The Great Depression Page 6

  “Shame!” shouted Bennett.

  “Shame!” cried Stevens.

  At that point King should have backtracked, but, uncharacteristically, he failed to scent disaster and plunged on. “My honourable friend is getting very indignant. Something evidently has got under his skin. May I repeat what I have said? With respect to giving moneys out of the federal treasury to any Tory government in this country for these alleged unemployment purposes, with these governments situated as they are today, with policies diametrically opposed to those of this government, I would not give them a five cent piece.”

  At that the Speaker was forced to call for order. The Opposition could scarcely believe its good luck. The phrase “five cent piece” would haunt the Liberals in the months that followed, but King himself appeared oblivious to the damage he had inflicted on his party. He pooh-poohed the idea of a national conference on unemployment. What was needed, he said, was more foreign investment in Canada. He followed that with the extraordinary statement that if Canada admitted to having an unemployment problem by holding such a conference, that act alone would dry up foreign investment!

  After King sat down, Isaac Macdougall, a Nova Scotia Tory, asked if there was anything in the British North America Act to prevent the federal government from helping the provinces meet the unemployment crisis.

  “Nothing,” King replied.

  “Then why don’t you do it?” Macdougall asked.

  “Because,” King answered, “we have other uses for our money, other obligations.”

  He still didn’t understand the full impact of his words about the five-cent piece. The Liberal claque had responded with the usual applause that any major speech by a party leader demanded. King, who was susceptible to the most transparent forms of flattery, thought he’d given a magnificent speech. He didn’t get back to his Ottawa residence, Laurier House, until four the following morning, but he took the time to write that “our side of the House was well pleased.… I got a splendid reception from the men, as fine an ovation as I have ever received in the Commons. It was a fighting speech and except in two particulars was what was needed.”

  Those two particulars, however, caused him some unease. “I made a slip I think.… It was a slip in that it can be read apart from the context and it is capable of much misrepresentation as applied to unemployment.…”

  He returned to the matter the following day: “… I went perhaps too far. It is not in accord with my gen’l attitude of conciliation etc. – But it has the other purpose of making a definite line of cleavage between the Libs & Cons which our men like. It is, however, not good speaking to lay one’s self open to where explanation is necessary.…”

  By April 8, King realized that he was in trouble. The press had already pounced on the five-cent piece remark. “I feel very sorry about this unnecessary break,” King wrote. “I can see wherein the Tories intend to misrepresent it as meaning not a cent for unemployment & not a cent to a Tory province for anything. It may afford a chance on the public platform for me to show how I am seeking to guard expenditure, & I believe will appeal to the people when limited to unemployment, as most persons get nothing therefrom.”

  These internal musings demonstrate how out of touch the Prime Minister was with the realities of the Depression. In the cities and the small towns, housewives had become accustomed to – and appalled by – the steady stream of shabby young men knocking at their back doors, asking for a handout. Everybody except those in the top echelons of society was affected by unemployment. Few (except the same top echelons) wanted the government to pinch pennies when jobless men were going hungry. The cries for a national conference on unemployment had been so strident that King in his circumlocutory way was forced to back into one.

  Since the government didn’t want to be seen to reverse its policy, it called for a dominion-provincial conference on immigration at which time the unemployment situation could also be discussed. It never took place because King decided in May to call an election. It was the very worst time to go to the country, but the Prime Minister didn’t seem to realize that. The campaign would begin in June. Election Day would be July 30. Mackenzie King was certain he would win.

  2

  Mother’s boy

  When he went to the polls in the summer of 1930, William Lyon Mackenzie King had been Prime Minister of Canada for the best part of nine years. He was fifty-six, at the mid-point in his career, and, although he would never admit it, as healthy as a horse. For King was a monumental hypochondriac. To read the despairing comments in his diary about his condition, one would think he was poised on the brink of a breakdown from exhaustion or nervous tension.

  “It must be a brain fatigue greater than I imagine” (February 1, 1927). “Too fatigued to do my work properly” (January 23, 1929). “My brain was fagged out …” (October 17, 1929). The litany of complaint is unending: “tired and strained” … “excessively weak and faint” … “fatigued and exhausted.”

  King portrayed himself, to himself, as a man all but crushed by the burden of office, with no one at his side to help shoulder the load, yet gamely prepared to sacrifice his health and well-being for the good of the Party and the nation. “It is hard not to get discouraged with the load I have to carry so largely alone,” he wrote early in 1929, adding, “I am determined to keep up if I can.”

  Of course he kept up, for there was nothing wrong with him. When he paid his periodical visits to his doctor he was pronounced perfectly sound. We know the truth of that because he methodically listed in his diaries every detail of the examination, from his blood count (“hemoglobin – 90% … 12.42 gms.”) to his urinalysis (“clear amber colour”).

  These famous diaries, so voluminous and so intimate, are the keys that unlock the secrets of King’s psyche. They strip him to the bone and do so in his own words. Surely no other statesman has been so nakedly revealed as this outwardly bland politician. It is all there – his eccentricities, his complexities, his sexual guilt, his mother fixation, his egotism, his parsimony, his personal furies. To the historian, these diaries, running to thousands of pages, are almost as much a burden as an asset, for we know far more about King than we do about his contemporaries – too much, perhaps, to make fair comparisons. The others did not keep revealing journals.

  In poring over the river of words that King bequeathed to the nation one must ask this question: what if others had kept diaries as frank and intimate as King’s? How many of his contemporaries would then appear in a new and perhaps less appealing light?

  Without the diaries we would know little of King’s loneliness, his sexual naïveté, his dislike of pomp and circumstance, his spiritualism, his extraordinary self-esteem, his love of flattery, his hypochondria, and his several petty guilts. In the thirties, he was thought of as a stodgy fussbudget, a colourless politician who made long, boring speeches – a typical Canadian, in short. But it wasn’t King who was colourless, and it wasn’t the Canadians, either. The fault lay with the journalists who didn’t make the effort to understand their countrymen or their Prime Minister. They were seduced by King himself into believing what he wanted them to believe. If he appeared boring it was part of his protective guise, like his habitually funereal attire – black suit, starched white collar and cuffs. One of his speech writers once complained that King had removed all the colourful phrases from his script. King replied, wryly, that it was the colourful phrases that people remembered (and that returned to haunt the speaker).

  Only the diaries reveal how desperately lonely this most complex of political bachelors could be. His only close friend was a woman, Mrs. Godfrey Patteson, five years older than himself, his constant companion, sometime hostess, and intimate confidante. He had known her for more than a decade. She and her banker husband had the use of what might be described as a grace-and-favour cottage on King’s estate at Kingsmere, about a dozen miles from Ottawa. Though Joan Patteson was a kind of surrogate wife, it was in no sense a ménage à trois. The relationship was platonic,
though there had, apparently, been one brief period in which it teetered on the verge of physical passion. Godfrey’s presence protected the circumspect Prime Minister from wagging tongues. He got on well with the banker, but it was to Joan that he turned for advice, comfort, and conversation; they shared a mutual interest in books, politics, and, of course, the occult.

  Only a handful of people knew of King’s interest in the spirit world. If any members of the press knew, they kept discreetly silent. In those days one did not invade a prime minister’s private life. (Another of King’s eccentricities – the collection of fragments of old buildings for his Kingsmere estate – was never referred to until after his death.) Certainly it would not have helped a campaign already in trouble to let it be known that the Prime Minister was consulting a Mrs. Bleaney from Kingston who put him in touch with the ghosts of those he habitually referred to as his “loved ones.” These included his mother and father, brother and sisters, and on occasion his political hero, Wilfrid Laurier. To King, these shades from the void seemed more real than the flesh-and-blood politicians he dealt with by day. These were his real companions, who came to him in his dreams and what he called his “visions.” Students of the diaries have concluded that far from influencing his political decisions, the apparitions told him no more than he wished to hear. Sometimes their predictions went awry. That baffled and saddened King, but he carried on pluckily, seance after seance, his faith unshaken.

  In August of 1927, for example, Mrs. Bleaney had told him he would be married the following year “to someone I already know, younger than myself.” Mrs. Bleaney was dead wrong. King would never marry, in spite of his repeated protestation: “I should have a wife of my own.” Mrs. Bleaney was forgiven.

  A year after the medium’s flawed prediction, King was still longing for marriage. It would, he wrote, “make my life infinitely happier. I need a wife, and I pray God that I may yet have one to love who is wholly my own….” It was a cry from the heart that occurs throughout his long years in office.

  Yet King made little effort to find a wife, and when a suitable prospect appeared he fled like a startled buck pursued by wolves. There was no lack of eligible women. He corresponded with several, including the granddaughter of General Ulysses S. Grant, Julia Grant, who had married and would later divorce an Italian prince. But he shrank from the ultimate intimacy. It was easier and less distracting to lean, when he needed to, on Joan Patteson.

  Nor could any woman hope to compare for beauty, compassion, selflessness, or purity of soul with his sainted mother, who haunted his dreams and his seances, guiding his destinies, consoling him in his darker moments, and leaving precious little time or space for a rival.

  It was King’s occasional habit, when returning to Laurier House late at night, to press his thin lips against the unyielding marble of his mother’s effigy. He not only idolized her, he invented her. The real woman – strong-minded, ambitious, calculating, and manipulative – was far removed from King’s fictional creation.

  Isabel King had dominated the family, overshadowing her passive and largely inadequate husband, who plays a minor role in King’s recorded visions. The child of a famous Canadian rebel, she gave his name to her elder son and never let William forget who his grandfather was, or the humiliation and poverty she had suffered during those desperate days when he was on the run after the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada. The son’s task was to support her, to worship and enshrine the memory of his grand-father, and to right the wrongs that the rebellious Mackenzie had sustained at the hands of the establishment, known in those days as the Family Compact.

  The irony is that King, the rebel worshipper, was anything but a rebel himself. After a term as Minister of Labour in the Laurier Cabinet and a conciliator in hundreds of strikes, he joined the establishment. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a man of whom his grandfather would never have approved, hired him to repair his shattered image after one of the bloodiest and most appalling strikes in U.S. history. King’s solution was to impose company unions on the Colorado miners, scarcely the act of a committed radical. They were, in the words of the chairman of the congressional committee appointed to investigate the matter, “specious substitutes for trade unions that will deceive, mollify and soothe public opinion while bulwarking the employers’ arbitrary control.” To King the hero-worshipper, who always basked in the approval of great men, Rockefeller was the greatest of all.

  Though he tended to cry poor, King was a rich man. By 1930 he was worth about five hundred thousand dollars, at least four million in 1990 dollars. Half of it had been raised from wealthy Liberal supporters by his friend the Tea King, Peter Larkin. His investments would pay him at least twenty thousand annually, his salary as Leader of the Opposition another ten thousand, and his tax-free sessional indemnity four thousand more. That was an enormous sum in those days of deflation and limited income tax, when the average office employee earned only two thousand dollars a year and the average production worker only half that amount. King’s annual take-home pay, calculated in 1990 terms, was in the neighbourhood of a quarter of a million dollars.

  He could not and did not spend it all. Yet when he determined to buy some additional property next door to his Kingsmere estate, he boggled at the price of fifteen hundred dollars. “It wasn’t worth five hundred to me,” he thought, “save to prevent Jews or other undesirable people getting in” – a phrase King used more than once in his diary. Like most of his class, he was an anti-Semite. “The greatest danger and menace,” he wrote, “is a sale to Jews, who have a desire to get in at Kingsmere & who would ruin the whole place.” It goes a long way to explain King’s lack of interest when in the worst days of the Nazis his immigration department turned back to Europe a shipload of Jewish refugees, many to their deaths.

  He had convinced himself during a visit to India a few years before the Great War that “it is in every way desirable that Canada should be kept for the white races and India for the black, as Nature appears to have decreed.” He was far more at home with men like Signor Mussolini, then the darling of the Canadian right wing, whom he visited in Rome in the fall of 1928. “I have been enthused,” he wrote, “about the manner in which this country has been bro’t together & is going ahead, the order of it all, the fine discipline, the evident regard for authority & for M.[ussolini] himself.” It filled him with admiration to note the way in which Mussolini had offered to clean up an Italy “filled with communists, banished them all to an island, cleared the streets of beggars and the houses of harlots.…” Mussolini was a “truly remarkable man of force of genius, fine purpose, a great patriot.” So much for the grandson of the rebel who had tried to topple the Family Compact.

  The distaste he felt for communism was less political than it was religious. The communists were godless atheists and King was a committed, if quirky, Christian who felt himself unworthy in the sight of his Maker. It was part of his obsession with spiritualism. In his Industry and Humanity, a naïve and almost unreadable book that he published in 1918 and of which he was excessively proud, he suggested that the church could solve “the vast problems of Industry and of the State.” Brotherly love was all that was needed to come to grips with economic and social questions. “It is from the reverence for life which men get from their mothers, and from the faith which a religion pure and undented imparts, that there comes the spirit of mutual aid through which the material interests of the world make way for the nobler aspirations of the soul.”

  King may have believed that, but as a practical politician he was far more devious, more canny, and more ruthless than his words suggest. Friends, enemies, biographers, and revisionist historians have all agreed on one thing: he was a consummate politician. It was hard to pin him down, to use his own words against him (the “five-cent” remark was an exception) because his speeches were masterpieces of ambiguity. He toiled over them for days at a time, but only his diaries reveal that he approached the task with something akin to terror.

  King once gave hi
mself a full week to prepare for a speech in Toronto, but a week, he felt, wasn’t nearly long enough. “I shudder,” he wrote, “as I think of the little time ahead.” Three days later, he still hadn’t mastered the speech. Another two days passed; it still wasn’t finished, and King was “nearly desperate” – almost in tears. Another day and he was suffering from “brain fatigue greater than I can imagine.” Twenty-four hours later he was still struggling away, totally disconsolate. “It lacks punch,” he wrote – but then, King’s speeches always lacked punch. “I can clearly see that I am not at all up to the mark.” He could only hope that God would give him strength to bring it off.

  Apparently God did, for King was able to speak for two hours – so long that his deputy, Ernest Lapointe, had to cut his own speech short and the other speakers were forced to cancel theirs. King felt “immensely relieved,” but one’s sympathies are with the audience and with his fellow Liberals who found their own time gobbled up. That didn’t bother King, who felt that a Higher Power was running the affair and had carried him through.

  Each time he spoke, he felt himself under nervous strain and tension. Once, when he tried to reply to “an exceedingly poor speech” by Bennett, he felt that he had failed. “Some fiendish influence seems to have taken hold of me … and makes it impossible for me to think.” Fiendish influences were always at war with King’s soul. Was it fatigue, he wondered, or “passions”? That word recurs in the diaries. He wrote of feeling, one evening, a “sort of internal fever, fighting passions.” And again: “I have been consumed by a sort of inner fire, partly over-eating I fear, but mostly passions which will not let me rest as I should.”

  The celibate could not rid himself of guilt. He dared not utter the terrible word “masturbation” even to his secret self, but it is clear that, in common with most men of his time including a good many doctors, he believed the practice to be not only evil but also debilitating. “If I could only get over the feeling that there was something wrong in these desires & realize they are natural & all that is necessary is to control & subdue them I should be much happier.” But he could not conquer them or rid himself of the burden they imposed. “To be married would have, of course, be best of all but that will have to come or not as may be ordained. I have given up worrying about it.” Yet his worries continued.