By 1945, Canadians had endured their share of hardships and struggle. The Great Depression and World War II were enough to scar the country’s traumatized people with memories of sacrifice and deprivation. Traumatized as they were, Canadians were not expecting the prosperity and affluence that came with the postwar era, and they readily embraced the period of economic and personal security with open arms. However, the Cold War infected the Canadian atmosphere with incorporeal threats to this long-awaited national security. As the Cold War fostered policies of containment and anti-radicalism in Canada, so national ideals, most notably the normalization of the suburban nuclear family, were formed in a climate of conservatism.
Canadians feared that the end of World War II would signal the beginning of another depression, like the one that followed the First World War. Much to their surprise, post-WWII Canada experienced the opposite. A period of unprecedented economic growth rose Canadian citizens to affluence and witnessed a new age in production and accessibility of material wealth and consumer goods to the working- and middle-classes.[1] As stated by Whitaker and Marcuse in their book on Cold War Canada, “capitalism was emphatically working again.”[2] This prosperity played a crucial role in the development of politics after WWII. High employment and low inflation ushered in by the new, state-assisted capitalism turned Canadian society strongly toward conservatism.[3]
In this peacetime prosperity, Canadians wanted nothing more than to leave the difficulties of war behind them and enter a secure, new age. However, the Cold War brought new threats to Canada that couldn’t be ignored. Eschewing the appeasement and isolationist policies attempted before World War II, the western powers agreed that collective security was a priority they could not afford to jeopardize. General consensus was that Canada’s duty was to step up and play its part, as a middle power and as an important participant in NATO, in battling against totalitarian aggression for the defence of the alliance.[4] The Cold War enemy was “an evil and alien ideology” that threatened the freedom and democratic lifestyle that Canadians had come to value.[5] To stray far from the consensus of Canada’s anti-totalitarian front was to contradict the values of Canadian economic and political security. Discoveries of Soviet spy rings with the Gouzenko affair of 1945 initiated extreme paranoia regarding the possibility of spies and betrayal, leading to government propaganda urging citizens to keep to themselves and stimulating an atmosphere of distrust. To question the consensus was to contradict the “good guy” stance of Canada against undemocratic Communism, and deviation from the norm was not well tolerated. Free debate was discouraged and most radicals learned to keep to themselves and err on the side of discretion.[6]
As the “Canadian way of life” was perceived as threatened by external forces, citizens enjoying the benefits of postwar prosperity defended it by leaning conservatively. “Domestic launching of the Cold War was managed by a central bureaucratic élite,” write Whitaker and Marcuse, “that had never had....such scope for influence over events. [They] used this influence in ways which reinforced the conservatism.”[7]
The suburban nuclear family was a major symbol of this conservatism in action. The promoted social order called the men, as fathers, workers, soldiers, and leaders, to defend the family—the microcosm of moral, democratic, Canadian values—from external threats, while the women, the mothers, were called to keep watch over the family in the internal realm of the home. This determined return to prewar ideals shaken by role ambiguity during wartime was another example of Canadians searching for a sense of normalcy and security.[8]
WWII veterans did not face the same challenges on their return home as in WWI. The government sought military security in rearmament, guaranteeing high employment. [9] Financial support for veterans, education, and the opportunity for home ownership had most Canadian veterans focusing on careers and raising families upon their return. Though the consensus among families was doubtless conservative, the movement for personal security turned everyday Canadians increasingly apolitical. While the nation’s leaders fought a battle of mounting international tension, homeowners’ concerns fell primarily on their immediate, individual stability. New housing projects had middle- and working-classes rushing to the suburbs—a privatization and isolationist move that exemplifies this apolitical phenomenon.
One result of the demand for internal Canadian security, combined with reactions to American McCarthyism by the Canadian state ,was massive security screening with regards to Canada’s immigration policies, beginning in 1946. In 1947, the government decided that prospective immigrants would be investigated and screened regarding their past activities, associates, and personal convictions. If an immigrant was found to be Communist, it was decided that “admission [to Canada] should be refused by the Immigration Branch without reason assigned for such action.”[10] This meant that the vast majority of new additions to Canadian society were politically of the far right, and immigrants who did hold radical left-leaning views were careful to hide them, adding to the conservatism being fostered across Canada. These immigrants brought different types of conservatism with them to Canada, as well. Many of them were fleeing the Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe, and sought only economic improvement for their families. This strengthened the national consensus for anti-Communism and individualistic economic security.[11] White skin was also a requirement for entry until the 1960s, reinforcing the Caucasian, suburban family ideal.[12]
The desire for normalcy and security in postwar life promoted the management of risk and valued the expertise of psychologists in 1950s Canada. Sexual morality was viewed as a major factor in social and domestic security, placing heavy emphasis on the threatening abnormality of sexual deviance. Homosexuals were added to the list of undesirable citizens in 1952, and remained under “undesirable” status for over twenty years.[13] Hundreds of civil servants lost their jobs and were blacklisted from government employment on the grounds that their alleged homosexuality made them vulnerable for blackmailing as well as for their natural tendencies towards dishonesty and deception.[14] Not only did these actions allow the government to take precautions for the security of the civil service, it also allowed them to forcibly promote the acceptable norm of the heterosexual, nuclear family.
The Cold War began in a time when Canadians only wanted to put the difficulties of war behind them and grow in economic and personal safety. The suburban family home is a perfect symbol of that individualistic, hard-won, economic and security gain. As “elusive threats of inflation, unemployment, crime, juvenile delinquency, Soviet aggression, Communist subversion, and...nuclear war” put this prize domestic stability, as well as their prosperous, capitalist affluence, at risk, Canadians turned to an apolitical conservatism to protect the normalcy they so craved.[15] Forceful promotion of racial, sexual, and ideological conformity dually ensured a consistent, anti-radical, national consensus, as well as a stabilized social status quo that the elite could control. The Cold War climate was comprised of tensions, conflicts, and the sinisterly intangible, ever-present threat of nuclear war. Canadian society’s strict adherence to the “normal” nuclear family paradigm was a direct result of the quest for security that emerged from the insecurities and doubts of this atmosphere. The incorporation of the anti-Communist mentality into every facet of ordinary Canadian life during the Cold War demonstrates the all-pervasive reach of total war and its ability to use even the minds of a nation’s citizens as resources for war aims.
[1] Alvin Finkel, Our Lives: Canada after 1945, (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 1997), 61.
[2] Reg Whitaker, et al., Cold War Canada: the Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 13.
[3] Ibid, 14.
[4] Ibid, 5.
[5] Ibid, 4.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 14
[8] Finkel, 64.
[9] Whitaker, et al., 16.
[10] Finkel, 34.
[11] Whitaker, et al., 18.
[12] Finkel, 34.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid, 33.
[15] Whitaker, et al., 22.
Great article. Very well researched and written. Good read!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
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