Mackenzie King

Author : Christopher Dummitt
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2017-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780773549388

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Unbuttoned by Christopher Dummitt Pdf

When Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King died in 1950, the public knew little about his eccentric private life. In his final will King ordered the destruction of his private diaries, seemingly securing his privacy for good. Yet twenty-five years after King's death, the public was bombarded with stories about "Weird Willie," the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. Unbuttoned traces the transformation of the public’s knowledge and opinion of King's character, offering a compelling look at the changing way Canadians saw themselves and measured the importance of their leaders’ personal lives. Christopher Dummitt relates the strange posthumous tale of King's diary and details the specific decisions of King's literary executors. Along the way we learn about a thief in the public archives, stolen copies of King's diaries being sold on the black market, and an RCMP hunt for a missing diary linked to the search for Russian spies at the highest levels of the Canadian government. Analyzing writing and reporting about King, Dummitt concludes that the increasingly irreverent views of King can be explained by a fundamental historical transformation that occurred in the era in which King's diaries were released, when the rights revolution, Freud, 1960s activism, and investigative journalism were making self-revelation a cultural preoccupation. Presenting extensive archival research in a captivating narrative, Unbuttoned traces the rise of a political culture that privileged the individual as the ultimate source of truth, and made Canadians rethink what they wanted to know about politicians.

Author : Allan Levine
Publisher : D & M Publishers
Page : 1 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2011-09-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9781553659082

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King by Allan Levine Pdf

William Lyon Mackenzie King, twice former Prime Minister of Canada, was a brilliant tactician, was passionately committed to Canadian unity, and was a protector of the underdog, introducing such cornerstones of Canada’s social safety net as unemployment insurance, family allowances and old-age pensions. At the same time, he was insecure, craved flattery, became upset at minor criticism, and was prone to fantasy—especially about the Tory conspiracy against him. King loosened the Imperial connection with Britain and was wary of American military and economic power. Yet he loved all things British and acted like a praised schoolboy when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt treated him as an equal. This first major biography of Mackenzie King in 30 years mines the pages of his remarkable diary, at 30,000 pages one of the most significant and revealing political documents in Canada’s history and a guide to the deep and often moving inner conflicts that haunted Mackenzie King. With animated prose and a subtle wit, Allan Levine draws a multidimensional portrait of this most compelling of politicians.

Author : lian goodall
Publisher : Dundurn
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2003-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781770707566

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William Lyon Mackenzie King by lian goodall Pdf

Mackenzie King (1874-1950) was Canada’s tenth and longest serving prime minister and an important figure on the international scene, especially during the Second World War. This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of Mackenzie King.

Author : C. P. Stacey
Publisher : Formac Publishing Company
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780887801365

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A Very Double Life by C. P. Stacey Pdf

A shrewd politician whose private life was one of bizzare and obsessive drives, sex life, love affairs, seances.

Author : R. B. Fleming
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2007-10-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780774850780

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The Railway King of Canada by R. B. Fleming Pdf

During the first two decades of this century, Sir William Mackenzie was one of Canada’s best known entrepreneurs. He spearheaded some of the largest and most technologically advanced projects undertaken in Canada during his lifetime – building enterprises that became the foundations for such major institutions as Canadian National Railways, Brascan, and the Toronto Transit Commission. He built a business empire that stretched from Montreal to British Columbia and to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil. It included gas, electric, telephone and transit utilities, railroads, hotels, and steamships as well as substantial coal mining, whaling, and timber interests. For a time Mackenzie also owned Canada's largest newspaper, La Presse. He accumulated an enormous personal fortune, but when he died in 1923, his estate was virtually bankrupt as a result of the dramatic collapse of his Canadian Northern Railway during the First World War. In an era when the entrepreneur has come to be seen as a media hero and when struggles about the role of state enterprise in the transportation and energy sectors consume public policy debate, it is ironic that Mackenzie is largely forgotten by all but a few historians and railway aficionados. He left no papers to guide biographers. After a decade of gathering and piecing together fragments from an immense array of sources, Rae Fleming has written the first biography of the man that the German press extolled as the “Railway King of Canada.” Mackenzie was wily, crafty, manipulative, and intimidating. Starting as a general contractor in Eldon Township in rural Ontario, he built a small fortune contracting for the CPR in the Selkirks in the 1880s and then moved on to bigger things. Along the way, he funded the first full-length documentary movie, was toasted by the House of Lords, received a knighthood from George V, and developed close friendships with the major politicians of his day, including Borden and Meighen. In a business biography intended as much for general readers as for a scholarly audience, Fleming offers a revisionist perspective on Mackenzie. He dispels the simplistic approach of those historians and journalists who have depicted Mackenzie and his partner Sir Donald Mann as melodramatic crooks who could have stepped out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn.

Author : Charlotte Gray
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2008-06-03
Category : Mothers of prime ministers
ISBN : 0143168355

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Mrs. King by Charlotte Gray Pdf

Mrs. King is the superbly told story of a woman lost in the shadows of Canadian history. Daughter of William Lyon Mackenzie and mother of Canada's longest-serving prime minister, Isabel Mackenzie King was intimately involved in the changing political and social landscape of Canada. Yet we have known very little about her. In this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted biography, award-winning writer Charlotte Gray pulls Isabel Grace Mackenzie King into the light while painting a highly absorbing portrait of our Canadian past.

Author : Allan Gerald Levine
Publisher : Douglas & McIntyre
Page : 554 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : History
ISBN : 9781553655602

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King by Allan Gerald Levine Pdf

Advance Praise for King "Here we have Allan Levine, one of the aces of Canadian historical chronicles, channelling Mackenzie King. And what a story they have to tell: our longest-serving prime minister, getting advice from his dog and having two-way conversations with his long-dead mother. If Canadian history was ever dull, it isn't now. Get this book." Book jacket.

Author : Taylor Hollander
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2018-01-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781487521936

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Power, Politics, and Principles by Taylor Hollander Pdf

Power, Politics, and Principles gets to the root of the policy-making process, revealing how a wartime order forced employers to the collective bargaining table and marked a new stage in Canadian industrial relations.

Author : H. Blair Neatby
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1963-12-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781487591144

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William Lyon Mackenzie King, Volume II, 1924-1932 by H. Blair Neatby Pdf

This second volume of the official biography of Mackenzie King (the first, written by R. MacG. Dawson, was published in 1958) covers the years 1924 to 1932. At the opening of this period, King was still an inexperienced and untried leader but the next few years were to test his qualities as he dealt with the concessions and compromises necessary in governing with an unstable majority and finally emerged the winner from the complicated chess games of parliamentary sessions. The Liberal success in the election of 1926 returned to office a Prime Minister with confidence in his own judgment and more inclined to hold firm to his own opinions against opposition from his colleagues or his party. After this election and the outcome of that in 1930, which handed over to the Conservatives the problems of the depression, the myth of King's political infallibility continued to grow. But a less able man would have been less lucky. As this book shows, King was a consummate party leader, with an unusual sensitivity to political danger and an unusual capacity to learn from his mistakes. In the years 1924 to 1932 a number of familiar Canadian issues had to be dealt with: freight rates on land and sea, the debate between a tariff for protection, the problems of the Maritime Provinces, the natural resources of the Prairie Provinces, old age pensions, the St. Lawrence Waterway, immigration. There were also other more striking incidents, which the author chronicles with verve and style: the customs scandal of 1926, the heady pleasures of the years of prosperity and the dismal frustrations of the years of depression, the election of 1930, the Beauharnois sensation. Throughout skilful use is made of the public records of these years, of the King papers, and the copious pages of King's own daily diary of his political problems, his conversations with colleagues and diplomats, his worries and frustrations over difficult decisions, his own aims and ideals. Over these years King developed and strengthened his convictions about the over-riding concern of all Canadian political leaders, national unity. Only a proper estimate of what was desirable, what was necessary, and what was impossible could guide in the working out of policies that would be tolerable by the whole of Canada, and it was, of course, King's firm belief and the guiding principle of his political life that the cause of national unity was best served by the cause of Liberalism, since that party above all represented the major sections or groups in Canada and alone could effect a satisfactory compromise among them. This book, brilliant and effective in conception and execution, is a study of political leadership in a divided nation, a nation which even in calmer times is proverbially difficult to govern. It is also a revealing and convincing study of a complex man whose drab public image concealed unsuspected eccentricities.

Author : J. L. Granatstein
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1977
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UVA:X000044660

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Mackenzie King by J. L. Granatstein Pdf

Author : Ferns, Henry,Bernard Ostry
Publisher : James Lorimer & Company
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0888621159

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The Age of Mackenzie King by Ferns, Henry,Bernard Ostry Pdf

William Lyon Mackenzie King played a vital role in shaping Canadian politics, economics and international relations from 1900 to the present. His importance is indicated by the energy of Liberal party historians in creating an official version of life.

Author : Louise Reynolds
Publisher : Trafford Publishing
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781412059855

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Mackenzie King by Louise Reynolds Pdf

'Dead men', they say, 'tell the most interesting tales'. In Mackenzie King's case that is certainly true. While he did not write his own life story because time simply ran out, he did leave behind his extensive diaries and personal letters which are an author's dream come true. Many writers accessed this material with the result that more has been written about King than about any other Canadian Prime Minister. The primary interest was in him as a politician and, as a result, the personal side of his life was either neglected or used to ridicule his memory. You need only mention his name and you are told of his intense love for his mother, of his interest in spiritualism (to the extent of 'talking' to the departed, including his little dogs) and then there were the reconstructed 'ruins' at his summer house in Kingsmere. It does not go much deeper than that. What might have been learned about King's personal life had he written his autobiography? At one time he had considered doing this saying, '[I] should write my own memoirs when the right time comes, not lay bare my soul before others.' Had he written, it would surely have been a heavily censored story. It is difficult to think that he would have told the reader of his storms of passion or details of his sessions at the 'little table'. This book, Mackenzie King: Friends & Lovers, takes the reader into its confidence, introducing first his family background, then his closest friends, male and female. As well, there is a chapter on his association with the various Governors-General of Canada from 1900 to 1950. Yes, knowing King's life story as we now do, it would be interesting to learn how he would have written about it. Spiritualism seems to be on the decline but has anyone consulted the weegieboard recently?

Author : Lita-Rose Betcherman
Publisher : Springer Science & Business
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0802035752

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Ernest Lapointe by Lita-Rose Betcherman Pdf

Focusing on the relationship between Lapointe and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, this biographical study traces the development of Lapointe's career from his appearance on the stage of Canadian national politics during World War I to his death in 1941. Thirteen pages of b & w photographs support the narrative. Betcherman is the former director of the Ontario Women's Bureau. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Allen R. Wells
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2014-01-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781493161683

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The First Canadian by Allen R. Wells Pdf

William Lyon Mackenzie King served all of Canada as Prime Minister. He was Canada’s longest serving Prime Minister and for all other Commonwealth countries, too. His successive governments created the Canadian Welfare state and the place we once held in the world. King strove for the social cushion of a united, autonomous and prosperous country. A lifetime later all Canadians still benefit from his initiative and skill. King’s life followed the Social Gospel in the political world and in the pioneering study of industrial relations. His work, relatives and friends; successes and disappointments, are presented as you have never encountered them before.

Author : J.L. Granatstein
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : History
ISBN : 9781487524760

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Canada at War by J.L. Granatstein Pdf

This essay collection traces the sustained work over the past fifty years of the foremost historian of Canadian politics in the era of the two world wars.