(17 Dec. 1874-22 July 1950), political figure connected in various ways with Glengarry County over many years. (Mackenzie King) Born at Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario. He was educated at the University of Toronto, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1909); was deputy minister of Labour in the Canadian government and minister of labour in the Cabinet of Sir Wilfrid Laurier; succeeded Laurier in 1919 as the leader of the federal Liberal Party; and was prime minister of Canada Dec. 1921-June 1926, Sept. 1926-Aug. 1930, and Oct. 1935-Nov. 1948.

     In 1919, when as the newly chosen leader of the Liberal Party he was seeking a seat in Parliament, King was offered the Liberal nomination for the constituency of Glengarry-Stormont. He refused the offer, however, on the grounds that he did not want to run against a candidate of the United Farmers. (J.W. Kennedy was elected in the 1919 by-election for Glengarry-Stormont as the candidate of the United Farmers of Ontario.) During the 1925 federal election, King visited Alexandria to support the Liberal candidate, A.J. Macdonald. (Glengarry News 18 Sept. 1925) King was caused great political embarrassment through an unwary friendship, personal as well as political, which he had formed with the Glengarry-born businessman, Dr W.L. McDougald. King named McDougald to the Senate in 1926, but McDougald had to resign from the Senate in 1932 because of his involvement in the Beauharnois scandal.

     In the 1945 general election, King’s Liberals were returned to office, but King himself was defeated by a CCF candidate in his riding of Prince Albert, Sask. Dr W.B. MacDiarmid, Glengarry’s newly-elected MP, agreed to resign his seat so that the prime minister could succeed him as the MP for the county. In the resulting by-election, which was held on 6 Aug. 1945 (the day, as it turned out, of Hiroshima; King heard about the electoral victory and the atom bomb attack on the same day) Mackenzie King defeated by a large majority the one candidate who ran against him, Dr Richard Monahan. The Conservatives and the CCF did not place candidates to oppose the prime minister, so if Dr Monahan, a man previously unknown in Glengarry, had not intervened in the election, King would have been returned by acclamation without the inconvenience of actually holding an election. King visited the constituency to take part in the Liberal nominating meeting at the Armouries, Alexandria, on 17 July 1945. At that meeting, he spoke for more than an hour. Otherwise, King delivered no campaign speeches and did not visit the constituency during the campaign. One remarkable practical joke, of a kind which must have few parallels in Canadian political history, enlivened the short campaign. A Glengarrian who closely resembled the prime minister posed as Mackenzie King successfully enough in Alexandria to deceive Dr Mohahan for a short time into believing that he had met King. In this stunt Clarence Ostrom posed as the lookalike of Mackenzie King’s chauffeur. (Montreal Gazette, 4 Aug. 1945)

     Following the election, King was in Alexandria on 24 August to attend a meeting of the local Liberal Party. On this occasion he announced that he had appointed Lt. Col. W.J. Franklin as sergeant-at-arms of the House of Commons. In Sept. King attended the fairs at both Maxville and Williamstown. His own highly-appreciative comments from his diary on the warm reception he received at Williamstown have been printed in the history of Wiliamstown Fair. Three years later, in one of his best remembered interventions in Glengarry affairs, King perfomed the official task of opening the Glengarry Highland Games at Maxville on 31 July 1948. This was the first of the “revived” Highland Games, which have continued at Maxville with great success every year since then. In his speech at the Games, King made what he described as his first official announcement of the entry of Newfoundland into Confederation. Another official visitor at the Games that day (with Glengarry connections through his wife) was agriculture minister J.G. Gardiner. (Glengarry News 6 Aug. 1948) King attended the funeral of Dr MacDiarmid at Maxville in 1947 (as did Gardiner and Franklin). When J.W. Kennedy (the man King chose not to oppose in 1919) died in Nov. 1949, King attended the funeral services held at Ottawa but not those held at Maxville. Among the tributes at Mrs Florence Gormley’s death (1945) , Mackenzie King, who had recently become MP for the county, sent a telegram of condolences. The Gormleys were a prominent, well-regarded, well-connected family, and it was not unimportant that her husband, Tom Gormley, though now aged 81, had been a valued local Liberal Party activist.

     Though King resigned as prime minister in 1948, he remained the MP for GC till the dissolution of Parliament 30 April 1949. He did not run again in any constituency; the GC election was his last. King attended the Liberal nomination meeting held in Alexandria on 27 May 1949. His name was moved in nomination as the candidate for GC at the forthcoming election, but he refused to allow the nomination to go forward. At the Liberal Party convention of Aug. 1948 which chose Louis St. Laurent to be the new leader of the party, King had voted as the delegate for GC. His vote was for St. Laurent, not for Gardiner, who was also running. King was the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, the leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. Harkness notes it as striking that King ended his political career as MP for a constituency once so associated with the loyal clan of the Macdonells. Earlier, of course, the Macdonells had been Jacobites, and in his speech of 17 July 1945 in Alexandria, Mackenzie King drew attention to the Jacobites of his own family background.

     One of King’s distinguished political opponents in Parliament was John Bracken, premier of Manitoba from 1922 to 1943, who turned to federal politics and was Conservative leader of the opposition from 1942 to 1948 (but with a seat in Parliament only from 1945 to 1949). Bracken was also in Maxville for the Highland Games day in 1948. Later, a bond was formed between the Bracken family and GC when Gordon Bracken of that family married Elizabeth MacCrimmon from one of the long-established farm families of the 9th of Kenyon. (Lochinvar to Skye, 303) George Drew, who succeeded Bracken as leader of the Opposition in Parliament, was himself apparently of GC descent or connections. (See entry for George Alexander Drew) See also the entries for G.S.H. Barton, and W.C. Clark, who were prominent deputy ministers of the King era. And see the entries for Lionel Chevrier, Donald A. Macdonald (Q.C.), J.D. MacRae, and W.J. Major (King’s successor as MP for GC), all of whom were prominent in securing the GC seat for King in 1945.

     It has been speculated that having King as its MP preserved for GC a little longer than would otherwise have been the case the honour, poorly based as it was in terms of the county’s small population, of being a parliamentary constituency in its own right. (Ostrom) Ewan Ross wrote that this distinguished MP “did little for the county and had no real connection with it” (MacGillivray & Ross 538) but the first of these charges was equally true for many of the GC MPs, and the very favour and notice of so great a person as a prime minister must be supposed to bestow a benefit in their own right, just as a president or prime minister does honour to a university by accepting its honorary degree. It has been reported that some of the GC Liberals hoped that as a result of getting King the GC seat, GC might again have a senator. The wistful and bullheaded notion that in some way GC (or even Alexandria) was “entitled” to a senator survived by decades the thirty years during which Dr Donald MacMillan, of Alexandria, was a member of the Senate.

     For King’s early connections with a distinguished family of GC origins, and the belief that he came close to marrying a daughter of the family, see James Bethune. See also Alexander Macpherson, newspaperman.

R.M. Dawson and H.B. Neatby, William Lyon Mackenzie King (3 vols., 1958-1976). J.W. Pickersgill & D.F. Forster, The Mackenzie King Record (4 vols., 1969-1970) * Glengarry News 29 June 1945-31 Aug. 1945, & Standard Freeholder same period; also both (includes Standard Freeholder 28 & 30 May 1949) for the events cited here * Ostrom 212-213 * Johnson (1968) * MacGillivray & Ross: index * Harkness: index * fairs: Maxville (1991) , 287; Ruth D. Mowat, All’s Fair: the Story of Ontario’s Oldest Fair and Its Home Williamstown (1976), 39, 67-68, 77 * King and GC: Chevier, chapter 7 & earlier; Bernard Chevrier, “Mackenzie King Sought Election in Glengarry,” Glengarry Life No. 32 (1993), repr. from Viewpoint Canada & GN 6 May 1981(with a superb illustr.); Edward St. John, Glengarry Highland Games, 1997 Souvenir Program * see also J. G. Berry this dictionary