| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 58

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Robert Rutherdale, Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada's Great War (Vancouver: UBC Press 2004)

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY of Canada's participation in World War I has until recently been dominated by official military and diplomatic histories, and more popular narratives of battles and campaigns. They have typically focused on those engagements — the Second Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, the Hundred Days, and above all the capture of Vimy Ridge — in which Canada's citizen soldiers particularly distinguished themselves. Viewing World War I as the crucible of Canadian nationhood, they show how the scope and scale of its sacrifices and contributions to the Allied victory contributed to the achievement of constitutional autonomy and national sovereignty in the interwar years. The general theme of this body of work might be summarized in the clichéd proposition that modern Canada "was born on Vimy Ridge."

With the exception of the traumatic upheavals of the conscription crisis, the home front was relatively neglected. However, military historians have now begun to turn their attention away from the killing grounds of France and Flanders, and the activities of generals and politicians, to consider the social and cultural impact of World War I: addressing such issues as systems of voluntary recruitment; federal reconstruction and resettlement policies, and their relation to the evolution of the modern welfare state; the plight of returned veterans; and the attempt, after the Armistice, to construct a hegemonic collective memory of World War I that sought to invest its unprecedented horrors and losses with a transcendent meaning and purpose.

All of these studies share a broad national perspective that, apart from the growing cleavage between Francophone Quebec and the rest of Canada, does not take much account of the pluralistic nature of Canadian society, and the range of responses among different groups, regions, and localities to the experience of war. One prominent exception was John Thompson's pioneering account of the social and economic impact of World War I on the Canadian West. But his example did not inspire many imitators, at least not in the short term.

Robert Rutherdale's book, however, joins a growing body of work — Ian Miller's Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War is another notable example — that is concerned with revealing how the war was experienced and understood in local terms, at the level of individual communities; in this instance, of three mediumsized "hometowns" representing the regional diversity of Canadian society in 1914: Trois Rivières, Guelph, and Lethbridge. Their approach is based on the assumption that the impact of major historical events on complex, pluralistic modern societies is far from uniform, but varies widely, according to such factors as class, gender, ethnicity, and, above all, locality.

Rutherdale's study suggests that the effects of World War I on Canadian society can only be fully apprehended by narrowing our focus down to the level of the individual community. For most ordinary people on the home front, separated by thousands of miles from the battlefields of Europe, the experience of war was largely mediated by local factors. Rutherdale shows how most of their information about the war, from the progress of military campaigns to the imagined plots and conspiracies of enemy aliens, was filtered through the medium of the local press. He explores the consequences of a system of enlistment that, until the advent of conscription, was largely organized on a local basis. New recruits joined "community regiments" that preserved a strong sense of local patriotism and identity. The meanings and purposes of Canada's participation in the war were represented and enacted in an endless round of community rituals — parades, "send-offs," sermons, speeches, and so on—organized by local voluntary associations and staged in familiar public ceremonial spaces. Popular attitudes towards enemy aliens, which, as the war progressed, became increasingly marked by outbreaks of paranoid hysteria, were at least partly determined by the relative proximity of German, Austro-Hungarian, and other suspect ethnic groups. Until the federal government intervened in the latter stages of the war with the introduction of state-directed measures to finance the war, the vast, nation-wide relief effort directed at the families of enlisted men took the form of local fundraising campaigns, organized by middle-class voluntary organizations, under the umbrella of the Canadian Patriotic Fund [CPF]. The activities of the CPF, according to Rutherdale, were as much directed to the preservation of local social hierarchies and power relations as to the alleviation of economic hardship. Rutherdale's microhistorical approach reveals the complex, contested nature of the response to conscription that went beyond a simple dichotomy between Francophone Quebec and English Canada. In largely Francophone communities like Trois Rivières, he finds voices of moderation like Joseph Bernard opposing conscription in the name of British liberty and a pan-Canadian nationalism premised on the idea of Confederation as a pact between the two founding races; while in western Canada, the truculent and intolerant imperial nationalism associated with English Canada and the Union government was tempered by radical demands advanced by local labour and farmer organizations for the conscription of wealth as well as manpower. By focusing on the wide-ranging contributions of local Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire [IODE] chapters and other women's organizations to the war effort, as well as the faintly ludicrous activities of Home Guard units mobilized in defence of their neighbourhoods, Rutherdale develops a more nuanced picture of the consequences of World War I for gender roles and identities. Similarly, Rutherdale uncovers the often vexed relations between civilians and soldiers, and the significance of the prolonged post-war debate about the most appropriate ways of honouring returned veterans and commemorating the "glorious dead," by analysing how these issues were confronted and resolved locally. So, for example, in Guelph, the treatment received by recuperating veterans in a nearby military hospital brought latent resentments between soldiers and civilians bubbling to the surface; while in Lethbridge, a decade- long, frequently acrimonious debate over the best means of memorializing the sacrifices of the city's veterans saw the wishes of the returned men overruled by local civilian élites.

Rutherford is arguing, therefore, that for the majority of Canadians who did not serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force [CEF] and endure at first hand the horrors of trench warfare, the meanings of World War I — what ordinary people believed, felt, and understood about the cataclysmic events taking place in Europe— were largely shaped by local circumstances. Canada may have been born on Vimy Ridge. But the birth was announced and its significance was interpreted in Guelph, Lethbridge, Trois Rivières, and countless other communities, large and small, in articles and speeches, sermons, parades, thanksgiving services, and other forms of social communication. The nature of these interpretations was in turn shaped by the peculiar characteristics of each community: its major industries, class structure, ethnic profile, and so on. Rutherdale therefore begins his study with a long detailed chapter, studded with statistical tables, graphs, and maps, establishing the social, economic, and physical parameters of his three chosen "hometowns." However, he then abandons this conventional structural analysis in favour of a largely cultural approach that is concerned with determining the nature and influence of local communications networks, and analysing the role of public rituals and other forms of symbolic action in mediating experience, generating social meaning, and constructing usable pasts. But he is not of course claiming that World War I can only be understood as a manifestation of the local. One of the great virtues of Rutherdale's study is the way in which he ties the micro- historical analysis of local urban cultures to events taking place beyond their parochial boundaries. Rutherdale does not treat his three hometowns as isolated, self-contained communities, but places them within a complex web of "reciprocal linkages" to the state, the "surrounding social world," and "history itself," represented by the war raging in Europe. (271) The boundaries between the national and the local were permeable and fluid. The war may have been experienced and comprehended in local contexts, making use of the social and cultural materials available within limited "hometown horizons." But Rutherdale shows how under conditions of modernity these horizons were constantly shifting and expanding, admitting various influences from the wider world in a continuous process of communicative exchange. He conceptualizes this relationship by drawing upon John Bodnar's well-known distinction between "vernacular" and "official" culture. The collective identity of Americans, Bodnar argues, has been largely shaped by the more concrete, intimate associations, memories, and allegiances of locality, ethnicity, and class rather than the abstract patriotic values of a homogeneous national culture. Rutherdale identifies a similar dichotomy between vernacular local and official national cultures in early 20th-century Canada. But he also identifies numerous points of contact between them, arguing that the ability of national political élites to impose their interpretations and procedures on the periphery depended on the extent to which messages emanating from the centre intersected with local interests and perspectives. Rutherdale's analysis has also benefited from his engagement with anthropological theories of ritual and symbolic action, associated with such key figures as Clifford Geertz, Catherine Bell, and, above all, Victor Turner. Turner's conceptions of social drama, communitas, and liminality inform Rutherdale's accounts of how cultural practices such as ritualization were deployed to define and valorize social boundaries and hierarchies — between soldiers and civilians, men and women, workers and middleclass élites — and also to transcend and transform them.

The principal shortcoming of Hometown Horizons is the discrepancy between the suggestive, stimulating questions it continually raises and the cautious, rather anodyne answers that Rutherdale in many cases provides. His arguments and interpretations are almost always surrounded by a thicket of qualifications that threatens to drain them of vitality and interest. Meanings and effects are invariably ambiguous and contingent; relationships are shifting and reciprocal; ethnicity, gender, class, and other explanatory factors are conscientiously invoked without a clear priority being assigned to any of them; traditional social hierarchies and gender relations are both reinforced and undermined. This urge to cover every possible angle and hedge every analytical bet is reflected in Rutherdale's dense, at times opaque, prose style, with its abstract vocabulary, complex syntax, and long, run-on sentences, full of qualifying phrases and clauses.

Rutherdale has an impressively thorough grasp of the inherently ambiguous and multivocal nature of cultural practices. And he brings considerable theoretical subtlety and sophistication to the task of unpacking their layers of meaning. But at the end of it all, one also longs for some forceful, unequivocal, even provocative conclusions. Does Rutherdale believe, for example, that locality was the most crucial determinant in shaping our collective response to World War I and negotiating our encounter with modernity? Would he endorse the view that the modern Canadian nation-state (as Alon Confino has argued with respect to Germany) was constructed as a local metaphor? Does he think that the many-sided involvement of Canadian women in the war effort at the local level served to emancipate them from traditional roles and constraints? The likely answer in each case would be both yes and no. Rutherdale will not allow himself to skate out on such potentially thin historical ice. It is unfair to criticize Rutherdale's book for conforming to current norms of historical scholarship. But one is left wishing that cultural historians would more often combine their methodological boldness with a willingness to hazard some startling and unpredictable theory or hypothesis which, even if it turns out to be untenable, might serve to arouse strong opinions and stimulate fruitful debates.

As it stands, however, Rutherdale's main theme — the value and necessity of local studies for a complete understanding of the domestic impact of World War I — is convincingly demonstrated. It should act as a catalyst for further research into the responses of other hometowns to the challenges of total war and other 20th-century crises of modernity.


Robert Cupido Mount Allison University

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