Browsing by Author "McLean, Robert Irwin"

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    "Most effectual remedy": temperance and prohibition in Alberta
    (1969) McLean, Robert Irwin; Gagan, David P.
    Canadian historiography has witnessed a healthy interest in social history during the past two decades. A great deal has been written about the rise of progressivism; A. R. Allen has opened wide the study of the Social Gospel movement in Canada; and Catherine L. Cleverdon and Mary Q. Innis have examined militant feminism. In addition, historians such as W. L. Morton, L. G. Thomas and Paul F. Sharp have discussed prohibition as one of the general reform movements of the early twentieth century that enjoyed the backing of the farm community. But prohibitionism has been generally treated as a relatively isolated reform movement which, for a brief time, happened to run parallel to, but was not actually a part of, the main stream of agrarian unrest. No systematic attempt has been made to show the direct link between other agrarian reactions to industrialism and urbanism, and the nationwide victory of prohibition during the second decade of this century. Moreover, there has been no clear statement of the fact that the victory of the Alberta prohibitionist forces at the polls on July 21, 1915 was the prelude not only to the electoral victory of the United Farmers of Alberta, but also to the political triumphs of the entire Canadian progressive movement. The purpose of this study, then, is to describe and account for the success of one of the most striking reform crusades that the nation has ever experienced, the temperance and prohibition movement in the Province of Alberta, and to examine the relationship between the prohibition cause and the atmosphere of reform present from 1907 to 1915 which has been generally subsumed under the label of agrarianism or progressivism. The last three-quarters of the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of temperance and prohibition agitation, spearheaded by evangelical Protestantism, which saw its first major political success in the enactment of the Dunkin Act in 1864, and culminated in the prohibitory law incorporated in the North-West Territories Act, 1875 and the Scott Act of 1878 . Yet the nineteenth century movement, robbed of its economic validity by the return of good times, was defeated in the National Plebiscite of 1898. Prohibitionism as a force in Canada was at its nadir. But the rise of industrialism and urbanism set off social and economic counter-forces such as the Social Gospel movement, militant feminism and agrarianism. These movements, which were qualitatively different from their counterparts in the previous century, combined in Alberta to create a reform environment conducive to the evolution of prohibitionism as the panacea of contemporary socio-economic problems. Finally, the advent of World War I, which temporarily encouraged the subordination of individual liberties to the prosecution of the war effort, supplied the ideal psychological momentum for a massive campaign culminating in the 1915 Prohibition Referendum. As a result of that campaign, in 1915 Alberta became the first province to impose prohibition by a popular vote. The Province thus set the pace of social reform for the rest of the country; and , equally as significant, was the first to allow the people to express their collective will by means of direct legislation, the key factor in the progressives' drive to power. In fact, the political experience gained by the reformers in the battle for prohibition, together with the socio-economic class unity generated by contemporary circumstances, were soon to be turned, with telling effect, against old line politicians, political parties and governments, and culminated in the U.F.O. political victory in 1919, the electoral triumph of the U.F.A. in 1921, and the creation of the National Progressive Party.