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Beyond the Purge: Reviewing the Social Credit Movement's Legacy of Intolerance
ABSTRACT
This article discusses Alberta premier Ernest Manning's purge of the anti-Semites from the Social Credit movement in late 1947 and early 1948 and examines recurring incidents of anti-Semitism within the national and provincial Social Credit parties in the postwar period. Its purpose is to show that Manning's purge did not eradicate the movement's inherently anti-Semitic ideology, as formulated by its founder, Major C.H. Douglas. Newspaper and archival sources in the postwar period reveal that the anti-Semitism within Social Credit could never be fully expunged and that there continued to be loyal adherents to Douglas's original, anti-Semitic theories. This was no more clearly witnessed than in the case of James Keegstra, Social Credit politician and Alberta high school teacher convicted of wilfully promoting hatred against Jews, who taught students that there was an international Zionist conspiracy attempting to take over the world. This article contributes to Social Credit historiography by arguing that the Keegstra affair was the culmination of Social Credit's fifty-year ideology of intolerance.
Introduction
In 1985, Canadian Ethnic Studies published an article by David Elliott entitled, "Anti-Semitism and the Social Credit Movement: The Intellectual Roots of the Keegstra Affair."(1) The same year David Bercuson and Douglas Wertheimer published their analysis of the Keegstra affair entitled, A Trust Betrayed.(2) Other pieces on Keegstra followed, but these two works explored the connection between the Social Credit movement's anti-Semitic ideology and the beliefs and actions of James Keegstra, a Social Crediter and Alberta high school teacher convicted in 1985 of wilfully promoting hatred against Jews. Newspaper and archival sources on the Social Credit movement in the postwar period corroborate the connection between its original anti-Semitic ideology, as formulated by its founder, Major C.H. Douglas, and its legacy of intolerance into the 1980s. Although some scholars suggest otherwise, Social Credit's anti-Semitic inclinations did not end when Alberta premier Ernest Manning purged the movement of its anti-Semites in 1947-48. In fact, anti-Semitism was a recurring problem throughout the postwar period, manifesting itself in the national and provincial Social Credit parties in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec until it bubbled over with the Keegstra affair. Thus, in contrast to those commentators who see Keegstra as an anomaly within...