When a Novelist Declared War

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
2 September 2013

When a Novelist Declared War

John Buchan was a Scots writer whose most famous novel is The 39 Steps (1915), a really good “the wrong man” spy yarn.  In addition to adventure stories, Buchan also wrote scholarly works and served the British government in a number of jobs.  His politics, like those of any thoughtful citizen, cannot be labeled: he argued for the right of women to vote, supported respect and better pay for workers, and wished to restrict the power of the House of Lords, but he rejected the socialism and acidic class warfare of David Lloyd George, whose friend-of-the-working-man rhetoric did not extend to rejecting the offer – or bribe? – of elevation to the peerage, with the attendant hyphenation of his last name to Lloyd-George.

Buchan’s last posting was as Governor-General of Canada, 1935-1940.  As G-G he lived in Rideau Hall, which features a dignified façade and some nice state rooms, and a throne for the monarch when she visits.  Essentially, though, Rideau Hall is a modest residence with a small back porch whose somewhat rickety screen door opens onto a pleasant back yard.  Of course it is possible that the fellow who fixes things around Rideau Hall has recently popped over to the local Bytown Lumber Store or perhaps Les Structures De L'Outaouais for a new screen door.

I was happily taking snapshots in the back yard of Rideau Hall when the tour guide told me I mustn’t.  My friend introduced himself and me, and the tour guide was most impressed – with the friend, yes.  She batted her eyelashes at him.  Me, no.  But I was allowed to keep the snaps I had taken.  Good to have friends who can awe tour guides.

In 1939, as Governor-General of Canada, Buchan worked with Prime Minister McKenzie-King and President Roosevelt in peace efforts, but in September of 1939, following his King, Buchan, not as a writer of stories nor as John Buchan, but as the Governor-General, led Canada into war against Nazism.  He was the last Governor-General to declare war, and although by the Statute of Westminster (1931) the Governor-General could do so now, this is not likely to happen without the consent of Parliament.

The United States is sometimes faulted for its dilatoriness in declaring war on Nazism, but in those years the three branches of our federal government often followed the law, and under the Constitution this nation cannot drop, fling, or fire explosives or other engines of destruction upon the citizens of another nation without following Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, and all of Article VI.  Not even the War Resolution of 1973, sometimes erroneously referred to as the War Powers Act, and of questionable legality under any name, permits violence on other people at the mood of a leader.

In sum, the United States, by its own laws, cannot make war on another nation on the sole predicate that the other nation is a bad nation or that its leader is a bad man who is doing bad things.  Further, war under any of its legion of names – police action, intervention, mutual assistance pact, advice, drug interdiction, no-fly-zone, use of force, enforcing a resolution, kinetic military action, aid mission, nation-building, spreading democracy, peace-keeping, monitoring - may not be initiated by an American president.  Congress may declare war formally, or may permit it through “letters of marque and reprisal”, which is authorization for limited war.  No individual American, not even the president, may do so.

A Governor-General of Canada may by Canadian law start a war (though Parliament may refuse to fund it).  An American president by American law may not, because our founders realized that if one man possesses the power to take a nation and its people into war, then that nation’s people are not free.

Every election cycle there is some twaddle about the President being “the leader of the free world.”  Well, no, he or she is not, and no passive acceptance of inaccurate filler-language can make it so.  Nothing in the Constitution, in the laws of other nations, or in the very questionable documents purported to be international law makes any president the Emperor of Planet Earth. 

Sometimes a leader, even of the parish’s new-air-conditioner fund, needs to put down the ego and step away from it.  When John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, thought and prayed over committing the survival of Canada and the lives of Canadians to a terrible war, he did not command a court photographer to attend upon his person for a delegated selfie, and he did not lift his leg to place his foot upon a Canadian national treasure.

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