STRANGE STATESMEN
King of Canada
Stereotypically, Canada seems perhaps the dullest land on Earth, with a political life of stable, centrist consensus. Yet this reputation may not be entirely deserved, as shown by the story of Canada’s threetime Prime Minister, William Lyon MacKenzie King (1874-1950), the country’s rough equivalent to Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee combined, who held office for a total of 21 years between 1921 and 1948. King led his country through WWII with such a steady hand that Canada came out better off than before the conflict began, with GDP doubling, while contributing more troops to the D-Day invasion than anyone besides the US and Britain.
It would be churlish to deny Mr King was a great man… but he was also an incredibly tedious one. Hardly Churchillian in manner, he was even more self-effacing than Attlee. In a
1946 survey, only eight per cent of Canadians said they admired their leader, in spite of his obvious service to them and their freedom. Far more exciting was King’s Scots-Canadian grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie (17951861), Toronto’s first mayor, who in 1837 led an armed uprising against colonial rule before serving as President of a short-lived rebel enclave, the ‘Republic of Canada’ in 1837-38. Considering it his sacred duty to finish what his ancestor had started, it was King who negotiated Canada’s decoupling from Britain, ultimately winning it the status of an autonomous nation. Rather than being ruled by the King, Canada was now ruled by King instead, and his triumphs were legion; he set up Canada’s first sovereign Foreign Office and the Bank of Canada, as well as Canada’s welfare state.
The war over, in 1946 King passed the Canadian Citizenship Act, which for the first time legally defined inhabitants as fullblown Canadians, not mere British subjects. On 3 January 1947, he received Canadian Citizenship Number 0001, thus making him literally first among equals. His only flaw was his dullness. But then, following his death in 1950 aged 75, it was revealed that, from his student days in 1893, King had been meticulously keeping a candid diary, some 30,000 pages in length – and, when its contents were revealed, it turned out he wasn’t so boring after all… 1
MR KING AND WEIRD WILLIE
Mackenzie King was a classic Jekyll and Hyde figure, later given the shared moniker of ‘Mr King and Weird Willie’; the classic account of his bipolar existence is historian CP Stacey’s 1976 best-seller A Very Double Life. King had intended editing his diaries down into a memoir, desiring many portions be destroyed. However, reports of their contents quickly leaked after his death.
Once able to hang onto power “like a lobster with lockjaw”, had King’s secrets emerged earlier, his vice-like grip could have been loosened. A lifelong bachelor who appeared married to the job, he emerged as a surprising youthful frequenter of prostitutes – but only to save their souls for Jesus, not to sleep with them. Stacey speculated otherwise, helping shift extra copies.
More irrefutable was the fact that King was enamoured with another world; it turned out that he was a committed amateur psychical researcher, who may even have allowed his many escapades in this field to sway his conduct in politics. King was not a Spiritualist per se, but a lifelong Presbyterian. Yet, corresponding with the day’s top spook-hunters like Nandor Fodor and Hereward Carrington (of whose American Psychical Institute he was a covert member under a false name), and attending so many séances, he was bound to end up mixing with adherents of the Spiritualist faith. King was always superstitious. Thinking himself a sort of ‘Mackenzie King Arthur’, and his political colleagues fellow Knights of the Round Table, the PM fantasised he had a mission from God to bring about the Holy Geopolitical Grail of peace, and saw divine messages all around him. Daily, randomly-chosen Bible passages guided him about which paths to pursue; he would look at clocks only to find that their hands lying in certain ‘significant’ positions confirmed he was on the right track. God and ghosts even communicated via shaving-foam. His diary entry for 20 January 1948 tells of a waking vision of the spirit of silent-movie star Mary Pickford, indicating that a speech he was due to give that day “would be an historic one”. Then, parsing the patterns formed by his lather in the bathroom, he saw “a huge eagle with its wings outspread” being assaulted by a polar-bear, only to be thwarted by “a joyous youth who seemed to have great vitality, pushing the bear away.” Such simulacra were “as clear as if… cut in marble,” and told of Cold War tensions between American Eagle and Russian Bear; that the bear was being beaten meant the Free World was winning this Manichean struggle because of “the new light and life that is coming into the world” thanks to the shining efforts of speechifying Grail-Knights like himself.
2
’KING RIDICULOUS
King initially rejected the paranormal. Reading a book on Spiritualism in 1902, he threw it away in disgust. He believed in an afterlife, but felt the amazing feats of physical mediums of the DD Home/Eusapia Palladino type were just conjuring tricks. The turning-point came via bereavement. Within the three years of 1915-17, his sister, father and mother all died. His mother’s death hit him hardest, and he created a shrine in his house, thinking her spirit was guiding him in dreams.
Lonely, he sought company in man’s best friend, getting an Irish Terrier named Pat in 1924. King talked to the pet so much he thought it was human, and in psychic linkage with his mother. When kneeling in worship at Mrs King’s portrait, Pat licked King’s feet – a sure sign of their innate spiritual connection. When this “Angel Dog” fell ill, King sought medical advice from the ghost of Louis Pasteur, but when a watch fell on the floor and stopped at 10 past five, King realised Pat would die at this same hour the next morning – which he did, albeit not before being given messages from King to pass on to his relatives. King actually postponed a meeting of the Cabinet War Committee to perform this solemn duty. In 1941, Pat was replaced with Pat II, who was also fully human. “We spoke together of the Christ-child,” King once confided to his diary. So human was Pat II that, when offered the Order of Merit by George VI in 1947, King toyed with it being given to the dog instead, even though Pat II had just died. Naturally, both Pats’ spirits returned to hear their master’s voice again after death.3
In 1926, King consulted a fortune-teller who, after psychometrising his handkerchief, correctly predicted his next election victory. Yet she also predicted 1930 would be a good time for him to call another election… which he then lost. King realised ghosts’ and psychics’ opinions were like everyone else’s – fallible, at least in policy matters. As such, King’s basic future rule was to come to a tentative decision himself, then seek otherworldly reassurance that he had made the correct choice. Even his decision about the 1930 election turned out to be a wise one, for five years out of office gave him time to examine Spiritualism properly; he even consulted the ghost of the top Victorian SPR man FWH Myers for his views. At some séances, King’s diary reveals, “Queen Victoria and Anne Boleyn came, but I do not remember what they said.” Detroit medium Etta Wriedt made a silver trumpet jump around for King before eerie voices emerged from it, but London was home of the world’s best mediums. There in 1947 for the Royal Wedding, he sought out Geraldine Cummins, an Irishwoman whose plays had once been performed at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Cummins connected King with the soul of his old war-time ally President Franklin D Roosevelt, who had created an all-star “brains-trust” cabinet of dead statesmen to advise him: “You will not know how we come, but when you sleep we will put suggestions into your mind.” This cabinet sought both to avert a secret Wall Street plan to annex Canada, and to determine whether or not the elderly King should retire. “Say, Mac, it is kind of you to come… Don’t retire, stay on the job, your country needs you,” said FDR, before ordering he improve his diet. “I want you to retain Canada’s independence. There are a bunch of roughnecks in finance in the USA. They would like to get hold of Canada through economic penetration.” Worse, “that cheerful cut-throat, Joe Stalin” sought to flood the country with Commie spies. Only King’s continued leadership could ensure that, while “the 19th century was the century of the USA, the 20th century will be Canada’s century,” as while King was “not clever, you are wise.” But when King changed his own mind about his departure, FDR did likewise. Standing down in 1948, King was advised by Roosevelt to “live like a vegetable for a while” and regenerate, as he would soon be needed again to save the world when the Cold War got hotter over in Asia, an alleged forecast of the Korean War. King passed Churchill transcripts of FDR’s talks, but to only polite interest. 4
THE LION KING
The most notable example of King allowing his superstition to influence his statecraft came when, in June 1937, he managed to gain a personal audience in Berlin with none other than Adolf Hitler. Meeting Hitler was “the day for which I was born,” Weird Willie thought, something confirmed by manifold signs and wonders. On the train from Paris, he saw a cloud which looked like a “seated lion” facing towards Germany; on a visit to Berlin Zoo, he observed some more lions (not that surprising, perhaps), and patted one cub’s head; and he saw a pair of stone lions flanking the steps of a museum. Even better, another lion-statue bore the date ‘1874’, the year of his own birth. These were symbols of “security” and “strength”; the Imperial British Lion, as embodied by his
KING TALKED TO THE PET SO MUCH HE THOUGHT IT WAS HUMAN
own good self, William Lyon Mackenzie King, would continue to roar strongly, thanks to his holy mission to Naziland. Opening his Bible, he read a passage in which St Paul is assured that, when brought before Caesar, God would protect the safety of his shipmates; Britannia’s Ship of State would thus fail to be torpedoed by that modern-day Caesar, the Führer. The night prior to the meeting, King made sure to sleep beneath a blanket of Mackenzie tartan, in psychic communion with his Scottish ancestors, feeling “the whole Mackenzie clan were communicating in my diplomatic mission and telling me what to do.” Their advice could not have been very good, as Hitler then duped King entirely.
Entering Adolf’s chamber, King produced a deluxe biography of himself, planted it on Hitler’s desk, and began showing him photos. Hitler politely pretended to be interested as Mackenzie told how, having been born by divine fiat in the town of Berlin, Ontario, he “understood the German people very well.” Hitler reacted “in a very friendly way” and offered a signed photograph of himself in uniform in return. Handsome Herr Hitler had himself a new fan. Like a teenage girl, King later gushed over Adolf in his Dear Diary, swooning over “a sort of appealing and affectionate look in his eyes,” which had “a liquid quality about them” indicating “profound sympathy” for all. Moreover, “his skin was smooth,” he was “very nice and sweet” and “eminently wise” and appeared “particularly strong on beauty, loves flowers, and will spend more of the money of the State on gardens and flowers than on most other things.” Panzers excepted.
In Hitler, King saw a doppelgänger of himself: “As I talked to him, I could not but think of Joan of Arc. He is distinctly a mystic… The German people… feel that he was [on] a mission from God… [but] he dislikes any of them thinking of him as anything but a humble citizen who is trying to serve his country well. He is a teetotaller and also a vegetarian. Is unmarried, abstemist in all his habits and ways… very much of a recluse… deeply religious… he believes strongly in God.” Given Hitler’s obvious excellence of character, King had no qualms in believing his host’s honest assurances that he had “no desire” to begin any war, and that, in fact, Britain and France were the true aggressors in 1930s Europe. As he left Hitler’s room, a very happy Mackenzie “wished him well in his efforts to help mankind.” Later, he even pondered whether or not Poland was somehow to blame for its own invasion.5
IDYLLS OF THE KING
The only true consequence of the King of Comedy’s trip to Berlin was to help confirm the Nazi view that Western democratic leaders were weak and naïve – or possibly insane. In 1939, leafing through an old Christmas present, Richard Wagner: The Story of an Artist, King realised his choice of reading matter had been directed by his mother, hinting that knowing your Wagner was the key to understanding Hitler’s soul. Thus, wrote King, to negotiate with Nazis: “One should become saturated with Wagner. Wagner’s music has possessed Germany – his philosophy [along] with it. Hitler loves his music… and doubtless has imbibed [Wagner’s] philosophy.” Which was what, exactly? “I believe Hitler to be like Wagner in his beliefs on reincarnation… [and] like Wagner [in] believing in compassion as the thing to aim at... the ultimate perfection in purity of living. This may cause him in the end not to yield to force… Like Wagner, he may become, or strive to become, [the tripartite reincarnation of the German mythical heroes] Siegfried-Amfortas-Parsifal…” Wagner’s operas embody the “ultimate triumph of good, through suffering and sacrifice,” like Christ on the cross; and was not the Nazi swastika just another form of “crooked cross” and Hitler a second Jesus? Wagner teaches us that “pity is holding [Hitler’s] sword” of war in its sheath, meaning “It will be Christ who will win out in the end” in the battle to possess Hitler’s soul. “The German [Grail-] Knights were not ‘milk and water’ men, they were… ready to fight if need be [but] their higher natures overcame their lower” thanks to the influence of “the supernatural” on their souls. That German defences were called the ‘Siegfried Line’ revealed Hitler’s hidden belief he was Siegfried reincarnate, “obliged to come in humble circumstances into the world” and that he would be reborn again later as Parsifal, the warrior-knight who, in Wagner, ultimately ended up guided not by violence but “by compassion”. Like John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in prison, Hitler penned Mein Kampf behind bars too, showing how his soul would progress to “greater heights of manhood” from the slough of sabre-rattling despond.
Hitler lived in Berchtesgaden, ‘Berchta’ being an old German goddess, subliminally representing “some deity… a woman who symbolised something [Hitler] did not know what.” But who was Adolf’s Queen Guinevere, guiding the hitherto errant knight on his spiritual pilgrim-quest of moral progress? As with King, it turned out to be his dear old mum: “I am convinced [Hitler] is a Spiritualist… [as proven by] his going to his parents’ grave at the time of his great victory, the annexation of Austria… [I admire] his devotion to his mother – that mother’s spirit is, I am certain, his guide and no one who does not understand this relationship… can understand” Hitler’s actions. When Adolf spoke of himself “following his star of destiny, just as a somnambulist walks in his sleep”, maybe this ‘star’ was Mrs Hitler’s ghost? King believed in a “process of spiritual evolution”, driven by political
pilgrims like himself and Hitler introducing the “right policies” independently, until ultimately humanity itself “all become of one mind”, thus becoming “like-minded with Christ” and “one with God”, at which point any one man would be every man, leading to peace in our time. Thus, King’s vain delusion that Hitler was just like him, only German, becomes understandable.
Thankfully, King’s strategy during the war itself was not guided quite as closely by The Great Beyond. On 28 August 1939, a small blue flower snapped its stem and toppled onto King’s table. This, he saw, was a sign that “some decision has been made” over in Germany. Sadly, it was the decision to invade Poland. On 29 August, King saw a cloud which resembled his mother’s head, looking for all the world like an “ectoplasm formation – but much more beautiful.” Did this mean peace would come after all?
On 2 September, King held a table-rapping session in which his dead father announced the news that the Führer had just been assassinated by an angry Pole. “War will be averted,” confirmed his mum. King waited for official corroboration of the news to come though… and waited… and waited. Why did it never arrive? In his diary, King speculated that either a lying spirit has come in somewhere, or subconscious wishes [sometimes] dictate the words expressed [by the table] . Men may be guided by evil spirits or by good spirits. Shaken, King essentially laid off séances throughout the war, consulting Ouija boards and mediums but rarely, and mainly about trivia like his dead pets “hunting for rabbits and squirrels” in Doggy-Heaven. King himself passed over to join them in July 1950, five years after the holy war against the Führer-Parsifal had ended.
6
THE KING IS DEAD
King’s reputation is today exploited by organisers of ghost tours, with Mackenzie House, the former home of King’s rebel grandfather, billed as ‘the most haunted house in Toronto’. It’s now a museum, but in 1960 the Toronto Telegram claimed the home’s caretakers had spotted the apparitions of both “a short, frock-coated man” – probably Mackenzie Sr himself – and “the spectral figure of a woman with long hair”, before hearing phantom footsteps on the stairs, a self-playing piano and an antique printing-press starting up by itself. The phantasmal lady even slapped one witness’s face in her bed. Actually, the story was invented by the House’s wantaway owners to drum up interest in the place. After an Archdeacon performed a televised blessing there, the house was snapped up by the City of Toronto, with the official list of contents, built-in as part of the deal, including “one ghost (exorcised)”. The only true link with spirits at Mackenzie House comes in a dedicatory panel unveiled by the dead rebel’s grandson, whose inscription honours the “PIONEERS OF FREEDOM” who had once risen up against colonial rule. In King’s secret diary, he admitted these very words had been ghost-written for him by his ancestor from beyond the grave.
The two most haunted houses in Ottawa, meanwhile, once belonged to Mackenzie King himself. Laurier House, the former residence of Canada’s seventh PM, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919), whom King had known in both life and death, was donated to King in 1921 and served as a base for his séances; the soul of Laurier himself was known to drop back in from time to time. One room contains both the shrine to King’s beloved mother and a crystal ball, gifted by a London Spiritualist. In 1991, a tourist spied Mrs King staring out at her from within this uncanny item. King’s country retreat of Kingsmere, north of Ottawa, is also unquiet. In June 1954, a New York Times journalist, Percy J Philip, was sitting in the grounds when King himself suddenly manifested, seeking informed chat about current affairs. Before vanishing back behind the veil, King revealed that “We have two worlds. Those people who think their world is the only one… have a very dull time.” In spite of
7 initial appearances, a dull time was the very last thing Weird Willie had enjoyed throughout his long and double life. It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?
NOTES
1 King’s diaries are online at www.bac-lac.gc.ca/ eng/discover/politics-government/prime-ministers/ william-lyon-mackenzie-king/Pages/diaries-williamlyon-mackenzie-king.aspx; they are fully searchable by keyword if readers wish to mine them for further eccentricities.
2 Diary, Jan 20 1948; King saw numerological messages everywhere. 10 and 30 were particularly significant. 10 appeared within the word ‘radio’ if you inexplicably wrote it as ‘rad10’, for example, while his diary paper had holes punched in it. There were three holes, each of which, incredibly, was circular: three circles equals ‘3-O’ or ‘30’, naturally. He read tea-leaves, too. When some looked like a bear, he thought it referred to his mother ‘bearing’ him. CP Stacey, A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King, Macmillan of Canada, 1976, pp.176-7
3 Stacey, pp.139-44. King’s watch actually stopped at 5.25, demonstrating yet again his unerring capacity for total self-delusion.
4 For much fuller accounts of King’s career in psychical research than can be provided here, see Stacey, pp.160-204; www.gedmartin.net/ published-work-mainmenu-11/268-w-l-mackenzieking-canada-s-spiritualist-prime-minister; https:qspacelibrary.queensu.ca/bitstream/ handle/1974/5348/Bullock_Allison_C_200911_ MA.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y; https://archive. macleans.ca/article/1951/12/15/the-secret-lifeof-mackenzie-king-spiritualist; http://houdini.org/ MackenzieKingandSpiritualism.html
5 https://junobeach.org/canada-in-wwii/articles/ aggression-and-impunity/w-l-mackenzie-kingsdiary-june-29-1937/; https://nationalpost.com/ news/canada/he-loves-flowers-the-insane-truestory-of-the-day-canadas-prme-minister-met-hitler; www.cjnews.com/news/canada/mackenziekings-forgotten-visit-to-nazi-germany; www. winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/fyi/mackenzie-kingmeets-the-fuhrer-131909873.html
6 Roy MacLaren, Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators, McGill-Queens University Press, 2019, pp.245-6; Joy E Esberey, Knight of the Holy Spirit: A Study of William Lyon Mackenzie King, University of Toronto Press, 1980, pp.209-15; Stacey, 1976, pp.190-2, 195-6; Diary, Aug 27, 28, 29, 30, 1939; Geraldine Cummins’s medium friend Hester Dowden made her own attempts to invade the brains of wartime leaders, viewing Hitler not as evil but as an empty vessel, whose skull bore “an infinite capacity for receiving influences” from both bright and dark spirits, due to his “colossal egotism”. The real war, therefore, took place within Hitler’s mind. This opinion coincides with Mackenzie’s own; did Dowden give him the idea in the first place? They did meet for sittings.
7 www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/once-upon-a-cityarchives/2017/01/12/once-upon-a-city-torontosoriginal-firebrand-leaves-spirited-legacy.html; www.torontoghosts.org; https://globalnews.ca/ news/4613378/mackenzie-house-toronto/; John Robert Colombo, Mysteries of Ontario, Hounslow Press, 1999, pp.170-2.