King left a mixed legacy for Canada to parse

Opinion

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This article was published 20/12/2024 (286 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dec. 17 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Lyon Mackenzie King in Berlin (later Kitchener), Ont. in 1874. Though he was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister for close to 22 years — 1921-26, 1926-30 and 1935-1948 as well as the leader of the Liberal party from 1919 to 1948 — he is mostly remembered today, if at all, as being a strange, complicated and flawed man and a cautious plodder.

And it was true. He was an ardent believer in spiritualism, who convened seances so he could communicate with the dead, mainly the departed members of his family; who saw meaningful symbols in the hands of the clock, tea leaves and his shaving cream lather; who named the three Irish terriers he had (one after the other) Pat; and whose affection for his mother, Isabel, bordered on creepy.

We know so much more about King’s private life and inner thoughts than any other of Canada’s prime ministers because he left one of the most exceptional records of any of the country’s political leaders: a diary, which he started writing when he was nearly 19 years old with the final entry made three days before his death on July 22, 1950. It is the window into King’s turbulent personality and his tortured soul, a treasure trove of his triumphs, anxieties, prejudices, pettiness, sexual proclivities and chronic guilt.

With the transcribed version running more 30,000 pages, it is, indeed, “one of the great political documents of our time,” as W.K. Lamb, the Dominion Archivist, put it in 1955. Journalist and critic Robert Fulford asserted in 1980 that King’s diary “might turn out to be the only Canadian work of our century that someone will look at in 500 years.”

The diary and King’s voluminous correspondence reveal that King was a product of his time. He subscribed to the ideas, then current, of white Anglo-superiority and that undesirable immigrants — Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Eastern Europeans, African-Americans, among others — should not be encouraged to come to Canada.

Within his diary are countless references which today would be regarded as cringeworthy and racist. Blacks he encountered were referred to as “darkies.” On Aug. 6, 1945, when he learned that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he wrote in his diary, “It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.”

This comment, which was referenced by the New York Times in 1976 after a section of the diary was made public, might not have been entirely representative of his prejudices but it was probably a more common sentiment among many Canadians than we would care today to admit.

King’s legacy has also been tarnished by his refusal as prime minister to permit German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany into Canada in the late 1930s.

This decision was based in part on King’s prejudices: He did not like Jews as neighbours, nor as citizens. As well as the fact there was strong opposition in Quebec, a Liberal stronghold in those days, to admitting the refugees. It was easier to adhere to the strict and antisemitic dictates of Frederick Blair, the veteran immigration branch bureaucrat and its director from 1936 to 1943, who maintained that Jews, whether they were refugees or not, were not suitable immigrants for Canada.

Despite the occasional reservation, King’s cold-hearted pragmatic side won out and he allowed political expediency to override his humanitarian concerns.

Still, no one remains in power for more than two decades without a high degree of political acumen. He was both cautious and compromising as well as persistent. A bachelor with no family to care for, King devoted every ounce of his time and energy (as wavering as that usually was) on strengthening the Liberal party and pursuing an agenda which appealed to, or at least did not offend, the greatest number of voters.

He also benefited from his rival Conservatives’ more extreme policies, which contributed to the Liberals’ electoral popularity in Quebec. Over seven elections, this unwavering support assured the Liberals of an average of 86 per cent of Quebec’s then 65 seats.

His leadership during the Second World War and his management of the conscription issue kept his government and the country from tearing itself apart as had happened in 1917. To his credit, he refocused Canada’s relations with Britain, shaping the Commonwealth in his own image but without sacrificing the country’s historic link to the mother country. And he helped initiate Canada’s social welfare system, a factor in the Liberals’ success from 1935 to 2000 in which they were in power for 49 of 65 years.

King might not have evoked the adoration from Canadians other prime ministers have, however that is beside the point. “King so dominated Canadian politics for almost three decades that it is impossible to think of Canada … without his special contribution,” asserts intellectual historian Paul Roazen. “In fact he played such an immense role in Canadian public affairs that I am inclined to think that it is a nonsensical question to ask whether what he did was good or bad for the country … Canada and King are inconceivable without each other.”

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.