The sideways March: Mackenzie King's monumental quest, 1893-1940.(Report)

William Lyon Mackenzie King knew how to work up a grand occasion and a grand monument too. As a very junior minister in 1905, he had engineered the enshrinement adjacent to Parliament Hill of his heroically dead roommate, Bert Harper. He had not only raised the funds and selected the sculptor and the emblem for the memorial (a stalwart Sir Galahad), he had wheedled his way into a site that most viewers would assume was the Hill itself, so closely did it adjoin those sacred precincts. Most of all, he had convinced his patron, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, to grace the occasion of the monument's unveiling, thus transforming personal mourning into public monumentality. (2)

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King knew how such deeds were wrought. What then had gone wrong with what should have been the unalloyed delights of his 18 June 1938 unveiling of a Niagara Falls memorial arch? After all, its panels marked the progress of Canadian governance and bestowed a culminating role in that pageant to his Grandfather. Though neither the monument itself nor the attendant ceremony lay under his Prime Ministerial sway, he had had his say about both. Its origins lay in the nationalist designs of a provincial cabinet minister; its unveiling lay in T.B. McQuesten's hands too. But McQuesten was a Liberal, and as such shared Mr. King's estimation of the role that William Lyon Mackenzie had played in the evolution of responsible government. He had consulted with King and even asked him for a list of appropriate Scriptural quotations for the monument. Ostensibly a memorial to Upper Canada's pioneers, the Clifton Gate Arch had broadened the normal notion of pioneering, expanding it from a narrative of exploration, land clearance, settlement and defense to one including the development of political institutions that came about well after the typical pioneering experience had concluded. One of its most notable bas-relief panels--there were four--depicted an idealized profile of Grandfather presenting to the Upper Canadian Assembly in 1835 his Seventh Report on the deficiencies of the colonial regime that he would take arms against.

The panels' story was a novel one, recombining various elements of Upper Canadian history within a teleology that concluded in the 1837 Rebellion where Mackenzie had played so prominent a role. St. Jame's Anglican cathedral in Toronto parades a set of stained glass windows marking a progress of events originating with the creation of the world and culminating in the establishment of Trinity College. The sequence may strike non-tribal viewers as bathetic, yet it expresses a community's sense of selfhood and the pride taken in its own achievements

So with the secular faith of Upper Canadian liberalism. The panels move chronologically from French explorers such as La Salle and Hennepin (along with Pere Marquette, the first European to look upon the Falls), to pioneering United Empire Loyalists in an ox-drawn wagon, in turn leading to a British regular along with a sailor and an Indian defending Upper Canada in 1812. Mackenzie's Report concludes this process. Rather than a series of events marking a historical evolution, the sequence more closely resembles a set of historical snapshots. Those looking on it with the eyes of faith beheld a geometry as inevitable as the line from first base to home. The panels' deft assemblage of constituencies and historical worthies chiselled into the service of a common good could have caused no disquiet in the Prime Minister, himself expert in such constructions. Mackenzie King wanted the struggle for responsible government at once focused upon his ancestor yet decoupled from the Rebellion, and the panel certainly accomplished that. (3)

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The inscription itself summarizes a visual narrative at once triumphalist and egalitarian in its exaltation of the commonality: