Rogers, The Hon Norman McLeod (1894-1940)

Rogers was a Queen's politics professor who went on to become a prominent member of Prime Minister Mackenzie King's cabinet and Queen's Rector (1937-1940) before his early death in a plane crash.

Kingston’s Norman McLeod Rogers Airport commemorates the loss of a life of academic excellence and exemplary public service, values at the core of Queen’s culture.

Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1894, Norman Rogers proved an adept student, gaining entry to Acadia University where he pursued his interest in history and politics. When the First World War intervened, Rogers enlisted but was invalided out of the army. Back at Acadia, he completed his BA degree and won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1919. At Oxford, he further indulged his love of history, writing a thesis on Canada’s federal labour dispute legislation while taking a degree in civil law.

Professor Rogers returned to Canada to teach history at his alma mater in 1922 (he taught at Acadia from 1922 to 1927) and was soon called to the Nova Scotia bar. His opinionated writing caught the eye of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who called on him for speech writing and advice, and then asked him to serve as secretary for Privy Council affairs. He served as private secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King from 1927 to 1929.

When the Depression pushed the prime minister out in office in 1930, Professor Rogers accepted an offer from Queen’s to teach politics in the Department of Political and Economic Science (now separate departments) until 1935. During those five years at Queen’s, Professor Rogers wrote a biography of King and a series of groundbreaking monographs on cabinet government and federalism, and vigorously argued about the role of the federal government in Canadian decision-making.

Professor Rogers became one of Mackenzie King’s few close friends, and in 1935, he persuaded him to run in the federal election. Once elected as Member of Parliament for Kingston, King appointed Professor Rogers as labour minister, a portfolio he used to champion Canada’s hesitant adoption of interventionist economic policies as a stimulus for economic recovery. Noting his ascendancy in Ottawa, Queen’s students asked Professor Rogers to be their rector in 1937. When war came in 1939, the prime minister appointed him as Minister of National Defence. He served in this important post during the first part of the Second World War as the youngest member of the powerful wartime cabinet.

On June 10, 1940, a Hudson bomber ferrying the minister of national defence from Ottawa to Toronto plunged into a field, killing all on board including Queen’s Professor Norman Rogers. Pilot error thus robbed Canada of Roger’s great potential.

After his death, the Kingston airport was renamed in his honour. His nephew, Norman MacLeod Rogers (not "McLeod," like his uncle), became a prominent Toronto lawyer who served as Chair of Queen's Board of Trustees from 1980 to 1985.

In an obituary notice, one-time Queen’s colleague Bill Mackintosh celebrated Norman Rogers’ “unabashed, passionate, yet realistic belief in democratic methods, in liberalism, in Canadian nationalism, and in the importance and dignity of public service.”

Norman McLeod Roger's personal records can be found at Queen's University Archives.