Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War

J.L. Granatstein, Distinguished Research Professor of History Emeritus,
York University, served as Director of the Canadian War Museum from 1998
to 2000. He is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and coauthor
of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influ

This book is a detailed examination of Toronto’s response to the Great
War. Heavily based on newspaper research, the author’s study
challenges the usual view that Canadians knew little of the horror of
the struggle at the front. And if they knew what was happening overseas,
Ian Miller asks, why did Torontonians continue to support the war and
press their men to enlist?

There are important issues raised in this book, but Miller’s
arguments are not wholly satisfying. Why did newspapers print what they
did? Was there anything approaching anti-war sentiments in the news and
feature stories? Was more coverage given to pro-war activists than to
those elements who were cool to or opposed to enlistment and
conscription? And although Toronto was a very Anglo city in 1914–18,
what did the city’s ethnic, labor, and pacifist elements think? Did
they get coverage in the press?

To use the press as a major research source, therefore, runs headlong
into questions of what the media covered and why. In 1914 Toronto, it
would have been completely out of character for the city’s newspapers
to be anti-war or for them to fail to cover extensively the efforts of
the city’s leaders, male and female, to support the struggle. Miller
does not seem to grapple with this source problem and, credulously, he
takes his newspapers at face value. The result is that Our Glory and Our
Grief ultimately becomes a very old-fashioned history, a careful study
of what the press said and much less an examination of what Toronto’s
citizens thought and believed. Miller has made use of letters and other
records, to be sure, but there can be no doubt that his book depends on
the newspapers for its thesis.

A media study of Toronto in the Great War has its utility, to be sure,
not least in Miller’s coverage of the pressures to make men enlist and
of the struggle for conscription. But Miller does not upset the
applecart of historical interpretation. If this can be done, it will
require a much broader-based study that plunges beneath the surface of
an apparently rock-solid public opinion.