Funny thing I noticed: Friday marked the anniversary of the 20th century’s most remarkable explosion in Canadian-American relations, which took place on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1911. On that day, Feb. 14, Missouri Democratic congressman James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark gave a short speech in defence of a free-trade agreement that had been hammered out between the (Republican) Taft administration and Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.
Clark, a progressive and witty westerner who had already been chosen to become Speaker of the House in April, was widely expected to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1912. He was, in other words, a man who counted. And on the floor of the House, he advocated passage of the free-trade deal on grounds that eventually doomed it: namely, that it was a conscious step toward total American absorption of the Dominion of Canada.
When Clark’s remarks hit the newspapers up north — and no news story hit harder between 1900 and the dawn of the Great War — there was a spasm of anti-American and pro-Empire feeling throughout the country. As any schoolbook will tell you, this helped lead to the defeat of Laurier and the ruin of the trade deal in September 1911’s general election. This gaffe is indeed now what Clark is best remembered for, along with his eventual fumbling away of the 1912 presidential nomination to an unassuming professor named Woodrow Wilson.
When I was an undergraduate, we all had to have it explicitly explained to us that back in Edwardian days, the Liberals were the party of free trade, and the Conservatives the great defenders of tariff protection (although Sir John A. had sometimes sought without success to kick-stark “reciprocity” negotiations with the U.S.). Perhaps the most confusing feature of the 1911 controversy to students of today will be Champ Clark’s idea that the U.S. government would want to lower trade barriers to facilitate eventual annexation of Canada, rather than raising them to mutually punitive levels as a matter of crude antagonism.
Between Confederation and Champ’s time, Americans often just assumed as a matter of course that Canada would fall into their laps without any need for aggression or invasion. We northerners would eventually see that the benefits of American citizenship were more valuable than our romantic imperial attachments, and we would come beat down the door. This was certainly Clark’s own idea, and it created no controversy among Americans themselves when he expressed it.
“I am for (reciprocity),” he told the House, “because I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole. They are people of our blood. They speak our language. Their institutions are much like ours. They are trained in the difficult art of self-government.”
Clark went on to observe that British America and the U.S.A. had a free-trade agreement from 1854 to 1866, when the Americans abrogated the deal; if the U.S. government had not made that mistake, Clark thought, “the chances of a consolidation of these two countries would have been much greater than they are now.”
The 1911 reciprocity treaty, doomed by Clark’s maladroit advocacy, was no more than a finicky, carefully negotiated list of products to be zero-tariffed on both sides of the border. When a Republican asked Clark if he would like all trade barriers to be removed, Clark said yes, but only “by taking Canada in to become a part of the United States.” He rhapsodized charmingly about a future where “commercial relations properly established with the nations of the Earth … will bring universal peace.”
He added that the newfangled “flying machines” then in prospect would help a great deal, “because you cannot have a war if somebody can get above an army with a bucket of dynamite and kill 10,000 men in 10 seconds.” This tells us that Champ Clark wasn’t exactly a perfect forecaster. And yet I don’t quite know how to judge his assurance that greater economic union naturally dissolves political barriers between nation-states.
Free trade does broadly coincide with peace on the planetary scale, but is that because, as Clark thought, trade sometimes does the work of conquest without the need for war? If he is right, then President Donald Trump’s tariff terrorism will do nothing but guarantee that Canadian independence endures for longer than it otherwise might.
National Post