Charles Vincent Massey (February 20, 1887 – December 30, 1967) was a Canadian diplomat and statesman who served as the 18th governor general of Canada from 1952 to 1959. Massey was the first governor general of Canada to be born in Canada.
Massey was born into an influential Toronto family and was educated in Ontario and England, obtaining a degree in history and befriending future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King while studying at the University of Oxford. He was commissioned into the military in 1917 for the remainder of the First World War and, after a brief stint in the Canadian Cabinet, began his diplomatic career, serving in envoys to the United States and United Kingdom. Upon his return to Canada in 1946, Massey headed a royal commission on the arts between 1949 and 1951, which resulted in the Massey Report and subsequently the establishment of the National Library of Canada and the Canada Council of the Arts, among other grant-giving agencies. In 1952 he was appointed Governor General by King George VI on the recommendation of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, to replace the Viscount Alexander of Tunis as viceroy, and he occupied the post until succeeded by Georges Vanier in 1959.
On September 16, 1925, Massey was sworn into the King's Privy Council for Canada, giving him the accordant style of The Honourable. However, Massey was later, as a former Governor General of Canada, entitled to be styled for life with the superior form of The Right Honourable. He subsequently continued his philanthropic work and founded Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Massey Lectures before he died on December 30, 1967.
Early life, education, and career
Massey was born in Toronto, Ontario, to Anna (née Vincent) and Chester Daniel Massey, the owner of the Massey-Harris Co. (predecessor to Massey Ferguson) and the patriarch of one of the city's wealthiest families. His brother was Canadian-American actor Raymond Massey. The Massey family, of English origin, had immigrated from Cheshire, England, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. The clan was strongly Methodist and played an important role in supporting local religious, cultural, and educational organizations, including Victoria University, Massey Hall, and the Metropolitan Methodist Church (now the Metropolitan United Church). Massey was thus raised among Toronto's elite, which gave him a number of social and familial connections throughout his life. However, despite their status as one of Toronto's richest families, the Methodist Masseys were not considered to be one of the FOOFs (Fine Old Ontario Families), the slightly disparaging term used to describe the clique of wealthy Anglican families of English and Loyalist descent who dominated the social life of Toronto from the late 18th century well into the 20th century. To compensate for their parvenus status, Massey together with other members of his family were much given to philanthropy.
Massey was raised in the family mansion at 519 Jarvis Street and educated at St. Andrew's College from 1902 to 1906, then at University College at the University of Toronto, despite his family's close ties to Victoria College. At the University of Toronto, he enlisted in The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada in 1907 and joined the Kappa Alpha Society, through which he met future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who would be his long-time friend. After passing matriculation three years later with his Bachelor of Arts degree in history and English, Massey continued his education at Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he graduated with a second in modern history in 1913.
In 1911, thinking that the University of Toronto lacked a facility where its 4,000 students could engage in extracurricular activities, Massey donated $16,290 to the students' fund to build a student centre and thereafter led the endowment and construction efforts. In 1913, he returned to Toronto and became the first Dean of Men at Burwash Hall, the residence recently donated to Victoria University by his father. He also served as a lecturer on modern history at the college. When Canada entered the First World War in 1914, Massey was commissioned as an officer for Military District No. 2 and was called to work for the Cabinet war committee. On June 4, 1915, Massey married Alice Parkin, the daughter of Sir George Robert Parkin, who was a former principal of Upper Canada College (UCC) and secretary of the Rhodes Trust; through the marriage, Massey later became the uncle of George Grant and the great-uncle of Michael Ignatieff. Within a few years, Vincent and Alice had two sons, Lionel Massey (1916–1965) and Hart Parkin Vincent Massey II (1918–1996; a WWII Spitfire pilot who flew with John Gillespie Magee, author of "High Flight"). Massey was discharged at the cessation of hostilities in 1918.
In 1921, Massey became president of his father's business, Massey-Harris Co. He also pursued philanthropic interests, mostly in arts and education, such as his collection of paintings and sculpture through his Massey Foundation, which he established in 1918. By the next year, University of Toronto's social and athletic facility was completed and dedicated to the memory of Massey's grandfather, Hart Massey, as Hart House; there, Massey participated as an amateur actor and director in the building's theatre.
In 1925, finding himself unsuited to corporate life, he resigned from Massey-Harris. Later that year, on September 16, he was appointed to the King's Privy Council by Governor General the Viscount Byng of Vimy, and was also made a minister without portfolio in Mackenzie King's Cabinet. He ran for the House of Commons in the riding of Durham in the 1925 federal election, but was defeated Though he thereafter resigned his cabinet post, Massey was still included in the Canadian delegation to the 1926 Imperial Conference, where was drafted the Balfour Declaration that would ultimately lead to vast constitutional changes in the role of the monarch and his viceroys throughout the empire.
In 1932, Massey became the first president of the newly formed National Liberal Federation of Canada, before which the Liberal Party was a loose and informal association of national, provincial, and regional entities without a permanent central organization. In the 1935 federal election, the Liberals returned to office with a majority and Mackenzie King was once again prime minister. Massey managed the Liberal campaign in the 1935 election. In his last year in office, Bennett had swung sharply to the left, passing a set of bills known as "Bennett's New Deal" that were modelled after the New Deal in the United States that sought to increase state involvement in the Canadian economy. In the 1935 election, to make up for Mackenzie King's lack of charisma who was additionally a poor speaker and whose views on the issues were inscrutable, Massey sought to portray Mackenzie King as a steady, competent, experienced leader who could best manage the Great Depression. Massey coined the election slogan "It's either King or Chaos!", portraying Bennett as an erratic leader whose judgement could not be trusted, unlike Mackenzie King.
Massey would have preferred to return to politics, not the least because he thought he would make a better prime minister than Mackenzie King, whose muddled politics Massey privately held in contempt, but he accepted a diplomatic career as a consolation prize. Massey believed that Canada was a British nation in North America that also had a French infusion and that the essence of being a Canadian was to adopt primarily British traditions to a North American settling. Reflecting his Anglophilia, Massey quite consciously sought to model his mannerisms after those of an upper-class "English gentleman", which limited his political appeal as it led to accusations of snobbery. Massey's style of convoying a "tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority" that he picked up during his time at Oxford annoyed many Canadians, most notably his patron Mackenzie King, who decided that being a high commissioner to Britain would be the best place for him.