In Blunderland

This post is adapted from a talk given as part of the panel “Play(ing) With Language in Canadian Texts” at the ACCUTE 2021 conference on 29 May 2021.

Opening up the Edmonton Journal in 1941 invokes similar degrees of dread and exasperation as opening up Twitter in 2021 does for people who follow Alberta politics. Against the background of global catastrophe, with a few thumb-flicks a reader can find headlines shouting about failed government policies, back-benchers in revolt, opposition leaders calling for the Premier’s resignation, and accusations of funnelling public money into partisan propaganda. Then, as now, we see evidence of a new party elected in a time of economic distress swiftly pushing through legislation to implement a radical ideological agenda targeting provincial finances, public services, and education. Then, as now, we see ruptures inside the party soon after and the promulgation of opaque boards and organizations sucking up funds and negative publicity while doing…something. Though we may be years and many Freedom of Information requests away from tracking the activities of the Canadian Energy Centre and the Allan Inquiry launched by today’s United Conservative Party, we do have some material remnants of what the Social Credit Board was up to in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 

Today, I would like to share with you two unusual publications produced by this Board: the one-act plays A Popular Loan and Alice in Blunderland, both published in 1941 directly from the Alberta Legislature as part of a short-lived Educational Series. First, I will consider some of the stylistic elements of the texts. Then, I will consider who the audience for these plays may have been, and how they might have encountered them. Lastly, I will consider their role and effectiveness as propaganda.

I have examined both of these plays in digital format via the Peel’s Prairie Provinces Collection. The University of Alberta Library holds a print copy of A Popular Loan and the University of Calgary Library holds a print copy of Alice in Blunderland. There are a few holdings in Canada, mainly on microfilm, but I have not encountered any scholarship into these texts. When they are referenced at all, pamphlets of the era (including Social Credit ones) are typically mined for supporting evidence or illustration to political histories; they are rarely considered for their rhetorical or textual features. Alice was my gateway to this material: parodies or reworkings of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland have been popular since its original publication, but political commentaries set in a satirical “Blunderland” had a surprising vogue in the period surrounding the Second World War. While examining Adolf in Blunderland, a publication of a 1939 BBC radio play by James Dyrenforth and Max Kester, I became interested in the possibility of a Canadian take on Blunderland. This does exist in a similar mode to Dyrenforth and Kester’s text (as seen in a 1938 editorial in Liberty magazine, for example); however, the Social Credit plays opened up a far more baffling rabbit hole.

The plays share a number of stylistic features. Each play is structured as a single act, with just two characters, a male and a female figure. A Popular Loan, the first of the two, based on the notation of it being “Educational Series no. 1” is the shorter and more explicitly didactic play. It has only six pages of dialogue, and is introduced by a narrator, the Chairman, who explains both the characters and the meaning of the play right at the outset. We learn that “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street represents International Finance which is attempting to get control of the world,” while The Prime Minister “represents reactionary political governments, befuddled by the power of Finance.” (If you are picking up on a certain flavour of globalist anti-semitism, you would not be surprised to learn that another Social Credit pamphlet entitled “Banker’s Toadies” makes the subtext text.) The Old Lady and the Prime Minister butt heads over questions of production and expanding global markets as the PM argues for the need to colonize the fictional nation of Hydrophobia. He suggests the Hydrophobians be extended loans in order to purchase the goods produced by Lanchashire cotton mills. This end achieved, both comment on the unsettling influence of Social Creditors who raise questions about where the money comes from. End scene.

Alice in Blunderland presents the scene of Alice interacting with the Mad Hatter. Here, the Hatter takes the role of financier and spokesman for Blunderland, while Alice (who is a visitor from Socredia) criticizes the structure and results of the global financial system. This play, which is almost twice as long with 11 pages of dialogue, also gives much more detailed directions for staging and performance. Through the questioning of Alice, the audience is presented with the populist case for Social Credit, while the Hatter is aligned with “Economic Professors,” the “Intelligentsia,” and “Science.” Having accused the Hatter of being “criminally insane,” Alice exits “with great dignity,” while he shouts with rage and hurls insults.

The primary question I have regarding these texts is who they are meant for. The plays are clearly meant to be educational, as the series title indicates. By 1941, Albertans had experienced six years of Social Credit governance, but its particular philosophies were still difficult to parse, especially around financial reform, credit unions, and the issuing of its own money in the form of so-called “prosperity certificates.” In its report for 1941, the Board is adamant that “an ever-increasing volume of mail requesting literature and further information was another certain indication of public interest,” though these plays do little to explain the specifics of the government’s work. Notably, neither of these plays has any connection to Alberta - indeed only A Popular Loan even mentions Canada at all. Both are distinctly Anglophilic, in terms of references and their very pale imitations of Carroll and possibly Swift. I suspect these plays may come originally from a UK source, though further work with the records of the Social Credit Board is necessary to back up this hypothesis. The Social Credit movement in Alberta was heavily inspired by the work of British engineer and economic theorist Clifford Hugh Douglas, who was consulted directly as an advisor to Premier William Aberhart when his party won power in 1935 to become the first (and one of the only) social credit government ever elected. The “Alberta Experiment,” as it became known, was keenly watched by supporters in England. The movement’s main organ, The Social Crediter, featured near-weekly updates from the province through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, as well as direct reprints of the party’s reports and publications. Given that there is a direct print relationship between The Social Crediter and Alberta’s Social Credit Board, it seems reasonable to think that publications could also have crossed the other way.

The second question I have is how these plays were meant to be encountered. Each is priced at 10 cents, as indicated on the cover, but it seems more likely that this is what James Raven refers to as a token payment that marks the text as something with value rather than an actual mechanism of exchange. Sales, or costs, are beside the point. Indeed, materials produced by the Social Credit Board - which I will note was not a government department and was not subject to public scrutiny - were published from the Alberta Legislature itself, using government funds. This was a particular source of ire for Opposition MLAs, who used printing costs to point to evidence of partisan interference. The Board’s 1941 Report mentions a “series of public addresses illustrated by lantern slides [that] were delivered in various parts of the Province” as part of an “educational programme.” Plays such as these could possibly fit within such events. Lastly, given Premier Aberhart’s innovative use of the radio both prior to election and throughout his time in government (the costs of which were also noted by the Opposition), it is possible that plays like these could have been delivered as radio dramas. This, as well, puts me in mind of the broadcast of Adolf in Blunderland by Dyrenforth and Kester that set me on this path in the first place. I’m interested in further pursuing the ways that radio and other new media were taken up for purposes of political communication and propaganda in Alberta during this time. (I would appreciate any leads or suggestions you might have.)

The third question I have is what is the function of these texts. The plays appear at an interesting moment in the Social Credit regime. The Social Credit Board had been set up in 1937 following the revolt of a number of MLAs who felt the government was not doing enough to forward the movement it had been elected on; as such, the Board became the more ideologically-driven arm of the government. The party began to jettison some of its more radical policies after several pieces of legislation (including the Accurate News and Information Act aimed at press control) were thrown out by the Supreme Court, and it began to lean more into social conservatism and right wing populism after its second election in 1940 - upon the death of Aberhart, this transition intensified. By 1941, many of the original British architects of Social Credit had turned against its Albertan morphology and its philosophical structure was wavering.

The plays strike me as an attempt to shore up the ideological aims of social credit at a time when its most zealous converts were losing ground. The Board’s report for 1941 frames its educational programme in ways that overlap with Lenin’s conception of agitprop. Lenin envisioned educating the Russian peasantry about communism using both print propaganda (for evidence, argument, and data), and agitation in the form of speech and dramatic presentation. Like agitprop, or morality plays before it, the Social Credit plays are heavily allegorical, ideologically-driven, and pretty low on entertainment value. However, this isolates the unnamed educational materials from the Board’s more notorious work. With more nuance, Jason Stanley has parsed the ways that propaganda works in ostensibly liberal democratic societies, through what he has termed supporting propaganda and undermining propaganda. 

The messaging of the 1941 report places the educational programme (and I will include the plays as part of this, based on their series title) as supporting propaganda: regardless of the goal, supporting propaganda seeks to increase the realization of that goal. The Board explicitly states that it is building “an information service that would arm our people with that knowledge which is the strongest bulwark against the onslaughts now being launched against Truth, Democracy and our most cherished Liberties” - education correlates with supporting the goal of knowledge here. However, the Board’s work as a whole appears to be more focused on stifling criticism and operating around the objections of the public and the Opposition - undermining the ideals of democracy and truth. The educational programme goes further as a potential vehicle of propaganda: a 1942 article in the Social Crediter comments on the revisions being made to Alberta’s High School curriculum - an ideal insertion point for the further propagation of social credit. Significantly, Stanley notes that the commitments of propagandists can be sincere, even if the contradictions exploited by such undermining propaganda can only be masked by flawed ideological beliefs.

Whether they are the products of true belief, or of an opportunistic attempt at re-educating Albertans and reinforcing ties to the larger social credit movement across the Atlantic, it is clear that A Popular Loan and Alice in Blunderland are bald attempts at propaganda. However, I would ask as a final question: how effective were they in this goal? To call these plays propaganda assumes that they were meant to be persuasive, or at least that they were meant to reach an audience. There is a great more deal of work to be done with archival sources, public records, and periodicals like The Social Crediter  and Alberta’s own equivalent Today and To-Morrow to better frame the intended audiences as well as the stated purposes of the producers. We could equally recast these texts as mere bureaucratic outputs, intended only for internal busywork and virtually inaccessible to those outside of the Legislature, like so many other government documents then, as now. So, how can we consider the effects of a text with a non-reader, or a play with a non-audience? I remain unsure of where the blunder lies: in taking these too seriously as propaganda, or in failing to recognize the efforts of underminers as they emerge and re-emerge.

Sources

The Edmonton Journal (various)
Hansard (scrapbook Hansard)
Public Accounts on printing contracts (1943)
James Raven, Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing Since 1700
Harold Schultz, “The Social Credit Back-Benchers Revolt”
Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works
The Social Crediter (various)