The American Response to Canada Since 1776

VI. Assessment

VI ASSESSMENT The questions to be answered in this concluding chapter remain those posed at the outset. Are there any permanent features or recurring patterns in the American response to Canada? Is it possible to identify an American policy toward Canada and, in particular, does it make sense to think in terms of an American imperialism directed against Canada? These questions are more difficult than they seem. There is so much encrustation on the American relationship with Canada that the underlying pattern is easily obscured. There have always been so many demographic, economic, and cultural interactions between the two countries; such a wide and complex range of official contact and un-official activity; and such an efflorescence of good neighbor rhetoric since the 1930s that the relationship can be reasonably portrayed in a variety of ways. One recent interpretation, argues that the contacts below the official level are so numerous and influential that they constitute the real relationship. According to this view, the "sub-system" or the complex of economic and cultural relationships below the level of government institutions in both countries contains the real forces that shape the contours of the American response toward Canada. On the other hand, it is plausible to present American economic expansion and American military and foreign policy influence as examples of the American empire at work in the modern world. And yet again, it is possible to concentrate on the evidence of institutional cooperation between the two countries since the establishment of the International Joint Commission in 1898 and cite this (in the manner of James Shotwell in the Carnegie Series) as confirmation that Canada and the United States have evolved a unique, exemplary collaborative relationship. 175 1. The difficulties in determining what constitutes American policy can be well illustrated by looking at the background of the 1941 Hyde Park Declaration and the 1935 Reciprocal Trade Agreement, two markers at the beginning of the modern economic integration of North America. The Hyde Park agreement can be presented as an important element in a deliberate American policy of forcing the pace of economic integration. Since that integration led to the smaller economy of Canada adjusting to the needs of the larger American economy, the Hyde Park agreement becomes evidence that the United States was maneuvering Canada into a posture that made Canada less autonomous and pushed her into a dependent status. Yet one of the striking aspects of Hyde Park is that there was no prior planning by the State Department. Moreover, the draft agreement was drawn up on the Canadian side, and President Roosevelt simply accepted it. John Hickerson, who had been at the center of State Department planning on Canada throughout the 1930s, noted with some surprise these origins of the agreement. He explained to Pierrepont Moffatt, the U.S. Minister in Ottawa, the declaration at Hyde Park I now find was written by Clifford Clark, Jim Coyne and Hume Wrong. They drafted it as something which they hoped the Prime Minister would be able to get the President to agree to and the President agreed with a few slight changes in phraseology. No one in the State Department and, I am told, in our Treasury Department, had any advance knowledge of the statement. 1 In the case of the 1935 trade agreement, the State and Treasury experts did playa central role, but it was a reluctant one. There was great fear of the impact of a Canadian treaty on American farmers. The final agreement was extremely narrow compared to the strategic planning proposed by W.Y. Elliott in his communications to Hickerson and Roosevelt. In the executive branch this reluctance was palpable. President Roosevelt's chief concern was to protect the dairy farmers in upper New York State. George Peek, Special Advisor to the President on international economic matters, was disdainful of the entire reciprocal trade program. He derided Secretary Hull as a member of "the school of international altruists." As Sir John Simon, who was the British ambassador in Washington at the time, observed, the reciprocal trade policy "is in fact the personal creation of the Secretary of State without whose devotion and care it 176 could scarcely survive. The President has given it his perfunctory blessing rather than his active support and made no reference whatsoever to it in his recent message at the opening of Congress. "2Notwithtanding this division and hesitancy on the American side, the...