Research Catalog

Title

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

Author

Dummitt, Chris, 1973-

Publication

• Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2017]
• ©2017

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xxii, 326 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

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."--

Subjects

• King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 1874-1950 > Public opinion
• Prime ministers > Canada > Biography
• Political culture > Canada
• King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 1874-1950 > In mass media
• Politicians > Canada > Public opinion

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-319) and index.

Additional Formats (note)

• Issued also in electronic format.

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?

Call Number

JFE 17-7866

ISBN

• 9780773548763
• 0773548769

LCCN

2017415695

OCLC

968345159

Author

Dummitt, Chris, 1973- author.

Title

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

Publisher

Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2017]

Copyright Date

©2017

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-319) and index.

Additional Formats

Issued also in electronic format.

Other Form:

Dummitt, Christopher, 1973- Unbuttoned. (CaOONL)2016908163X

Research Call Number

JFE 17-7866