Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta by Edward Bell

528 The Canadian Historical Review be particularly helpful in courses dealing with the architectural history of a region or province. The books' images are stunning, including both contemporary documentation (no doubt reflecting Kalman's interest in preservation) and archival images. The number of photos showing buildings in use is particularly refreshing, as opposed to the old-fashioned notion of photographing spaces unoccupied, believed by some to be architecture in its 'purest' state. And there's something to please everyone, from cathedrals to bicycle sheds. ANNMARIE ADAMS .McGill University Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta. EDWARD BELL Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993. Pp. xviii, 196, $42.95 cloth, $17.95 paper Edward Bell's systematic ecological analysis of class voting patterns in the 1935 and 1940 provincial elections in Alberta has produced compelling empirical evidence about the Social Credit League's class support in its early days. Bell proves that Social Credit relied more on the southern Alberta urban working class than the rural and smalltown petit bourgeoisie for its breakthrough and initial staying power in Alberta. This book is a significant contribution to the already voluminous scholarship on Social Credit in Alberta Bell's objectives are considerably grander, however. He wishes to put paid to virtually everything C.B. Macpherson said about Social Credit in Democracy in Alberta. On the empirical side, Bell's jousting scores some direct hits; his analysis of voting data disproves Macpherson's contention that Social Credit succeeded primarily because it appealed to the agrarian petit bourgeoisie. On the theoretical side, however, he often tilts at windmills or constructs straw men to aid his cause, and underestimates the subtlety of Macpherson's portrayal of Douglasite or Aberhartian Social Credit thinking. More irritating is his sustained implication that his theoretical criticism of Macpherson is novel, and his tendency to inflate the value of his own contribution with blanket dismis·sals of previous literature on Social Credit in Alberta. One of the more striking examples of the latter problem occurs on page 158, where Bell contends that the 'general climate of opinion in favour of monetary reform in the early 1930s' is 'rarely mentioned in the various accounts of the movement.' This assertion will come as a surprise to anyone who has read Macpherson, Irving, Mallory, Young, Book Reviews 529 Conway, or Laycock on Social Credit and other prairie populisms. His other claims about what 'the literature' has erroneously claimed or ignored about the Social Credit experience too often suggest that all previous scholars were either sloppy or ideologically motivated. Bell devotes much energy to an exaggerated construction ofMacpherson as an analytical antagonist. Criticisms of Macpherson's deduction ofnecessary ideological orientations from class position had been made earlier by Pratt and Richards (1979) and by Laycock (1990), among others. More problematic, however, is where Bell's anti-Macpherson fervour leads him. He contends that C.H. Douglas's Social Credit theory is a coherently collectivist, radically interventionist doctrine, and that Aberhart's adaptation of this doctrine in 1935 was responsible for much of the support garnered by the Social Credit League. Bell's alternative interpretation of Social Credit doctrine and its appeal is not convincing. First, because Douglas's writings were notoriously incoherent and inconsistent, they are equally able to support contentions that he is a crypto-communist, an anarchist, a deluded English technocrat, or merely a rabid anti-socialist with several sound intuitions about, and a lot of nonsensical analysis of the problem of underconsumption in capitalist economies. For every passage Bell quotes purporting to prove Douglas's idiosyncratically commandeconomy promoting tendencies, others have found more typical passages revealing him as a monomaniac whose demonization ofthe banks and 'the price system' would somehow preserve capitalism while instituting a mystical form of 'community control' over financial institutions. The second serious problem with Bell's account of the ideological character and appeal of Douglas's and Aberhart's Social Credit doctrine[s] is that his analysis lacks any effective comparison with contending ideologies of the time. Ironically, he repeats one of Macpherson's major failings. To show how Aberhart might have appealed by appearing progressive with regard to social legislation, or because he and...