Statesman or Politician?
In the summer of 1952 an Ottawa Citizen reader wrote to complain to the paper: “It seems as if no one may mention the name of the late Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. W.L. Mackenzie King, without bringing forth a violent diatribe from Mr. Eugene Forsey.” 1 The reader wasn’t wrong. In the middle years of the twentieth century, if you went looking for criticism of the former prime minister in any newspaper or magazine across the country, you would probably find Eugene Forsey. At the time Forsey worked as research director of the Canadian Congress of Labour but the former McGill University professor was also coming to be considered one of the nation’s foremost constitutional experts. Not surprisingly, Forsey replied to the disgruntled reader. He admitted to being a perennial corrector of Mackenzie King myths but he also pointed out that the reader hadn’t suggested that any of Forsey’s criticisms were actually wrong.2 For Forsey, this mattered most of all: the truth.
When revelations emerged about King and his relations with mediums, Forsey privately guffawed like the rest.3 But Forsey did not think that revealing King’s spiritualism would truly expose the prime minister for who he had been. For Mackenzie King’s most persistent critic, the question of who the former prime minister really was and the secrets he kept from the Canadian public had almost nothing to do with his personal oddities. The damning evidence against King wasn’t peculiarity but lack of character. King’s great secret was his dishonour. The real truth of Mackenzie King was that, although he had pretended to be a statesman, in fact King had merely been a grubby politician.
In the early 1950s, in the years just after Mackenzie King died, it appeared as if getting to the truth of Mackenzie King’s legacy might mean sorting out exactly these kinds of issues. Forsey would have agreed with King’s literary executors about the importance of retaining a sense of the dignity of the nation’s public leaders. He simply disagreed on whether King had himself lived up to those high standards. The real secrets of Mackenzie King, according to a critic like Eugene Forsey, lay with those parts of his political actions that he had kept hidden from the public. In taking on Mackenzie King’s record so relentlessly, Eugene Forsey put to the test whether the statesman ideal still held sway in Canadian politics. Forsey would expose King for who he really was. And Canadians would have to judge if it mattered whether one acted as a statesman or merely as a politician.
The young Mackenzie King might have liked Eugene Forsey. As Canada’s youngest deputy minister of labour, King had seen himself as Galahad, engaged in a quest for the grail of labour peace. He sat up nights in the apartment he shared with his friend Bert Harper reading Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. This was the Mackenzie King who led a campaign to erect a statue when this same friend Bert Harper died in 1902. Harper had thrown himself into the Ottawa River in an effort to rescue a woman who had fallen through the ice at a skating party. “What else can I do?” Harper had said as he slipped to his heroic death.4
Life gets murky, especially for the ambitious. As a politician King learned that he couldn’t always follow where his ideals led. Still, King was always, in his heart, the aspiring Galahad. Even as he acted duplicitously, told lies, and evaded the truth, he wanted to believe that he did right.5
In Eugene Forsey, King met the man he might have become had he stayed true to his ideals – a man who believed in the possibilities of politics and in the dignity and worth of the statesman. If it wasn’t inevitable that Eugene Forsey came to be Canada’s leading constitutional expert, it wasn’t altogether surprising either. Forsey grew up in his maternal grandparents’ home in Ottawa, steeped in daily lessons on government, parliamentary procedure, and politics. His maternal grandfather started work as a clerk in the House of Commons in 1855 and retired in 1915 as chief clerk of votes and proceedings. Forsey knew the faces of every prime minister in the country since 1894 save for Charles Tupper. He went to McGill in the 1920s and then off to Oxford as one of two Rhodes scholars from Quebec in 1926.6
Like a small but significant number of young men his age (and like the young Mackenzie King), he didn’t smoke or drink or gamble. At Oxford a man living next to him once convinced him to join a game of bridge being played for money. Forsey reluctantly agreed but then, when he and his partner won the game, Forsey fretted about what to do with his ill-gotten gains. His friends jokingly suggested that he could give his winnings to missionaries. For Forsey it wasn’t a joke. He promptly did just that.
But a straight moral back didn’t mean he couldn’t take risks. It was Oxford, he later recalled, that made him a socialist. He left Montreal a Conservative but came back determined to socialize the economy. His second stay in Montreal was bumpier than the first. He became involved in political and radical circles, the kinds of intellectual gatherings that led to the formation of the League for Social Reconstruction and the new socialist political party, the CCF. Forsey ran as a candidate for the party several times, always in ridings that didn’t offer him much of a hope of winning. For Forsey, in this and in so much else, it was the principle that mattered.
His socialism didn’t endear him to his employer, the McGill University Board of Governors. McGill only barely tolerated the activism of its few left-wing professors like Forsey and his friend, the radical poet and lawyer Frank Scott. While Scott managed to hold on to his position, the university ultimately forced Forsey out of his job. The official reason given was that Forsey had not yet earned his doctorate, but Forsey claimed it had much more to do with his stern willingness to stand up for principle even when it inconvenienced those in authority.
Still, Forsey landed on his feet. The upstart radical Canadian Congress of Labour hired him to be its research director, a position he held for more than two decades and from which he launched himself into national discussions of politics across the country. Later in life, Forsey would come to be known as Canada’s pre-eminent writer of letters to the editor. It was an odd achievement, and one that Forsey made into a unique and dignified post of a kind. In an age before the press regularly published op-eds by leading intellectuals, Forsey used the “Letters to the Editor” sections of magazines and newspapers to carve out the same kind of space for himself.
Journalists and editors respected and feared him. A letter from Forsey could unzip them from top to bottom. The Maclean’s journalist Blair Fraser once privately wrote to Forsey, plaintively asking: “Would you consider accepting a small bribe to discontinue your subscription to Maclean’s?” The Globe and Mail’s obituary writer Don Downey recalled that Eugene Forsey was the only man, aside from the paper’s owner, who had been asked to read his own obituary. Forsey responded by saying he had found “a few minor errors” and then attached seven pages of corrections.7
The public myths around Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King also needed a few corrections. Forsey did end up finishing his doctorate and based on that work he published, in 1943, his book The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth. The title was somewhat misleading. In fact, much of the book centred on the King-Byng dispute that had played such a central role in the 1926 national election. In it, Forsey exploded the Liberal interpretation of the King-Byng dispute of 1926. Some saw the timing of Forsey’s book as an attack on the Liberal government. After all, Mackenzie King was a sitting prime minister. This was wartime, and here was an upstart socialist academic undermining one of the central pillars in the Liberal story of Canada’s rise from colony to nation and Mackenzie King’s place in that achievement. He was also doing so in the same year that the Conservative Party had brought back Arthur Meighen, King’s nemesis from 1926, as party leader in an attempt to undermine King’s wartime government.
The King-Byng crisis is now only barely remembered, and probably for the assonance of the name rather than anything else. In the middle years of the last century, though, the incident gleamed brightly amidst other gems of Canada’s emerging constitutional and national story. King-Byng baked together all of the classic ingredients of the colony-to-nation struggle: a haughty British aristocrat, an out-of-touch and arrogant English Canadian Tory, and a defiant Liberal determined to stand up for Canada’s independent status. That, and a happy ending. The country fought an election over the issue. And Mackenzie King and the Liberals won. Or, at least, this is how it went according to one version of the tale.8
In 1926 the governor general had denied Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, his request that Parliament be dissolved and an election called. Byng had instead turned to the Conservative leader, Arthur Meighen, to see if he could form a government. Yet a short time later, when Meighen’s government lost the confidence of the House of Commons, Byng granted Meighen a dissolution of Parliament and Canadians went to the polls anyway. How could Byng have granted the dissolution to Meighen when he denied it to King? For Mackenzie King and the Liberal version of history, this was a gross manifestation of Canada’s still colonial status and an example of British (and aristocratic) interference in Canadian democracy. Canadian voters seemed to agree and they elected King’s Liberals to a majority government in the 1926 election.
Writing in Maclean’s in 1949, Lister Sinclair neatly encapsulated this popular reading of King-Byng, saying that “the Governor-General ruled in Canada until 1926 as even the King did not rule in England.” It was only the King-Byng controversy that finally upended this state of affairs. “That year,” Sinclair wrote, “Governor-General Byng rejected Prime Minister King’s recommendation to dissolve Parliament and King instantly resigned. Lord Byng then sent for Arthur Meighen who in a few days offered the same advice, which was accepted this time. In the election King was decisively supported, and a hurried Imperial Conference made the constitutional position of the Governor-General absolutely clear.” 9
Or did it? Eugene Forsey’s book put the whole issue into the context of British parliamentary democracy and how it was supposed to work. King and the Liberals had put themselves forward as fighters for liberty and the rights of the people. In Forsey’s analysis, King’s logic showed itself more and more as a smokescreen – a politician claiming one thing and appealing to popular prejudice as a ruse. In reality, Forsey argued, King’s actions had systematically belittled the essence of parliamentary democracy.
Forsey went through the argument with an eye for detail that few could muster. He dissected the arguments and the precedents and, one-by-one, showed the faults in the Liberal logic and evidence. Even King, Forsey pointed out, had acknowledged that a governor general had the right to refuse a prime minister’s request to dissolve Parliament. As to the question of British interference in Canadian politics, Forsey showed that it had been King himself who wanted British interference when he thought it would help his case. King had written to the governor general urging him to get advice from the Colonial Office in London. Yet this letter had only emerged after the 1926 election, and after King had campaigned on a nationalist platform that would have derided such British interference. There were other details, dull with the intricacies of parliamentary governance (on the “broken pair” that had brought down the Meighen government, for example), yet the overall thrust was clear and deadly. The whole Liberal story of King-Byng was a sham. Far from being a nationalist hero, Mackenzie King had actually acted against the interests of Canadian democracy. In subsequent years, Forsey has largely been proven right on many of these details, but the nationalist mythology has been hard to dislodge.
Although Forsey acted on principle, there was also a personal element to his dislike of King. In preparing the manuscript of his book, Forsey had earlier sent copies of two draft chapters to Arthur Meighen, the Conservative prime minister with whom King had battled. Meighen responded warmly and with detailed comments. After the publication of Forsey’s book, Meighen and Forsey drew closer. They would correspond regularly, sometimes almost daily. “From then on,” Forsey later recalled “Meighen was perhaps my closest friend.” 10
Meighen and Forsey’s friendship didn’t make sense: a Tory and a socialist; a scion of the Bay Street country-club establishment and a radical proponent of labour rights and the nationalization of banks. Forsey even ran as a CCF candidate in 1947 and again in 1948 against the then current Conservative leader and aspiring prime minister George Drew. Conservatives lambasted Forsey as a radical, accusing him of being a communist. After Forsey was defeated by Drew, the Ottawa Journal, whose editor Grattan O’Leary was a Meighen friend, wrote a glowing story on the strange friendship of Forsey and Meighen. This embarrassed both of them. “I suppose our friendship is a mystery to most people in our respective parties,” Forsey wrote to Meighen. Still, Forsey claimed that he found it “a trifle hard to understand why people think it so extraordinary when I reply to lies about you. I can’t see it has anything to do with your being my friend. It’s a matter of common decency and fair play that when a distinguished public man is shamefully misrepresented, people who know the facts should state them.” 11
For the rest of his life, Forsey continued to set the record straight on the King-Byng dispute, long after the publication of his book and after King’s death. Again and again, he set out the case for the way Meighen had been wronged in the King-Byng dispute and how the accepted version of events was nothing more than “the fables of the Liberal party propaganda.”12 But Forsey didn’t simply leave it at King-Byng. He also wrote about King’s legacy on Canadian constitutional politics and on politics in general, including the way in which King’s policies had hurt the possibilities for stronger central government action on social welfare, on the lack of attention to civil liberties, and other matters. In his book and then again in articles and letters throughout his life, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s, Forsey unmasked Mackenzie King. The case was detailed and intricate, often difficult to follow or even understand. As Forsey complained: “You can tell a lie in three words; to expose it may take twenty.” Forsey quoted Keir Hardie: “The lie goes round the world while truth is putting on her boots.”13
The strength of the critique, though, emanated from its moral basis in a code of honour. Politics ought to be a gentleman’s game, a place not just of that ambiguous figure, the politician, but of that much abler, noble creature, the statesman. If a politician could survive by cunning and manipulation, a statesman persevered with integrity, adhering to principle and truth. In showing King to have lied and deceived, Forsey essentially exposed him as someone with no honour.
What was the truth of Mackenzie King? For Forsey, the answer was clear. Yet did any of this really matter to Canadians? The moral code of statesmanship that Forsey appealed to depended upon others agreeing to its significance. But did they?
We don’t often speak of statesmen any more. The term is reserved for truly outstanding public officials, perhaps a Nelson Mandela or a Mahatma Gandhi. Indeed, as the Google Ngram shown in figure 6.2 demonstrates, the term “statesman” rose to prominence in the early years of democratic government in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century but came to be used much less frequently in the more rambunctiously democratic and egalitarian context of the post–Second World War decades.14 The elusiveness of this term in our own era seems to reflect our own changed attitudes toward politics and political leadership. It shows the decline of an older notion of democracy that was both more idealistic but also hierarchical. In the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century, the idea of the statesman occupied an important place in democratic politics.15 These were figures who stood above the rest, representatives of the people but allegedly in the best sense. Their elevated status in public discourse rested on social, political, and economic hierarchies which put certain men above others (and usually men above women), and on a belief in divisions between what was public and private that allowed these figures to seem to be essentially public men and to hide certain aspects of their lives that would have complicated such idealistic characterizations. They seemed better because we knew less about them. And we knew less about them because of a deference rooted in Victorian notions of propriety. Even as systems of government in Canada became more open, allowing for universal male suffrage and then universal female suffrage (with important lingering racial exclusions), the ideal of the statesman provided a continuing aristocratic tinge to the political scene.
6.2 Graph showing shifting use of the terms “statesman” and “statesmen” in the Google Books library of books digitized and searchable (in English).
Early democratic reforms in Canada and elsewhere aimed to bring others up to the idealistic elevated status of the statesman. Democracy seemed to demand the best of citizens. This was the hope of universal education, that it could create these kinds of ideal citizens. The same hope was at the basis of the desire to make electioneering more rational through reforms like the secret ballot. It lay behind the discourse of those who gathered together in civic organizations to create a public sphere via intelligent discussion in newspapers and in local meetings. All of these initiatives were inspired by liberal notions of individual uplift. There was also, of course, the concomitant fear and assumption that certain people couldn’t be lifted. This was at the heart of the various exclusions of women or racial groups that persisted so long – rooted in racial, class, and sexual prejudice.16
Still, this idealistic notion of democracy hoped for a better political self that could act in the public sphere. The best expression of this public self was supposed to be the statesman. That all politicians didn’t match this ideal was clear. And disagreements about who exactly did achieve such a status were often violently partisan. But the ideal itself has been a significant feature of modern democracy. It hasn’t altogether disappeared though hopes have dimmed. Expectations lessen.
These liberal-democratic ideals fuelled the criticisms of Mackenzie King in the years just after he died. To criticize the public record of Mackenzie King after the fashion of Eugene Forsey was to assume a notion of politics as a high form of public service. Those who truly excelled at politics deserved to be lauded for their achievements. The test of whether someone excelled at politics mattered and it mattered in precise detail. Forsey’s critique was based in these older traditions of parliamentary conduct and notions of the honourable behaviour needed of citizens in the public sphere.
It is hard now to resurrect the full meaning of what honour meant to an earlier Canada.17 Yet honour used to matter a great deal to Canadian political culture and social life. Honour shaped the language, though, of course, not always the practice, of politics. The prime minister was and still is “Right Honourable.” Members of Parliament speak of themselves and their colleagues as the “Honourable Member” from such and such a riding. The rules of decorum in the House and Senate are meant to add dignity and ritual to its proceedings, shared ceremony and titles embodying virtues and relationships. We can translate honour partially into modern parlance by replacing it with respect or self-respect, yet this loses some of the intricacy and hierarchy implicit in the older idea. Honour was meant to be a code that impelled action. Honour could be lost, and once lost, it was utterly gone. It was the male equivalent of feminine virtue. The reverse of honour is not just less honour but shame, humiliation, and disgrace. Even if it is held and acted upon individually, honour is a communal idea. It depends on a collective set of understandings of right action that are then internalized. Honour is most readily seen in small groups, among an elite, a family, a small community or ethnic group, a sports team, or a military unit. It also can be seen in politics and especially among the small group of those who occupy political office. The question of whether these small-group hierarchical notions of honour could survive into the era of democratic, universal-rights mass politics remained open at mid-century.
Today parliamentary ritual and etiquette appear Byzantine and foreign. Yet in the nineteenth century they did not so clearly contrast with everyday life nor with ideals about what democracy ought to be. Political relations between local citizens and their representatives resembled those between patron and client, a system that one historian has called “clientelism.”18 Voters put forward their local bigwig, a man (always a man) with local connections and status, someone who might also hold or have held local office. The system of patronage worked to cement these relations. Many voters could expect to receive something back from their vote, not simply a voice in Parliament but perhaps a job or a contract for themselves or a relation. Governments kept lists of reliable or trusted businesses who could receive contracts, even newspapers that would receive government advertising. The local member of Parliament played a direct role in the minutiae of this kind of patronage and connection with his riding. With a much smaller electorate, and the open ballot (until 1877), voters and their representatives knew who was on their side. The party systems of the late nineteenth century cemented these mutual ties of obligation and support.19
The society of nineteenth-century Canada was also much more obviously formal in its outward relations. This included everything from relations between the sexes (one needed to be introduced to a woman before speaking to her) to formal modes of address: to use someone’s Christian name implied familiarity, something to be earned not assumed. As soon as pioneering families could manage it, they built homes that reserved a room, the parlour, for public socializing. Kept meticulously clean and proper, and usually out of bounds for day-today activities, the parlour represented the formality of nineteenth-century life in domestic miniature. Part of the home, and yet not entirely of it, it sat often empty, a depressurization chamber between the public and the private. In a society such as this, the codes of parliamentary behaviour were not entirely foreign even if they differed in kind from how most Canadians went about their daily business. Respectability mattered even if it could not always be achieved at home or in public life.20 Indeed, the facade of respectability mattered most when private behaviour undermined publicly shared values. Politics and family life could often be tumultuous, violent, and messy yet that only made the public face of respectability all the more important.
This is not to say that political debate was not partisan and bitter. Indeed, quite the opposite. The level of partisan vitriol in a nineteenth-century newspaper along with the liberal dose of vituperative Dickensian insult can often seem shocking to those more accustomed to the neutral tone adopted by most newspapers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.21 Yet these attacks coexisted with a more widespread sense that the act of politics itself mattered and ought to be held in high regard. The insults meant so much because they were contrasted with an exalted ideal.
When Eugene Forsey attacked Mackenzie King, he appealed to the moral force of this culture of virtue and honour among the small club honoured to have been selected to sit in Parliament. The truth ought to have mattered. A statesman was supposed to hold himself to higher standards, at least in public and at least when it came to publicly defending his actions. To act in a forthright manner, all could agree, was the ideal position of the statesman.
Yet the moral code that gave force to Forsey’s arguments was crumbling under the social and political changes of the twentieth century. The change in politics was clear. The clientelist model of politics, with its strong role for individual members of Parliament, was only a shadow of its former self. Although political parties still doled out patronage, they did so in different ways that often excluded or at least minimized the role of a local MP. Some spoke, for example, of welfare-state programs like the Family Allowance as new forms of patronage that went directly to citizens. The creation of the Civil Service Commission in 1907, and then frequent reforms to it over the years since, removed much of the power of the MP to control patronage directly and to dole out positions to local supporters. Political parties still used government contracts to win support and get money from companies, but this increasingly happened at a more centralized level, perhaps with the assistance of regional cabinet ministers. In other words, the material rewards of clientelism diminished.22
Moreover, the expansion of different forms of commercial entertainment, from cinema to radio to the automobile and beyond, meant that Canadians had many more ways of amusing themselves. Politics had always been partly about socializing. It mattered because it was one of the only shows in town. Like the mainstream churches in the same years, political parties struggled to keep the attention of Canadians. As Norman Ward wrote of a slightly later period, “the day is over when local political enterprise provided the major form of social activity outside religion, with few alternate sources of entertainment.”23 Pierre Trudeau had not yet said that as soon as an MP was fifty yards away from Parliament Hill he was a nobody, but the long slow decline of parliamentary prestige was well on its way.
Culturally, the 1950s sat on a precipice of change, teetering in both directions, from the more to the less formal. Many English Canadians still admired the monarchy, for example. To read letters from the era is to go back into a period when the slightest variations in address still carried great weight. When King’s literary executor Fred McGregor got to know the official biographer Robert MacGregor Dawson better, the shift in their correspondence from Dear Mr Dawson to Dear Dawson to Dear Bob intimated much.24
Yet the signs of a less formal, more democratic sensibility bubbled everywhere. In so many areas of life, formalism retreated – in dining with the barbecue, in architecture with the California-style bungalow and its easy shift from inside to outside. Journalism and writing changed, throwing up Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan as exemplars of the new style. To write well was to write shorter, punchier sentences, to throw off punctuation and extraneous phrasing even as some threw off the constrictions of Victorian clothing and values. Even fonts threw off serifs. In communication, radio embodied this trend, as did, in more dramatic fashion beginning in the early 1950s, television. They brought public figures and politicians into the open. For both mediums, little change was evident at first – their daily fare was heavily scripted speeches and announcements. But soon the media responded to immediacy and even intimacy, to sheer presence. Old traditions and codes of conduct meant for small quarters looked old-fashioned and stodgy, out of date and maybe even irrelevant.25
The codes of honour and morality that Forsey appealed to, in other words, were themselves being transformed in the middle years of the century. The idea of the upright statesman who spoke the truth and led with dignity still carried weight. Many read Forsey’s articles and were inspired and convinced. But there were other ways of thinking about politicians and political life emerging in these years, and the differences did not just depend on partisanship – they did not just pit Liberals against Conservatives, Tories versus Grits. The material basis for the statesman ideal, rooted as it had been in clientelist patronage politics and a society of moral Christian respectability and small-town life, diminished. At the same time, Canadians turned away from politics as one of their main areas of entertainment and socializing. As Canadian culture grew slowly less formal, the stiff formalities of Parliament became an ever more distant and archaic ritual – less real and thus less relevant.
Yet in the 1950s it still seemed as if the old formalities could hold out, at least for a while longer. Stiff formalities could pass themselves off as necessary respectability; the long-winded speeches of Parliament might not yet seem pompous – or not necessarily so. Eugene Forsey could deride the lack of statesmanship of the country’s most successful prime minister, and insist that the details did, in fact, matter.
