November 15, 1948: William Lyon Mackenzie King retires as Prime Minister of Canada and as Leader of the country's Liberal Party.
He was born on December 17, 1874 in Berlin, Ontario, a town renamed Kitchener due to anti-German sentiment during World War I. His maternal grandfather was William Lyon Mackenzie, the 1st Mayor of Toronto, and the leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837. Within his family, he was known as Willie, but, while at the University of Toronto, he adopted "W. L. Mackenzie King" as his signature, and began using "Mackenzie" as his preferred name with those outside the family.
Influenced by the settlement house movement, he was elected to Parliament in 1908, and was soon appointed the country's 1st Minister of Labour by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. He lost his seat in the 1911 Conservative Party landslide, and was hired by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to work for the Rockefeller Foundation. He was criticized for working for them instead of serving his country, in any capacity, during World War I, though he was 39 years old when the war began.
But King had been working for his Party behind the scenes, and when Laurier died in 1919, leaving the Party Leadership vacant, he ran for it and won, with the aide of prominent Quebec politician Ernest Lapointe Lapointe was aptly-named, because, for the rest of his life, he would be King's point man on Quebec: King never learned how to speak French, but, through Lapointe, he kept Quebec's Liberals on his side. Now, to keep it, he needed to run for a seat in the House of Commons, and won a seat in 1921. Forming a coalition to outflank the Conservatives, he became Prime Minister.
That year, Julian Byng, 1st Baron Byng of Vimy, Canada's leading hero of World War I, was named Governor-General of Canada by King George V. In 1925, Arthur Meighen, the Prime Minister that King had defeated in 1921, returned to power with a coalition government, as he took the Tories to a lead in the Commons, but not a majority.
King, however, thought he could retake the government by peeling off some members of the coalition. He combined the Liberal and Progressive caucuses to gain a plurality, and hung on to power. But the following year, due to a scandal that didn't involve King himself, the coalition fell apart.
King turned to Lord Byng, and asked him to exercise his power and dissolve Parliament, so that a new election could be called. Byng refused, citing the will of the people that had given Meighen the lead in the most recent election, and the right to form his coalition. On June 29, 1926, Byng asked Meighen to form a government, and he did.
King accused Meighen of acting irresponsibly by accepting Byng's appointment, attracting Progressive Party support to take down the fledgling government. The government lost a motion regarding Meighen's acting Ministers by 1 vote, only 3 days after Meighen's appointment. With no other parliamentary leader to call upon, Byng called a new election for September 14.
King effectively campaigned against Byng, instead of against Meighen, and won the most seats in the House of Commons. It became known as "The King-Byng Affair," and Byng returned to Britain at the end of the year, while Meighen resigned as Conservative Leader. King had not only defeated his predecessor: He had, for all intents and purposes, forced the Governor-General to resign, showing the Crown that Canada was its own nation, with its own government, speaking for its own people. Since 1926, no Governor-General of Canada, and no monarch of Great Britain, has tried to impose his or her will on the Prime Minister. All of which makes it weirder that the Prime Minister would be named "King."
He strengthened the Provincial governments of the Western Provinces: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. In collaboration with the Provincial governments, he inaugurated a system of old-age pensions based on need. In February 1930, he appointed Cairine Wilson as the 1st female Senator in Canadian history.
With the Great Depression having started, Mackenzie King was slow to react, and lost the 1930 election to a Conservative Party now led by Richard B. Bennett. But Bennett could not get Canada out of the Depression, and held off calling a new election for as long as he constitutionally could, finally standing for one in 1935. Campaigning under the slogan "King or Chaos," King and the Liberals won it. While there have been other Prime Ministers of Canada who lost the office and regained it, King remains the only one to have held it 3 times.
King not only had an indisputable majority government for the 1st time, he had, like his American counterpart Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the largest majority any party in his country had ever had, and for the same reason: The rejection of the country's conservative party for its handling of the Depression. But King knew he had to respond in 1935, as he had not in 1930. Instead of a "New Deal," which was FDR's term, he promised "a new era, where poverty and adversity, want and misery are the enemies which liberalism will seek to banish from the land."
He and FDR negotiated the Reciprocal Trade Agreement of 1935, aiding both countries. He started youth-work, farm-work, and conservation-work programs, similar to FDR's. His National Housing Act of 1938 led to the federal government building low-rent housing. He established Trans-Canada Air Lines, which became Air Canada in 1965; and nationalized both the Bank of Canada and the nation's railroads, forming the Canadian National Railway.
Canada entered World War II along with Britain in 1939. Despite this, an election was held on time in 1940, and the Liberals slightly increased their majority. Another was held on time in 1945 -- between V-E Day and V-J Day, as it turned out, just as Britain's was -- and the Liberals lost seats, but hung on to enough seats to keep their majority.
King hosted FDR and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference in Quebec City in 1943, though he objected to Churchill seeming to ignore him. The men were the same age, having been born 17 days apart, and had similar back-and-forth electoral histories. But Churchill had served in a combat role in 2 wars, and had that over King.
It's also worth pointing out that, like FDR, King ordered the internment of citizens of his country of Japanese descent. In some ways, Canada has been ahead of the curve compared to America; but it has had its own moments of bigotry.
He had attended the founding conference of the United Nations at San Francisco in the Spring of 1945, but played only a minor role. He realistically conceded that the major powers would dominate the UN, although he did argue for a "functional principle" that would give such middle powers as Canada an influence based on their contributions to the settlement of disputes.
After World War II, King introduced the Canadian Citizenship Act: Effective January 3, 1947, Canadians were citizens of Canada, not citizens of the United Kingdom. And he began the process of bringing the British Dominion of Newfoundland into Canada, gaining it status as the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador on March 31, 1949.
But King's health was declining, and he announced in May 1948 that he would not be Liberal Leader going in the next election. On August 7, a Party Convention selected Louis St. Laurent, his handpicked successor and his Minister of Justice, as its new Leader. King officially retired on November 15, having served as Prime Minister for 13 consecutive years, and 21 total years, in each case a record.
He did not live long thereafter, dying of pneumonia on July 22, 1950, at the age of 75, at "The Farm," his country estate in Kingsmere, Quebec, outside Ottawa. He bequeathed the estate to the government, which, in 1955, made it the official residence of the Speaker of the House of Commons. King is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.
King never married, and is not known to have had any children. Rumors have gone in several places: That he had quiet affairs with prominent women in the capital, some of them married to other politicians; that he satisfied his desires with prostitutes; and that he was gay. None has ever been proven. What was proven, and shocked people, were the publication of his diaries and their content of his interest in the occult, including seances where he tried to contact dead relatives, especially his mother; his dogs, which were known by the public to be a keen interest of his; and even, after 1945, President Roosevelt.
In 1951, the Mackenzie King Bridge opened over the Rideau Canal in the capital city of Ottawa. Since 1975, his portrait has appeared on Canada's $50 bill. In 1997, and again in 2016, Maclean's, Canada's leading newsmagazine, conducted polls that ranked King as the greatest Prime Minister in Canadian history. A 2011 poll ranked him 3rd, behind Wilfrid Laurier and John A. Macdonald, the country's 1st Prime Minister.
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November 15, 1948 was a Monday. Fashion designer Jimmy Choo, famous for his women's shoes, was born on this day.
Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. No games were played in the league that became the NBA, or in the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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