Beyond the Purge: Reviewing the Social Credit Movement’s Legacy of Intolerance

ID:	HARP-574
Title:	Beyond the Purge: Reviewing the Social Credit Movement’s Legacy of Intolerance
Source:	Canadian Ethnic Studies, 1999, Vol. 31 Issue 2, p76, 24p
Parties:
Dispute Resolution Organ:
Year:	1999
Pages:	0
Author(s):
Keywords:	Canada, human rights, non-discrimination, politics, Alberta, civil and political rights, minority rights
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 antiSemitism 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 antiSemitic 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, antiSemitic 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.
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