"Reckoning with the Machine" : The British Columbia Social Credit Movement as Social Criticism, 1932-52

Abstract

WITH A SMALL MEMBERSHIP AND FAINT PROMISE o f i t s eventual political success, the British Columbia Social Credit movement dwelt in obscurity for most of the twenty years following its incorporation in 1932. Consequently, this early phase of its development has not drawn much scholarly attention. Yet a consideration of the movement's career before its electoral breakthrough in 1952 may dispel some misconceptions about the movement itself and lead to a clearer understanding of mid-twentieth-century Canadian attitudes towards ideas like planning and democracy. T h e movement's members tended to gaze disapprovingly upon the social changes they perceived, especially from the later stages of the Second World War to the early 1950s, a time in which talk of reconstruction prevailed and many were cheered by the prospect of a new world order. Viewed in the context of a depression-war-prosperity cycle, the movement's internal difficulties and protracted inability to recruit a mass following raise fascinating questions about the effects of rapid economic and cultural change on doctrines like Social Credit. In developing a critique of collectivism and the welfare state that historians of wartime and post-war Canada rarely consider characteristic of the period, the movement nonetheless reflected its cultural milieu by gradually turning away from the scientific Social Credit system of monetary reform and embracing individualism, Christianity, and free enterprise. Historians of Alberta's Social Credit regime have argued that a similar shift occurred in that province, and interpretations of the BC movement's evolution have presented Social Credit's electoral success in British Columbia as an outgrowth of its Albertan experience. But before 1952, BC Social Credit, with its own set of pamphleteers and radicals, was more than a mimetic political entity. The present