Empire and Cultures of Militarism in Canada and the United States

Abstract

While Canadians have been described as an “unmilitary people,” their historic affections for empire have contributed to a conspicuous reluctance to criticize past military exploits. A tradition of anti-imperialism, meanwhile, has colored American attitudes to war, and produced a powerful current of antiwar sentiment throughout US history – even as that nation developed into a dominant imperial power. This essay finds the source of these national discrepancies in the founding myths of each country and in subsequent demographic, economic, strategic, and ideological transformations which have both reinforced and challenged each nation's traditional responses to empire. The result is a relationship between war, imperialism, and national identity that is multifaceted, often paradoxical, and in certain instances, surprisingly antiquated.

Keywords:

• Canada
• United States
• imperialism
• war
• memory

Notes

1. Desmond Morton, Canada and War: A Military and Political History (London: Butterworth & Co., 1981), 1. George F.G. Stanley, Canada's Soldiers 1604–1954: The Military History of an Unmilitary People (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1954).

2. Peter Scowen, Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003), 28.

3. Susan Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.

4. A recent book by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), outlines with precision the unprecedented campaign directed by Stephen Harper's Conservatives “to rebrand Canada as Warrior Nation” (xii). I would argue that the success of this campaign owes something to the deference to the nation's military past discussed here, a deference nourished by English Canada's historical relationship with empire.

5. Donald Schurman, “Writing About War,” in John Schultz, ed., Writing About Canada: A Handbook for Modern Canadian History (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 241.

6. I include the South African War and America's War of 1898 in this study, as both began on the eve of the twentieth century and concluded after the century's turn. While the Americans had defeated the Spanish by August of 1898, the subsequent battle to seize the Philippines continued until 1902.

7. Patrick O'Brien, “The Pax Britannica and American Hegemony: Precedent, Antecedent or Just Another History?,” in Patrick O'Brien and A. Clesse, eds., Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001 (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2002), 3.

8. Cited in Niall Ferguson, “Hegemony or Empire,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003, 154.

9. Mary Ann Heiss, “The Evolution of the Imperial Idea and US National Identity,” Diplomatic History, 26 (4) (2002): 521.

10. Norman Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 4.

11. Ibid.; Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan, Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

12. Ibid., 140–1; Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists, 26–7.

13. Joseph Fry, “From Open Door to World Systems: Economic Interpretations of Late Nineteenth Century American Foreign Relations,” Pacific Historical Review 65, 2 (May 1996): 277–303.

14. David Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America's Rise to Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 199–201.

15. Felix Adler to Edward Ordway, January 2, 1900. Edward W. Ordway Papers, Box 1, New York Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.

16. Michael Adas, “Improving the Civilizing Mission?: Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonization of the Philippines,” in Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, eds., The New Empire: A 21st-Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: New Press, 2003), 153–81.

17. Desmond David Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009), 294.

18. Doug Owram, “Canada and the Empire,” in Philip Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 149.

19. Coates and Morgan, Heroines and History, 131–41; Carman Miller, Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993), 9.

20. Gordon Heath, A War with a Silver Lining: Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009).

21. Cited in John Threlfall, “Empire over Nation: Victoria Newspapers and the Boer War,” B.C. Historical News, 30 (1) (winter 1996–7), 36.

22. Robert J.D. Page, “Canada and the Imperial Idea in the Boer War Years,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 5 (1) (1970): 33–49.

23. T.G. Marquis, Canada's Sons on Kopje and Veldt (Toronto: Canada's Sons Publishing, 1900), iii.

24. George Munro Grant, “Introduction,” in Ibid., 1–6.

25. W. Sanford Evans, The Canadian Contingents: A Story and a Study (Toronto: Publisher's Syndicate, 1901), 2.

26. David Nash, “The Boer War and its Humanitarian Critics,” History Today, 49 (6) (June 1999), 42–49.

27. Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada, 5th ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007), 116–7.

28. Goldwin Smith, In The Court of History: An Apology of Canadians Opposed to the Boer War (Toronto: William Tyrrell and Company, 1902), 63.

29. Peter Webb, “‘The Silent Flag in the New Fallen Snow’: Sara Jeannette Duncan and the Legacy of the South African War,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'etudes canadiennes 44 (1) (Winter 2010): 75–89; Adam Chapnick, “A ‘Conservative’ National Story? The Evolution of Citizenship and Immigration Canada's Discover Canada,’ American Review of Canadian Studies 41 (1) (2011), 20–36; Robert Shipley, To Mark Our Place: A History of Canadian War Memorials (Toronto: NC Press, 1987), 41–44.

30. Miller, Painting the Map Red, xi; Robert Teigrob, “Glad Adventures, Tragedies, Silences: Remembering and Forgetting Wars for Empire in Canada and the United States,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 45–46 (2012): 441–65.

31. Smith, In the Court of History, 64.

32. Miller, Painting the Map Red, 22–3.

33. Mayers, Dissenting Voices, 237–38.

34. Cited in Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 627.

35. Ronald Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 43.

36. Cited in Franz Ansprenger, The Dissolution of Colonial Empires (New York: Routledge, 1989), 30.

37. Cited in Mayers, Dissenting Voices, 247.

38. Ibid.; Jerald Combs. American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing Interpretations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 119.

39. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 316.

40. Donald Creighton, Dominion of the North (Toronto: Macmillan, 1944), 437.

41. Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–1916 (Toronto: Viking, 2007), 21.

42. D.E. Macintyre, Canada at Vimy (Toronto: P. Martin, 1967), 4.

43. George Casser, Hell in Flanders Fields: Canadians at the Second Battle of Ypres (Toronto: Dundurn, 2010), 21.

44. Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996).

45. O.D. Skelton, The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921), 269; J.M.S. Careless, Canada: A Story of Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 327. For examples of accounts that focus on immediate causes, see Desmond Morton, When Your Number's Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto: Random House, 1993), 2; Nathan Greenfield, Baptism of Fire: The Second Battle of Ypres and the Forging of Canada, April 1915 (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2007), 2. For those that depict Britain as standing above, see John Swettenham, To Seize the Victory: The Canadian Corps in World War I (Toronto: Ryerson, 1965), 27; C.P. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, Volume I: 1867–1921 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1977), 173–4; and Morton, A Military History of Canada, 130. For those that begin with the Canadian reaction, see Alexander McKee, Vimy Ridge (Toronto: Ryerson, 1965), 24; Pierre Burton, Vimy (Toronto: Random House, 1986), 29; Cassar, Hell in Flanders Fields, 15.

46. J. L. Granatstein, Irving Abella, David Bercuson, R. Craig Brown, and H. Blair Neatby, Twentieth Century Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1983), 93

47. Cook, At the Sharp End, 10.

48. Donald Creighton, Canada's First Century: 1867–1967 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), 157.

49. Warren Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 95–7.

50. Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 61.

51. Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 617, 630–31.

52. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 356.

53. Owram, “Canada and Empire,” 154.

54. Cited in Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 77

55. “Toronto Professors Censured in the Legislature; Hepburn Demands Curb,” Globe and Mail, April 14, 1939;” Professors and Politicians,” Hamilton Review, January 26, 1940.

56. Frank Underhill, “Goldwin Smith,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 2 (3) (April 1933): 292–94.

57. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 79–83.

58. Lower to Underhill, October 6, 1940, Frank Underhill Fonds, Box 5, “A.R.M Lower” file, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.

59. Ibid., November 14, 1936.

60. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 79–80.

61. “Editorial,” Ottawa Gazette, April 18, 1938; King to Underhill, October 6, 1938, Frank Underhill Fonds, Box 19, “Carlyle King” file.

62. Buckner, “Introduction: Canada and the British Empire,” in Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire, 5.

63. See speeches by H.S. Hamilton and Mackenzie King, Hansard, Fifth (Special War) Session, 18^th Parliament, September 7–13, 1939 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1939), 9, 22.

64. Ibid., 3, 9, 47.

65. Cited in Henrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 358.

66. Ibid., 369; George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford, 2008), 484, 519–26, 537.

67. Heiss, “The Evolution of the Imperial Idea,” 534; Life cited ibid.

68. Felix Belair, “Roosevelt Warns Americans to Meet Force with Force,” New York Times, April 16, 1940.

69. Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 161.

70. See Richard Hofstadter, American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); and Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

71. John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 81.

72. Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 218–19.

73. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1959), 39.

74. Bradford Perkins, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-Five Years After,” Reviews in American History 12 (1) (March 1984), 15.

75. See, for instance, Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) and Bacevich, American Empire.

76. Walter Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History LVI (1980), 810–31.

77. For a summary of this work, see Robert Griffin, “The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies,” Reviews in American History 29 (2001): 150–57.

78. David Farber, “War Stories,” Reviews in American History 23, 2 (1995): 318.

79. Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy 111 (summer 1998): 25–35; Krauthammer cited in Emily Eakin, “All Roads Lead To D.C.,” New York Times, March 31, 2002.

80. Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals, 11.

81. On public attitudes to these events, see Robert Teigrob, Warming Up to the Cold War: Canada and the United States’ Coalition of the Willing, From Hiroshima to Korea (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

82. Ryan Edwardson, “‘Kicking Uncle Sam out of the Peaceable Kingdom’: English-Canadian ‘New Nationalism’ and Americanization,” Journal of Canadian Studies 37 (4) (Winter 2003): 131–50.

83. Philip Buckner, “Introduction,” in Philip Buckner, ed., Canada and the End of Empire (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 2, 5.

84. Ibid., 7–9.

85. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 259–320.

86. Morton, A Military History of Canada, 251–54.

87. José Eduardo Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–1971 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 1.

88. Tim Cook, Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 216–21.

89. Laurel Halladay, “Renegotiating National Boundaries: Canadian Military Historians and Thematic Analysis,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, 8 (2) (Winter 2005–2006): 6.

90. Cook, Clio's Warriors, 226.

91. Emily Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 117.

92. J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History?, 2^nd ed. (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2007), 123, 89, xvii.

93. Vance, Death So Noble, 26–9.

94. Cook, Clio's Warriors, 93, 130; Greenfield, Baptism of Fire, 356.

95. Andrew Smith “Canadian Progress and the British Connection: Why Canadian Historians Seeking the Middle Road Should Give 2½ Cheers for the British Empire,” in Christopher Dummit and Michael Dawson, eds., Contesting Clio's Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 75.

96. Terry Cook, “A Reconstruction of the World: George R. Parkin's British Empire Map of 1893,” Cartographica 21, 4 (1984): 53–65.

97. Allan Gotlieb and Thomas Delworth, “The Queen has her Place, But So Do the Pellans,” Globe and Mail, August 27, 2011; Gloria Galloway, “Navy, Air Force will become ‘Royal’ Again,” Globe and Mail, August 16, 2011. For a contrapuntal version of the militarized and imperial Canada presented in the 2009 citizenship manual, see Esyllt Jones and Adele Perry, eds., A People's Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2012).

98. Christina Blizzard, “Promises were ‘Far Surpassed’” The Daily Press (Timmins), July 9, 2011.

99. Jane Taber, “Harper Spins a New Brand of Patriotism,” Globe and Mail, August 20, 2011.

100. Cited in Tristen Hopper, “‘Royal’ Returns for Canada's Armed Forces,” National Post, August 15, 2011.

101. Cited in Gloria Galloway, “Navy, Air Force will become ‘Royal’ Again,” Globe and Mail, August 16, 2011.