Following up from our quick look at the UK and Germany, we now cross to North America for a special guest post by
Brainbin.
Part II Post #7b: Outrageous Fortune
The Dominion of Canada had found itself in a unique position when the Cold War began, as it was located directly between the two superpowers, with the United States to the south, and the Soviet Union to the (far) north, on the other side of the Arctic Ocean. This was an immediate concern in a world where atomic bombers - and later missiles - had sufficiently long ranges that the two countries could engage each other directly, and quite possibly over Canadian skies. Obviously, the fear was primarily of the Soviets - Canada was a founding member of NATO and a close ally of the United States - but the Canadian national identity had always been predicated on its distinctiveness from that of the US, and many Canadians did not simply want to fall into lockstep with Washington over foreign and defence policy. Canada had eagerly fought in Korea alongside American and British troops, but the country had been demilitarizing at a fairly swift pace since then - the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world in 1945 was rapidly diminished as early as 1960.
The Liberal Party of Canada had governed the country since 1935, assuming power when the Conservatives proved unable to surmount the economic challenges of the Great Depression. The Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, governed until 1948, replaced by his Quebec lieutenant, Louis St. Laurent. “Uncle Louis”, as he became known, allowed his party to grow complacent and corrupt, and made the fatal mistake of underestimating the dynamic, charismatic Tory challenger, John G. Diefenbaker, in the 1957 election. In a victory that nobody saw coming, the PCs won a tenuous minority government - only to be followed by a snap election and Canada’s largest majority ever the following year. Diefenbaker was positioned to govern Canada in whichever way he saw fit in the years that followed, a task he took to with considerable relish. However, the early-1960s were an economically tumultuous time for Canada - by the time 1962 rolled around, the country was in a worse relative position than it had been in 1956. More immediate was Diefenbaker’s concern with foreign policy. He got along very well with President Eisenhower - the two had served alongside each other for nearly four years. His successor, Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was somewhat less agreeable than Eisenhower had been, and was far less patient of Canada’s attempts to assert its independence from the United States. It was probably inevitable: both “Dief” and “Tricky Dick” had such strong personalities, after all.
Nevertheless, Diefenbaker entered the 1962 campaign with his party as the odds-on favourites to win a second majority term, something that the Tories had not done since 1917, when they were heading a wartime coalition government. The leader of the opposition Liberal Party was Lester B. Pearson, who had also led the “Grits” in 1958, surviving the scale of his defeat based on his international reputation as the statesman who had resolved the Suez Crisis (for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize). But that didn’t translate to very much success on the home front - many (English) Canadians still felt considerable attachment to their British Imperial heritage, and considered Pearson’s actions a betrayal. Pearson, for his part, made no bones about his desire to have Canada distance itself from Perfidious Albion, even making the adoption of a “uniquely Canadian” national flag a campaign issue. At the time, Canada had no official national flag - however,
de facto, the Red Ensign (with the British Union Jack in the canton, and the Canadian arms defacing the fly) had been used for several decades. Canadian troops (when distinct from Imperial/Commonwealth troops as a whole) had served under that flag in both world wars. Diefenbaker personally had a great affinity for it, and often mentioned “the flag which our Canadian boys fought and died under” when defending it. But the flag was in general a minor campaign issue - Dief fought vigorously in support of his “Bill of Rights”, legislation he had passed in 1960 which enshrined the rights and freedoms of the Canadian citizen. However, this legislation was toothless in that it could be repealed by any later government (including the Liberals, who showed no interest in supporting it). Unlike the British government, the Canadian government was bound by overriding constitutional law… which could only be amended
by the Westminster Parliament, even though Canada had otherwise been fully independent of British legislative authority since 1931. Diefenbaker made enshrining his Bill of Rights, and other social reforms, the cornerstone of his platform. Despite a shaky economy, he also pointed to the Avro Arrow, a natively-designed and built supersonic interceptor aircraft, as a demonstration of Canadian technological competitiveness, and that buyers were already being lined up worldwide. This would come back to haunt him in his second term.
For sure enough, the PCs won a second majority, though much smaller than their previous one had been - they were elected in 140 ridings, down from the 208 they had won in 1958. As the House of Commons had 265 seats, this gave them a workable majority of 14 seats. They would need every last one of those in the years ahead. The Tories lost a few seats to the resurfacing Social Credit Party (who had been wiped out in 1958) in the West, along with the New Democratic Party, formed out of a merger between the rural agrarian Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress. The NDP, as it became known, saw only modest gains east of Manitoba - the Liberals largely won most of the Tory seats lost in the most populous province of Ontario. Quebec was another story. In 1958, the PCs had swept the province with support from the Union Nationale, which formed the provincial government. In the intervening years, the provincial Liberals had been elected and, under their leader, Premier Jean Lesage, Quebec was undergoing a rapid shift from a rural, pastoral, and deeply traditional and conservative society into one more modern, secular, liberal and progressive, with government agencies taking the reins of social and educational programs previously in the hands of the Church - one of their last bastions of temporal power in the industrialized world. Quebec was changing, and that too would prove significant in the years to come. For the time being, however, it meant the collapse of Tory strength in that province, though they retained 17 seats there, still well above average by their standards. The Liberals picked up some of the slack, but the Quebec wing of the Social Credit Party, which had never been an electoral force east of Manitoba before, picked up a whopping 23 seats - against five in the rest of Canada. The Socreds (“Creditistes”, in French) were popular in Quebec due in large part to their leader, Real Caouette, who controversially did
not lead the party as a whole - party bosses in the Prairies revolted at the notion of a Francophone Catholic in charge and backed R.N. Thompson, who controversially won the leadership convention on the first ballot (vote totals were never released). Still, his party had never done better, winning 28 seats on over 10% of the national vote.
After Parliament reconvened in the autumn of 1962, Diefenbaker faced several pressing issues. First and foremost was the possibility of nuclear warheads on the BOMARC anti-ballistic surface-to-air missiles which had been developed by American military contractors. Diefenbaker was extremely resistant to Nixon’s proposition that Canada equip their missiles with nuclear warheads, and did his best to defer any commitment to them, earning the ire of the President. Even before Arrow planes began flying for the RCAF, critics began observing that they were obsolete - and that Canada had tossed aside the future of warfare for a pointless exercise in chest-thumping nationalism. It didn’t help that the buyers which Avro had been claiming would line up to purchase these shiny new supersonic interceptors never materialized. West Germany greatly reduced their preliminary order for Arrows, thus weakening Avro’s standing with regards to their only committed foreign client, and this in turn would set off the payola scandal in both countries. The few other countries which had shown an interest in the Arrow disappeared from the bargaining table entirely, and notwithstanding the tenuous German interest, it seemed that the plane made entirely by Canada would be flown solely by Canada. The crowning achievement of the Canadian aviation industry, its pride and joy just a few years before, had become nothing more than a flying white elephant, and the scandal tainted the triumph of the first Arrows entering RCAF service. The press was merciless in its criticisms: “ARROW FLIES - AT WHAT COST TO CANADIANS?”, asked the
Toronto Daily Star. The
Toronto Telegram was less diplomatic: “AVRO PAYS GERMANS TO FLY OUR OWN PLANES”, read the headline. Their editorial commentary was even more blatantly Germanophobic: “Our planes have fought Germany’s in two wars over the last fifty years - now Avro is practically giving them new planes for whatever purposes they see fit.” The Defence Minister, George Pearkes, was sacked from cabinet as a consequence of the emerging Arrow Scandal, resigning his seat in Parliament shortly thereafter. Diefenbaker, meanwhile, sought to focus on domestic policy for the remainder of his term, aware that he would likely lose power to the opposition Liberals - led by right-winger Robert Winters since Pearson had resigned his leadership position shortly after losing his second consecutive election (making him the first Liberal leader not to become PM since Edward Blake in the 1880s).
The Canadian press came to see the Avro Arrow as a symptom of all that was wrong with the nation under Diefenbaker.
Diefenbaker’s frenemy, Richard Nixon, faced considerable domestic issues of his own. Civil Rights, a burgeoning concern throughout the 1950s, had come to the forefront. Disenfranchised blacks demanded the basic rights that had been denied them for most of American history, and found increasingly sympathetic supporters for their cause in Congress. The Democratic Party, which controlled both Houses, was split between its Northern and Southern wings, but the minority Republicans were overwhelmingly supportive, and gave the pro-Civil Rights factions a decisive majority. President Nixon was lukewarm on the expansion of civil rights, partly as continuing resentment at many black leaders endorsing his opponent in 1960, Senator Kennedy, and partly because the “slow-and-steady” approach had worked for his predecessor, President Eisenhower - who won nearly 40% of the black vote in 1956, the most for any Republican candidate since the Great Depression, simply by abiding by Supreme Court rulings such as
Brown v. Board of Education. Even Nixon won about a third of their ballots cast in 1960. But the days of gradualism were past. Civil rights agitators wanted radical change, and if they could not achieve it peacefully, or playing by the white man’s rules, they were increasingly prepared to do so
by any means necessary. By the early-1960s: two alternatives had emerged: peaceful integration, or violently-enforced “black supremacy” and “separatism” from white society. It was likely that an emerging extremism led many who were otherwise resistant to change to back the “compromise” espoused by moderates, and these culminated in the bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, notably a Southerner, was a principal architect of the bill, signed into law by President Nixon (who only reluctantly supported the legislation, when it was clear that most Americans did). Both parties tried to take credit for the bill in the 1964 elections, but many Americans came to see the bill as a “bi-partisan” effort; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted that both Republicans and Democrats were united in drafting and passing the bill. It was also consistent with other bi-partisan cooperation between President Nixon and Senator Johnson that year, such as the appropriation of funding for the National Environmental and Space Sciences Administration in Houston (located in Johnson’s state of Texas).
Although both parties had come together to support the Civil Rights Act, one of those two parties was deeply divided: the majority of the Democratic Congressmen and Senators from the US South opposed extending any civil rights to blacks. Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had become a nationally-known figure for his direct and active opposition to desegregation, announced that he would run for President in February of 1964 on the Democratic ticket, in order to reverse the party’s policies on segregation and civil rights. He soon lined up the support of most Southern Democratic operatives, making it clear that a lone Northerner would have to do the same in order to have a chance opposing him. John F. Kennedy considered running again, as Adlai Stevenson had done in 1956, but his health was in decline and he eventually announced his retirement from the Senate; his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, sought and won the nomination to replace him. Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to run, but knew that he could never win the nomination - he decided to play kingmaker instead. Among those candidates who did run were: Pat Brown, Governor of California; John Reynolds, Governor of Wisconsin; Matthew Welsh, Governor of Indiana; Daniel Brewster, Senator for Maryland; Henry M. Jackson, Senator for Washington; and Hubert H. Humphrey, Senator for Minnesota. Humphrey was liberal but staunchly anti-communist and an ardent civil rights supporter; he had played a key role in the Democratic National Convention of 1948 presaging the party’s movement away from their segregationist past. More ominously, Humphrey’s influence convinced southern Democrats to abandon the party and rally behind South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond (who had later been elected to the Senate, where he remained in 1964 - naturally backing Wallace for the Presidency). History would repeat itself after Johnson endorsed Humphrey (who chose Johnson’s fellow Texan Senator, Ralph Yarborough, as his running-mate as an obvious proxy), and Wallace and his delegates walked out of the Democratic National Convention, announcing that he would run for President on the schismatic “American Democratic Party” ticket (forcing the Northern Democrats to identify as the “National Democratic Party” - especially in the states where Wallace co-opted existing Democratic infrastructure).
Although the Democratic schism of 1948 had not been successful in preventing Truman from securing re-election (much to most everyone’s surprise), Wallace was more optimistic about his run hampering Humphrey. In fact, given how close 1960 had been, Wallace hoped to deadlock the Electoral College, preventing either Nixon or Humphrey from winning a majority of the electoral vote, thus forcing them to negotiate with him and commit to adopting some of his policy planks. Wallace had a more universal appeal than Thurmond, however, and was popular with the white working class voter. He also ran in states outside the South, even choosing a running mate from Nevada, Rep. Walter Baring (who also opposed expanded civil rights). Both Humphrey and Wallace attacked the incumbent Nixon on civil rights - Wallace claimed that Nixon administration had gone too far, while Humphrey claimed that the President hadn’t gone far
enough. Naturally, many blacks supported Humphrey, though others, particularly those in the South who had been newly enfranchised, were loyal to Nixon.
In the election that November, Nixon was returned to office by a surprisingly slim margin in terms of the popular vote, less than three points ahead of Humphrey on only 44.4% of the total, translating to over 31 million votes. This time, a split in the Democratic Party would prove sufficient to allow the GOP to emerge victorious, though Nixon had the advantage of incumbency and a fairly solid domestic record, despite his shaky foreign policy in his first term. Humphrey received 41.7% of the vote - the gap in absolute terms was about two million. George Wallace did very well for a nominally third-party ticket (he insisted that his ticket was the “real” Democratic ticket, though most observers disagreed), picking up over 13.5% of the vote (nearly ten million ballots cast) and winning seven states - six in the former Confederacy (two better on Thurmond’s run in 1948) and Nevada, in a close three-way. The state’s reputation as the “Mississippi of the West” was firmly cemented in the popular imagination. His seven states were good for 56 electoral votes. The National Democrats won close races in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas, allowing them to take 174 electoral votes. Nixon won 308 electoral votes, actually a slight improvement on the 286 he had won in 1960. This allowed him, like most Presidents who won a second term, to technically better his first-term performance despite a reduction in his popular vote share. His Republican Party also performed well in the House and Senate - particularly in the Northeast and Midwest - gaining seats in both Houses of Congress, though the Democrats retained their majorities.
Richard Milhouse Nixon was inaugurated into his second term as President of the United States on January 20, 1965. It would prove a most eventful four years…