I’m going to tell two stories in this book. One is the story of how Canadians came to learn about the eccentric private activities that former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had managed to keep secret while he was alive. The second story is about the transformation in Canadian culture from the 1950s to the 1980s that gradually allowed many Canadians to talk publicly and irreverently about the details of this former prime minister’s secret life.
This book is a kind of narrative history where the argument is largely, though not entirely, developed through the unravelling of a series of events. It moves forward chronologically, retelling the stories of those figures who played an influential role in exposing King’s secrets. It’s a book, as the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton might have said, of characters and their circumstances. Readers looking for the usual sorts of things that one associates with peer-reviewed scholarly monographs – the review of the academic literature, the positioning of my arguments within theoretical debates, and an acknowledgment, in the text, of the many debts owed to the work of other scholars – will not find them here. This is not to say that the book doesn’t rely extensively on the work of others (it does), nor that it isn’t making an argument that interacts with this literature (it is). But in this book those debts and debates are largely confined to the endnotes.
In some academic circles, narrative history has come to seem old-fashioned. It is supposed to be insufficiently analytical. A postmodern critic might say that it creates an artifice in the form of a story, using realism to hide what it (and its author) doesn’t know: history didn’t really happen in “just that way” and to pretend otherwise is just an example of the historian trying to fool the reader and perhaps even to fool himself. These criticisms seem, to me, insufficient and unconvincing on the whole.1 As any teller of stories, fables, or parables knows, it’s very clear when a story has a point to make. Analysis and argument aren’t precluded by storytelling but the writer often makes those points in different ways. As for the postmodern concern about truthfulness, I both concede to not knowing the whole truth and, more to the point, admit to the necessity of constructed and partial versions of the truth offered in any history.2 I’m just not convinced that a more analytical style of writing that more obviously engages, in the text, with what other scholars are saying gets us any closer to the truth or its construction.3
It seems to me that the role of history is to make an earlier era come alive again in the minds of our contemporaries. It won’t really be the past, to be sure, but this isn’t essential. A map is never the place it represents. Yet the usefulness of history comes from the affinities and sympathy it inspires or the shock of difference it can evoke, even for a relatively recent historical era that used to be, but is no longer, our own. Perhaps a personal analogy can make clearer this point. As a father of four children I’ve relived the early years of parenthood again and again and again, each time realizing how little I remembered from the previous child, each time reliving in new ways what I had done before many times but had forgotten. And, of course, it is and is never just the same. This isn’t quite what we do in history but it’s similar. In reliving the memories of what the last child was like, in looking back to ask “Is this what a baby does now?” I’m forced to question what I think I know, to relive what I remember, and to experience it all again. By the fourth baby I’ve learned something, though it’s nothing close to total recall. Nor would I say, because I’m a historian, I’ve avoided the fate predicted by that usual quotation we employ to justify our existence – “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Though (usually) I would hesitate to call parenting my “doom,” I have indeed repeated the past. Perhaps because I remember what came before I am, sort of, prepared. This, it seems to me, is the most we can ask of history.
The real questions are these: How best to make this past come alive so that others today can relive and remember it in somewhat accurate and useful ways? How to make it poignant? How to make it (sort of) real, or at least allow us to catch glimpses of an earlier time in what can only be, at best, a kind of peripheral vision? My modest ambition is twofold: to eke out a place for narrative history as one legitimate answer to these questions; and to suggest that narrative history isn’t just for popularizers or journalists or dead historians. It is possible, I hope, to write a story and to still make a contribution to scholarly knowledge.
Having said all this and forewarned the reader about what will be coming in the book proper, I do want to make space here, over the next several pages, to explain more explicitly how this book does in fact engage with certain areas of contemporary scholarly literature. We’re still in the Preface, so the story hasn’t quite yet begun.
In his book on the posthumous memorialization of French explorer Jacques Cartier, historian Alan Gordon reminds us of how much “interpretations of the past … reflect the common sense of their own times.” A whole historical subdiscipline now devotes itself to the politics of historical memory and the way in which particular historical figures and events come to be written into history – by whom, when, and for what purpose.4 This book benefits from these works, and certainly from the basic insight that historical memory is always rooted in a particular kind of political project and cultural situation. Yet the goal here is somewhat different. We are looking at only one relatively short period of time, from King’s death in 1950 until the early 1980s. Because King was prime minister for so long, it is likely that he will continue to show up again and again in Canadian historical writing and in the broader culture, taking his place as someone whose life and career can speak to other kinds of concerns.
But this book addresses an accident – the fact that King died when he did and that he had secrets to reveal, and that these secrets were written in a diary that was ultimately opened up to the public at a propitious moment. It was a chance event, an example of a concept that historians prize almost above everything else: contingency. This book isn’t concerned so much with the many changes in historical meaning of Mackenzie King as it is with the very specific meanings that a couple of generations of Canadians gave to King’s secret life over the course of a few decades in the second half of the twentieth century.
My account primarily contributes to a scholarly debate about how best to characterize political and cultural change in North America from the 1950s to the 1980s. Here I lean on the work of those scholars who push us away from a decade-by-decade division of the era. Too much of the popular imagination of these years – and some of the scholarly debate – retells the story as a transition from the conservative and “quiescent” 1950s to the radical 1960s, and thence to the co-opted 1970s and the neo-liberal 1980s.5 While there is some truth in these generalizations, the neat dividing lines of decades obscure longer-term trends and continuities. As we move farther away from this part of our recent past, it becomes clearer that, if we want a convincing explanation for what happened in these years, we need to avoid what Michael Dawson and Catherine Gidney call “decaditis.”6
This book also takes the view that many earlier histories, written by partisans of one view or another, do the post-war years an injustice. Although the radical political movements and general rebelliousness of the 1960s clearly represented a rupture with what came before, the general direction of these changes was presaged by similar developments in the 1950s. And while some partisans see the 1960s as a failed revolutionary moment, to frame the era primarily in this way is to see history mostly as a Marxist and counter-cultural quest for revolution that has continually failed to arrive. The fact that capitalism was not overthrown and that bourgeois society didn’t explode into oblivion in the 1970s may be one way of seeing this era but it surely is not the most helpful.7 Politics did not end in the 1970s. Even if one sticks to the priorities of the political left, it was actually in the 1970s and afterward that a host of movements radically altered Canadians’ political consciousness – from the women’s and environmental movements to gay liberation and beyond. As the American historian Thomas Borstelman writes, the 1970s saw the rise of “a spirit of egalitarianism and inclusiveness that rejected traditional hierarchies and lines of authority, asserting instead the equality of all people, particularly women, gays and lesbians, people of color, and the disabled – that is, the majority of people.” Borstelman concludes that for Americans – and the same could be said of Canadians – “‘the 1960s’ really happened in the 1970s.”8
Yet even this reading of the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s doesn’t go far enough – it simply points out continuities in radical politics. The key change under way in these years – the “thinning out” of social discourse in a wash of radical individualism – did not so neatly fit into ideological categories.9 Instead, these individualizing metaphors were taken up by those on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, albeit in different ways. For instance, the rise of neo-liberal market ideas and an attack on the welfare state and social-citizenship ideals in the 1970s actually shared a good deal in common with the radical anti-authoritarian politics espoused by those on the left at the same time. In Canada, the welfare state had been slow in arriving. There had been a long, hesitant development of state programs to counteract the failures of capitalism and modern urban-industrial society to meet the needs of all – with programs for mothers’ allowances, benefits for veterans, and old age pensions (initially means-tested and later universally based on citizenship). Only in the 1960s did the key universal welfare-state programs emerge, especially universal health care. In the early 1970s other programs were seemingly on the immediate horizon, including universal daycare and perhaps a guaranteed minimum income. Yet all of these programs, as well as the ability of the state to act within the economy, came under attack in the 1970s.10
The long post-war boom dramatically came to an end in 1973 as the OPEC oil embargo combined with an overall economic downturn and rising unemployment. Yet inflation continued at a rampant pace and the combination of stagnant economic performance and high rates of inflation created the newfangled crisis of the era, stagflation. Economists and government planners struggled to make sense of what was happening and how to fix it – or whether governments even could play a role in doing so. In this context, the regulations of government and the social-citizenship goals of the welfare state came under attack by those who thought that what was needed was to free markets and individuals.
While this has often been presented as one of the key factors in diminishing the radicalism of the 1960s, that explanation no longer seems complete. It’s true that the economic downturn forced many to tighten their belts. It was at this time that the Baby Boom youth, who had played such a key role in 1960s radicalism, reached their twenties and were obliged to look for work in tougher circumstances, to form families and to take on the responsibilities of life that made the radicalism of youth harder to sustain. Yet there are clear continuities in the rhetoric and priorities between the 1960s and the 1970s and between those on the left and those on the right. The egalitarian impulse for individual rights and the desire to overturn social constraints like conventional morality and prejudice found its right-wing counterpart in the radical individualism of neo-liberalism. As Borstelman puts it, “while sometimes at odds with each other, egalitarian values and market values converged to form a purified version of individualism and consumer capitalism, one in which all were welcome as buyers and sellers, but the devil might take the hindmost.” 11
This book draws on the work of a range of scholars who try (in different ways) to make sense of this overall trajectory of change in a way that isn’t directly tied to one political project or another. The American intellectual historian Daniel T. Rodgers’s Age of Fracture is especially helpful. Rodgers explores the intellectual atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s, pointing out the way in which certain terms and ideas, certain metaphors of freedom and choice, spread across the cultural landscape and were picked up by those on both the left and right. He argues that a language that “had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.” Here Rodgers links schools of thought not typically associated with each other, from the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School to the postmodern thought of Michel Foucault and critical feminist and anti-racist thinkers. He points out that the deregulation of markets urged by neo-liberal economists actually shared affinities with the radical social deregulation urged by counter-cultural critics of the 1960s. As he puts it, “deregulation was a radical project before it became a conservative one.” 12
Also important are the works of several conservative American historians and political scientists including Francis Fukuyama, James L. Nolan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and James Lincoln Collier. Like Rodgers, these scholars have been concerned with tracing the way the individual’s relationship to society and state changed over the second half of the twentieth century. These scholars largely decry the kinds of changes that they identify. For Himmelfarb, what happened was a “demoralization of society” in which older cultural values were thrown aside in favour of a demoralized and anything-goes radical individualism. Collier titles his work The Rise of Selfishness in America. He sets out to answer a series of questions: “How in the course of about the sixty years from 1910 to 1970 did a morality that seemed fixed and permanent get stood on its head? … How did the United States turn from a social code in which self-restraint was a cardinal virtue to one in which self-gratification is a central idea, indeed ideal? How did we erect a moral code which has at its center the needs of the self – in which self-seeking is not merely condoned but actually urged upon us by philosophers, schools, television pundits, even governments?” Fukuyama calls the overall period of change the “great disruption.” By this he means the way in which a radical individualism undermined social values and constraints, from family values and deference to legitimate authority, that had girded social and communal life in America for generations.13
In the Canadian scholarly context, these kinds of conservative perspectives have had little influence and the end result has been a diminished ability of scholars to characterize adequately the nature of cultural change in this era.14 In Canadian scholarship, the tendency has been to decry the lack of radical change over the whole period and to focus consistently on thwarted movements for liberation. What gets lost is a real sense of how much had changed and why – exactly the issues that so concern conservative scholars. So, instead of focusing on the incredible rise in drug use in the 1960s, one of the few books on the topic explains how marijuana was not legalized. Works on the history of censorship, instead of noting the ever-widening scope of what was considered publishable, emphasize the continuities in moral regulation. Histories of gay and lesbian activism, instead of underlining the growth of acceptance and equality, focus on continued regulation and discrimination. In each case (and in other similar instances) it isn’t so much that these scholars are incorrect on the details as that they miss the wider picture. They don’t see the historical forest because their attention is trained on chopping down the few remaining trees that obscure the vista of the world as they wish it to be.15
One key Canadian figure who has traced some of these changes, and to whose work this book is indebted, is the philosopher Charles Taylor. In Sources of the Self and The Malaise of Modernity especially, Taylor has traced the rise of a culture of authenticity in the modern West that values self-affirmation, choice, and freedom. Unlike American conservatives, Taylor does not lament the changes he surveys (though he does point out the many downfalls of such an individual-oriented idea of what is good and true). He points to the longer-term trajectory of change, arguing that the culture of authenticity that had become so prominent in Canada by the 1970s and 1980s actually had its roots in Western Christianity and the Enlightenment. Yet he also acknowledges how the decades after the Second World War saw a radical speeding up of this culture of self-affirmation where notions of the good were bound up in valuing the experience of ordinary life.16
Each of these very different scholars and groups of scholars, including the philosopher Taylor with his roots in the New Democratic Party, the conservative Americans like Fukuyama and Himmelfarb, and the newer historians of the 1970s and 1980s like Borstelman and Rodgers, are pointing to the complex way in which a culture and language of the self and individualism grew steadily from the 1950s to the 1980s. Without denying the differences between decades and across the whole period, my book takes the position that this broader trajectory of change is worthy of scrutiny.
How does this connect to William Lyon Mackenzie King and the oddities of his private life – his table-rapping seances and his guilt-ridden carnal confessions, scribbled out in his diary? That is the subject of the book itself. Mackenzie King died in the summer of 1950. Over the next several decades – over just the period discussed above – his secret life would be revealed ever more fully in newspaper stories and books and documentaries. As each new story and anecdote made it into print, and as year followed year, Canadians responded to King’s secret life ever more irreverently and openly, delving into the full story of who King had been. In the story of King’s secret life, in other words, we see one particular example of the rise of an individualistic, therapeutic culture of the self and the odd consequences it had for the reputation of a prime minister who just happened to die, and have his secrets revealed, at a moment in history where self-revelation mattered profoundly.
There is a lesson here of a kind: be careful when you die. And burn your diaries.
Although I’ve already mentioned them, they need now to reappear and to come first in this place where I acknowledge those who have helped in the writing of this book: my children. To say that Rowan, Finlay, Gilbert, and Arthur helped with the book might seem odd if one thinks only about efficiency. There is no doubt that the book would have been finished years earlier if not for them. But to live with this book and with these children over the last nine years has been to live a rich life indeed. Although I love my work and still marvel at the privilege of getting paid to read and write books and to talk about them, I also love the time away from the books, at the end of the day, in the middle of the day or, alas, in the middle of the night – whenever being a parent requires me to pay attention to life now and to those I love. The book took longer, but the life has been better.
The children, though, have lived not with one writer but with two. And I owe Juliet more thanks than a few words here can convey. But in this instance, I can at least say how much her wise counsel, keen eye for literary and grammatical detail, sharp intelligence, and soft, bright spirit have meant. Mackenzie King was unwise to have remained a bachelor.
I first started working on this book while I was teaching at the Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA) at the University of London. It wasn’t until after I had taken my first trip to the archives that I stopped to read the small historical plaque that hung behind the front door to one of the Bloomsbury mansion houses the Institute occupied on Tavistock Square. I was then more than a little amused to learn that the building I was working in had once been the home to the Society for Psychical Research – that body of pseudo-scientific spiritualists who wanted to believe in the possibility of communing with the dead but didn’t want the whole enterprise to be ruined by the quacks. Mackenzie King would not have seen it as a coincidence.
But certainly this was a good place to begin, and the scholarly friendships there and in Canada have helped immensely along the way. In London, Phillip Buckner was a mentor and very good friend (which he remains). James Dunkerley was a model of what good university leadership looks like, and my other ISA colleagues were immensely helpful and gracious to their token Canadian who didn’t know enough about Latin American or American history and politics.
At Trent University, many of my colleagues have provided smart advice and good companionship as I worked on the project. Special thanks go to John Wadland, John Milloy, Julia Harrison, Kevin Siena, Finis Dunaway, Dimitry Anastakis, Caroline Durand, Janet Miron, Carolyn Kay, Keith Walden, Jim Struthers, T.H.B. Symons, Michael Eamon, and Jennine Hurl-Eamon. In 2014–15 and 2015–16 I had the great pleasure of teaching the core class in the joint Trent University and Carleton University PhD in Canadian studies. The students in these classes, through their range of experiences and sharp questions, taught me a good deal, and I greatly benefited as well from the knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and generosity of my co-instructor, Peter Hodgins.
In the summer of 2011 I was the visiting professor of Canadian studies (sadly the last to occupy the post) at the Freie Universität’s John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin. I owe a great debt both to Petra Dolata for initial help and especially to my host Frauke Brammer. She didn’t entirely know what she was getting in this professor who showed up in Berlin speaking no German and with very young children. But she and the Institute were paragons of good intellectual citizenship and a poignant example of what was lost when the Harper government cancelled the Understanding Canada program.
A number of archivists have helped me track down documents for a book that both was and wasn’t about Mackenzie King. My thanks to the many, many archivists at Library and Archives Canada who have assisted me on my many trips to Ottawa. The archivists dealing with prime ministers and political papers, Maureen Hoogenrad and Michael MacDonald, have been especially helpful. My thanks also to George Henderson at Queen’s University, Brian Hubner at the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, the staff at the University of Calgary Archives, the University of Toronto Archives, the Cork County Archives in Ireland, and the Dalhousie University Archives.
Very early on, and then again a few years later, H. Blair Neatby agreed to sit down with me and give me his recollections about being Mackenzie King’s official biographer. This was especially kind. I’m grateful, too, to Graham Fraser and to John Ferns and Pat Ferns, all of whom helped me to understand their fathers a little better. Lynn McIntyre also agreed to speak to me about the psychobiography of Mackenzie King that she wrote as a student at the University of Toronto. And Lucile McGregor kindly spoke to me of her recollections of her grandfather.
When trying to figure out the oddities of RCMP Security Service records and when trying to get hold of the Operation Featherbed files which were open but which Library and Archives Canada somehow could not locate, two people with a good deal more experience in working with these records than me came to my help. My thanks to Reg Whitaker and Jim Bronskill.
In the project’s early days, Pauline Harder worked as a research assistant, and her work was invaluable. Daniel Simeone provided very useful technical assistance and I still owe him more than one beer at least. Heather Graham and Chris Marsh raided western Canadian archives with digital cameras in hand, hence saving me time away from my family. I am very grateful that this work and other parts of the project were funded by the Symons Trust Fund for Canadian Studies, the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies at Trent University, a Trent University SSHRC Operating Grant, and a Faculty Research Grant from Foreign Affairs Canada.
I am grateful to several people who read parts of the manuscript, including Erika Dyck and, in the form of an article, Bryan Palmer and Finis Dunaway. A few others agreed to read the whole thing and for this I can’t thank them enough, except to say that I probably didn’t improve the manuscript nearly as much as their comments should have allowed. Thanks to Dimitry Anastakis, Jerry Bannister, and Tim Cook. The three anonymous readers gave model reviews which genuinely improved the book. I have presented parts of the work here to audiences at the University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, Trent University, the University of Alberta, Brock University, University College London, the Canadian Historical Association, the J.F.K. Institute in Berlin, the University of Toronto, and the British Association of Canadian Studies in London. Several people have graciously played host to my talks and I want to thank particularly Ian Milligan, Shirley Tillotson, Dominique Clément, Tony McCulloch, Frauke Brammer, and David Wilson. My editor at McGill-Queen’s, Jonathan Crago, has been a champion of the project from the very beginning.
Quite a few years ago I picked up a copy of C.P. Stacey’s A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King. It was summertime and I was on a cross-country road trip, a short break before I finished my PhD dissertation. As I drove across Canada, reading about Mackenzie King’s oddities as a way of not thinking about the dissertation, it occurred to me that there might be a different way to tell the story of Mackenzie King’s secret life. Too many years later, it now seems clear that one ought to be careful when selecting what is supposed to be light summer reading.