7

Blame Freud

Different truths, though, matter to different people. In the early 1950s, another book came along that promised to tell unsuspected truths about Mackenzie King. It wasn’t a disreputable book by a mudslinging, politically motivated detractor. Nor was it an academic treatise. Instead, Bruce Hutchison’s The Incredible Canadian: A Candid Portrait of Mackenzie King was about as middle of the road as you could imagine. Yet the book promised to tell “the amazing story of the man, Mackenzie King, not as the public knew him, but as he really was.”1 It raised King up with one hand – as the greatest prime minister – and brought him down with the other – as a chubby, petty little man. The Incredible Canadian presented King as an enigma, highlighting the mismatch between King’s small personal stature and his record of public greatness. An effeminate man who acted on intuition, who was dominated by his mother, yet one who understood the needs of his country as no other. It was a candid portrait indeed.

The Incredible Canadian came out in the autumn of 1952, just in time for the Christmas book-buying season. It made a huge splash. Maclean’s published three large instalments in advance to whet the public’s appetite. The titles came as bold exclamations, like the excited announcement in films of the time about “Technicolour!” or “Cinemascope!”: “Mackenzie King and the Revolt of the Army” – “How Mackenzie King Won His Greatest Gamble.” Newspapers across the country widely reviewed the book, many favourably. It would go on to win various awards including the University of British Columbia Award for Biography.² There was clearly a market for a certain kind of truth-telling about the former prime minister.

This is because Bruce Hutchison’s desire to get an authentic version of the great public man spoke to a burbling cultural current of ideas that supported just this sort of thing. It didn’t just mean looking at King’s public record (though that counted too). It also meant thinking about his personality and the inner truths of the man. Hutchison was willing to take this curiosity only so far. Others would go farther in following decades. But in the early 1950s, it seemed that there were some rumblings about the need to look to the inner workings of public men.

Blame Freud. The rise to prominence in the 1950s of psychoanalytical and therapeutic ways of thinking put a premium on revealing what was hidden in the unconscious mind. Freudian ideas were popularized in these years in a mishmash of loosely Freudian metaphors and terms.3 The trend indicated the mid-century public’s fascination with the hidden secrets that often underlay the facade of respectable life.

It is hard to overestimate the novel excitement generated by Freudian ideas in 1950s Canada. Although Freud died in 1939, his ideas came to dominate psychiatry in the 1940s. Freudian ideas also spread throughout North American popular culture, forming a kind of common sense about the importance of childhood sexual experience in later psychological development. These ideas had been taken up by the urban middle class of Europe in the early twentieth century and had become more popular in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and especially after the arrival in North America of psychoanalysts fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. American historian of psychiatry Nathan G. Hale calls the period after the Second World War the “Golden Age” of Freudian and psychoanalytic popularization.

Freudian psychoanalysis came to be the dominant paradigm within the psychiatric profession in the United States and Canada, though there were certainly alternate perspectives, and Freud dominated most in urban areas.⁴ The Canadian psychiatrist (and historian of psychiatry) Joel Paris noted that Freudian ideas made psychiatry itself seem significant, with large numbers of medical students (more than later in the century) wanting to specialize in psychiatry. “Becoming a psychiatrist,” Paris recalled, “was seen as the only way to become a physician who cared about the mind and the soul.” The public fascination was flattering. “Analysis was believed to provide access to the unconscious mind. While this claim was never backed up by data, the general public was in awe of the technique’s purported capacity to understand the psyche. Psychiatrists or psychiatric residents [could] be asked at parties whether they could read other people’s minds.”⁵ As historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter puts it, “for a brief period at mid-twentieth century, middle-class society became enraptured of the notion that psychological problems arose as a result of unconscious conflicts over long-past events, especially those of a sexual nature.”⁶

7.1 Graph showing shifting use of the terms “Freud” and “therapy” in the Google Books library of books digitized and searchable (in English).

The mid-1950s saw the centennial of Freud’s birth and the celebrations combined with new translations and reissues of his works put Freudian ideas into circulation as never before. A three-volume biography by Ernest Jones, published between 1953 and 1957, gave English speakers a Freud that was both personal and profound. The reviewer in the New Yorker called it “the greatest biography of our time.” Most importantly, Freudian ideas came to North Americans via magazines. Beginning during and just after the Second World War, journalists worked to popularize – and vulgarize – Freud for readers across the continent. Freudians added new words to the English language and gave new meanings to old terms: penis envy, Oedipus Complex, transference, Freudian slip, psychosomatic, erogenous zone, obsession, fixation. Freudian ideas slipped into the common sense of North America: the idea that dreams reflected the workings of the unconscious, and the very idea of the unconscious as a part of one’s personality where certain desires and impulses bubbled away beneath the surface, the unfinished business of ongoing childhood conflicts that were ready to expose themselves at awkward or random moments.7

Publications like Life, Scientific American, Newsweek, and Reader’s Digest brought Freud into the living rooms and waiting rooms of North America. These US magazines enjoyed a larger readership in Canada than Canadian ones, and Canadians, too, became fascinated with, if not always believers in, the new psychological insights. Hollywood played its part as well. The period from the mid-1950s through to the mid-1960s represented its own golden age of psychiatry in film. Just as many working in the industry went through their own analysis, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts never looked better as a profession than they did on the screen.⁸ In other words, the popularizing of Freudian ideas in Canada was part of a broader trend of Americanization in these years when American capital and American cultural products flooded into Canada, propelling the post-war boom.

The rise of Freudian psychiatry was also part of a wider push toward environmentalist explanations of human behaviour in the middle of the twentieth century, and away from biologically determinist views. For Freudians, mental illness and mental health existed on a continuum. The difference between the severely mentally ill and run-of-the-mill neuroses was only a matter of degree. Everyone was “a little bit schizophrenic or a little bit manic-depressive.” ⁹

In this democratic version of mental health, psychiatry became not just something for the severely mentally ill or for those in asylums. Everyone could benefit from an understanding of how the mind worked and the role of unconscious conflicts in our lives. Not coincidentally, the psychiatric profession came in these years to move out of the asylums and into private practice and to focus on a broader, more common, range of mental illnesses, often understood as neuroses. The concept of mental illness was becoming ever more inclusive.

What this meant in practice is that social conventions that seemed to proscribe or inhibit the self opened themselves up to scrutiny. The rise of psychoanalytical ways of thinking provided the language whereby these earlier values could be labelled as repressed – a pseudoscientific gloss to explain why older values should no longer reign. Freud gave North Americans permission to look more frankly at their desires and their impulses. As Robert White put it in Scientific American, Freud was a hero “for many thoughtful people because he dared look steadily at the dark forces within us and … held out hope, however cautiously, that they might be better governed.” The rise of a psychoanalytic view of human impulses opened the door to a more relativistic assessment of them, although, at mid-century, Freudianism did not necessarily condone these dark places and impulses. Instead, it offered a modern, scientific moralism shorn of Christian theology. These ways of thinking represented a shift away from a Victorian moral code around issues of sexuality and respectability, but Freudian psychology retained the aura of a moral code nonetheless – a moral code translated into scientific, psychological language.10

Perhaps the best-known Canadian Freudian was Brock Chisholm, who had become famous in 1945 for telling Canadian parents that they were laying the seeds of future wars by lying to their children about the existence of Santa Claus. While journalists and politicians ridiculed and lambasted Chisholm’s ideas, he represented the wave of cultural change that was to come. He led the way in setting up psychological testing in the Canadian military. He rose to public prominence through his Santa Claus remarks in the aftermath of being awarded the Lasker Award for 1946 (the Lasker being an attempt to create an American Nobel). The first Lasker had gone to American psychoanalyst popularizer Karl Menninger. Chisholm fitted well into this company. In the speech he gave on receiving the award, and in others subsequently, he decried the way that contemporary morality skewed the actions of individuals in contemporary society. Modern North Americans needed to develop new and rational ideas of right and wrong. They needed to throw off the yoke of cultural baggage, especially the sort stemming from the traditional churches, that led to neurotic impulses like aggression, guilt, desire for power, and other psychological causes of war and turmoil. Here was a man who demanded a truer and more frank assessment of the real patterns at work in post-war Canada.¹¹

Freud did not reign unchallenged in these years. Indeed, many psychiatrists and psychologists offered alternate methodologies and explanations for human behaviour. Because of the unwillingness of Freud and then his daughter Anna to bend and modify the field’s original tenets, the history of psychoanalysis is like the history of Christianity in the Protestant Reformation, with new sects splintering off in all directions. A series of influential thinkers including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Fritz Perls, and Wilhelm Reich would emphasize different explanations for neuroses and offer slightly different methods for treatment. Yet collectively they represented the flowering of a therapeutic culture of self-awareness by mid-century. The importance of one field of psychiatry or psychology mattered less than the overall rise of a perspective that saw ultimate truths in revealing what was essential or authentic in the individual self.

In this sense, Freud was a symbol as much as an agent of change. Freudian ideas matched other developments across the culture that pushed for a more authentic and frank expression of what an older morality would have wanted to hide or condemn. For example, beginning in the 1930s but picking up steam in the post-war decades, Alcoholics Anonymous radically changed how North Americans thought of drunkenness. Alcoholics Anonymous called for those with drinking problems to admit to themselves and to others who they truly were: alcoholics. The process was a hodgepodge of religious inspiration (admitting your powerlessness before the Creator), psychotherapeutic practices (group-therapy meetings), and pseudo-science (seeing the drinker as an addict).12 The truth of problem drinking didn’t rest with alcohol (and so prohibition was not the answer) but in the individuals themselves, and the need to admit who they really were.

In other fields, the trend was similar, pushing toward an acknowledgment of what was really on the inside. By the 1950s, progressive child-centred education was making inroads in most Canadian schools (with some regional variation, notably in Quebec where the Catholic system was a holdout). There were many critics of these developments, including historian Hilda Neatby, whose 1953 book So Little for the Mind crystallized the popular conservative worry over changing cultural priorities. When Eugene Forsey read Neatby’s book, he wrote to Arthur Meighen, aghast at a school system that would raise a student’s grade from 29 per cent to 50 per cent because of a grade curve. For Forsey, this was a sad example of a wider “flood of nonsense, stupidity, ignorance and mendacity.”¹³ But what for Forsey might have been evidence of decline could also be described as a progressive development. Schooling experts in the 1950s increasingly pushed for a more democratic classroom that centred on the needs of the child and where the usual need in schools to maintain authority was “tempered by the doctrine that too much authority was dangerous.” 14 In the post-war schools, teachers needed to worry not only about curriculum and discipline but also about the child’s personality and self-esteem.

This could be both prosaic and profound. The main currents of high art in the 1950s were also predicated on the unvarnished truths that could be found within the self if only one could do away with restrictions of social convention. The idea of the artist who let out her real self in her work has a long history, but it reached new heights with the rise of abstract expressionism in these years. Perhaps the best Canadian exemplar of the new school was the artist Jack Bush, whose friendship with the influential American critic Clement Greenberg put him at the centre of these cultural currents. Bush himself began psychoanalysis in 1947 and started a regular diary in part based on this analysis in 1952. His analyst urged him to use his art as a kind of therapy, as a way to work through the emotions that still lingered from childhood trauma. It was essential for Bush and for other painters of this era to paint in a free and flowing style, eliminating the censor of the conscious brain and letting the truth that burbled within emerge on the canvas.¹⁵

Other cultural and intellectual developments pushed in the same direction. Margaret Mead became a popular figure for writing about Polynesian peoples and their more open, frank sexual practices. The popularization of her research moved mainstream North American culture toward a more relativistic assessment of sexual and moral standards. So too did the Kinsey reports on human sexual behaviour, published in these years – the volume on male sexuality appearing in 1948 and the volume on women in 1953. Here was a seemingly scientific, not moral, accounting of what people allegedly actually did in their sexual lives – and all of it presented in public.¹⁶ Better out than in.

All of this can seem at some remove from politics – Freud, high art, educational philosophy, frank scientific talk about sexual practices. But when Bruce Hutchison’s publishers promised Canadians a “candid” biography, they cannily locked into these broader developments. It certainly wasn’t that Hutchison wrote a Freudian biography of King – for he did not. But the culture of the early 1950s was ripe for this kind of seemingly more authentic version of the self – even the self of the nation’s longest-serving prime minister.

It didn’t hurt that Bruce Hutchison was a dazzling writer.

This was partly why Mackenzie King’s literary executors had seriously considered asking Hutchison to be the official biographer and why they ultimately opted against him. They knew he could bring dramatic zeal and excitement to the task, but they opted for the safer academic choice of Robert MacGregor Dawson. Still, they had been tempted by the possibility of a Bruce Hutchison biography of Mackenzie King.17

As one of Canada’s pre-eminent journalists and writers, Bruce Hutchison scribbled the history of twentieth-century Canada as it happened.¹⁸ His trademark humility obliged him to say that he watched from the sidelines, but really he stood at the centre. As one of the country’s few national political columnists, and a man tied by inclination and friendship to the Liberal Party, Hutchison knew all of the key politicians who controlled Canada’s national fate from the 1920s to the 1970s. He came of age as a journalist in the 1920s and 1930s, working for newspapers in Victoria and Vancouver. In the 1940s, he impressed John W. Dafoe, the heralded Liberal editor of the Winnipeg Free Press (and one of Eugene Forsey’s nemeses), who lured him into the orbit of the Free Press. From then on, even when he was far from Ottawa as editor of the Victoria Times Colonist, he played a role on the national political stage alongside other Free Press liberal journalists like Grant Dexter, George Ferguson, and the owner of the paper, Victor Sifton.

Hutchison could do it all. Even those who didn’t much like his politics couldn’t help but wonder at his way with words. Hutchison could make any subject come alive. He wrote columns not just on politics and international affairs but also gardening, a subject he loved, and any other light and humorous subject that struck his fancy. He wrote short stories for popular American magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly. Most importantly, he wrote books: ruminations on the state of Canada like his Governor General Award–winning The Unknown Country (1942) and the follow-up Canada: Tomorrow’s Giant (1957); descriptions of his home province, as in The Fraser (1950); and accounts of Canadian politics like his history of Canada’s prime ministers or his biography of one prime minister in particular, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

The Liberal Party had no more able and loyal friend than Bruce Hutchison. Hutchison and the Free Press had stood with the King government in the conscription crisis of the Second World War. In Louis St Laurent, Hutchison saw a father figure whom he admired more than any other. With Lester Pearson, Hutchison had a friend, someone of his own generation for whom he wanted the best of things. If he had asked for it, the Liberals would have given him a safe seat in Parliament, and almost certainly a seat in cabinet. They tried to convince him to run on several occasions. He always turned them down. But he remained loyal, even writing speeches for Pearson.19

This loyalty and friendship is no doubt partly why King’s literary executor Jack Pickersgill took Hutchison aside and suggested that perhaps the great journalist could write his own biography of the chief, one that, unlike the official biography, could be popular and engaging. The spark of the idea flared in the kindling of Hutchison’s imagination. He would write a biography of King. It would be a book not only about King but also about Canada and the era in which he had governed. He thought that the literary executors had been wise to pass him over for the official position of biographer since he would “only [be] interested in a portrait which paints the great man warts and all.” The book would be “fair” but it also needed to be “utterly candid.” For it had to “try to answer that fascinating question which haunts all my contemporaries, namely how a man so essentially small in most of his human aspects was yet able, with these ingredients, to erect such a large corpus of public achievement.” ²⁰

It was a good time for candid biographies. By mid-century, a few other voices dared to ask why Canadians had been so ill-served in the biographies of its political figures. “It seems to me,” lamented one critic in the Ottawa Journal, “that when a Canadian sets out to write about another Canadian he puts on his cleanest shirt and Sunday tie and dusts off his typewriter lest the keys bear any worldly dust as they make their imprint.” No matter the real-life differences, the characters appearing in such biographies blurred into a national sameness: “We get a little parchment fellow who was born of Scotch-Canadian parents and always ran errands for his mother until he worked his way through university and won a scholarship in philosophy which brought him into business or politics wherein his sterling character at length but inevitably broke through to public recognition and left its beneficent rays on all with whom he came in contact.” The respectable biography recoiled from the passions – beautiful, dirty, or anything in between. It stepped gently over “rows” and rarely admitted ambition. If the subject did well in life (as, of course, he did, hence the biography), his “advancements must always be ascribed to plain reward forced upon an unwilling victim.”21 If the journalist had been specifically describing the biographies so far published of Mackenzie King, he couldn’t have been more spot-on.

Surely Canadians were ready for more insightful and authentically individualistic fare. Victorian-era biographies had been thoroughly deferential, eschewing scandal and intimacies. Such biographies were “constrained by a mania for good taste, respectability, and decorum.” In England, of course, Lytton Strachey had begun writing exactly the opposite of these virtuous Victorian volumes a generation earlier. Canadian writers and publishers read Strachey but only belatedly copied him. In Canada, the debunking style of Strachey biography had been admired by some but, as Carl Berger notes, the Canadian versions were more “tepid and limited.” Historians had tended to turn away from biography altogether and to look for the real patterns of history in economic forces. Yet by the 1940s some Canadian writers were looking to return to biography as a form of writing which was more human and direct, and which showed the real lives of individuals and their ability to influence their worlds. When the historian Donald Creighton set out to write his monumental biography of John A. Macdonald in the late 1940s, he complained about how “Canadian biographies have a formal, official air, as if they had been written out of the materials of a newspaper morgue.” In such biographies, the human being at their centre “remains an important Public Personage – in capitals – dwarfed by the circumstances of his ‘Times,’ which are portrayed in great chunks of descriptive material, pitilessly detailed, and among which he drags out an embarrassed and attenuated documentary existence, like an unsubstantial papier-maché [sic] figure made up of old dispatches and newspaper files.” Readers find it hard to resist the “uncomfortable sensation that one is reading about one and the same man.”22

As good a Liberal as Bruce Hutchison was, he had no intention of giving Canadians a starched and respectable biography of Mackenzie King. If he didn’t have access to King’s private papers (reserved for the official biographer), Hutchison still had his sources. He drew informants from those who had been close to King. Jack Pickersgill, King’s former assistant and current literary executor, gave him stories as someone loyal to King and a civil servant close to the action. For the secrets of the cabinet, Hutchison relied principally on two ministers, Chubby Power and T.A. Crerar. Both men had been at the highest reaches of the King government, but both remained skeptical of the King mystique. Both helped Hutchison on the assurance of anonymity. Power even gave Hutchison access to a diary that he had kept in the midst of the conscription crisis of 1944. Many other individuals pitched in to give Hutchison a sense of what had really happened in some of the key moments of King’s life.

From this base, Bruce Hutchison gave Canadians a published version of Mackenzie King’s life unlike anything published before. The Incredible Canadian presented King as a great prime minister but it did not do so by draping him in sentiment, high intentions, and noble action. Hutchison did believe King’s vision for the country to have been great. But he also exposed King’s often devious, manipulative, and self-serving actions. Hutchison wanted to show how politics really worked, the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring that really mattered. Ultimately, he generally approved of King’s actions and he happily bathed them in the light of retroactive glory and claims of farsightedness. Yet his detailed reconstructions of events on Parliament Hill had a vivid action that was new.

On the King-Byng crisis of 1926, Hutchison actually presented much of the evidence of King’s misdeeds, though he did still repeat the Liberal story of the crisis as a moment of national evolution. What is intriguing about Hutchison’s account is the way he happily transforms the story of the King-Byng dispute into a tale of political cunning and chance. The title of the excerpt in Maclean’s gave the flavour, “How Mackenzie King Won His Greatest Gamble.” In other words, King-Byng was not primarily a constitutional achievement (pace the traditional Liberal story) nor was it an example of moral perfidy (as Forsey had it). Instead, it was a perfect example of King’s political skill.

When Mackenzie King goes to the governor general to ask for a dissolution, this comes after repeated attempts to get his government out of the danger of being defeated in Parliament. Hutchison has King trying on many disguises – Uriah Heep, Galahad, Sherlock Holmes, and Machiavelli – as he tries to navigate the crisis. In Byng’s refusal to grant the dissolution, and Meighen’s acceptance of the premiership, Hutchison has King finding a way to survive. Hutchison claims that King showed “fantastic adroitness” in burying his government’s problems under the weight of this constitutional issue of a governor general refusing a Canadian prime minister’s request to dissolve Parliament. He repeats many of the elements of the Liberal story about the memory of the fight for responsible government and the importance of King as a defender of Parliament (even when, as Forsey would say, he was trying to escape its verdict). Overall, though, King-Byng is turned into a story of political calculation – strategy over substance, luck over morality.23

Hutchison could not have picked a more certain way to offend Eugene Forsey. Forsey wrote extensively about the book, in private letters, in letters to the editor, and in a long article published in Saturday Night. The Ottawa Citizen even published a satirical poem by Forsey, mocking Hutchison’s over-the-top prose style.²⁴ Forsey did not fall for what he saw as the trickery of Hutchison’s realism, his bare-bones, politics-as-it-really-was, account. Forsey admitted that King did not come off unscathed in Hutchison’s account but he nonetheless saw the danger that lurked underneath this “nasty, slippery, clever job.” For, while Hutchison did not entirely overlook all of King’s misdeeds, he also removed the whole event from the calculus of right and wrong. What truly offended Forsey was “the calm identifying of proficiency in mendacity and utter lack of honour or scruple with ‘political genius.’”²⁵

Forsey didn’t disagree with everything Hutchison wrote. He thought that Hutchison did show the secrets of King’s success: lying, support in Quebec, luck, strong ministers, an effective civil service, and, most importantly, being “unhampered by principles.” But this could not excuse the Liberal journalist’s refusal to cast judgment. How could you see and not find fault? This seemed to be the Liberal way. It demonstrated how the King era continued to bleed into the St Laurent Canada of the 1950s. As Forsey said, Hutchison “dislikes Mr. King. He denounces his foreign policy between the two wars … He is highly critical of a lot of other things. But, like so many of our ‘intelligentsia,’ he just can’t get over those elections. It is perhaps Mr. King’s most enduring monument that for a whole generation he made the winning of elections the final test of statesmanship.” In the same vein, Forsey wrote in a letter to Saturday Night that the version Hutchison gave of King’s “double fraud” in King-Byng said a good deal about Hutchison himself: ‘If a political manoeuvre succeeds, it doesn’t occur to him even to question its morality; or that if it does, the standard Liberal answer to everything is enough: ‘We won the election.’”²⁶

7.2 “How Mackenzie King Won His Greatest Gamble”

Forsey wasn’t any happier with Hutchison’s account of the conscription crisis of the Second World War, also excerpted in Maclean’s and the subject of much discussion in publications around the country. It was one thing to admire King’s Machiavellian tactics in the distant case of King-Byng, but when Hutchison turned to the explosive issue of conscription during the Second World War, he ventured into a territory littered with still-active moral landmines. Hutchison claimed to have a secret to tell, a revelation that he clearly hoped would see him through this treacherous landscape.

The Maclean’s headline boasted of a tale of “Mackenzie King and the Revolt of the Canadian Army.”27 The magazine promised to tell readers about “the most critical thirty-five days in the political life of Mackenzie King and perhaps in the life of the Canadian nation.” Many might think that they knew this story. But Hutchison had a great secret to reveal. He claimed that in the final days of the conscription crisis, as the cabinet threatened to divide and break apart the government and the Liberal Party, an event that would have had terrifying consequences for the nation, Mackenzie King was worried about another crisis, one that no one, until this point, knew about. The details were vague, and even Hutchison admitted that he couldn’t be sure how to reconcile the conflicting accounts. What he could say was that “King either saw, or thought he saw, or pretended to see, the Canadian Army on the verge of seizing political power through a sit-down strike or an open uprising.” Hutchison proceeded to tell the tale, which reads “like the stage directions of a play, with an ending almost beyond belief.”

It is not clear who was Hutchison’s source for this story, though the most likely candidate would be the King literary executor and Hutchison friend Jack Pickersgill. No one else close to events during the war or after gave the story of the “Revolt in the Army” any credence.28 Allegedly, King received a telephone call from General Andy McNaughton after he had been made minister of defence and in the short period when McNaughton was still trying to prove that the voluntary enlistment system could get more recruits quickly in the autumn of 1944. McNaughton had just been to a meeting with the Army brass. They insisted to him that the recruitment system was not working and would not work. More so, he said that “I have terrible news for you, Chief! What I must tell you will come as a body blow.” When the call was over, King “hung up the telephone knowing, he said, that he no longer faced a political crisis, or even a racial schism, but the disintegration of the army, a military uprising, which might seize the civil power, a state of national anarchy, nothing less.” Or so the source close to King told Hutchison, and so Hutchison reported.

When Hutchison was researching his book, he ran the story of the revolt past everyone he knew who was close to events at the time of the crisis – cabinet ministers, Army officers. They all thought the story was nonsense. Chubby Power, one of Hutchison’s sources for other parts of the book, and the man who had been minister of air, joked to Angus McDonald, his predecessor in the post, that “it would have been great fun, had your loyal and intrepid Navy turned its guns on Laurier House from its armoured rowboats, in Dows Lake.” ²⁹

The revolt story also continued Hutchison’s account of politics as a kind of spectacle. Ultimately, King reversed his position. Even though he had fired Ralston for supporting conscription, three weeks later he adopted the same policy himself. For many in English Canada, this amounted to betrayal of the worst kind. In the writing on conscription in this era, Ralston plays the role of martyr. He died in 1949, and even then King refused to honour him in Parliament. As the Winnipeg Daily Star put it, “a less great Canadian than Mr. Ralston could have split the Liberal Party down the middle. It is to Mr. Ralston’s credit, having seen the government finally take action, that he did not take any step that would interfere with the country’s war effort. His patriotism came before his personal position.”30 This clearly contrasted with King’s behaviour. King and his allies professed that King acted for the best of the country. But it is difficult to believe that the three-week delay before conscription was implemented truly mattered. King faced defeat, threw aside a rival, and then adopted the policies of that rival.

In the face of this conduct, Hutchison professed to see only King’s higher intentions and, when these weren’t enough, his political skill. King acted out of daring, and brutally. A leader needed to behave like this. Or such was the impression left by Hutchison. Privately, where Hutchison was less concerned about protecting the party’s interests, he admitted that even King’s official documents might not help in substantiating the revolt in the Army story because “the documents will be constructed to support the theory.” He also admitted that he even doubted whether McNaughton’s papers would “substantiate the suggestion that the military were about to launch some form of up-rising. Nevertheless, Mr. King used this fantasy, if such it was, with remarkable cunning.” ³¹

Eugene Forsey initially thought that Hutchison’s account of the conscription crisis left “King naked and shivering before the bar of history. It throws a good deal of light on some of the secrets of his power: ruthlessness, callousness, utter lack of principle, infinite capacity to wear opponents down by sheer weight of irrelevant talk and, of course, sheer mendacity.”³² Yet this was not the whole story. Yes, Hutchison exposed King’s brutal methods, but he also wrapped this up in a tale of how King tried to keep the nation together – how his tough tactics aimed at the better Canadian national good. The ends justified the means. Forsey saw only the double-handed duplicity, the absence of honour, but it’s not clear that this was enough to bring down a politician’s reputation. There were other kinds of truths to be told.

In the early 1950s, in a North American context that gave new values to being frank about hidden truths, Bruce Hutchison offered Canadians a story of Mackenzie King as he really had been, and politics as it really was. This didn’t just apply to events in Parliament. Hutchison also wanted to give an unvarnished account of Mackenzie King the man, a frank assessment from someone who admired Liberal policies but also thought it important that the warts and blemishes mark the page every bit as much as the accomplishments. The book offered up a dual version of King, indeed almost a schizophrenic King.

The book parallels Hutchison’s approach to Canada itself. His 1942 best-seller The Unknown Country began with a dark, poetic account of the nation and its unknown character. There, Hutchison had written: “No one knows my country, neither the stranger nor its own sons.” Ten years later in The Incredible Canadian, Hutchison sang the same tune. “The mystery of William Lyon Mackenzie King is not the mystery of a man. It is the mystery of a people. We do not understand King because we do not understand ourselves.” 33

Hutchison promised to change all that, to give Canadians the real Mackenzie King. It was a mangled reproduction of a mixed-up man whom Hutchison admired – though not without reservations. Hutchison matched King to the nation, for bad and good. “Just as Canada, built against all logic, the laws of geography, the forces of economics and the accepted theories of politics, became larger than the sum of its parts,” Hutchison wrote, “so King built a personal achievement incomparably larger than himself.” One needed to admit King’s private faults. “By the public measurement of statesmanship,” Hutchison argued, “King was the greatest Canadian. By the private measurement of character, by the dimensions of the man himself, his two predecessors [John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier] tower above him.” ³⁴

Throughout Hutchison’s writing on King and Canada, he kept coming back to this idea of the hidden and unknown interior, the dark or important point that couldn’t be seen from the outside. “Outwardly the dullest, he was inwardly the most vivid.” This is King as an enigma, a mystery, someone whose public persona is as much “shadow” as substance. Canadians never understood this, they “never divined his infinite variety.” For King played many roles – the politician as actor. He was philosopher and historian, “devious party manager,” “supreme court of his party,” friend to small people, a hard employer to secretaries, a “passionate social reformer,” a “crafty autocrat,” and “under all this ran a sense of humor too deep for the public to suspect!” Really, he had been a better actor than Roosevelt or Churchill for he put on the “drab impersonation of the common man – the last thing he ever was.” ³⁵

The politician as actor and impersonator: Hutchison upended the moral reading of this idea. Back in 1949, the King biographer Reginald Hardy had claimed that King had been putting on a “show” in 1926. Hardy said King had “learned how to put on a show when the occasion demanded one” and talked about how King gave a “studied performance” of “righteous indignation” at Meighen’s temporary government in 1926. Eugene Forsey laughed in delight at this characterization. “It doesn’t seem to have struck him,” Forsey wrote to Meighen, “that this is about as damning a thing as anybody has ever said about King. Even you and I could hardly say worse, and if we had said this, King would probably have sued us for libel.” 36 Forsey’s laughter made sense in a culture where character defined the man. But what about in a culture of personality? Personality was the newer psychological slippery concept. It implied that, in a sense, everyone put on an act. The outward appearance of a man was always an imposition.

Hutchison took Canadians into King’s home, but he didn’t do so, as an earlier biographer had instructed, because Canadians had a duty to know the statesman. Instead, Hutchison presented the private King as not much of a man at all, at least according to the standards of the day. King stuffed his house with bric-a-brac, like a fussy Victorian housewife. He could be petty and mean. He treated his employees terribly, showing little sympathy for their needs, certainly not when they conflicted with his own desire for immediate and constant service. King had no great skill as an orator, no charm with the people.

Yet Hutchison merged these personal criticisms with a sense of King’s larger achievement. “The mystery grows, the fascination deepens and the enigma retreats farther from our clutch when the private man emerges and suddenly is overstopped by the public shadow. That single fact, more than any other, explains the mystery of King and his Canada – he, like the nation, was bitterly aware of his own stature, he was determined to be larger than his nature ordained and, in the affairs of this world, he and the nation succeeded.” It was all an incredible act – the clothes of personality that King donned in order to do his job, to achieve what he so desperately wanted to achieve. “The Canadian people never divined this infinite variety. They saw only his set public act, the round little figure with hunched shoulders, the flat and homely face, the wisp of hair on the bald head, the antique collar and cuffs, the delicate hands, the bouncing, cautious gait of one walking on invisible eggs.” Yet what an achievement it all really was.37

Ultimately, Hutchison threw up his hands at the disjuncture between petty man and great statesman. He called it a mystery, just as Canada itself was a mystery – and just as Freudians were telling Canadians that the human psyche was a mystery. The swirling passions and desire of the id, the inner child as it would later be popularized, never went away. They thrust and prodded and threatened to erupt constantly. But on top of this, the super-ego kept a lid on things. Social sanctions and morality, lessons of respectability, the hallmarks of civilization, ensured that the id could not ultimately rule. Sometimes, bad things might happen. An individual might erupt in passion. At other times, these passions could be sublimated in another direction. The animal drives of mother-love could be turned to a mature love of a mother-substitute. Such was the Freudian logic, which in the 1950s was only just becoming common sense. And such is the image of Mackenzie King and Canada that Bruce Hutchison gave Canadians: a man driven personally by the pettiest and silliest of intentions but who, through determination and skill, yet managed to achieve great things politically: a sublimation that ultimately benefited the nation at large.

What to make of Bruce Hutchison and his candid biography?

Many Liberals just didn’t know. They knew that The Incredible Canadian sparkled with fine writing and drama and more excitement than any typical Canadian political biography. The Globe’s literary critic William Arthur Deacon half-joked that the “excitement injected into the character and career of William Lyon Mackenzie King constitutes the greatest feat of magic yet performed by any Canadian writer.” The book sold thousands of copies and was a Canadian publishing success. Many commentators noted that MPs and others in political circles read it avidly. People approached Arthur Meighen and Colonel Ralston’s son Stuart, on the street, to talk about it. When ex-cabinet ministers travelled the country, the book was the top subject of conversation. Chubby Power declared that the extracts from Hutchison’s book published in Maclean’s were read widely even in Quebec. Clearly, Hutchison had done something right. And yet one critic later remarked that official Ottawa greeted the book with an “ovation of silence.” 38

Liberals just didn’t know what to think of this book, so “full of treacle, [yet] laced with vinegar.”³⁹ The safest thing to do was to say very little at all. Chubby Power, ensconced in the Senate, and close to but well above the fray, chuckled at the reaction of the “courtiers” in Ottawa. Whenever The Incredible Canadian “is mentioned by these gentlemen,” he said, “there is first of all a look off the shoulder to see who is listening, and then a sort of a contemptuous shrug but no commitment. Apparently word is being awaited from on high as to whether it is to receive the imprimatur or not. There is some thought that the Party may be injured in some vague kind of a way. People outside the inner circle have varied and usually strong opinions – all the way from those who think that an injustice was done to the old man, to those who strenuously maintain that he was not damned half enough.”⁴⁰

Privately, the literary executor Fred McGregor wondered what had got into Hutchison. He couldn’t “understand the tone of personal bitterness which is so evident.” He knew “that Bruce was no worshipper … but why should he feel it necessary, in referring to the man, to use words such as despicable, flat and homely face, plump, round and spiritless, pale and bookish little man, flabby scholar, tiny creature?” It didn’t make sense. Only one MP spoke out publicly, though. George Murray, the representative for Cariboo, British Columbia, put his displeasure on the record in the House. “One would almost think [Mackenzie King] was a monster from reading the book,” Murray declared. This for a man whose record showed him to be “great humanitarian,” “a stout defender of the poor, a diplomat, a negotiator; a modest man, simple in his habits.” One citizen wrote to the Ottawa Journal to denounce Hutchison. All of this story about King being a mystery was pure nonsense, the writer declared. Canadians “protest when one of our great leaders is misrepresented.” Someone, he wrote, “should write the true story of Mackenzie King’s life, leaving out the sarcasms, the exaggerated phrases, the half-truths. Above all, do not attempt to represent Mackenzie King as a man of mystery. Definitely he was not that … His life was an open book. A good clean book.”41

With this last line one could almost imagine the letter writer going on to speak on temperance and the evils of the white slave trade, so redolent of a Victorian moral common sense. That was the world that Hutchison’s book threatened. Not because Hutchison was a radical. He was an ideological liberal but middle of the road in most of his views. The culture was roiling around exactly these kinds of issues: whether to be more open and frank about our less than exemplary passions and secrets, and hence what to make of politicians and their own secrets. Some revelled in the freedom to see a politician as he really was. Frank Underhill didn’t agree with everything in The Incredible Canadian but he loved the complex human picture it gave. The book, Underhill exclaimed, “makes you feel what an exciting, inspiring, disgusting, broad-minded, selfish creature a first-class politician really is.”⁴²

But this was just the point: the frank assessment of politicians, the open look into what makes them tick, neither hagiography nor partisan philippic, threatened the very idea of the statesman. One Liberal wrote to Fred McGregor to wonder what would be done about Hutchison: “To ignore is to condone and that is declaring an Open Season on every future Leader upon ending his Term of Office.”⁴³

Thomas Crerar had known King as well as anyone. The Canadian senator had once been the leader of the Progressive group in Parliament. But he had been drawn into the Liberal Party and into Mackenzie King’s cabinet. Crerar didn’t entirely agree with Hutchison’s dual portrayal of King – as pathetic little man and greatest prime minister simultaneously. King didn’t have the long-term vision that The Incredible Canadian claimed for him. Still, this didn’t mean that Crerar thought it wise to portray the private King as such a “pitiable figure.” “Hund[re]ds of thousands of Canadians believed him to be a great statesman and a great man,” Crerar wrote to Hutchison. “You strip him completely of that.” Crerar “doubt[ed] the wisdom” of writing this kind of book. “Without question,” he claimed, “there has been a great loss of faith in public men in this country and in the institutions of Government.” By his portrayal of the King in The Incredible Canadian, Hutchison might lead, “in some degree at least, [to] a furthering of that loss of faith.” “Nothing is more important,” the old politician wrote, “than to maintain as strongly as possible in the minds of our people a faith in their institutions and in the character and quality of their public men.” 44

Old men often complain that the world is declining around them. They aren’t always right to think that the next generation will mind the changes, but they often do see the direction of what is changing. So it was with Crerar. The language of politics was changing. In The Incredible Canadian Hutchison opened up the idea of the statesman to a kind of frank and honest scrutiny that posed a threat to public men everywhere.