Polarity, Patriotism, and Dissent in Great War Canada, 1914–1919 by Brock Millman (review)

I confess I find it jarring, well into the 21st century, to see a historian remark, as Brock Millman does in the Preface to Polarity, Patriotism, and Dissent in Great War Canada, 1914–1919, that "historians go to theory when they do not have facts." (xiii) Surely historians have caught up with other scholars in the humanities and social sciences who recognize that theory is a useful and arguably a necessary instrument for observing facts and for making sense of them, not an alternative to observing. I was under the impression that the theory wars were over and, while I wouldn't have wanted to make a big thing about it, I assumed that those of us who advocated for following other disciplines (like literature) in taking rhetoric seriously and (like anthropology) problematizing our authority – even if we, like our erstwhile opponents, have mellowed somewhat with age and experience – had won. But perhaps not. Maybe the history wars were a war of attrition, and the victory, such as it was, was to simply hang on and keep doing our work as long and as well as we could.

That's certainly the crux of Millman's argument about the repression of dissent in Canada during World War I. As war of attrition, the war offered victory to the powers that held on the longest; key to holding on the longest was managing dissent on the home front. Being in it to win it, therefore, meant using the power of the state to enforce compliance with the war agenda. In this, Millman stakes out territory somewhat less idealistic than most apologists for the wartime excesses of the state, who seek to contextualize egregious violations of human rights and democracy and thereby reduce them to nothing, or insist that the government's conduct of war is not relevant to the war itself, which was heroic. Millman insists, refreshingly, that the boot heel of the Borden government wasn't an unfortunate footnote to World War I; it was the war.

For Millman, in fact, this argument seems almost to go without saying; what he explicitly argues, in fact, is a step further: that the government had to act not because opposition to the war was a serious threat, but because reactionary forces outside the state were so extreme that their actions had to be pre-empted by more moderate state action. Everything Borden and his government did to limit the rights of those opposing the war, to impose military service on the recalcitrant, even to rig the franchise to ensure their re-election, Millman argues, was really the necessary minimum they had to do in order to prevent an explosion of nativist violence on a national scale. Winning the war meant preserving the state from the excesses of its supporters.

This is an interesting thesis, and Millman makes some smart moves along the way. The book is full of interesting observations neatly phrased, many of them counter-intuitive and exciting to contemplate. And the end of the book in particular, in the discussion of the Winnipeg General Strike, Millman's argument that authorities believed that vigilantes would, in the absence of concerted repression by the government, act to suppress socialism among New Canadians in a violent way, is powerfully drawn and supported by very strong direct evidence. This chapter alone makes an important contribution to the historiography of state repression, and is well worth the effort of getting a copy of the book and reading it.

Too often, though, Millman's original arguments are not supported by direct evidence, but are developed from inference; the evidence he does have – direct quotations from people at the time – is marshalled into line, but the line is from Millman's imagination, not the evidence. For example, the discussion of the establishment of the Union government, Millman cites numerous examples of people who supported conscription voicing their support of conscription, which is evidence that people supported conscription. He then...