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Psychic Newsflash

It took only a few weeks for one of King’s occult friends to expose him. In mid-August 1950 an obscure British publication called the Psychic News published an article on its front page headlined “Mackenzie King Sought Spirit Aid in State Affairs.” The piece was based on the stories of an acquaintance of King, the Duchess of Hamilton, an aristocratic woman known for her eccentric views. The duchess recalled that she had introduced King to many reputable spiritualist mediums when he had visited England. Her initial introductions had led to many later meetings between King and British spiritualists. She even told a story of how King had been responsible for bringing back to England a watch that Queen Victoria had given to a spiritualist medium and which had since been removed to the United States. The ghost of Queen Victoria apparently wanted the watch returned to her homeland and King allegedly took on the task of Anglo-American spiritualist rapprochement.1

The duchess didn’t want anyone to think the worse of the Canadian prime minister. Quite the opposite. She cautioned that, of course, she had led King only to “reputable mediums.” King himself knew that messages from the spirit world could be “coloured,” she said, as they passed through the minds of even the purest mediums. According to the duchess, the former prime minister had been a rigorous thinker and practitioner of psychic research. In true scientific fashion, he had consulted more than one medium, sifting the information they delivered to him from beyond the grave. On the same day that the Psychic News broke the King story, it also reported on its front page about the dangers of fraudulent mediums. This was, the paper claimed, always a danger. The community of reputable mediums needed to root out these imposters lest spiritualism’s reputation be tarnished. When your own beliefs are so far outside the realm of normal, it always helps to have someone else who seems even crazier.2

News of the story leaked back in private letters to Canada. King’s partisan enemies privately snickered, loving the embarrassment that this allegation could cause Liberals and other King-defenders.³ Finally, a few months later, in October 1950, a Canadian newspaper decided to break the story on this side of the ocean. The Ottawa Citizen reprinted the Psychic News article, albeit without the headline specifically saying that King had relied upon the advice of mediums in state affairs. The Citizen story inspired a series of similar reports in papers across the country in the autumn of 1950. Mackenzie King had been “outed” as a ghost-talker.⁴

How to respond to this stunning news? William Lyon Mackenzie King, the bachelor prime minister in the fussy suits, the man of careful speech, of practicalities and pragmatic politics, the man who ran an efficient if unexciting government, who turned his back on any kind of wild ideas, who made his reputation by refusing to be riled, by keeping his head when all about lost theirs – this man had sat down in darkened rooms to speak to spirits? Perhaps with ouija boards and a crystal ball? It all seemed too much, too far-fetched.

Years later some historians would try to rejuvenate King’s reputation by claiming that spiritualism was much more common in his own day and age. King was odd, but understandably odd – like the Duchess of Hamilton who posthumously outed him. The historian Michael Bliss asked contemporary Canadians to recall that King’s had been a much more religious era. “Surely,” he claimed, we can recall “the force of the belief in the immortality of the spirit, and how it led millions of lonely people into intense efforts to communicate with the souls of loved ones who had gone before.” If spiritualism sometimes seemed silly, still “there was also a serious interest in life after death.” Such has been the sympathetic recent historical interpretation of Mackenzie King’s ghost-talking.⁵

This laissez-faire approach to the spiritual is a product of our own relativistic age. It’s true that the much more church-going and Christian world of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada helps explain why King believed what he did. Most Canadians did indeed believe in life after death, and in fact this idea was part of the public culture of the nation. But slight differences mattered. To shift from theology to tarot cards, from the catechism to psychic research as King called it, meant taking a step outside of what was respectable. If these differences can seem less significant in our own age, we shouldn’t mistake the varieties and hierarchies of belief in King’s own day.

While a belief in the spirits is long-standing, the modern version of spiritualism as a kind of communication between the living and the dead traces its history to the period of religious revivalism in mid-nineteenth-century North America. The Fox sisters of upstate New York claimed to be able to communicate with the ghosts of the departed who took over the girls’ bodies and communicated through a series of raps. Although the women admitted later in life that the whole thing had been a hoax, in the meantime the movement was picked up by many others and spread across the United States, Britain, Canada, and elsewhere. The methods of communication grew and diversified, and different mediums sprang up to promise that they could be the ones who would put you in touch with spirits from the other side of the grave. Yet, while the movement spread widely, it remained a minority taste and retained a whiff of the taboo. Especially in Britain, it found a home in upper-class circles and there were even semi-mainstream associations established such as the Society for Psychical Research whose purpose was ostensibly to test mediums and their claims scientifically. Such researchers, however, were often found to be less than scientific in their real desire to believe it was all possible. The mainstream churches officially shunned spiritualism and anyone who openly practised it invited sanction or ridicule.6

Especially after the Great War and the many deaths that rent apart families, some privately turned to spiritualism in the hope of reaching out to loved ones lost too soon. There were also many stories of those who hunkered over a ouija board, almost as a joke but hoping still for some kind of sign. Yet, contrary to the claims of some historians, there is no evidence of “millions” of Canadian sympathizers. In reality, only a small number of Canadians seem to have been spiritualists in any significant sense. We need only look to other figures who “outed” themselves as practising spiritualists to see why King kept this part of his life hidden. The most famous case was the Reverend Benjamin Fish Austin, the Methodist educator and thinker who became convinced of the need to search for truth in spiritualism. Austin had been a respected educator, principal of a girl’s college in St Thomas, Ontario, for more than twenty years. The Methodist church even conferred on him a doctorate of divinity in 1897. But when he turned to spiritualism and preached the need to be open to its truths, his church expelled him. He may have gone on to become a renowned spiritualist, but this was a hollow success. His position in society generally would never be the same. Others learned from this and other international examples. A few prominent Canadians dabbled in spiritualism, and others drew inspiration from them. But for most, and especially for a politician, the costs of believing openly were too high.7

King himself had always kept his spiritualistic activities a closely guarded secret. Over the years, he would occasionally say something to a colleague or a friend about the life beyond this one, about the survival of the human personality. And sometimes he went too far, remarking on how he had been speaking to someone long dead. When King let this slip, his listeners raised an eyebrow, perhaps thinking that they hadn’t heard him right.⁸ Did he just say that he had spoken to FDR? The dead president? No, that couldn’t have been right. Such slips, though, were just that: lapses. King did not advertise his interest in matters psychical beyond a small circle. He guarded his privacy because he feared the consequences of revelation. The risk was not worth it. King’s assistant Frederick McGregor later wrote to King’s English confidant Violet Markham that “the spiritualistic cult has not achieved in Canada the degree of acceptance which it seems to have done in the Old Country.” ⁹

What did Canadians in 1950 make of the allegation that King had been a devotee of this “spiritualistic cult”? Some of King’s opponents thought it a gift. The Globe columnist J.V. McAree wrote up the whole story for Torontonians, detailing the Duchess of Hamilton’s revelations and the bizarre stories of King and his English mediums. McAree treated King’s spiritualism as part of a larger problem. After King’s funeral, the executors of his estate had released the news of King’s gift to the Canadian public of much of his estate. But this had made public the fact that Mackenzie King had died a very rich man. For McAree, the spiritualism news fitted into this revelation, showing “that Mr. King was not quite the sort of man he had been generally supposed to be.”10

Still others remained uncertain. The editor of the Victoria Times claimed that “it is hard for us to believe that he waved his small hands [and] … sent his imagination into overtime as a slave of the occult.” Surely it wouldn’t be right to think that King ventured “into the realm of table-tapping and the weird happenings in the darkness where only the ouija board holds sway.” King was a “practical man” and “a good man. Leave the rest.” A letter to the Toronto Star thought the story an “unfair attack,” and a fifty-year subscriber to the Globe demanded that McAree “kindly try and refrain from slurring [Mackenzie King’s] good name when he cannot defend himself.” For many, the old adage kept its power: do not speak ill of the dead.¹¹

With only this one allegation, and no confirmation as to its truth, King’s defenders could pretend that King had been a spiritual leader, but not a spiritualist. The Liberal Toronto Star thought it all a “curious discussion.” In truth King could “more aptly be described as a mystic.” The paper quoted extensively from his speeches during the Second World War, showing that “he believed in Satanic forces at large in the world; spiritual not military forces, although they found expression in military aggression. He believed in powers of evil which take possession of men’s minds; the minds of nations as well as individuals.” This wrapped up King’s beliefs in the kind of acceptable Christian common sense that he himself had always publicly expressed.¹²

To know more of King’s private beliefs probably wasn’t possible. Time magazine published a short article on the allegations but concluded, “Chances are that no one would ever know whether in the privacy of his study, Mackenzie King actually tried to communicate with his dead mother or whether his spiritualist experiments had any effect upon his conduct of the country’s affairs.” The truth might be in King’s personal diary but that documentary trove was “ordered destroyed after his death under the terms of Mackenzie King’s will.”¹³ Perhaps Canadians would never know the full story.

It really all depended on what became of that diary.