Propaganda and Censorship During Canada's Great War

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

This very fine book is a massively researched study of Canada’s Great
War propaganda at home and abroad. Keshen looks at the themes that were
used to galvanize (and deceive) the home front, but he also studies the
ways in which censorship limited what the people were told. The censors
feared the American media, free in its neutrality to say things that
Canadians should not hear, and the domestic radical press in almost
equal measure, and under the authority of the War Measures Act, they
blocked the import of U.S. magazines, books, and films and shut down
foreign-language papers with a will. At the same time, censors watched
what soldiers wrote to those at home, though self-censorship seems to
have been every bit as effective. From the horror of the trenches,
soldiers produced their bland unit newspapers and wrote cheerful
semi-literate notes home—why make Mother worry when nothing she could
do could help her boy? Nonetheless, the soldiers knew the truth while
the civilians did not, and it took years before the two versions of what
had happened between 1914 and 1918 came together.

Keshen’s well-written account is the first major study of what
Canadian soldiers and civilians thought and believed in the midst of the
greatest national effort the Canadian people had underta-ken to that
point in their history.