DAVID MACKENZIE
The First World War touched the lives of every Canadian man, woman, and child, whether they remained at home or served overseas, and it continues to be one of the most fascinating periods in Canadian history. No one who seriously studies Canada in the modern era can ignore the First World War. But it is one of those peculiar historical truths that despite the impact of the Great War on all aspects of Canadian life, Canadians played practically no role in its outbreak. In 1914 war came to Canadians, as it did to Europeans, ‘out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent.’1 Canadians had no choice about their involvement in the war, but they did have a voice when it came to deciding on the extent of their participation. The effect of the choices Canadians made at home and overseas is still reflected in Canadian society.
In the literature on Canada and the Great War, Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook’s Canada: A Nation Transformed is a standard work. The focus of that book is much broader than the one found here; Brown and Cook begin their story in 1896 and examine Canadian society through the First World War and beyond to 1921. Canada in these years ‘was a country being transformed’ by a process of rapid modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and social and cultural upheaval. It was a transformation that ‘must be measured by more than numbers and size,’ the authors write, and it grew from ‘seeds planted in previous decades, even centuries.’2 This theme of transformation and the impact of war on Canadian society, as Ramsay Cook reminds us in his chapter, is central to the work of Craig Brown.
At the heart of their book is the Great War – a traumatic event, seen by many to be a major catalyst of transformation. In a recent history of the Great War, Michael Howard writes that ‘events on the battlefield ultimately determined what happened on the home front, and were responsible for the vast transformation that resulted in the entire structure of European society.’3 Is it possible to say that the entire structure of Canadian society underwent a ‘vast transformation’ because of the First World War? It is clear that the war has had a profound impact on Canadian memory. Monuments, memorials, and cenotaphs can be found in nearly every city and small town across the country, and our bookstores are stocked each year with new titles examining different aspects of the war.4 In Canadian literature, the First World War has attracted writers of early romance novels, such as Ralph Connor and Robert Stead, through to the more literary works of Hugh MacLennan, Timothy Findley, and Robertson Davies, and its themes continue to be mined by contemporary writers.5 Every 11 November we are reminded that something important happened in 1914–18, and that importance still resonates with Canadians today.
But was the country transformed by the war and were Canadians different after the war than before? How has the memory of the war coloured the way we understand what happened? And how can the war be credited or blamed for the changes that did occur? The economic developments, women’s suffrage, linguistic strife, emerging autonomy and Americanization – would these changes have taken place in any event, without the war? This theme of transformation – collective and individual, national and regional, political, economic, and social – forms the underlying structure of this book. This is not surprising; for change, the factors that perpetuate it, and its effects have always been a primary focus of historical enquiry. The First World War is a special case, however; it was a cataclysm that affected all quarters of society, creating a perception that change had been unusually rapid and profound.
This book is organized around several general sections, but inevitably some themes transcend these somewhat arbitrary divisions. All the contributors examine the larger question of how Canadians experienced the First World War and challenge the way we think and write about it. As Douglas McCalla notes in his chapter on the economy, the First World War is a good illustration of how ‘the power of established stories and images’ can ‘dominate understanding long after research has called them deeply into question.’ These ‘stories’ include the standard interpretations that Canada’s society was transformed by the war; that Canadians responded to the call with enthusiasm; that the economy industrialized and prospered; that Canadian nationalism was born in the trenches; that Canadian women found a degree of liberation through war work; and that conscription was essentially a political issue dividing French and English Canadians. Other questions are raised as well: What did Canadians know about the war? Did they make conscious decisions to fight or work or protest, or were they swept away by forces beyond their control?
Part One consists of this introduction and a chapter by Ramsay Cook on Craig Brown. Cook offers a snapshot of Brown’s career and pays particular attention to his work on the First World War, especially his two-volume biography of Robert Borden.6 It is this scholarship on the Great War that has made Craig Brown one of Canada’s leading historians. As Cook explains, it was Brown’s view that Prime Minister Borden put the ‘national interest’ above ‘national unity’ when it came to the war and conscription. Others in this volume put that idea to the test.
Part Two comprises five essays that examine in a broad way and from a variety of perspectives – military, political, and economic – how Canadians fought the war. Terry Copp situates his chapter on the Canadian military effort in the most recent literature and challenges interpretations that describe the war as an exercise in futility and portray Canadians as victims of impersonal and malevolent economic, military, and governmental forces. Copp argues that Canadians, by and large, were aware of what was happening in the war, including its devastation. Yet thousands of English-speaking Canadians still believed it to be a just war. As Copp writes, ‘The Canadian Corps and the Canadian people had accomplished great things together in what they believed to be a necessary and noble cause.’ Here conscription becomes a popular cause, at least in parts of English Canada, long before the politicians moved to introduce it.
The centrality of conscription in the Canadian war experience is underlined in several chapters. It was an issue that cut across all levels of Canadian society. J.L. Granatstein, who has written more on the subject than anyone else over the last forty years, takes a fresh look at conscription, especially at his own views on the matter, and argues, contrary to his earlier writings, that it was necessary to repair a military system that was breaking down. Conscription was a politically divisive issue that polarized Canadians for more than a generation, but, Granatstein reminds us, it became necessary, owing to difficulties in recruitment that arose from the unwillingness of both French- and English-speaking Canadian men to serve.
Streetcar: Step aboard, free trip to Europe, 1915 (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 728)
In his chapter on political leadership, John English inevitably comes back to conscription, and he shows how the intellectual and cultural context of Canada’s political leaders influenced their wartime decision-making. They were, by and large, British Protestant males, centred mainly in Ontario, and they represented the views of their community. The government was essentially ‘democratically elected but unrepresentative in character,’ English writes, and therefore was insensitive to the views of francophone or ethnic minorities. In this context, the decision on conscription, however difficult to make, becomes a logical one. British-Canadian nationalism won its last triumph in 1917, but it was ‘profoundly dangerous in a nation where those of non-British background were over 40 per cent of the population and where many of British background themselves did not share the particular expression of British-Canadian nationalism so strongly expressed in English Canada’s urban centres.’
Like Granatstein, English takes a fresh look at an area of scholarship that he and Craig Brown know well7 and re-evaluates Canadian political leadership in the light of newer literature on memory and loss, painting a richly textured portrait of Canada’s federal political leaders, in particular Robert Borden. Rather than looking through a modern prism, English sets these politicians in their Victorian and Edwardian contexts and, in the process, takes aim at present-minded critics of wartime leadership. Like Copp, English takes the perspective of the leaders themselves and examines what they believed and the context within which they lived. To examine these wartime leaders from a modern perspective, with modern sensibilities as a guide, English argues, makes them ‘easy targets, uttering, as they so often did, phrases about duty, honour, and democracy, while the modern age with its ironic, discontinuous, and anti-traditional ways was successfully storming the heights of western life.’ It is a valuable reminder of the importance of context in any effort to understand and explain the experience of the war. As Copp explains, ‘the men and women who participated in events like the First World War were not concerned with the views of later generations. The meaning of their war was constantly changing, and since no one knew the outcome or the consequences of decisions that needed to be made, they relied upon the best information available at the time and tried to act in ways that did not violate their shared values.’
The chapters by Copp, Granatstein, and English help us to understand more clearly the context for, motives of, and pressures on Borden and the other wartime leaders and English-speaking Canadians generally. Conscription and the recruitment issue are considered from a different perspective by Patrice Dutil, who examines French Canada’s role in the war through the prism of Napoléon Belcourt and his fight against Regulation 17, the provincial government regulation that severely curtailed use of the French language in Ontario schools. To understand attitudes about the war in Quebec and French Canada generally, Dutil argues, it is necessary to take into consideration Quebec’s profound isolationism, which although not necessarily anti-British, affected the way French Canadians perceived the war and the outside world. For someone like Belcourt, isolationism was something to be feared and opposed, because in the context of the war it played two ways and could intensify both the isolationism of French Canadians with respect to the outside world and the isolation of French Canadians within Canada. Here, social transformation had negative effects; in the effort to create a national consensus, a new sense of citizenship, and a new national unity, French Canada was isolated and the result was national disunity. As Dutil puts it, ‘A war that many thought could unite French and English Canadians, had proved everything to the contrary.’
Questions of myth and transformation are central to Douglas McCalla’s chapter on the wartime economy. McCalla takes direct aim at the idea that the war helped to industrialize Canada’s economy and produced permanent structural changes within it. McCalla turns this thinking on its head, arguing that Canada produced few new things during the war, shells and munitions being the exception, and that most of the changes to industry, urbanization, and governmental intervention in the economy were either temporary disruptions or part of longer term trends already occurring in the economy. There was no ‘vast transformation’ here. Historians generally have got the story backward, McCalla argues; these developments were not the product of the war, but rather, ‘they actually reflect what the Canadian economy had become by 1914.’ In the light of these arguments, he notes, it will be necessary to re-examine post-war protest, especially in western Canada, where the war has been singled out as the impetus for over-specialization in grain production and for the expansion of existing farms and the opening of marginal land.
McCalla argues that ‘the war reinforced trends; it did not initiate them.’ These views are echoed in Part Three, where the focus is the home front and how Canadians individually and collectively experienced the war. In her chapter on mobilizing women for the war, Joan Sangster challenges the image of the First World War as a ‘political turning point’ for Canadian women and questions the ‘myth of unity, patriotism, and homogeneity.’ The lives of working-class Canadian women were hardly transformed by the war, Sangster argues; if anything, these women experienced the ‘acceleration of existing trends.’ But pre-war attitudes about gender, family, and work persisted into the post-war era and, rather than being a unifying experience, the First World War ‘accentuated existing class and ideological tensions among women.’
The persistence of pre-war attitudes is a theme examined by Donald Avery in his chapter on ethnic and class relations in wartime western Canada. By looking at the experience of immigrants from enemy countries Avery shows how the war experience combined with prevailing attitudes in the dominant culture to set the context and define the status of these workers in western Canada. ‘During the years 1914–19,’ he writes, ‘individuals and groups were deemed loyal or disloyal, law-abiding or revolutionary, according to how their behaviour conformed to the values and norms of the middle-class Anglo-Canadian community.’ Avery takes his study of Anglo-Canadian nativism through the war years into the post-war red scare and the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and concludes that we ‘should not underestimate the extent to which the war itself dramatically turned western Canadian public opinion against enemy aliens.’
Joan Sangster also asks important questions about what the British historian Niall Ferguson has called ‘the myth of war enthusiasm,’8 a theme touched on elsewhere in this book by Terry Copp and in the chapters by Adam Crerar and David MacKenzie. Sangster argues that the idea that working-class women moved into war work for patriotic reasons is largely a myth, however ‘resilient,’ ‘shaped by the inevitable hegemony of those with more power to shape public images, symbols, and consciousness.’ Yet there was an outpouring of war support and demonstrations of patriotism on the streets of Toronto and other Canadian cities. By exposing the diversity of attitudes that could be found across the country – from urban middle-class English-Canadians and working-class women to rural Ontarians, Westerners, Acadians, Quebeckers, Newfoundlanders, and others – these chapters help us to understand more clearly how Canadians perceived the war.
The theme of moral regulation is developed by both Sangster and Desmond Morton, in the latter case with respect to the families left behind by the men who went off to fight. The Canadian Patriotic Fund was a testament to the determination to ensure that a quarter-million wives and children would not suffer, but Morton also demonstrates how the system was informed by ‘moral and social assumptions’ and how these assumptions influenced the process. By the end of the war, Morton concludes, ‘thousands of working-class women had come in painful contact with both charity and bureaucracy, and neither experience had been pleasant.’
In his chapter on science and technology, Rod Millard also questions the extent of transformation, as he challenges the myths that ‘there was no industrial research in Canada before the First World War, the war forced the government to establish the NRC [National Research Council] in 1916, and the NRC then became the focus of industrial research.’ The war helped to change attitudes towards science and enhanced the prestige of the scientists themselves, and the creation of the National Research Council was the ‘first attempt to organize science on a national basis,’ but it was only after the war that the idea became accepted that industrial research in Canada began with the creation of the NRC. Millard traces the roots of these developments back into the pre-war era. He also discusses the migration of scientists and researchers who were lured to the United States because of the lack of research opportunities in Canada, and he illustrates how this ‘brain drain’ led to a backlash of ‘nationalist indignation’ in the scientific community.
In raising this larger issue of the rise of nationalist feelings during the war, Millard draws attention to the lack of opportunity in Canada and, more generally, to anti-Americanism in Canadian society. This topic is directly addressed by Paul Litt, who examines the impact of the war on mass culture and Canadian cultural nationalism. Litt demonstrates how mass culture was used to promote the war effort – to encourage recruitment, to raise funds and sell government bonds, and to publicize the war and mobilize public support. He also explores the complexity of this rising sense of nationalism. Canadians were establishing their own autonomy, politically and culturally, by loosening their ties with Great Britain. At the same time, the experience of the war led many Canadians to question the spread of American popular culture in Canada. ‘Canadians are known for their ability to consume American culture,’ he writes, ‘but the heightened emotions of wartime and the differences in points of view of a belligerent Canada and a neutral United States fomented an unusual cultural indigestion.’ The irony was that without an indigenous Canadian popular culture to replace it the indigestion would only get worse: ‘If Canada became less British, mass culture and the American values it bore would become relatively more influential.’ Despite their best efforts, there was little the cultural nationalists could do to offset the influence of American mass culture.
As mentioned above, two regional chapters, Adam Crerar’s on Ontario and David MacKenzie’s on the Maritimes and Newfoundland, take as their starting points the patriotic enthusiasm that began the war. Crerar tests the strength of this enthusiasm across the spectrum of Ontario society. The way the people of Ontario responded to the war was ‘both breathtaking and sobering,’ Crerar explains, but these views were not universally shared, and the depth of support for the war effort varied across the province. Giving particular attention to rural Ontario, Crerar sifts through the different attitudes about the war and reminds us that a common cause did not necessarily produce ‘shared purposes,’ and that ‘patriotism in Ontario took many forms and was, in fact, qualified to varying degrees.’ Behind the explosion of patriotic enthusiasm in the cities were rural Ontarians and the thousands of French, German, Ukrainian, and African Ontarians who had their own unique stories; for them the war was ‘experienced and imagined on many fronts.’ Similarly, MacKenzie examines the diversity within Maritime and Newfoundland society and argues that what the war produced in this region would be characterized more accurately as ambivalence rather than transformation. While the war may have been something of a Canadianizing experience for many Atlantic Canadians, he argues that it also helped to ignite a wave of post-war regional discontent in the Maritimes and nourished a growing sense of independence in Newfoundland. Ultimately, both authors question the old stereotypes of ‘loyal’ Ontario and the ‘conservative’ Maritimes.
In Part Four the aftermath of the war is examined, and in two very different chapters the authors try to answer the question: What did Canadians want and what did they get out of the war? The standard answers are ‘recognition’ and ‘60,000 dead,’ and these responses provide the starting point for the chapters by Margaret MacMillan and Jonathan Vance. MacMillan looks at the efforts of the Canadians at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and the transformation she considers is the evolution of Canada from colony to nation. For the small Canadian delegation, Paris was like a coming-out party on the international stage, but in an environment where their role would be necessarily ‘modest,’ status and autonomy became ends in themselves. ‘Participation in the peace settlements was something of a false dawn for the dominions,’ MacMillan concludes. ‘They had made an exceptional effort, but none, not even Canada, had the diplomatic resources to sustain a role in international affairs.’
The 60,000 dead weighed heavily on Borden’s mind and affected his conduct in Paris, leading him to demand greater autonomy and greater representation for Canada. It was his way of ensuring that these Canadians had not died in vain and giving meaning to the loss of thousands of lives. But if MacMillan focuses on the sense of loss on the national level, Jonathan Vance brings it down to the personal level and examines how individual Canadians across the country dealt with and grieved loss on a scale never before experienced. In a way that resonates in the chapters by English, Copp, Crerar, and others, Vance explores the widely held view that the ‘nation itself was raised to a higher level of existence because of its sacrifice in Flanders’ and suggests that, regardless of whether this assumption was true or false, the ‘belief that their loss had meaning and purpose enabled [Canadians] to cope with grief.’ There might be debate about what the war was about, but no one could deny the loss of 60,000 Canadians: ‘Providing consolation for that loss, rather than rational explanation for the war as a whole, was the goal of the nation’s memory of the war.’
MacMillan and Vance and others examine in one way or another how the war has been remembered. Coming to terms with the war experience – dealing with the loss, grief, absences, political turmoil, and social disruption – contributed to the way the war was perceived at the time and, ultimately, remembered. Running through this memory is the idea of transformation – in the economy, in social relations, in politics, in Canada’s international standing and elsewhere. But in the end we are left with a very uneven transformation in Canadian life as a result of the experience of the First World War. If there were a new nationalism and unity, they were accompanied by regionalism and undermined by divisions along linguistic, class, ethnic, and gender lines. Where there was pride in accomplishments – on the battlefield and at home – there was also a profound sense of loss, for loved ones who had died and for a way of life that seemed to have disappeared. Internationally there was the achievement of a new-found sense of independence and status, but this autonomy had to be measured against the growing Americanization of Canadian popular culture. Everywhere there was the perception of great social, political, and economic upheaval, the sense that something important had happened, even when in many ways the fabric of Canadian life remained relatively unchanged.
Perhaps our view of the Great War as a transformative period in Canadian history stems from our desire to see the roots of modern Canadian society in the war; that somehow who we are today and the roots of the problems we face can be seen and understood if we look hard enough, crystallized in one short, purposeful period in the war experience. But it is the historian’s duty to look more deeply into the historical record – that careful mixture of character and circumstance – and judge the past and the evidence on their own merits. Did industrialized, urban, modern Canada really emerge from the First World War? Many contributors to this book suggest that we can no longer be certain; any examination of the public support for the war, despite the death, devastation, and grim realities of life at the front, must be measured against the unevenness of that support based on region, ethnicity, gender, and class. The debate over conscription, the outrage over Regulation 17, the efforts towards moral regulation, the rise of political and cultural nationalism, the varying experiences of soldiers, working women, farmers, immigrant workers, widows, scientists, and diplomats, the economic fluctuations and regional variations, and even the language used by political leaders all remind us of the complexity of Canada’s experience in the First World War and warn against making broad generalizations about that experience.
Finally, the question is raised of whether it would be more appropriate to approach the First World War not as the start of a new era but as the ending of an old one and, in this way, to view it not as the creative moment of the modern age but rather as the last gasp of Victorian Canada. Jonathan Vance elaborates on the idea: ‘Two approaches have dominated the historiography: one looks back at the First World War from the modern age, seeing in it the roots of modernist idioms, cultural forms, and modes of expression; the other looks forward to the war from the Victorian age, emphasizing the persistence of nineteenth-century traditions, values, and sensibilities. This debate has produced an immense literature that has most recently leaned towards situating the war at the end of the age that preceded it rather than at the beginning of the age that followed it.’ Perhaps Borden understood as much when he wrote in his diary on 11 November 1918, the day the war ended: ‘The world has drifted from its old anchorage, and no man can with certainty prophesy what the outcome will be. I have said that another such war would destroy our civilization. It is a grave question whether this war may not have destroyed much that we regard as necessarily incidental thereto.’9
Canadians had no idea of what they were getting themselves into in August 1914. But from that starting point evolved the linguistic tensions, the social and economic dislocation, the unleashing of nationalisms, the political turmoil, and an outpouring of emotions ranging from enthusiasm, patriotism, and determination to resignation, horror, anxiety, and grief. Canada and Canadians may have ‘come of age’ during the Great War, but if that is the case, then this new-found sense of maturity came at a very high price.
The generation that fought the war has largely passed, but the memory and the myths of that experience remain – to be reconsidered, questioned, and debated. Perhaps the fact that the First World War is now lost to living memory helps to explain our renewed interest in examining and understanding it. Clearly, Canada’s war experience still fascinates and appeals to Canadians today, almost a century later, and it undoubtedly will continue to do so for many years to come. The chapters that follow are a reflection of this continuing interest in the history of Canada and the First World War.
1 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Random House, 1998), 9.
2 Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada, 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 1.
3 Michael Howard, The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), v.
4 For example, some recent works specifically focused on the war, by authors other than those in this volume, include Tim Cook, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999); Jeffrey A. Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship during Canada’s Great War (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996); Susan Mann, ed., The War Diary of Clare Gass, 1915–1918 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Bill Rawling, Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Ian Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); and Bill Freeman and Richard Nielson, Far From Home: Canadians in the First World War (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1999).
5 Some recent novels that deal with the First World War and its legacy include Jack Hodgins, Broken Ground (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998); Frances Itani, Deafening (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2003); and two novels by Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997) and The Stone Carvers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001).
6 Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography, 2 vols (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975 and 1980).
7 See Robert Craig Brown, ‘“Whither are we being shoved?” Political Leadership in Canada during World War I,’ in War and Society in North America, ed. J.L. Granatstein and R.D. Cuff (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1971), 104–19.
8 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 174–211.
9 Borden, quoted in A Nation Transformed, 338.