During World War II, Havelock moved away from the socialist organisations he had been associated with, and in 1944 was elected founding president of the Ontario Classical Association. One of the association's first activities was organising a relief effort for Greece, which had just been liberated from Nazi control. Havelock continued to write about politics, however, and his political and academic work came together in his ideas about education; he argued for the necessity of an understanding of rhetoric for the resistance to corporate persuasiveness.