2.1 Mackenzie King lying in state.
Death of a Statesman
When a man is prime minister for almost twenty-two years, the nation cannot help but react to his death. As one newspaper put it, “he was Prime Minister of Canada for so many years that boys and girls grew up without realizing that conceivably somebody else could fill that post.”1 In our current age, when political leaders are selected and disposed of like T-shirts on the sale racks, it is hard to comprehend the longevity of Mackenzie King. The only man who has come even close to King’s record in the last seventy years is Pierre Trudeau, a man who divided even as he united the country, and at whose death the population responded with sharply divergent sentiments, some with profound respect, others muttering their long-held resentments.2
Late on a hot July Saturday night in 1950, a sombre-voiced announcer came over the radio to inform the nation that Mackenzie King had died. Grant Dexter, the Ottawa correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, heard the news as he popped into a store. Looking at the other customers, he listened as they talked about King and noticed that they didn’t seem to be criticizing anything about “his life or the things he had done.” It could just have been the usual hushed deference for the dead, though he wondered if “perhaps it was something more favourable than that.” Dexter didn’t know. He just knew that they were calling him a “great Canadian.”3
On Monday, when everyone went back to work, and the newspapers gave their first draft of history, this too was their assessment. Even Tory papers held in check their usual partisan ire and reflected on the significance of Mackenzie King as statesman. For this was an era that still believed in the idea of the statesman, the public leader who came from the people but who rose above them. This is how most papers across the country, east and west, French and English, chose to remember Mackenzie King, as “a great Canadian.”
“Next to Confederation itself,” intoned the Globe and Mail, “no single factor has been more significant” in the shaping of “national affairs” than the career of Mackenzie King.4 The Tory Ottawa Journal admitted that “Mr. KING … was actuated in all his public acts by a deep concern for the good of the Canadian people … He was a great Canadian, a world figure, and a very human figure as well. He was MACKENZIE KING of Canada, and we shall not see his like again.”5
Canada in 1950, at the end of the Mackenzie King era, stood higher in the world than it had a generation earlier. Five years after the end of the Second World War, a war in which Canadians had fought fiercely and with distinction, and a war which had been followed by economic boom and not recession, the nation found itself more confident and more assertive in its collective identity. The death of Mackenzie King made commentators look back and appreciate the national achievements since King had first entered office.
It mattered what others thought. The newspapers prominently republished the praise of foreign dignitaries. What did the British prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee have to say about the Canadian prime minister? What about the American president Harry Truman, or India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru? The favourite pictures to publish included the images of King as wartime leader: King with Roosevelt, or King with Churchill, or better yet King with Roosevelt and Churchill. One caption showing the leaders at the Quebec Conference of 1943 in the Globe read: “Mr King not only acted as host for the parley but took an active role in the discussions.”6 This stretched the truth considerably. In fact, King and the Canadian delegation had been little more than furniture for photo-ops at the conference. King showed up smiling to pose for the camera, then the American and British leaders sent him away while they decided strategy. King largely accepted Canada’s exclusion from strategic talks, afraid of the international commitments that they might involve. Yet the truth remained hidden, and Canadians could peruse these images at the time of King’s death as symbols of Canada’s rising place in the world, oblivious to the real story.7
Numbers speak. And when it was announced that King would lie in state in the foyer of the houses of Parliament, Canadians came in large numbers. Over a little more than a day and a half, close to forty thousand lined up for hours in the midsummer heat for a chance to shuffle into the cool interior of Centre Block and past the former prime minister. King lay in an open coffin surrounded on four corners by a member each of the Navy, Air Force, Army, and RCMP. So many came that officials kept the building open later into the night so that no one would be turned away and everyone could have a chance to pay their respects. The prime minister arrived early to pay his respects along with a group of nuns. Yet the newspapers wanted it known that in the crowd that lined up to view King “there was no distinction of age or rank or occupation. Parents brought their children, some of them in arms. Teen-agers arrived in slacks. Laborers came from their jobs in their working clothes. Priests and clerics of all denominations mingled in that never-ending stream.” 8
What did these men and women, these boys and girls, think of as they walked past the still body of Mackenzie King? Even supportive journalists admitted that it seemed likely “there was no deep sense of personal loss.” Yet there did seem to be “something else; a feeling of sadness over the ending of a life of public service.”9 One woman noticed that “people who for years had criticized, condemned and often bewailed his existence, suddenly pulled up short when he died … suddenly realized, perhaps for the first time, that there was a man who had poured himself out unsparingly for Canada; had held its destiny in his hands for years. They realized that Mr. King had become a symbol of nationhood.”10
After King’s funeral, crowds lined up to watch the political elite of Canada march in ceremony down Wellington Street past the Chateau Laurier and into Union Station. As the RCAF band filled the station with the sounds of “Nearer My God to Thee,” that Protestant anthem of mournful, hopeful death, the song many believed to have been the last played on board the Titanic as it sank into the north Atlantic, Mackenzie King left Ottawa for the last time.11 The dignitaries departed on a train for Toronto where King was to be buried alongside the scions of the Canadian elite at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. As the train travelled across eastern Ontario, “the people were standing at every station, crossroad, village and farmhouse, bare-headed paying their last respects.”12
Critics privately sneered at the whole operation. Conservative Party leader George Drew thought, not without reason, that King had organized it all himself and called it a “revolting spectacle.” King’s former nemesis, Arthur Meighen, wrote privately how “the State funeral was put on with the same thoroughness and much the same purpose as a General Election.”13 Certainly King never left anything to chance, and had been known to fuss over the intricate details of many state occasions and dinners – flower arrangements and menus, seating plans and dinnerware. This was one of the reasons so many political men disliked him, or refused to take him entirely seriously. A statesman ought not to trifle with what they thought of as feminine trivialities. John Stevenson, the former London Times correspondent in Ottawa, thought that most of those who queued up to see King or to watch his funeral procession were American tourists. Certainly the “majority of them [were] women,”14 he wrote, as if this somehow made their show of sympathy less significant.
Still, in public, it wouldn’t do to be so impolite. The aftermath of death muffles dissent, beckons a soft reply. And then there was the fact that Mackenzie King had won all those elections. Never personally popular, Mackenzie King had nevertheless won the support of the nation and its parliamentarians more often and for longer than anyone else in history. Gossip and bitterness were for private conversations. In the pages of newspapers and on the radio, Mackenzie King was a statesman.
Yet who really was Mackenzie King? In 1950, when the newspapers recalled for the nation who Mackenzie King had been, what did they know and think about this former prime minister? Decades later, he would be “Weird Willie,” the prime minister who, as Dennis Lee put it in Alligator Pie, “loved his mother like anything” and “sat in the middle and played with string.” But in 1950, at the end of his long life, what did Mackenzie King mean to the Canadian public? Mackenzie King was born to be a Liberal prime minister. At least, it could seem that way.15 King was the grandson and namesake of William Lyon Mackenzie, the leader of the failed Upper Canada rebellions of 1837 and 1838. King wanted to recover the family reputation. Years later, he proudly hung on the wall of his office the offer of reward for his grandfather, traitor to Queen Victoria. When King, the rebel’s grandson, became prime minister and a member of His Majesty’s Privy Council, the family was redeemed. At the time that King entered politics, though, it’s not clear how much this mattered to contemporaries. After all, almost a century had passed since the rebellions. Passion faded. Animosity and disrepute slipped away, leaving only the young Mackenzie King with the benefit of a name that was already mentioned in the history books.
Mackenzie King had been engaged in public affairs from a young age. During his lifetime several sycophantic biographies had been published by admirers and Liberals, sometimes secretly with King’s direct aid. These presented the young King as an earnest and morally upright striver, a man born for a life of public service. He was a devoted Presbyterian who regularly attended church throughout his life. More importantly, he took seriously the moral strictures of late Victorian Canada that called on young men to be hard-working, abstinent, patient, self-denying, and disciplined. He volunteered his time reading to children in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. He attempted to rescue unfortunate “ladies of the night” by conversing with them earnestly, introducing them to the right companions, and extolling the message of the Protestant faith. King took an active role in student politics and was a key figure in a famous student strike at the University of Toronto. Or, at least, this was the version of his life portrayed in the early biographies.
King first made his mark in the wider world as a labour negotiator and expert on class turmoil. The turn of the century was a time of violent labour unrest and social tumult, when the massive transformations being wrought by industrialization seemed to be changing life in North America from the bottom up. Mackenzie King wanted to be at the forefront of responding to the crisis of class conflict and social need. After finishing his BA, he searched for the right future, finishing several university degrees in quick succession and going on to the University of Chicago to spend time at the famous Hull House, one of the birthplaces of modern social work. King rejected the radical arguments of contemporary socialists. Instead, he found his own thinking to be more shaped by Christian morality and moderate reform. He began a PhD at Harvard on these topics but would not finish the degree for a decade. The call of service to Canada interrupted his career.
While doing research in London, he received an offer from William Mulock, postmaster general in Wilfrid Laurier’s cabinet and a King family friend. In 1900 the Laurier government intended to create a new Department of Labour, with Mulock as its first head. Mulock invited King to return to Canada and take up a post as deputy minister of the new department and editor of the newly created Labour Gazette. The young King had to decide between a scholarly life and the more immediate and practical career of public service. King chose to work in Canada’s capital at the heart of power.
The young Mackenzie King soon made a name for himself as a competent and ambitious administrator. Criss-crossing the country by train, he waded into tense labour negotiations, armed with the message of conciliation. What was needed, King urged, was for labour and capital to come together in a process of open discussion alongside himself as the spokesperson for the government and wider community. Before any strike could occur, King believed, there should be a cooling-off period where both sides were presented with the facts of the situation by a neutral third party. His efforts in various strikes across the country led to government legislation mandating this kind of pre-strike conciliation.
In 1908 King left the civil service behind and ran for elected office, with the promise that, should he win, he would take up a seat in cabinet as minister of labour. He did win, and at the cabinet table Mackenzie King proved himself to be just as effective a junior minister as he had been a deputy minister. But in the government of Wilfrid Laurier, in power since 1896, other senior voices carried more authority. In 1911 the Laurier government mistakenly went to the people with a plan for reciprocity with the United States and went down to defeat. King found himself without a job.
King did not volunteer for military service during the Great War, and did not take up any kind of civilian posting connected to the war. His laudatory biographers tried to present what he did do as a form of service for the war effort. For King had accepted an offer in 1914 to go to the United States as a labour expert at the request of John D. Rockefeller, who found himself embroiled in controversy because of a violent strike at mines in Colorado owned by his family. At a time of massive labour turmoil, King applied himself to the task of achieving workplace peace. He earned a substantial salary but tried to protect himself from the charge that he served the moneyed interests by working for the charitable Rockefeller Foundation and not the Rockefellers directly. He was officially hired to conduct research into industry and labour relations in the modern world.
The war came to Mackenzie King anyway. King had insisted to the Rockefellers that he would not give up his political prospects in Canada. He secured the Liberal nomination in York North, the riding associated with his grandfather. Like everyone else, he watched as the war tore apart the political certainties of the nation. No issue hurt more than conscription. Farmers resented losing their sons to the dying fields of Europe. Labour unions complained about the conscription of labour when the state did not conscript capital. But as month followed month in the Great War, as the list of dead mounted, as the blinded, limbless, and disfigured veterans returned home, and still the war raged on with no sign of end let alone victory, the call for conscription came louder. Equality of sacrifice. If my son is to die, why does yours remain safe at home? That, and the rumours. Why did French Canadians not volunteer in the same numbers as English Canadians? The details did not matter – the fact that most who initially signed up had actually been born in Britain, or the inadequacy of recruitment staff in Quebec. Such statistical clarity, such reason, rarely found a place in the rhetoric of war.
The nation, and the Liberal Party, broke apart in 1917. The Conservative prime minister, Robert Borden, formed a Union government of pro-conscriptionists, inviting Liberals and Conservatives alike to join him in a coalition that would wage the war to the fullest. The election of 1917 was fought over the issue and it left Laurier leading a small rump of a party and most of Quebec isolated and unrepresented in government. The federal government sent its police across the country, into towns and villages, knocking on doors, traipsing through woods and fields, hunting men who fled conscription. The worst moment came on Easter Sunday 1918, a year after the battle for Vimy Ridge, as anti-conscriptionists rioted and clashed with Canadians troops at home. A race war. Everything Canadian governments had for years tried to avoid. And ultimately the Conservative Party would pay the price.
In the short run, the Unionists won and Mackenzie King went down to defeat in York North. Yet loyalty was rewarded. When Wilfrid Laurier died in 1919, and with the war over, the Liberals decided to hold the then untested process of a convention for the purpose of selecting a new leader. Although the Unionist Liberals were now back in the party, the animosity of their wartime departure had not disappeared. King ran for the leadership. His anti-conscriptionist record meant that he could present himself as someone who had stayed true to Laurier. That, plus his youth and his expertise in conciliating labour issues, a key issue in 1919, made him an attractive candidate. With significant support from Quebec, King ultimately triumphed against his main opponent, W.S. Fielding, who had joined the Union government.
In 1921 King came to power, defeating the Conservatives under the leadership of Arthur Meighen, the man who bore the brunt of the public’s disgruntlement about the wartime government. In the early 1920s the country was divided as never before. A farmers’ movement had taken off in the midst of the war, rooted in resentment against high tariffs and a general distrust of the political system and mainstream political parties. Farmers’ governments took power in Alberta (1921) and Ontario (1919). In 1921, under the loose banner of the Progressives, the farmers took fifty-eight seats in Canada’s House of Commons, the second most seats of any party – though because the Progressives derided the political system they refused to take on what they saw as the sullied role of Official Opposition.
For Mackenzie King, the task was to unite the country under the banner of the Liberal Party. He had no patience for Conservatives, whom he viewed, as he did throughout his life, as the enemy. But the Progressives he saw simply as Liberals who had temporarily gone astray. His governments of the 1920s tried to bring the Progressives, and the Canadians they represented, back into the Liberal fold. These governments were known for their modest efficiency – competent if unambitious. King had promised much in the Liberal Party platform that came out of the 1919 leadership convention, heralding the creation of a host of welfare-state programs. In office, King’s Liberals proved more tentative, concerning themselves with balancing the budget and paying off the debt.
King’s great achievement of the 1920s came in international affairs. In later years, King could claim to have asserted Canada’s independent stance on the world stage as a part of the British Commonwealth of Nations yet not as a subservient partner to Britain itself. Canada had achieved responsible government in domestic affairs as far back as the 1840s. In fact, King believed that his own grandfather had played no small part in this development by leading a rebellion whose intent was Canadian control over Canadian affairs. When Mackenzie King came to power in 1921 he took up the family fight for Canadian autonomy, but this time in international affairs.
This is the story of Canada’s rise from “colony to nation,” as one textbook of the 1940s had it. It is a complicated tale, fascinating to some historians but rarely to others. It is a story of pragmatism and compromise, of halfway measures and divided loyalties, a story of two steps forward and, it often seemed, two steps back. The highlights included John A. Macdonald’s efforts to participate in British treaty negotiations, the Laurier government’s decision to build a tiny Canadian navy, and the separate Canadian signature on the Treaty of Versailles that ended the Great War (even if Canada signed not as a fully independent nation but in a small rubric set off under the British signatures).
When Mackenzie King came to power, then, he grabbed a baton of national self-control that had already been passed from hand to hand, Conservative to Liberal and back again. The race he ran over the next three decades pushed the colony ever farther on the road to nationhood. Many commentators, on both left and right though especially in the centre, and particularly in Quebec, gave King credit. Arthur Lower, author of Colony to Nation, called King “the architect of Canada’s present position of national independence.”16 Saturday Night editor B.K. Sandwell thought this had been one of the constant impulses in King’s career, his conviction “that the colonies of the United Kingdom could not continue to be colonies, and that the only alternative was that they should become nations.” 17
How did King push Canada into nationhood? If the ending seemed heroic, the route travelled often gave little indication of impending glory. There was King’s refusal to commit Canadian troops in the Chanak Crisis of 1922 when it appeared that Britain might go to war against Turkey. There were the negotiations in the imperial conferences of 1923 and 1926 that ultimately led to the equality and independence of the dominions within the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 made law what King had pushed for in the Balfour Declaration that followed from the 1926 Imperial Conference. The Balfour Declaration put it thus: that the British dominions like Canada and Australia were “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
In this story of Liberal-led Canadian autonomy, the King-Byng controversy of 1926 symbolized how King stood up for Canada’s newly independent status. In the 1925 election King was returned with fewer seats than the Conservatives but he clung to power with the tenuous support of a much diminished number of Progressives and a few Labour MPs. Governor General Byng believed that King should resign and let Arthur Meighen, the man whose party controlled the most seats in the House of Commons, try to form a government. King refused to step down and managed to govern for several months with the help of the Progressives. Eventually, though, as claims of corruption relating to customs officials swirled around the government, King was forced to resign or face the censure of Parliament. King wanted to go to the people in an election but the governor general would not allow it. He claimed that Meighen should now have his chance to govern. King reluctantly handed over power to Meighen and then did everything possible to make sure that Meighen’s position was untenable. This proved to be the case as Meighen’s government lasted only a few days. Byng then acceded to Meighen’s request to dissolve Parliament and hold an election.
In that election of 1926 King brilliantly campaigned on the issue of British interference in Canadian affairs. He charged that the governor general had picked sides, allowing the Tory Meighen but not the Liberal King to dissolve Parliament and call an election. It was the battle of responsible government all over again, the fight King believed his grandfather had led in the rebellions, and King masterfully (if dishonestly) turned the issue into a winning strategy. The constitutional issue obscured what had seemed to be the more pressing concern about corruption in his own government. He was returned to power with a majority government, holding office until 1930 when, just as the harsh realities of the Depression were sinking into the Canadian consciousness, he was defeated by R.B. Bennett.
Nine years is a respectable length of time at the helm of any country and political parties in our era would think it sufficient. When R.B. Bennett trounced the Liberals in 1930, any contemporary party would have sent its leader packing, and most leaders would have known this and resigned before being forced out. Not Mackenzie King; not in 1930. King held on to office during the Bennett years, even enduring a humiliating scandal when it was revealed that his party had accepted huge donations, and King himself large personal gifts, from a business syndicate trying to win government favours. King called this his “Valley of Humiliation.” But he stayed on his feet and walked through the valley and out into the sunshine of the hill beyond in the form of the 1935 election. Overturning a sitting government in the midst of the Great Depression was not altogether a difficult task and King’s Liberals accomplished it. Several new smaller parties splintered the popular vote, leaving Mackenzie King’s Liberals with much the same support they had garnered in 1930 but this time with a majority government.
In the second half of the 1930s, the King government tried to drag Canada out of the economic doldrums, only very belatedly turning to a tentative form of economic stimulus based on the ideas then being touted by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. By 1937, it had also become clear that Europe was headed yet again to war and King hesitantly braced the nation for what this might mean, especially on the front of national unity. Like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, King hoped that appeasing Hitler would work. But he also vowed that, should it not, Canada would be at Britain’s side. This time, however, it would be Canadians themselves, in the form of Canada’s Parliament, who would decide when or whether the nation would go to war.
When Hitler invaded Poland in the autumn of 1939, Canada declared war and King, who was then sixty-six years old, became a wartime prime minister. King won re-election in March 1940 on a commitment to fight a limited war with no overseas conscription. However, with the German advances in the spring of 1940 and the fall of France, everything changed. Britain and its Empire alone stood against Hitler’s Germany. The neutral Americans remained to one side, unwilling to commit. The King government quickly put Canada on the path to total war, mobilizing all of the resources possible to support Britain in its fight. Yet, on the old issue of conscription, King was faced with a potential political crisis that could have ruined him.
In the family of Canada as it was at mid-century, there were a few topics guaranteed to disrupt and perhaps spoil any holiday dinner. One, the proper proportion of British pepper and American salt in the Canadian dish, Mackenzie King handled with expert ease. The second, and even more volatile, topic was the relation between French- and English-speaking Canadians – what many in the first half of the twentieth century called the “race question.” For many, King’s handling of French-English relations, especially in relation to conscription, proved his political genius.
This bitter feud between French and English Canadians over the issue of conscription in the Great War had greeted King as he became leader of the Liberal Party. King won the leadership in no small part owing to his loyalty to Laurier and his stance against conscription. The issue had divided the party but the Liberals also made sure that it helped them to win elections. Part of the reason the conscription issue threatened to be so dangerous again in the Second World War is that Quebec Liberals made sure, at every election in the 1920s and 1930s, that voters didn’t forget it. This was easy in the elections of 1921, 1925, and 1926. For who led the Conservative Party but Arthur Meighen, the diable Anglais himself, the man in the Borden cabinet responsible for the conscription law? The journalist André Laurendeau later recalled that, even in the elections of the 1930s, Liberal politicians hit the hustings calling Bennett simply another Empire-loving Tory like Borden or Meighen. The memory of conscription still burned in the mind of the Quebec voter. As Laurendeau put it: “How, moreover, could he have forgotten, when he was reminded of it at every election?”18
Mackenzie King probably knew very little of the details of electioneering in Quebec. He soon came to trust his Quebec lieutenant Ernest Lapointe, who represented the King government in the province. When Lapointe died in late 1941, King lured the corporate lawyer Louis St Laurent to Ottawa to take his place. On issue after issue, King avoided new policies that might have been viewed with disfavour in Quebec – holding back on social policy lest it interfere with provincial jurisdiction, not disallowing the infamous and illiberal Padlock Law of Maurice Duplessis.
In 1939 King promised the nation that he would not impose conscription, and he made the same promise again in the federal election of March 1940. Yet the fall of France in 1940 forced King to qualify this promise. The government passed the National Resource Mobilization Act (NRMA), registering all Canadians fit for military service, but with one important caveat. If called upon, conscripts would serve only within Canada. Yet this promise could not hold.
The bifurcated nature of the French-English Canadian reality is probably nowhere more clear than in the conscription crisis of the Second World War. The crisis refers to different events in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. When André Laurendeau wrote La crise de la conscription, he saw the height of the crisis as the events of 1942, when the King government held a plebiscite asking to be released from its promise not to impose conscription for overseas service. A series of events in late 1941 and early 1942 had transformed the nature of the war. Internationally, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and other American and British bases in the Pacific by the Japanese made the conflict truly global. It brought the Americans into the war, and it also exposed Canada’s west coast to attack. Domestically, Ernest Lapointe, the voice of Quebec in the national government, had recently died. At just this point, the Conservative Party coaxed Arthur Meighen to come back as leader. He and other Conservatives went on a national campaign calling for a unity government of all parties and the imposition of equal sacrifice through conscription.
King responded by calling a national plebiscite. The question, awkwardly and indirectly worded as most missives were from King, asked Canadians if they would release the government from its pledge not to impose conscription. This is the conscription crisis in the public memory of Quebec – the moment when the King government went back on its word – on King’s repeated promises not to impose conscription for overseas service. The results of the plebiscite showed a nation divided. It revealed, as Lord Durham wrote about the Canadas of the 1830s, “two nations at war in the bosom of a single state.” Quebec voted overwhelmingly against releasing the government from its pledge (79 per cent) while the other provinces voted overwhelmingly to allow the government the freedom of action to impose conscription.
King now became as cunning as he would ever be. He held off calls from within his government to see the plebiscite results as a clear mandate for conscription. Instead, he modified the NRMA to allow for overseas service of conscripts, but only if the government and Parliament deemed this necessary. As yet the government did not deem it necessary. It was then that King uttered the words for which he has become best remembered: “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary.”19 For a Quebec nationalist like Laurendeau, it was only a matter of time until the final blow came and the government imposed conscription. Still, King managed to find a middle ground. No conscript had yet been sent overseas.
In English Canada, the height of the conscription crisis came two years later in the autumn of 1944. Until this point in the war, Canadian involvement in actual combat hadn’t been extensive enough to challenge the voluntary system. With the June 1944 D-Day landings, though, came the heaviest and most intense combat in Europe. The push northward through France and into Belgium exacted a heavy toll. Defence Minister J.L. Ralston visited the troops in the autumn of 1944, and he came back to Ottawa with reports from his generals that the forces needed to be replenished and that the number of volunteers would not be sufficient. The final push at the end of 1944 and into 1945 would bring even more casualties. Already, units were fighting under-strength, making them not only less effective but endangering the lives of soldiers. Now, Ralston said, conscription really was necessary.
Mackenzie King resisted this advice almost unto the end. When the cabinet met, King insisted that the government try yet again to get more volunteers. Ralston agreed to this but wanted it guaranteed that, should the recruitment drive fail, the government would impose conscription. The issue threatened to bring down the government.
Years later, when some of King’s cabinet ministers and political journalists said that King could be ruthless, they usually had in mind this moment. When Ralston demanded his guarantee, King drew forth a letter of resignation that Ralston had penned two years earlier – in 1942 – in the midst of the last crisis. King had rejected Ralston’s resignation offer then, but he had kept the letter. King quietly but firmly said that he now accepted Ralston’s resignation – a resignation Ralston had not in fact offered.
To take Ralston’s place, King had secretly recruited General Andy McNaughton, the former head of the Canadian Army overseas, a man whose commitment to the “boys overseas” no one could question. The men at the cabinet table sat in stunned silence. No one had seen this coming. King had essentially just fired one of the most important figures in the Canadian government, and the man most responsible for its war effort.
What would Ralston do? Did he shout in anger? Did he threaten to begin a revolt of the pro-conscription Liberals and form a Union government? The fate of the government and the nation hung on his next moves. If he had decided to do so, it is very likely that he could have toppled King’s government and, along with the Conservatives, formed a coalition government. Ralston did none of this. He quietly rose from his seat, shook hands with the other men around the table, and left the room. The man who could have broken the government, the man whom, as many of his colleagues saw it, Mackenzie King stabbed in the back, did not flinch. The Christian gentleman, for the good of his party, and the nation, turned the other cheek.
Despite all of Mackenzie King’s cunning, though, neither he nor his newly recruited defence minister could convince enough NRMA men – “zombies” as the public called them – to switch from reserve duty to active service. Within two weeks, General McNaughton reported to King that he didn’t have the numbers. It was exactly as Ralston had said. At this final juncture, Mackenzie King conceded defeat – and just in time. Other ministers in cabinet had been meeting to prepare letters of resignation and to topple the government. Canada, in the second great war of the twentieth century, decided once again to force its citizens to serve in combat for their country.
As awkward and stumbling as King’s policies seemed day by day, in retrospect they came to be seen as his greatest legacy. Only one cabinet minister resigned, and the government carried on. The country did not fall apart. There was no repeat of the Easter riots from the Great War. King had kept the nation united. The praise of King always came in half-measures, with qualifications, but praise it was. “As a war minister,” Arthur Lower said of King, “he did well, but plenty of other men would have organized the country better; some might have inspired it; few [would] not have divided it.”20 On conscription, Blair Fraser put it succinctly, “Neither side liked it; both put up with it.”21
During the war King had led a government of able ministers, balancing the conflicting interests and needs of the country. Taxation had never (and has never since) been higher. The government controlled wages and prices. Much of the entire economy revolved around the government, whether directly through the one million Canadians who worked at some level in the military (out of a total 1939 population of 13 million) or in the scores of industries that serviced the military, building tanks and planes, sending supplies to Europe. It is little wonder that the socialism promised by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) came to seem like a more popular option in these years. Who could argue for private enterprise when the wartime economy had never been stronger, and it all depended upon government initiative?
The King government held in check such utopian hopes and the political challenge from the left. The Liberals planned for the postwar return of soldiers and resolved to stave off the feared post-war recession. In 1945 King’s plan of benefits for veterans and social-welfare programs, notably the Family Allowance (the “Baby Bonus”), was enough to win him just enough seats to hold onto power. Even as the more renowned Winston Churchill in Britain went down to defeat, Mackenzie King’s Liberals proved their electoral adroitness, scraping up sufficient seats to form another majority government.
The King government managed the potential economic crisis of reconstruction, fending off the post-war recession. It also negotiated Canada’s place in the new United Nations, with the country taking up a non-permanent seat on the Security Council. As the Cold War became a reality, and the Gouzenko scandal revealed that the Soviets even had an active spy ring in Canada, King pushed Canada ever closer to its traditional allies. With Britain’s power fading under the heavy debt load built up by the war, King found a new balance between Britain and the United States in the north Atlantic triangle.
Still, Mackenzie King was now well into his seventies and he increasingly seemed like someone from another era. A trip to Europe in the autumn of 1947 had him laid up in a London hotel, too sick to take part in diplomatic meetings. When he returned to Canada he slowly began putting in place plans for his retirement. His chosen successor, Louis St Laurent, was selected by a heavily stage-managed Liberal Party convention in the summer of 1948. King gave up his leadership of the party but held onto his role as prime minister until the autumn. Then, and only reluctantly, did Mackenzie King step down as prime minister of Canada. He had governed for almost twenty-two years, not only longer than any other Canadian prime minister but longer than any other prime minister in the Commonwealth. No parliamentary leader then or since has ever been as successful as Mackenzie King of Canada.
Such a career in the nation’s highest and most demanding post commanded attention even if the man who filled it did not. Almost everyone agreed that Mackenzie King was not an impressive figure, nor popular. He didn’t look the part. In an age before anxiety over obesity, commentators slipped in references to King as pudgy or tubby or just plain fat. His long-time valet once quietly muttered to another aide, after a particularly long and embittered attempt to fit King into his evening suit, “Well, I can dress him but I can’t make him look like a gentleman.”22
King had aged in the post, and so had his style and personal taste. In an era before television and before personal assistants who construct the image of a politician down to their choice of tie or sweatervest, King had largely been left to his own devices. He maintained the style of dress that he considered proper and fitting. This meant that, even as the age of flappers gave way to wartime restraint and then to post-war casualness, King continued to look like an upper-class and uptight Edwardian gentleman. His starched collars erased his short stubby neck. When in public, it was usually the more old-fashioned bowler hat and not the fedora that graced his head. Some found King’s fustiness reassuring. Here was a man who did not change, who at least looked serious and respectable. His looks and style, though, didn’t inspire the nation.
Neither did the way he spoke. Eloquence was not a Mackenzie King trait. His speeches seemed designed to hide rather than reveal. He refused catchy slogans, or colloquialisms, seeing in them political danger. More than one assistant frustrated themselves to no end in trying to spice up his speeches. It just wasn’t King’s style. And yet for all of King’s failures, his inability to inspire or to look the part of the great statesman, there was still the real success of Mackenzie King: his election victories and all those years in office. As the journalist Douglas How put it, “there was no way to reconcile the way Canadians talked and acted about Mr. King and the way they voted.” 23
When King died, commentators puzzled over this contradiction. Enigmatic, they called him. Arthur Lower stated that King was the “most unpopular man in Canada.”24 A tad strong perhaps. But it does get to the heart of the jokes about Mackenzie King – the ones people whispered and snickered over in private but didn’t put into print. It wouldn’t have been polite, to speak ill of the dead, and so soon. One joke had it that a drunkard boarded a Toronto streetcar and stumbled about the car threatening to shout the two most horrible words in the English language. The passengers implored him not to do so – for the sake of the women and children. As the drunk exited the car he finally let loose. “That’s it,” he shouted “I will say them … Mackenzie King.”
King was indeed an enigma. Popular and unpopular, successful and a joke, the target of ire, animosity, and yet also respect. Years later, historians would credit King as a founder of the welfare state. Others would come to laugh at his oddities. Yet at the time of his death commentators largely saw King as a statesman of the nation. He had led Canada to an ever more autonomous place within the world, and he did so even as he brought Canada through the war united. He was many things but, above all, he was Mackenzie King of Canada.
