Wild populist winds of Wild Rose province
In the Age of Trump, it’s probably only natural to muse on other political leaders of unlikely ascendancy and unorthodox ways.
And in marking the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation this year, it’s inevitable that any such exercise would summon the memory of William (Bible Bill) Aberhart of Alberta and the Social Credit party of his creation that governed that province for 36 consecutive years.
Alberta became a province in 1905, a place of raw frontier and fervent religiosity, congenitally averse, it seemed, to the controlling inclination of government and a long, long way from Ottawa by any measure.
Until 1921, the Liberals governed, before being swept from office in one of the periodic western gales by the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), who held office until 1935.
Rocked by drought and the Depression, the UFA became vulnerable in its turn to a populist preacher who had been born in Ontario and moved west along with the country.
William Aberhart arrived in Calgary in 1910 as a teacher before turning to preaching. A Canadian original, he was inspired by the unlikely combination of the Book of Revelations and the Social Credit theories of a Briton named Major C.H. Douglas.
In Calgary, Aberhart founded the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute and, with the rise of radio as the newest medium, began broadcasting on Calgary station CFCN, “The Voice of the Prairies.”
With his fulminations of coming Raptures and eventual Armageddon, Aberhart gave Albertans a healthy dose of the fear of God, along with a yearning for something better than their miserable earthly lot.
After being exposed to Social Credit, he began incorporating its tenets — for instance, the “velocity theory” of compulsory spending and the distribution of “social dividends” — into his radio lectures and sermons.
So the Social Credit movement grew through the same ways and means as his religious following — a dynamic radio presence and the establishment of study groups in all areas of the province.
“Bible Bill was suddenly an economic wizard, a martyr, a voice of prophecy crying in the wilderness, a lone brave man standing up against the eastern financiers, a saviour who promised redemption from the incredible woes of the Depression,” Robert Kroetsch wrote in his book Alberta. Not that any of it made much sense. In fact, in her book Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, author Aritha van Herk called Social Credit “a bundle of contradictions.”
“Capitalism was its devil, but ‘free enterprise’ its hero. Credit was positive, but money as a medium was devalued, and hoarding wealth was considered an offence,” she wrote.
As all good populist movements require, there were also scapegoats and villains. The banks, which Social Credit argued were responsible for general poverty by withdrawing money from circulation, and, as Aberhart thundered, “the 50 big shots in the east!”
The Social Credit carrot at the end of all that stickwork was the promise to Albertans struggling to survive the Depression of $25 a month.
Come the 1935 provincial election, Aberhart summoned honest men across Alberta to run for office under the Social Credit banner. They volunteered in multitudes.
And “despite their inexperience, their wild promises and their megalomaniac leader, Social Credit
Aberhart had impulses that would be familiar today. Among them, he lambasted the press for his troubles and tried to censor the rascals through his government’s Accurate News and Information Act
swept the province,” van Herk wrote, winning 56 seats to five for the Liberals, two for the Conservatives. The United Farmers of Alberta were routed.
Aberhart, who hadn’t run, became premier. A byelection was soon arranged to provide him with a seat. Then, predictably, chaos ensued.
“Populism was a wonderful tornado to ride into office, but a poor whirlwind” for governing, van Herk observed.
It became clear Aberhart knew nothing of governing, and equally clear Social Credit’s basic program was unworkable.
Needless to say, internal dissent erupted. And, in the eye of the storm, Aberhart had impulses that would be familiar today.
Among them, he lambasted the press for his troubles and tried to censor the rascals through his government’s Accurate News and Information Act. This, among other measures, required newspapers to reveal their sources and publish government handouts in response to any stories it disliked.
The media fought back and, in 1938, the Edmonton Journal — which launched and won court challenges against the Aberhart legislation — was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for defending freedom of the press.
Bizarrely, it wasn’t until almost four years after his election that Aberhart first spoke in the legislature. Instead, he used radio broadcasts — the tweets of his day — to announce decisions.
The rest of the country looked on, van Herk recounted, with “combined horror and amusement.”
Yet despite the fact “Social Credit had fulfilled none of its promises, had raised taxes, had defaulted on bonds, and had alienated every newspaper in the province,” Aberhart was re-elected in 1940.
His final years, however, were filled with snubs. The University of Alberta declined to grant him an honorary degree. He fell ill with liver disease. His wife, indignant on his behalf at the slights, insisted after Aberhart’s death in 1943 that he be buried in British Columbia rather than Alberta.
At Aberhart’s death, he was succeeded by Ernest Manning, who had been his lieutenant since the rise of Social Credit as a political force in Alberta.
Manning had many of Aberhart’s virtues — it was said his voice was impossible to tell from Aberhart’s on the radio — but, unlike his mentor, had applied himself to mastering government and conservative policy while shedding elements of Social Credit that were impractical, if not preposterous.
With the Manning years — which spanned more than 25 years — came postwar reconstruction, the birth of the oil industry and the squelching of Social Credit’s wackier or more intolerant elements.
Ernest Manning, whose son Preston would come blowing out of Alberta two decades later at the head of another blast of western populism, won his last election in Canada’s centennial year, 1967.
But when the prairie dust settled from that campaign, new leader Peter Lougheed sat across the aisle at the head of a six-person caucus of Conservative opposition MPs. In Lougheed, Manning — who would resign in 1968 — must have seen the future of modern Alberta, and the final setting of William Aberhart’s Social Credit sun.