A Small Price to Pay: Consumer Culture on the Canadian Home Front, 1939–45 by Graham Broad (review)

The trope of the “Greatest Generation” who endured the Great Depression and prevailed over the Nazis in the Second World War remains a compelling one. Though developed in the United States, the term resonates in Canada. Sometimes it is used to bemoan the self-interest and materialism supposedly indicative of more recent times. Commentary often waxes nostalgic about how everyone pulled together in wartime by rationing, saving scrap, and buying Victory Bonds. It is a view that influences not only popular memory, but also academic studies of wartime Canada that emphasize shared sacrifice on the home front. Graham Broad’s well-written book compels reconsideration of that picture. Turning the story on its head, he makes a convincing case that the “Second World War was, in many respects, a period of progress in the development of the modern consumer economy, rather than a time of consumer deprivation that it is usually made out to be” (193).

Broad shows that consumer spending climbed rapidly during the war. A 23 per cent wartime adjusted increase in retail sales exceeded the rate during the early postwar period. In the early years of the war, with considerable unused industrial capacity, Canadians were told that it was patriotic to spend more, especially to support domestic and British enterprises. Women did most of that spending. The majority were not in the wartime workforce or new female military auxiliaries, where, Broad suggests, historians have traditionally focused their attention. Indeed, stay-at-home women, arguably more than other females, drew praise as household guardians and “patriotic consumers” (16).

Broad presents a fascinating account of the many and often ingenious ways in which industrial establishments and retailers used advertising to link their profit-driven activities to the war effort. For instance, Parker presented its pens as an ideal gift for soldiers overseas, while Kellogg’s suggested that those who ate their All-Bran cereal and thus won the “private war” (90) against constipation would be more productive at war-related worksites. Companies producing bigticket items – such as automobiles and appliances – that stopped manufacturing for the consumer market still kept themselves before the public by detailing how their industrial output or activities like Victory Bond purchases supported the war effort, thus retaining customer loyalty for the postwar period. Broad argues that rationing was not only a means of patriotically cutting consumption, it also drew support from Canadians as a way to ensure that everyone got a fair share. He demonstrates that rations imposed in Canada were not very onerous, especially in light of rules like giving children the same allotment of meat as adults, thus allowing families to keep themselves well fed. Canadians purchased the maximum allowed by rations, skirted regulations by trading coupons to get a higher share of the items they most wanted, and ate out at restaurants in record numbers. In a further contrast to the image of self-denial, Canadians, with their increased wartime income, clamoured for leisure activities, and dance halls, nightclubs, sporting events, and especially movies enjoyed unprecedented business.

Having endured a decade-long depression, and with the war providing record employment, well-paying jobs, and the accoutrements of modernism, Canadians feared that the return of peace would bring – as it did after the First World War – a major economic contraction. Historians have explained that such anxiety initially worked to the advantage of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which had long advanced the need for a planned economy and extensive social welfare, in part as a counterforce against an economic downturn. However, Broad contends that far more powerful was the idea – championed by both business and the federal Liberals – that social welfare be paired with policies encouraging free enterprise as a means of stimulating consumerism. This was widely viewed as fulfilling the promise of a better life for all out of the conflict, as consumerism was linked with individual choice, freedom, and material...