Dafoe, Free Press editorial board took stand against Nazis

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/07/2015 (4021 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Consider for a moment three stories covered in the Winnipeg Free Press on April 21, 2015: the officers of a ship that capsized in the Mediterranean Sea carrying 850 refugees were arrested; the paper’s editorial writers opined on the finance minister’s latest budget; Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t wear a white Jets sweater to the April 20, 2015 playoff game.

Which story captured the attention of Winnipeg Free Press readers as they sipped their coffee: a developing African refugee crisis, middle-class tax breaks or the sweater? It was the sweater.

Turn back the clock and ask what articles might have captured a reader’s attention as they flipped though the morning paper between 1933 and 1939? Thanks to Robert J. Young, retired professor of European history at the University of Winnipeg and expert on the inter-war period, we get to find out.

The Free Press front-page articles and lead editorials often dwelled on ever-intensifying European crises, the failure of the League of Nations, collective security and, as the decade came to its dreary conclusion, the incessant pounding of war drums. That editorial page was print-heavy and readers knew it was serious stuff; even the political cartoon was grim.

However, Young writes, the pages of a daily paper contained many other stories to take a reader’s mind off the march to Armageddon. In an alliterative tour de force, he tells us these were: “crime, crops and cinema, to comics, commerce and concerts.”

So, if politics are not to your liking, you can get a feel for Winnipeg life in the 1930s from the stories he harvested from the paper’s back pages.

Young dedicates his book to the “memory of those who warned.” Those, he eulogizes, are Winnipeg Free Press editor John W. Dafoe — the “Prophet of the Prairies” — and his editorial staff.

In his skilled encapsulation of the paper’s editorial policy, Young gives his readers a clear and succinct picture of the decade’s unfolding tragedy. In this he provides a fitting tribute to memory of the watchers on Carlton Street.

By letting the editorial staff’s words propel the narrative, readers gain a clear understanding of the dynamics of daily journalism. Modern historians might have developed a more nuanced view of the politics of appeasement, isolationism and the origins of the Second World War, but these editors were writing the first draft of history.

Dafoe and his team believed it was their mission to inform and influence public opinion by making Free Press readers aware of the dangers the unchecked fascist and Nazi dictators posed to world peace.

In this regard, Dafoe and his team were almost unique in Canadian journalism. Of all the major papers, only the Toronto Sun and its European correspondent Matthew Halton spoke out against the rising tide of fascist evil. Others, like the Winnipeg Tribune and the Globe, tended to be conciliatory towards Hitler.

Were the editors successful in changing public opinion? This is difficult to quantify, writes Young, because scientific opinion polls as we know them today did not exist in the early 1930s. Relying on a few letters to the editor, church sermons, straw polls and other anecdotal evidence doesn’t provide an historian with hard evidence.

As an aside, James Gray, an old-time Free Press reporter, wrote in The Winter Years that Dafoe was denounced as “a war monger” and circulation fell-off after his stinging editorial condemning the 1938 Munich agreement. There is no evidence, however, that Dafoe’s team faltered in their mission.

Young’s book complements other works on Winnipeg history by authors Jim Blanchard, Alan Artibise, Jack Bumstead, Esyllt Jones and others. It inspires us to read more on Winnipeg’s social and political history and to be proud of the Winnipeg Free Press‘s heritage of free thinking, independent journalism.

 

Ian Stewart is a Winnipeg teacher who, in 1973, received a respectable C+ in professor Young’s second-year history course.