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The Canadian Historical Review 86.3 (2005) 557-559



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Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Bradford J. Rennie. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, University of Regina, 2004. Pp. 298, illus. $24.95

This collection of essays, based on secondary sources, provides profiles of each of Alberta's twelve premiers during the twentieth century. Alberta politics has involved a series of virtual one-party states, in which no party has so far returned to power after being once defeated. The twelve premiers divide nicely into four groups of three men representing the governing party of a given era, with the Liberals being followed in office by the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), Social Credit, and since 1971, the Progressive Conservatives.

While most of these mini-portraits of the premiers are quite informative, the quality of the work is uneven. The editor appears to have placed few restrictions on his authors. Most stick to a reasonable effort to balance facts and analysis, and to place the premiers' contributions in social context. The most glaring exception is David C. Jones's piece on Herbert W. Greenfield, the first UFA premier. Jones has the difficult task of portraying a lacklustre premier, and digresses frequently. Despite telling us little about the causes of social unrest in the province's coalfields, Jones writes of one strike, 'Again the conflagration of fury and hate raged out of control. When hundreds, even thousands, focus their mental power on anger, fear, and suspicion they create the chaos these qualities represent. Anger confuses, fear emasculates, mistrust degrades' (67), et cetera. [End Page 557]

Another questionable portrait is Franklin L. Foster's account of John E. Brownlee. Foster's sympathy with his subject, about whom he has produced a full-length biography, results in several dubious claims. First, there is the question of Brownlee's guilt or innocence in the charge of seduction made by government employee Vivian MacMillan. Foster relates Brownlee's side of the story, but treats the alleged victim as a nonentity. Instead, he focuses on the provincial Liberal party's apparent efforts to dig up dirt on the premier, quickly jumping from his circumstantial evidence of this partisan campaign to the incredible statement that 'the Alberta Liberals, jubilant after their destruction of Brownlee, believed the way clear for their rightful return to power' (102). Unless Vivian MacMillan was a greedy, lying pawn in the hands of the provincial Liberals, something that Foster does not even attempt to prove, his conclusion is ridiculous.

Equally baffling is Foster's effort to suggest that the UFA organization's affiliation with the socialist CCF proved deadly to the farmers' political movement as it confronted the rising Social Credit movement. His own evidence suggests that it was merely irrelevant. The Brownlee UFA administration was tight-fisted and repressive; it was that regime, under Brownlee's successor, Richard Reid, that faced the electorate in 1935, not the CCF.

The three essays on the Liberal premiers are more careful evaluations of the early administration of the province, but there are interesting contradictions among the authors. David Hall, explaining the fall of Alberta's first premier, Alexander C. Rutherford, and his replacement by Arthur L. Sifton, regards Rutherford's demise as the price leading Liberals believed had to be paid to salvage Alberta Liberalism in the wake of a railway scandal. But Patricia Roome, in her article on Rutherford, confirms L.G. Thomas's analysis that 'although the A&GW contract was a bad bargain, private vendettas played the major role in Rutherford's demise' (13).

There is somewhat less division among the authors of the Social Credit articles. While John J. Barr writes an insider's account of the Harry Strom years that closed the Social Credit era, both David Elliott, writing about William Aberhart, and Edward Bell, covering Ernest Manning, provide nuanced accounts of the early Social Credit leaders. Both deal squarely with the anti-Semitism within the party and the premiers' reluctance to attack it head-on. But Bell is too quick to conclude that Social Credit ideology little influenced the...

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