Since the mid-1960s, nationalist historians in Canada have beavered away on an interpretation of postwar Canadian foreign policy that has become deeply rooted in the country's popular culture. These “new nationalists” (a term revitalized by Laurentian historian Stephen Azzi's biography of Walter Gordon) embraced blue-blooded conservatives Donald Creighton and George Grant, as well as younger progressive scholars, and generated a biting critique of Canada's place in the postwar American empire. In their view, generations of Liberal politicians and their bureaucratic minions – continentalists to a man – connived behind the backs of ordinary Canadians during and after the Second World War to lead their country from the collapsing British Empire into the rapacious arms of American capitalism. Warming up to the Cold War, by Ryerson University historian Robert Teigrob, falls firmly into this critical nationalist tradition, adding several new twists to the well-known tale of national betrayal and defeat.
A comparative analysis of Canadian and American print media reportage and commentary on the Cold War from 1945 to 1950, Warming up to the Cold War sets out to reassess the significance of the Second World War for Canada's place in the world and to establish the importance of public opinion in the formation of the postwar foreign policy. Teigrob started his project assuming that there was a great deal of spillover into Canada from American media in the mid-1940s, and that this unchecked flow of opinion was largely responsible for developing public support for a US-led anticommunist consensus north of the border. As he delved into the published sources in both countries, he encountered an increasingly complex swirl of images and impressions. The vast and surprising range of American opinion (and it is always salutary to remind Canadians of this) and the distinctive views of the Canadian media gave pause for thought as Teigrob worked his way through the five foreign-policy case studies – the Bomb, Gouzenko, decolonization, NATO and the Korean War – that form the core of this book. The story, as Teigrob explains, turned out to be a good deal more complicated than it had appeared.
Warming up to the Cold War begins with an examination of attitudes in Canadian and American news and opinion outlets towards the use of the Bomb (his emphasis), which had just been dropped on Japan in August 1945. While Teigrob is always careful to note that there was a broad range of views in both countries, he concludes that Canadians were generally more critical of the Bomb and more sensitive to the moral implications of its use than were their American neighbours. More importantly, this difference suggests that Canada and Canadians possessed more autonomy at the end of the Second World War than the nationalist school has hitherto acknowledged. Indeed, Teigrob insists, the country had the option of choosing an independent path between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, as they headed into the Cold War.
This moment of relative freedom was short-lived. For Teigrob, it was extinguished not by the machinations of Liberal politicians and their continentally minded bureaucrats, but by the choices of the Canadian People (my emphasis), where popular sovereignty and control over a country's foreign policy rightly rested. Yet popular choices were sometimes circumscribed by historical conditioning. In the debate over decolonization, for instance, Teigrob contends that Canada's colonialist imperial legacy limited the capacity of Canadians to think critically about creeping American hegemony, with the result that they themselves helped create the framework for the emerging US-led anticommunist consensus. In other cases, in the public debates over the North Atlantic alliance and participation in the Korean War, a lack of information and genuine, if misguided, fears about the Soviet Union forced Canadians to make poor choices about their foreign policy and join Washington's “coalition of the willing” in the confrontation with Moscow. Teigrob's emphasis on the People's role is fundamental to his argument, shifting agency from the government to the Canadian public, and holding forth the promise of eventual redemption at the hands of a new generation of Canadian nationalists.
There are serious problems with this book. Laying aside the presentist preoccupations of Teigrob's title and his underlying theme of nationalist redemption, Warming up to the Cold War lacks theoretical or methodological precision. Teigrob largely ignores the complicated relationship between the state, both in Canada and in the United States, and the media. Limited samples of editorial opinion are often cited as self-evident generalizations, with meaningless assurances that they were reflected in “a steady diet of editorials” (146). But what does “steady” really mean? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?
More importantly, Teigrob never clearly explains for the reader how he determined which media outlets to survey or how they were surveyed, or which media voices formed “dominant” attitudes or narratives. I was surprised and puzzled when views expressed in the venerable New York Times were dismissed as outside “dominant” American opinion. I was left wondering too when editorials from a disparate group of American papers that included the New York Times, the Chicago Daily News, the Buffalo Evening News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Arizona Star were presented as somehow representative of a consensus. And surely the fevered scribblings of Willson Woodside from Saturday Night Magazine are badly overrepresented in this book, outpolling the combined efforts of Canadian Liberal journalists Blair Fraser, Bruce Hutchinson, and Grant Dexter?
Warming up to the Cold War has other flaws. Many readers will find Teigrob's efforts to minimize Moscow's responsibility for postwar tensions, often drawing straight parallels between the United States and Stalin's Soviet Union, unconvincing, and even offensive. We know, for instance, that there were substantial differences between the Soviet parliament and the US Congress, even with a Senator McCarthy in play (165). But throughout this book, whose prose is polished and glib, Teigrob deliberately blurs these distinctions. He reverts regularly to inflammatory prose and advances unsubstantiated claims that often suggest a genuine lack of historical judgment. It is doubtful that the Toronto Star of the mid-1940s could be described as “leftist” (27), that the communist-front Canadian Seamen's Union can be considered to represent the “average citizen” in 1946 (81), or that many postwar Canadian editorial boards still “retained solid war-forged affinities toward the Soviet Union” (81). And is it fair to characterize negotiated Canadian uranium sales to the United States as a “uranium seizure” (49); to claim that the Second World War was “aimed, at varying degrees, at shoring up British imperialism” (98); or to assert, in passing, no less, that through mid-century, Canada was a “semi-autonomous” state whose “sovereignty was limited by its Dominion status within the Commonwealth” (96)?
Teigrob compounds his liberal use of injudicious prose with argumentation that is as Orwellian as anything that emerged at the height of the Cold War. When Canadian newspapers failed to cover Washington's retreat from the Philippines in 1946, the absence did not reflect a simple lack of Canadian interest; instead, it pointed to the still tentative nature of the US-led anticommunist consensus in Canada. When Foreign Minister Pearson denies planning to integrate Canada and the United States, his denial becomes evidence for Teigrob that the government was indeed taking this idea seriously.
Admittedly, Teigrob's are wonderfully argumentative claims that are certain to enliven the most tiresome graduate seminar, but they are not representative of the kind of carefully calibrated research that really advances historical understanding. And that is too bad. A nuanced and sophisticated discussion of Canadian public opinion and the Cold War would be very welcome.