Mackenzie: A Political Biography of William Lyon Mackenzie

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the coauthor of The College on

Former Toronto mayor John Sewell’s unconventional biography of William
Lyon Mackenzie renews interest in the democratic ideas of this
journalist, rebel, and exile who was also a member of the legislative
assembly and Toronto’s first mayor. Mackenzie has long fascinated
people interested in Canadian political history, but few writers have
attempted to engage the agitator’s beliefs as fully or as
appreciatively as Sewell does here.

The author brings together fruits from recent historical scholarship in
order to emphasize the importance of Mackenzie’s unswerving commitment
to democracy. He begins and ends his account beside Mackenzie’s grave
in Toronto. In between, Sewell relates Mackenzie’s life and provides a
long digression that extrapolates from the newspaperman’s 19th-century
thought to criticize government practices in Ontario in the recent past
during the reign of neoconservatism. The result is a combination of
history, polemic, and biography that will please some and offend others.

The work does not overturn the late William Kilbourn’s interpretation
of William Lyon Mackenzie as The Firebrand (1956) whose temperament kept
him in a state of perpetual agitation over the drawbacks in collective
life. Because this is a political biography, Sewell feels no need to use
the insights afforded by Charlotte Gray’s award-winning life work on
Mackenzie’s youngest daughter that appeared in 1997 under the title
Mrs. King. He is even weaker in writing of concepts such as
“responsible government” without indicating their complexity in
historical discourse.

Sewell does not downplay Mackenzie’s very serious weaknesses or the
vituperation that erupted from his pen as libel, but his book succeeds
in pinpointing the man’s originality. As early as 1840, for instance,
Mackenzie explicitly acknowledged the importance in Canada not only of
political democracy (“equality of each man before the law”) but also
of social democracy (“equality of each man before society”). John
Sewell uses Mackenzie’s life to meditate on democracy’s soul today
and yesterday.