Following the Sheep

In September 1907, thugs paraded through Vancouver’s Chinatown, smashing windows, wreaking havoc and looking for non-white people to hurt. Julie F. Gilmour’s Trouble on Main Street: Mackenzie King, Reason, Race and the 1907 Vancouver Riots takes us back to these few days of racial trouble, but only as a starting point. Having zoomed in on Vancouver in that autumn, Gilmour focuses our attention on one man who showed up in the riot’s aftermath: William Lyon Mackenzie King. This is not the King we are used to seeing—the old wily politician with the dog and the ghosts and the dull, careful speech. The King of 1907 is the ambitious young civil servant and social climber whose burgeoning career was only partly fulfilled, most of its glory still a shiny promise in his imagination.

Between the autumn of 1907 and the spring of 1909, King traipsed back and forth across the country and...