Free The Great Depression by Pierre Berton

that I may yet have one to love who is wholly my own….” It was a cry from the heart that occurs throughout his long years in office.
    Yet King made little effort to find a wife, and when a suitable prospect appeared he fled like a startled buck pursued by wolves. There was no lack of eligible women. He corresponded with several, including the granddaughter of General Ulysses S. Grant, Julia Grant, who had married and would later divorce an Italian prince. But he shrank from the ultimate intimacy. It was easier and less distracting to lean, when he needed to, on Joan Patteson.
    Nor could any woman hope to compare for beauty, compassion, selflessness, or purity of soul with his sainted mother, who haunted his dreams and his seances, guiding his destinies, consoling him in his darker moments, and leaving precious little time or space for a rival.
    It was King’s occasional habit, when returning to Laurier House late at night, to press his thin lips against the unyielding marble of his mother’s effigy. He not only idolized her, he invented her. The real woman – strong-minded, ambitious, calculating, and manipulative – was far removed from King’s fictional creation.
    Isabel King had dominated the family, overshadowing her passive and largely inadequate husband, who plays a minor role in King’s recorded visions. The child of a famous Canadian rebel, she gave his name to her elder son and never let William forget who his grandfather was, or the humiliation and poverty she had suffered during those desperate days when he was on the run after the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada. The son’s task was to support her, to worship and enshrine the memory of his grand-father, and to right the wrongs that the rebellious Mackenzie had sustained at the hands of the establishment, known in those days as the Family Compact.
    The irony is that King, the rebel worshipper, was anything but a rebel himself. After a term as Minister of Labour in the Laurier Cabinet and a conciliator in hundreds of strikes, he joined the establishment. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a man of whom hisgrandfather would never have approved, hired him to repair his shattered image after one of the bloodiest and most appalling strikes in U.S. history. King’s solution was to impose company unions on the Colorado miners, scarcely the act of a committed radical. They were, in the words of the chairman of the congressional committee appointed to investigate the matter, “specious substitutes for trade unions that will deceive, mollify and soothe public opinion while bulwarking the employers’ arbitrary control.” To King the hero-worshipper, who always basked in the approval of great men, Rockefeller was the greatest of all.
    Though he tended to cry poor, King was a rich man. By 1930 he was worth about five hundred thousand dollars, at least four million in 1990 dollars. Half of it had been raised from wealthy Liberal supporters by his friend the Tea King, Peter Larkin. His investments would pay him at least twenty thousand annually, his salary as Leader of the Opposition another ten thousand, and his tax-free sessional indemnity four thousand more. That was an enormous sum in those days of deflation and limited income tax, when the average office employee earned only two thousand dollars a year and the average production worker only half that amount. King’s annual take-home pay, calculated in 1990 terms, was in the neighbourhood of a quarter of a million dollars.
    He could not and did not spend it all. Yet when he determined to buy some additional property next door to his Kingsmere estate, he boggled at the price of fifteen hundred dollars. “It wasn’t worth five hundred to me,” he thought, “save to prevent Jews or other undesirable people getting in” – a phrase King used more than once in his diary. Like most of his class, he was an anti-Semite. “The greatest danger and menace,” he wrote, “is a sale to Jews, who have a desire to get in at