For Home and Country: World War One Propaganda on the Home Front (review)

Propaganda, it seems, is one of the twentieth century's dirty words. In For Home and Country, Celia Malone Kingsbury traces that association to World War One, where governments bombarded their citizens with various media designed to demonize the enemy and stamp out obstruction at home—all with unprecedented sophistication, distribution, and impact. So far, so familiar; but Malone's book intervenes by presenting a remarkable archive of novels, posters, stories, games, recipes, movies, adverts and postcards that demonstrates how the home was the key location in both symbolic and practical terms for encouraging belligerent populations to think and act in concert.

Malone organises that archive through its various target audiences. Drawing mainly from American and British sources, her first chapter examines campaigns targeting housewives and mothers, especially the U.S. Food Administration's publicity drive urging the conservation of essential foodstuffs. Malone deftly examines how domestic science, the state, advertisers, and magazines transformed the kitchen into a key site of national formation and economy, and the conflicts that arose between its various functions of consumption, nurturance, and patriotism. Chapters two and three consider young women and girls, primarily how they were solicited for Red Cross and the British Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) work through wartime fiction. Certain stereotypes predominate: the narrow-minded, often wealthy, unpatriotic woman who will not curb her consumption to assist the nation's cause; the self-sacrificing and often bereaved (or even martyred) heroine, frequently Belgian or French, struggling to protect her ravaged home; the flighty volunteer who grows into mature womanhood through working as a nurse; the plucky tomboy who participates physically in defeating German invaders or foiling Teutonic spies. Chapter four examines how children's books and games encouraged children to donate money to the war effort, conserve food, and report "suspicious" behaviour. And chapter five examines how propaganda targeted at men utilised the home; homes were shown as imperilled sites that deserved men's protection, but also as containing wives and mothers coercively expectant that their menfolk would do their patriotic duty.

Readers will appreciate the thoroughness of Malone's archival research, and the reproduction of so many images of WWI propaganda. Yet they might also wish for more nuanced analysis of this fascinating archive. There is little sense of how propaganda works as much by institution as by image, for example. Similarly, the complexity of how individuals relate to their governments and states in wartime, uncovered in the recent work on WWI and citizenship by historians such as Kimberly Jensen, Christopher Capozzola, and Jennifer Keene, goes unmentioned. This leads Malone (who also largely ignores the significance of the voluntary institutions—unions, churches, special interest groups, lodges, and women's clubs—that were such a feature of Progressive America) into an often reductive theoretical divide between the authentic bonds of community on one hand, and the coercive and duplicitous demands of the state on the other. Stating that "the manipulation of public information, or any information, is negative"—a judgement which leads her to identify George Creel, the head of the CPI, as "one of history's villains"—her book does little to suggest how citizens reacted variously to this propaganda, or expressed agency in wartime; or, indeed, what a 'neutral' standard of public information might look like (266, 263). Her agentless and irresistible characterisation of propaganda aside, this will be important reading for scholars of World War One in America, and those interested in popular fiction in the early 20th century.