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.

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.

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

This comprehensive bibliography on William Lyon Mackenzie King, the most prominent Canadian politician in the first half of the twentieth century, will be an invaluable reference tool for researchers in archives and libraries, as well as for political scientists, historians, journalists, and book collectors. In this volume Henderson provides comprehensive lists of books, articles, and other material written by King or about him and his era, and includes a series of appendices relating to studies on King and miscellaneous material pertaining to his life and career. In addition, Henderson provides a list of unsigned articles by King that appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and of sound recordings and motion picture footage relating to him. Finally, he identifies all forewords and prefaces written by King, plays written about him, and books and poems dedicated to him.

Continues the record begun in William Lyon Mackenzie King, a political biography by R.M. Dawson.

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.