This book is a history of the afterlife of Mackenzie King in print and in Canadian culture. When King died in 1950 little was known publicly about his eccentric private life; King's final will declared that his voluminous diary should be destroyed and its contents were carefully guarded during the research and writing of his official biography. Yet twenty five years later, his diaries were publicly available and King's private life was the subject of energetic media discussion, including coverage of CP Stacey's A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King, the republication of H S Ferns and Bernard Ostry's The Age of Mackenzie King: Rise of the Leader, and the appearance of the third volume of the official biography by H. Blair Neatby. King increasingly came to be known in public as Weird Willie, the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. This book tells the story of this change and what it reveals about public attitudes towards politicians. It does so in part through detailed archival research into the specific decisions of Mackenzie King's literary executors along with close textual analysis of writing about and reporting on Mackenzie King. It also reads this story against the context of the cultural changes of the long 1960s and changing attitudes towards privacy, secrecy, morality, individualism and the rights revolution. The increasingly irreverent approach to Mackenzie King, the book argues, can be explained by the rise of a therapeutic culture of the self that increasingly based truth claims in individual experience, authenticity, and rights. In other words, the Weird Willie phenomenon is a microcosm of a fundamental historical transformation: the end of the era of the statesman.--$cProvided by publisher.
Authors
- Bibliography, etc. Note
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-319) and index
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Date published
- 2017.
- Description conventions
- rda
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 971.063/2092
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 23
- Distributor
- Canadian Electronic Library (Firm),
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- Geographic Area Code
- n-cn---
- ISBN
- 9780773548763 9780773549388
- LCCN
- F1033.K53
- LCCN Item number
- D86 2017eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOONL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (xxii, 326 pages)
- Published in
- Ottawa, Ontario
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)kck00237749 (OCoLC)968345082 (CaOOCEL)452363
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOONL
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- Unbuttoned 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- Dedication 6
- Contents 8
- Illustrations 10
- Preface 12
- Part One King, Then and Later 24
- 1 Changing Tastes 26
- 2 Death of a Statesman 34
- Part Two Keeping Secrets (or Trying to) 54
- 3 Psychic Newsflash 56
- 4 The Official Story 61
- 5 Striking an Unhappy Medium 79
- Part Three No One Could Fool the People So Long 94
- 6 Statesman or Politician? 96
- 7 Blame Freud 110
- 8 Ferns and Ostry 132
- 9 Official Secrets 159
- Part Four On the Precipice 176
- 10 End of an Era 178
- 11 Close-Up 191
- 12 Ravenous for the Remaining Courses 201
- 13 Final Spasm of Hypocrisy 211
- 14 To Open or Not to Open 219
- Part Five The People Unfooled 226
- 15 Weird Willie 228
- 16 Victorianitis 244
- 17 The Cover-Up Is the Story 259
- 18 The Greatest Prime Minister? 281
- Conclusion 287
- Postscript 293
- Notes 296
- Bibliography 332
- Index 344
