Ask most Canadians to name a great wartime leader, and the odds are they would come up with Britain’s Winston Churchill or American President Franklin Roosevelt, the noble duo who led the Allied victory in the Second World War. Canadian prime ministers — including Robert Borden, who guided the country during the First World War, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was in power during the Second — would be a bit down the list. Warlords they were definitely not.
And yet, as Tim Cook, a curator and historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, chronicles in his latest — though, arguably, inaccurately titled — book, both Borden and King, when thrust into wartime leadership, more or less rose to the challenge. They did so quite differently.
As Cook rightly concludes, “In broad strokes, it can be said that Borden sided with the soldiers at the cost of jeopardizing unity at home, while King did the opposite, choosing unity over the lives of the soldiers overseas.” Like in his other acclaimed books about the Great War, most notably Shock Troops and At the Sharp End, Cook melds solid academic research with readable prose. However, writing about the lives of ordinary soldiers or the commanders on the battlefields, as he did in those previous works, lent itself to a somewhat more compelling narrative than political machinations and debates about war supplies and financing.
In Warlords, Cook traces Canadian history from about 1911 to 1950 — from just before the outbreak of the First World War through the Second World War and on to the initial years of the Cold War. He adeptly moves through the well-known events and addresses major themes such as Canada’s changing relations with Britain and the conscription crises of both conflicts. He also draws astute portraits of Borden and King, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, as well as some of the key supporting characters. The latter include Sam Hughes, Borden’s erratic and controversial minister of militia (about whom Cook wrote in his previous book, The Madman and the Butcher), and Col. James L. Ralston, King’s minister of defence, who tried without success to browbeat King into adopting conscription.
Apart from R. Craig Brown’s two-volume biography of Robert Borden, now more than thirty years old, less has been written about Borden than King in recent years. Here, Cook adds a much more nuanced depiction of Borden and shows how he matured from somewhat of a disappointment as prime minister into a tough and decisive leader who learned as the war proceeded — unlike King, who, serving two decades later, had Borden’s example to follow. In contrast to the attention politicians and the media give today to Canadian casualties in Afghanistan, Borden and King displayed an almost callous disregard for what Canadian soldiers endured. Borden’s change of heart only came later in the war, after he visited the front.
That Canada was a British country in the first half of the twentieth century is given, and Cook does an excellent job of incorporating this theme into his narrative. The First World was perceived by a majority of politicians and Canadians as paramount, and so whatever was required — whether it was the draconian War Measures Act, interning Ukrainian Canadians, or conscription in 1917 — was supported without reservation. Borden considered the needs of French Canadians and their refusal to accept conscription as secondary. He treated the national unity crisis it precipitated as unfortunate yet acceptable collateral damage. The country survived it; the Conservative Party not so much.
Mackenzie King learned that lesson well and did everything he could do to keep the country together and the Liberals in power. Cook’s narrative ably recounts King’s brilliant political skills and his sense of destiny, along with his peculiar quirks and oddball beliefs. There is no getting around it: Mackenzie King was one strange prime minister. He was devoted to Canada and worked to make it more autonomous, while keeping it firmly tied to the mother country. But, as Cook shows, he was also an opportunist who resisted conscription as much for maintaining Quebec support of the Liberal Party as to preserve national unity.
One quibble: Cook suggests, with no references, that King’s lengthy declaration-of-war speech in Parliament on September 8, 1939, was “dreadful,” “drab,” and boring. However, the speech, as recorded in Hansard, was decisive and even passionate in spots, and the press reports the next day were positive — including the one from the Globe and Mail, no fan of King’s, which applauded his “strong, ringing voice.”
While distinctly different in style and temperament, Borden and King were “adept at wielding power,” as Cook argues, and expertly steered Canada through the worst crises of the twentieth century. They might not have been quite the warlords Cook suggests. But he nonetheless provides an excellent account of the complexities and struggles that tested each man and of the ways in which they and the country came through the wars generally unscathed.
— Allan Levine (Read bio)
Allan Levine is a Winnipeg historian and author. His most recent book is Toronto: Biography of a City.