Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

4. A Relationship Matures, 1919-1938

99 4 A Relationship Matures, 1919–1938 World War I was a watershed for both Canada and the United States. In the interwar decades Canada took its tentative first steps into the international community with a seat in the new League of Nations. The British Statute of Westminster in 1931 made Canada technically autonomous within the empire, but Britain remained a significant third presence in Canadian calculations about the United States. In these same decades, the United States affirmed its world power. U.S. foreign policy in the postwar decades seemed paradoxical: a trend toward political isolationism, best exemplified by U.S. rejection of the League of Nations, at the precise moment at which America achieved global military and economic reach. Yet there was no contradiction in this policy of “independent internationalism,” argues historian Joan Hoff Wilson; U.S. government and business cooperated to gain foreign markets and raw material in a way that allowed business to retain maximum freedom of action. With Republicans ascendant in Congress and Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover in the White House, the United States remained highly protectionist until 1933, a protectionism expressed in the Fordney-McCumber tariff of 1922 and in the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930. Canadian governments retaliated with their own tariff increases. As in the past, the Canadian protective tariff encouraged increased U.S. direct investment in the Canadian economy. As U.S. money came north, Canadians went south. The 1920s saw the renewal of the southward migration of the nineteenth century. Other issues from the past reasserted their importance in the bilateral relationship: the fisheries of both coasts, the development of the hydroelectric potential of boundary waters, and the transportation possibilities of the St. Lawrence waterway. During the 1920s, the International Joint Commission quietly disposed of a dozen 100 canada and the united states potentially thorny issues; during the 1930s, it would resolve two dozen more. Like their economies, U.S.-Canadian relations follow cycles; the early 1930s marked a simultaneous interwar nadir for both. After the relative prosperity of the 1920s, the Great Depression struck the United States and Canada more severely than any other countries on the globe, causing new problems and exacerbating old ones. The inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 brought new hope to a United States mired in despair; although it went unnoticed at the time, Roosevelt’s presidency also offered an opportunity for bold new directions in the U.S.-Canadian relationship.1 A Formal Diplomatic Relationship By the 1920s, an Anglo-American war involving Canada was universally described as “unthinkable,” even though soldiers on both sides of the border still thought about it. Canada’s Defence Plan No. 1 called for the use of “flying columns” to capture “key invasion bases” such as Seattle and Minneapolis in order to stall an American drive northward until the British Army arrived. The U.S. Army’s Strategic Plan Red hypothesized a conquest of Canada in the event of war with Britain, after which the “territory gained . . . will become states and territories of the Union [and] the Dominion government will be abolished.” Not even the soldiers, however, took these plans very seriously; the U.S. War Department obtained the maps of western Canada it needed for invasion planning by writing to the Canadian government and requesting them!2 The Canadian bureaucrat who sent the maps to the War Department was flattered that the Americans had shown an interest; Canada’s biggest diplomatic difficulty was to persuade the United States that the country to the north could be simultaneously a British Dominion and a world citizen with an independent role on the international stage. The United States opposed Canadian membership in the Pan American Union of western hemispheric states on the grounds that it was still a European colony—although Canada did not want to join in any event. 101 A Relationship Matures Along with a fear of being drawn into war through the League-imposed collective security, U.S. antagonism toward a separate Canadian seat in the League of Nations was one of the most frequent reasons for the U.S. Senate’s hostility toward the Treaty of Versailles. In his defense of the League, President Woodrow Wilson urged that Canada have full membership. Canada occupied a position of “considerable importance in the industrial world,” he told American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, and because the “problems of the...