most of the delegates from Manitoba were for non-participation. On the other hand, the Saskatchewan CCF leader, George Williams, was urging the party to support the war.

  Woodsworth put the question squarely to the meeting when he moved that “this council refuses to discuss any measure that will put Canada into the war.” The council skirmished around that and decided finally not to put the motion to a vote. Instead a committee of six was struck to frame a compromise.

  The party statement, which was debated through the following day and far into the night even as Parliament was sitting in its special war session, was intended to paper over the fact that the party had no clear policy. It contained a motherhood clause that “the root causes of war lie deep in the nature of our present society” and went on to urge that civil liberties be guarded during the coming hostilities, that the government extend economic aid to England and provide for home defence, but that no expeditionary force be sent across the water.

  With six members forced to leave the meeting before a vote could be taken, the compromise passed fifteen to nine. To the dismay of the others, Woodsworth rose from his seat to say: “You all know, as I know, what this must mean.…” With that he resigned from the leadership and the party. That his followers could not countenance. He was persuaded to remain on the condition that he would speak for himself alone in Parliament and that M.J. Coldwell, the future party leader, would follow to deliver the CCF’s shaky position.

  For the CCF and for Parliament itself, this was an emotional moment. King had been closeted with Woodsworth for two hours, apparently in an attempt to change his mind. Now, during a lengthy speech, he turned to the CCF bench to remark that “there are few men in this Parliament for whom, in some particulars, I have greater respect than the leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. I admire him, i
n my heart, because time and again he has had the courage to say what lay on his conscience regardless of what the world might think of him. A man of that calibre is an ornament to any Parliament.…”

  Those honeyed words did not affect Woodsworth’s fighting form. With his wife and two sons looking down from the gallery, he rose in his place and launched into a speech that none who were there that day would ever forget.

  There he stood, a frail figure, grown frailer during the grim years of the thirties when he had criss-crossed the country carrying the message of the movement. His mind, Coldwell had told King in confidence, was beginning to falter, but there was no hint of that now as he lambasted the Prime Minister, regretting in passing that he had to do so in spite of King’s earlier flattery.

  Woodsworth saw through King’s obfuscations. The Prime Minister had carefully fudged the whole question of exactly what Canada’s war effort would be. “We stand for the defence of Canada,” he had declared. “We stand for the co-operation of this country on the side of Britain!”

  What exactly did that mean? Woodsworth wanted to know. King had talked vaguely about standing with Great Britain to the last man, but he had also promised there would be no conscription in Canada. Well, what did that mean? Was the country going to send an expeditionary force or wasn’t it? King had carefully slipped round that issue.

  “We do not know,” Woodsworth pointed out, “whether or not wealth is to be conscripted. If we are to stand to the very last man in this country … wealth should be conscripted before men are conscripted.”