William Lyon Mackenzie King: The Loner Who Kept Canada Together

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Remember back in high school the dry-as-dust prime ministers we learned
about? In this new series, they’ve been rebranded as the Weakling, the
Loner, the Outsider, the Geek, the Prankster, and the Scrapper, and
presented “warts and all.” The series uses all the techniques—keep
it succinct, keep it moving, focus on the action, splash the pages with
cartoons, employ the common argot—to grab the reader’s attention,
but manages at the same time to present solid narratives of the
subjects’ lives and times.

The length of each chapter is similar to that of a column in a weekly
newsmagazine. Accompanying the text are full-page “sidebars” that
explore, for example, the relationship between a politician’s private
life (Laurier and his extramarital relationship; King and the spirit
world) and his public life (Diefenbaker and human rights; Trudeau and
the “just society”).

One commendable aspect of the series is the emphasis on each
subject’s experiences of childhood and youth in ways that are
explicable to contemporary youth. Young Laurier’s “coming out as a
rebel” while under the yoke at Le College de l’Assomption and Willie
King’s exposure to his rebel heritage as presented to him at his
mother’s knee reveal rebellious streaks, characteristics also found in
Diefenbaker, Trudeau, and Chrétien. Pearson’s proficiency in team
sports is calculated to effect a bond with young readers, who will be
surprised that a “geek” should have such talent.

The series is not without flaws, however. Its promise that the subjects
will be presented “warts and all” is not entirely fulfilled.
Selected warts are not exposed (among them King’s unwillingness during
World War II to send National Resources Mobilization conscripts to
Europe when the Canadian public demanded a more effective war effort).
Nor does any sidebar examine whether citizens have the obligation to
serve in the Armed Forces in time of war—a matter that might have been
introduced in the Trudeau volume. Throughout the series runs an implicit
streak of Whig history, Canadian style—an assumption that the “just
society” is a patented and near-perfect product, and that the
“Canadian values” explicit in it need not be questioned.

Teachers who use these books as class sets will need to know their
fields, question assumptions at work, and take their students through
but also beyond the trendy issues here. The series is recommended with
reservations.