Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response by Janine Stingel (review)

326 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 the field. (AMY SHAW) Janine Stingel. Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response McGill-Queen=s University Press. xvii, 280. $39.95 Social Discredit examines anti-Semitism in the Social Credit movement and the Jewish response to it, particularly that of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Janine Stingel meticulously demonstrates that from 1935 to 1947 the Congress reacted cautiously to anti-Semitic propaganda spewing from such party organs as Today and Tomorrow and the Canadian Social Crediter. Not until 1947 did the Congress adopt a more aggressive and forthright public relations policy, but by that time Alberta premier Ernest Manning had already purged anti-Semites from his party. The Congress cannot take credit for discrediting Social Credit; the party cleaned its own house. >Quiet diplomacy= may not have been in the best interests of Canada=s Jews, who were subjected to a steady stream of vilification. Stingel attributes the >ineffective and passive stance= of the Congress to the mood of the Canadian public at the time. The Congress was afraid that if it were too vocal in its denunciations, more anti-Semitism would be unleashed. Slurs against minority groups were more acceptable in the 1930s and early 1940s than they are today. The Holocaust produced a change in public attitudes. The Congress moved from a public education policy based on refuting allegations of Jewish conspiracies to a policy of zero tolerance for intolerance. It came to regard the human rights of all minority groups as a non-negotiable feature of liberal democracy to be supported by legislation and enforced by the courts. There was another reason for the hesitation of the Congress to tackle Social Credit head-on. Social Credit was based in Alberta, and most Jews in Canada lived in Toronto and Montreal. Representatives of the Congress who lived in western Canada tended to favour a stronger stand, but they were overruled by their central Canadian counterparts, who were more concerned with other issues, such as the plight of Jewish refugees. After all, who could take Social Crediters with their funny-money theories seriously? The flaw in this reasoning was that Social Credit was not a fringe group, but rather a prominent feature of the political landscape, and it controlled a provincial government. Stingel has uncovered a wealth of archival material illuminating the inner workings of the Congress as it struggled to come to grips with Social Credit. In February 1942, Rabbi Solomon Frank, executive director of the Winnipeg Joint Public Relations Committee of the Congress, met with Alberta premier William Aberhart, who >deprecated most strongly any antiSemitic tendencies on the part of members of his party.= He said he had >expressed himself in accordance with this thought to those of his party who HUMANITIES 327 were guilty of anti-Semitic statements.= Further, he gave his assurance that if, in spite of his repeated warnings to the contrary, >anti-Semitic utterances on the part of his membership were to continue, he would take whatever steps he possibly could in order to definitely squelch any anti-Semitic tendency.= The account of the conversation is revealing on two counts. First, Aberhart candidly admitted that certain Social Crediters were spouting anti-Semitism. Secondly, even though the premier failed to keep his promise to squelch the anti-Semitism among his followers, the Congress chose not to make the conversation public. As a result, an opportunity was lost to publicize Aberhart=s acknowledgment of the problem and his failure to do anything about it. Social Discredit is full of intriguing episodes, but typically the documentation is more complete on the Congress side than on the Social Credit side. In February 1947 two Congress officials held a two-hour meeting with three Social Credit members of Parliament. One of the Congress representatives summarized the conversation that took place in a lengthy memorandum to the national executive. Unfortunately, there is no record of the impressions of those sitting on the other side of the table. In addition, the heavy weight of documentation sometimes leads to repetition . We keep hearing that the Congress is on the brink of public relations policy shift B not actually doing anything, but seriously thinking...