Young Mackenzie King

REVIEWS 197 Young Mackenzie l(ing The lateR. MacGregor Dawson's William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Political Biography, I: 1874-1923 (University of Toronto Press, 1958, pp. xiv, 521, $7.50), is, in more than one way, a remarkable book. Its production may possibly have taken more time, required the effort of more people, and cost more money than that of any single biographical volume in the Englishspeaking Commonwealth. The limits of this rash generalization would certainly have to be set at the Commonwealth. They might more properly be restricted to Canada; and the United States, where the painstaking thoroughness of German-American scholarship can always be supplied by scores of ardent researchers and financed by stupendous sums of money, would most definitely have to be excluded. Yet even American scholarship, with its research teams and its "massed typewriters" in Steven Runciman's phrase, might, if it knew all the facts, look very respectfully indeed upon. the vast labours of what might be called the Mackenzie King Historical Enterprises Incorporated. These labours began about a decade ago, before the death of their subject, the late Mackenzie King. Their raw material, the King Papers, which com~ prise close to two million pages of documents, would surely be enough to provide even the most voracious American scholarly appetite with a fairly satisfying meal. For years a "team" of experts worked in the Public Archives of Canada filing and cataloguing the King Papers; for another period of years, another ''team" of experts worked in Laurier House assisting Professor Dawson in the composition of the biography. Even now, after this almost fabulous expenditure of effort, the end is not yet. Only the first volume of the biography has appeared. There will, we are assured, be two more. It is a tragedy that Professor Dawson did not live to complete the work upon which he had been engaged so long and which promised to enhance his reputation so much. Mackenzie King's literary executors could hardly have chosen a better biographer. They wished, we are informed, to secure an author "who is in general sympathy with Mr. King and his -work and career"; and certainly, on this fundamental point, their wishes seem to have been gratified. This reviewer has a vivid recollection of meeting Professor Dawson in Ottawa, early in June 1957, just two days after the rejuvenated Conservative party had scored its first astonishing electoral victory. 'What," Mackenzie King's biographer exclaimed loudly-and despite the beginnings of his illness his voice boomed with its old resonance-"what is the explanation of this appalling catastrophe?" "General sympathy" was undoubtedly what Dr. Dawson felt for the career of Mackenzie King and the fortunes of the Liberal party; but this is a feeling which most good biographers have for their subjects, and it was far from being the only asset which Dr. Dawson brought to the execution of his task. His knowledge of Canadian politics and Canadian history was very great~ he was interested in the complications of human character; he had a detached, amused attitude to the ironies, contradictions, and absurdities of public affairs; and he could 198 REVIEWS write a good, straightforward, forceful prose style. He was, however, a political scientist, who had been more concerned with description and analysis than with narrative; and it is arguable that a biography-unless it be a study frankly analytical in character-should be based on what the publishers like to call "a strong story line." Dr. Dawson had, we are told, completed considerable portions of the later parts of the King biography; but the present volume, which covers the period 1874-1923, is the only one which will be wholly his. It begins with King's boyhood in Berlin (Kitchener) and his undergraduate days at the University of Toronto and ends with his triumphs as leader of the Canadian delegation at the Imperial Conference of 1923. In 1923, King was already forty-nine years old; he had been leader of the Liberal party for four and a half years and Prime Minister of Canada for two. The threat to Liberalism implicit in the sudden rise of the Progressive party had given him his first great chance...