William Lyon Mackenzie King

Prime minister of Canada (1921-1926, 1926-1930, 1935-1948)

• Born: December 17, 1874
• Birthplace: Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, Canada
• Died: July 22, 1950
• Place of death: Kingsmere, Quebec, Canada

King helped organize Canada’s Department of Labour and was the first Canadian political leader concerned with the industrial exploitation of workers. As prime minister, he established an independent Canadian policy in world affairs.

Early Life

William Lyon Mackenzie King was born in Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, Canada. His mother, née Isabel Grace Mackenzie, was the daughter of the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie. His father, John King, was a lawyer.

Young King attended the University of Toronto, where he received a B.A. in 1895 and, while working as a journalist, an L.L.B. in 1896 and an M.A. in 1897. He studied at the University of Chicago (residing at Hull House) and completed his education at Harvard, where he obtained another M.A. in 1898 and, in 1899, completed course work on a Ph.D. In September, 1899, King received a Harvard traveling fellowship to study industrial conditions in Europe. At Rome, in the fall of 1900, he received a cable from Sir William Mulock, a family friend and the Canadian postmaster general, who was organizing a labor department. He offered King editorship of the Labour Gazette. After first turning down the offer in favor of a teaching position at Harvard, King reconsidered and accepted.

Returning to Ottawa, King became deputy minister of labor. Canada’s population was increasing and manufacturing industries were expanding and increasing in number. While King traveled about the country settling industrial disputes solving more than forty of great importance his former Toronto classmate and close friend, Henry Albert Harper, was in charge of the department. One time, while en route back to Ottawa, King learned that Harper had drowned in December, 1901, in the Ottawa River. Four years were needed for him to get over the shock, and then only by writing a memoir, The Secret of Heroism (1906).

King conferred with the British government in 1906 and secured legislation in their Parliament prohibiting “importation” of British strikebreakers into Canada. In the winter of 1906, he settled a potentially dangerous miners’ strike in the southern Alberta coalfields. King used his friendship with Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Liberal prime minister, who was thirty years his senior, to ensure his election in 1908 to the Canadian House of Commons. Laurier sent him to Asia to talk to government officials in India, China, and Japan about restricting immigration of their people into Canada as laborers. He was successful. While in Shanghai, he served as one of the British delegation of the International Opium Commission.

On King’s return from Asia, the Department of Labour became a separate organization. King, the first labor minister, continued to mediate industrial disputes. He successfully arbitrated the Grand Trunk Railway strike in 1910. As a direct result of that labor dispute, King convinced Parliament to pass legislation greatly restricting economic free enterprise and introducing government regulation over Canadian businesses.

King lost his parliamentary seat and his ministry when Laurier’s government was defeated in the 1911 general election on the issue of tariff reciprocity with the United States. The Conservatives equated free trade with American annexation of Canada. King spent the next three years, from 1911 to 1914, as the Liberal Party’s information officer, reorganizing the party and editing its journal, The Liberal Monthly. He also wrote, lectured, and read political economy.

When he took over the directorship of the Rockefeller Foundation’s new Department of Industrial Research in June of 1914, King’s first duty was to bring about an end to the two-year strike in Rockefeller mining properties in Colorado. He persuaded the aloof John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to witness the poor working conditions that management had provided. Despite the circumstances, Rockefeller and King became lifelong friends. In 1948, Rockefeller gave King an outright gift of $100,000 to ensure his comfortable retirement.

While King was still working for the Rockefeller Foundation, his sister, Bella, died, and so did, in the following year, his father. In 1917, while King was campaigning for a seat in Parliament (which he did not win), his mother died. The loss of his mother, to whom he was extremely close, was especially painful, coming so soon after the death of his sister and father.

When King’s foundation work ended in February, 1918, he became a freelance industrial relations consultant. He developed the labor-management plans for General Electric Company, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, and International Harvester. In 1918, King published Industry and Humanity. It summarized his work as an industrial conciliator and his philosophy of industrial relations. He believed that an elaborate program of social services was necessary if unemployment and poverty were to be eliminated.

King, a short, well-built man, was no showman. He was modest, shunned the limelight, and was likely to underestimate his importance on the political scene. He felt extremely insecure and was a man of contradictions. In character, he was described as proper, colorless, and Gladstonian. King, a pragmatist, could anticipate the needs of his government and of his country. His guiding principle once he was in a position of power would be national unity.

Life’s Work

In 1919, King returned to Ottawa, and in February, Laurier died. The Liberal Convention in August of that year elected King Liberal Party leader, both because he was Laurier’s protégé and because his ideas for social reform won the support of the younger generation of party members. In October, in a by-election, King was returned to Parliament.

King’s first task as leader was to unify the party: The conscriptionists had broken away, and many farmers in Ontario and western Canada now supported a new agrarian party, the Progressives. King would successfully return the conscriptionists to the party and retain the political support of Quebec throughout his career. He let his deputy, Ernest Lapoint (who was later succeeded by Louis St. Laurent), deal with administrative problems involving Quebec. The general election of December, 1921, returned the Liberals to political power, though without a decisive majority. King took office as prime minister for the first time on December 29. In the spring of 1922, personal tragedy again struck him; his brother died in early March.

In his first administration, King acted cautiously. He tried to maintain Progressive support by reducing tariffs and freight rates. In external affairs, helped by Canada’s isolationist attitude, King reversed his country’s usual support of England and asserted Canada’s independence within the Commonwealth. At his first imperial conference (in London, in 1923), King again opposed the principle of a uniform Commonwealth foreign policy. At the 1926 Imperial Conference, King sometimes acted as mediator to bring about a satisfactory definition of the dominions within the British Commonwealth. According to the Balfour Declaration , the dominions were to be equal in status within the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Statute of Westminster (1931), confirming the Balfour Declaration and the dominions’ relations with England, came out of the London Imperial Conference (1931), in which King played a major role.

King and several of his fellow Liberals had lost their seats in the 1925 general election. While a safe seat was soon found for King, Governor-General Lord Byng thought that King should resign and allow the Conservatives to form a government. Holding fewer seats than did the Conservatives, King’s government nevertheless received a vote of confidence, but within only six months, another crisis had struck: Customs officials were accused of smuggling bootleg liquor across the border. Rather than have his government face a vote of censure, King asked Lord Byng to dissolve Parliament and call an election. Byng refused and King resigned. On behalf of the Conservatives, Arthur Meighen accepted office. At the proper moment, King, leader of the opposition in the House of Commons, attacked Meighen for naming only acting heads of cabinet positions and for overriding a law requiring appointed ministers to be confirmed in a by-election. In the vote of confidence that followed, Progressive votes defeated the Conservative government. When Meighen resigned, Lord Byng called for an election. Even though Lord Byng had acted correctly, King used the constitutional issue to divert attention away from the customs scandal. King’s Liberal Party benefited from the attention given to economic issues during the election as well as from the alliance in several constituencies between Liberals and Progressives. For the first time, King and the Liberals had an absolute majority in Parliament.

As long as the Canadian economy prospered, King’s government remained essentially true to his promises of social reform. In addition to enacting an old-age pension law, he increased subsidies to the western provinces, lowered taxes, and used government surpluses to reduce the public debt. By late 1929, however, King had not recognized that an economic depression was imminent. He refused to help the provinces in programs of unemployment relief or to help them in road construction. The result was that in the 1930 general election, King and his government met defeat.

Early in 1931, the Liberals were accused of having accepted a large campaign contribution from the Beauharnois Power Corporation in return for navigation rights. King replied that his party had not promised anything in return. As opposition leader in the years from 1931 to 1935, King accepted the Conservatives’ social legislation but questioned its constitutionality. He attacked the government’s high tariff policy and its authoritarian methods. He reorganized the Liberal Party and adopted a platform of moderate welfare legislation.

The 1935 general election results were affected by the continued Depression, aggravated by western crop failures. Campaigning under the slogan “King or Chaos,” King was returned as prime minister for his third term in office. From that time until he retired in 1948, King was the dominant figure in Canadian public life. He continued to make federal grants to the provinces for emergency relief, to subsidize housing, and to assist farm rehabilitation. He enacted a new form of unemployment insurance and signed tariff agreements with both Great Britain and the United States.

As the Canadian economy slowly recovered, Europe again was on the brink of war. To preserve Canada’s autonomy and to avoid domestic conflict over foreign policy, King refused to enter into international agreements. He remained neutral when Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, when Adolf Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, and when the Spanish Civil War erupted. He supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, believing that Canada’s interests were the same as England’s. In violation of his appeasement policy, however, King increased Canada’s defense appropriations and worked for closer Anglo-American relations.

One week after Great Britain’s declaration, Canada declared war on Germany, on September 10, 1939. To get the country solidly behind his government, King called a general election for March, 1940; King won by an even larger margin than in 1935. With France’s fall in June, 1940, the opposition demanded full mobilization. A mobilization bill was introduced and passed by Parliament. When Montreal mayor Camillien Houde advised his people not to comply with the law, King imprisoned him. King now became dedicated to the war effort. King stated his position in Canada at Britain’s Side (1941) and Canada and the Fight for Freedom (1944). To control the Canadian war economy, King established the Wartime Prices and Trade Board. During the war, King went to London many times to confer with the British prime minister, Winston Churchill (whom he did not like), and other war leaders. In England, he met with Canadian soldiers, but because of his opposition to conscription, they were hardly cordial.

Before the war, King began to develop a close relationship with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (whom he greatly admired). The two became even closer once war was on the horizon, and cooperation between the two countries increased. As early as 1937, King and Roosevelt engaged in joint defense talks. Roosevelt declared that the United States would not remain neutral if Canada were threatened with aggression. That commitment was formalized between the two leaders by the Ogdensburg Agreement in 1940. The next year, King accepted the Hyde Park Declaration, which provided collaboration in defense production, and a joint board of defense was established. Sales of Canadian manufactured equipment to the United States increased considerably, helping to alleviate Canada’s American exchange problem. In December, 1941, King, Churchill, and Roosevelt met on a ship off Newfoundland to plot their common cause. When announcing the United States’ Lend-Lease plan to Parliament, King stated, “We in Canada may feel more than just a little pride in the share we have had in bringing about closer relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth.” A few months before the war ended, King reached a wartime agreement with the United States on military transport routes.

On the domestic front, King concentrated on his country’s industrial and mobilization efforts in helping the Allies win the war, maintaining his country’s precarious political unity, and ensuring his continuance in office as prime minister. The conscription issue loomed large. Quebec was against the draft. Beginning in 1940, King committed his government to an enlarged military without conscription. Once Canadian forces were engaged on the European continent, however, casualties increased, and there were insufficient volunteers for replacements. In English Canada, conscriptionist sentiment rose to the fore, even manifesting itself in King’s cabinet. King agreed to a series of compromises, finally putting the issue before the people in a plebiscite in 1942. In the country as a whole, the majority voted in favor of a draft, but Quebec’s voters remained solidly opposed. Conscripts were called up, but only for home defense. The great crisis came after the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, when a shortage of infantry reinforcements developed. Most of the home conscripts (“Zombies”) did not want to volunteer for overseas service. King agreed to partial conscription for overseas service. Since he had delayed and evaded conscription for such a long time, French Canadians accepted the decision.

Once the war ended, King called an election in 1945. King and his government won, but only because of Quebec’s support. King avoided a postwar slump by instituting a number of social security measures such as unemployment insurance and family allowances (the baby bonus), thereby creating the welfare state. He did not take any steps toward a national health plan, however, until he was close to retirement. A system of federal payments to the provinces was put into effect to allow even the poorest ones to maintain a minimum of services. King’s great achievement in the postwar period was to arrange for Newfoundland’s entrance as the tenth province into the Dominion in March, 1949, after King’s retirement.

In external affairs, King served as chair of the Canadian delegation at the 1945 San Francisco conference to draft the charter for the United Nations and headed the one in attendance at the peace conference (1946). Along with President Harry S. Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he signed the Washington Declaration on Atomic Energy. One of King’s last official duties was to attend the 1948 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, in London. Returning to Canada, he resigned as prime minister on November 15, 1948. He had dominated Canadian politics for more than thirty years, twenty-one of them as prime minister. King died at his much-loved Kingsmere estate, near Ottawa, on July 22, 1950, and was buried in Toronto.

Significance

King was accused of having been an opportunist, and many considered him ambiguous, evasive, and overcautious. Even though it cannot be doubted that he was masterful at compromise and procrastination, most Canadians admired him for his tenacity and his calm nature. One critic stated that though his methods might have been frustrating to many, he maintained national unity in a difficult federal system. In his time, Canadians became politically astute and, henceforth, maintaining national unity was to be much more difficult.

After King’s death, his diaries written over a period of fifty-seven years disclosed that in his early adult life he was enamored of nurses and that the longtime bachelor was not the solitary, lonely man the public believed he was. He had many relationships with women, many of them short-term, but three of them definitely not. The diaries also disclosed his visitations with spiritualists to contact his dead relatives.

Kingsmere, which he acquired in 1901, became synonymous with King. It was also his monument. He left it and Laurier Place (his Ottawa residence, which had been willed to him by Mrs. Laurier) to the people of Canada.

Bibliography

Esberey, Joy E. Knight of the Holy Spirit: A Study of William Lyon Mackenzie King. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1980. This work, a psychobiography, challenges the accepted view that King led a double life. The author relates the traumas and insecurity of King’s early life, his search for security, and his temporary release from his psychic tensions by his success on the Canadian political scene. This work gives a good insight into King’s personality and how it related to his political behavior.

Goodall, Lian. William Lyon MacKenzie King. Montreal: XYZ, 2003. A biography based on newly available information about King.

Hutchison, Bruce. The Incredible Canadian: A Candid Portrait of Mackenzie King. New York: Longmans, Green, 1953. A highly readable biography that not only acquaints readers with King’s background, family, education, and nongovernmental activities but also details his entire political career. Hutchison makes the point that King possessed his country’s confidence but never its affection.

Ludwig, Emil. Mackenzie King: A Portrait Sketch. Toronto, Ont.: Macmillan, 1944. This is a sympathetic, interview-like, idealized study of King dealing with his ancestry, the highlights of his life, and his political career to 1944.

Stacey, C. P. A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King. Toronto, Ont.: Macmillan, 1949. This work deals primarily with King’s private, personal, and intimate life, a life that was unknown to most Canadians. It is told mostly in King’s own words, extracted from his diaries.