Bio Politics

Louis St. Laurent served as Canada’s prime minister from November 1948 until June 1957, but not a single biography appeared until his former secretary published one in 1968. Robert Borden was prime minister even longer, but lacked a biography until his nephew collated some chapters Borden had written and published them a year after Borden’s death in 1937. Mackenzie King did better, but principally because he encouraged Globe journalist John Lewis to write Mackenzie King, the Man: His Achievements. Lewis became a senator almost simultaneously with its publication in 1925. Just before the 1935 campaign, King also persuaded Queen’s professor and Liberal candidate Norman Rogers to write Mackenzie King, a biography whose preface declared that King was “peculiarly fitted by inheritance, tradition and training to lead the Liberal Party of Canada in the period of momentous change upon which the world now seems to have entered.” Rogers quickly became King’s...