| Chapter 1: | Serial Monogamy or Constructive Bigamy |
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What was King thinking as he looked across the car seat at Acheson? What did he see? He may very well have thought, “My father knew your father 50 years ago in Toronto.” If his well-developed faculties for mental censorship were not working at full speed, King might have added silently, “You pompous, Anglican ass.” King, of course, was a Presbyterian and a Victorian, and sectarian and social considerations were never entirely absent from his thoughts. Acheson was more of an Edwardian, slightly raffish, and occasionally known to speak his mind, even in public. The prime minister was the son of Professor King, whereas Acheson was the grandson of Sir George Gooderham. Sect and status were linked in Toronto, which was Acheson’s and King’s common point of origin.
In the 65 years since Acheson preached to King, the United States has been Canada’s closest international partner, from the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line at Aklavik to Camp Friendship in Kandahar. All in all, chronology alone would suggest that the case for serial monogamy is amply proven. Power politics, representing Doran’s strategic point of view, would also sustain such an interpretation.
The two men had another point in common: the British Empire. Toronto was a very British city. Its mayor and magistrates were drawn from the Orange Order and were ultraloyal, as were the police who enforced the law. But the Roman Catholics, as historian Mark McGowan has shown, were loyal too, and like their Protestant fellow subjects, they were prone to enlist in the wars that expressed imperial sentiment in the late 19th century (McGowan, 1999). Acheson’s father had served in the army suppressing the Riel rebellion of 1885 and later had been an Anglican parson in Toronto, before moving across the border to become the Episcopalian bishop of Connecticut. In Connecticut the Achesons flew the Union Jack on ceremonial occasions and celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday on May 24. The British Empire was common to the Achesons’ life in Canada and in the United States, and seen from that perspective the empire, or Great Britain, was not so much an alternative as a link—or, in terms of the monogamy theory, a complication.
Imperialism proclaimed itself realistic, a phenomenon based on power, or military and economic strength, but it can also be usefully