Unbuttoned : a history of Mackenzie King's secret life / Christopher Dummitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dummitt, Christopher, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 1874-1950.

King, William Lyon Mackenzie.

Political culture--Canada.

Political culture.

Politicians--Canada--Public opinion.

Politicians.

Prime ministers--Canada--Biography.

Prime ministers.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (349 pages)

Place of Publication:

Montreal & Kingston, [Ontario] ; London, [England] ; Chicago, [Illinois] : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.

Summary:

"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."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part 1: King, then and later

Changing tastes

Death of a statesman

Part 2: keeping secrets (or trying to)

Psychic newsflash

The official story

Striking an unhappy medium

Part 3: no one could fool the people so long

Statesman or politician?

Blame Freud

Ferns and Ostry

Official secrets

Part 4: one the precipice

End of an era

Close-up

Ravenous for the remaining courses

Final spasm of hypocrisy

To open or not to open

Part 5: the people unfooled

Weird Willie

Victorianitis

The cover-up is the story

The greatest prime minister?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF cover (ebrary, viewed June 15, 2017).

ISBN:

9780773549395

0773549390

9780773549388

0773549382

9780773548763

0773548769

OCLC:

968345082