The Own Goal: A Tradition with Canada
By Amity Shlaes
This essay is adapted from Amity Shlaes’s regular column “The Forgotten Book,” which she pens for “Capital Matters” as a fellow of National Review Institute.
President Trump isn’t the first U.S. leader to turn a Canadian election with a few remarks. A little over a century back another president, William Howard Taft, managed the same feat.
The story starts in 1908, when outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt handpicked a successor, the lawyerly Taft. Taft won election. But from the eve of inauguration, Roosevelt began to voice doubts that Taft was up to the job. Word got around. Taft reacted to this disloyalty by attempting to prove he was no Roosevelt puppet. Where Roosevelt had invaded nations, Taft would write trade treaties. As Taft biographer Jeffrey Rosen writes, the motto of Roosevelt had been “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Taft’s maxim could have been “speak softly and carry a free-trade agreement.”
Taft’s marquee effort was to be a trade agreement with Canada, then lodged in the ambiguous status of “self-governing dominion.” As Taft noted, the dominion did have the freedom to conduct trade policy. Canada’s prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, was a distinguished free marketeer. The political stars appeared to align. In his enthusiasm Taft praised Canada, practically crowing: “She has cost us nothing in the way of preparations for defense against her possible assault, and she never will…. I therefore earnestly hope that the measure will be promptly enacted into law.” Such a treaty, Taft said, would mark a new “epoch” for North America.
Taft: Make Canada an “Adjunct of the United States”
In those days, tariffs represented a much more important share of U.S. federal revenues. Selling free trade was no easy work, especially not to Republicans, for whom tariffs were part of the brand. Then as now, trade treaties, unlike peace treaties, required support from both chambers of Congress. But again Taft sang his heart out, not only making the usual case for an “increase in trade on both sides of the boundary line” but also trying out wider arguments.
Early in 1911, Taft infused urgency into negotiations by threatening Canada via ultimatum: Team up with the United States, or there might be a “parting of the ways.” Hunting votes at home, Taft wrote a private letter to the still influential Roosevelt. Appealing to the imperialist in his predecessor, though not very hard, Taft suggested such a treaty might render Canada “only an adjunct of the United States.” Historians debate whether the “adjunct” letter was leaked or stayed private over the course of the 1911 negotiations. Lawmakers on the Hill, in any case, began to speak in similar tones.
Next, Taft called a special session of Congress. Congress warmed to the treaty but pounded the imperialist angle as much as Taft’s main case. “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,” thundered the soon-to-be House Speaker, James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri.
Such statements did not elude Canadian ears. Some loathed the treaty for pulling Canada farther from Britain; others, independence minded, loathed the idea of trading the thumb of one empire upon them for the thumb of another. By the time Taft signed the Tariff Reciprocity Agreement in July 1911, Canadian reciprocity opponents were on the march. By September, Canada was rejecting in a landslide referendum Taft’s and Laurier’s work.
As The Literary Digest commented in 1912, these flamboyant statements from U.S. politicians were handy weapons for Canada’s treaty opponents. They had put into Canadian Conservatives’ hands “an excellent club with which to cudgel the Liberals and their brilliant leader, Laurier.” Laurier himself was defeated in an election as well, on the argument he was pandering to the U.S.
From a Whisper to a Roar
Canadian and British ire over U.S. “designs on Canada” both rose yet again in 1912, when Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. Roosevelt turned on his old ally, alleging that Taft had promoted policy inferior to his own—even policy Roosevelt himself had formerly endorsed. Taft, now angrier even than Canada, went feral. “I am a man of peace and don’t want to fight. But when I do fight I want to hit hard. Even a rat in a corner will fight.”
One way Taft fought was to document where Roosevelt had reversed himself. He therefore shared with the press his 1911 trade correspondence with Roosevelt—including the damning “adjunct” letter.
What is the lesson beyond the obvious, which is that a whisper in the U.S. rings like a roar to Canada, and a roar, an avalanche? It is that making a pitch you don’t even half mean for domestic political reasons can be fatal. Only fourteen months after the noble Laurier was booted, Taft, too, was out of office.
Amity Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation, is the author of Great Society, and is a fellow of National Review Institute. A version of this article first appeared in National Review’s “Capital Matters.”