* Note: endnote #33 is missing from body of text
Moira Day
'While a preacher is more than an actor, he should not be less'
-Haddon Robinson
Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages 1
Not every clergyman turned his training
in homiletics - the rhetorical art of writing and delivering sermons -
to the purposes of social action theatre, but the results could be striking
when he did. By examining William Aberhart's extant political skits, sermons,
speeches, and lecture notes within the context of his career both as an
evangelistic preacher and as the premier of Alberta (1935-1943), this paper
hopes to establish that Aberhart, drawing strongly on his mastery of homiletics,
created some of Canada's most effective social action theatre of the 1930s.
Ce n'est pas tous les pasteurs que se sont servis de leur formation en homilétique - c'est à dire, l'art de composer un sermon et de le prêcher - a fin de créer un théâtre d'action sociale, mais les résultats pouvaient s'avérer frappants quand on le faisait. En examinant les satires politiques, les sermons, les discours, et les brouillons de conférences existants de William Aberhart dans le contexte de sa carrière de pasteur évangélique et de premier ministre de l'Alberta (1935-1943), cet article veut démontrer qu'Aberhart, par sa maîtrise de l'homilétique, a créé un théâtre d'action sociale des plus efficaces au Canada pendant les années 1930.
The well-documented work of such groups as the Worker's Experimental Theatre and the Toronto Theatre of Action has tended to reinforce the impression that the Canadian social action theatre of the thirties was almost exclusively the domain of left-wing activists dedicated to consciously creating theatre in the Marxist, materialist mode of Brecht, Piscator, and Soviet agit-prop. This tendency has perhaps led us to overlook the contributions of the political Right and of other theatrical and paratheatrical traditions to the development of agit-prop theatre in Canada.
This includes the contribution of the rhetorical, presentational art of homiletics, particularly as experienced in the evangelistic tradition of ministerial training - and even more particularly as adapted to the purposes of social action theatre and paratheatre by William Aberhart, Alberta's foremost preacher and premier of the Depression. By examining Aberhart's extant political skits, sermons, speeches and lecture notes within the context of his career this paper hopes to establish (1) that the otherworldly preacher of the 1920s was the father of the effective political dramatist of the 1930s; (2) that the distinction between the two Aberharts - the sincere man of God and the cannily constructed dramatic persona - became increasingly blurred after he entered politics; and (3) that as dramatist or as preacher, Aberhart created some of the most effective political radio theatre and paratheatre Canada has ever witnessed, contributing strongly, as it did, to the meteoric 1934-35 rise of the Social Credit League of Alberta out of oblivion to a position of power it was to hold in the province for the next thirty-six years.
The first of these assertions may seem the most surprising given the traditional enmity between church and theatre. Indeed, as an aspirant to the Presbyterian ministry in Ontario, the young Aberhart had been apt to view theatre-going in the same morally questionable light as dancing, card-playing and drinking, 2 a stance only reinforced by his choice of a highly evangelistic form of fundamentalism after his move to Alberta in 1910.
Yet, like many devout people of his time, Aberhart apparently drew a sharp distinction between theatre as a frivolity and drama as an effective pedagogical tool. As principal and English instructor of Crescent Heights High School in Calgary, he organized the school's music and debating societies and helped supervise student productions of Shakespeare. As Dean of the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, he similarly recognized the importance of giving prospective ministers some training in the arts. Music and literature were taught as separate courses, while rhetoric and its associated dramatic skills were particularly stressed in Aberhart's courses on homiletics.
The kinship between the rhetorical art of preaching and the dramatic art of acting is suggested by the fact that the authors of so many homiletic textbooks, including the three that Aberhart prepared for use at the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, 3 feel a need to spell out the difference between the two. Like most instructors, Aberhart sternly insisted that the passion, faith and caring the preacher radiated from the pulpit had to be genuinely his own and not that of an assumed persona. Yet, his manuals also make it clear that if, in Robinson's words, 'a preacher had to be more than an actor,' he could not afford to be less in his attention to proper physical and mental preparation, the effective use of the body and voice in delivery, and the ability to assess and play to his audience.
Aberhart's complex system of hand and foot positioning in the Movement section of his manual, Homiletics A, reflects an older tradition of rhetorical gesture already dated by the 1920s, and it is uncertain how strictly he adhered to it himself. His advice on obtaining greater strength and flexibility in the upper arms and trunk through the use of Indian clubs, and on developing an effective public voice through close attention to posture, breathing, projection, tone, pacing and pauses is astute but not out of the ordinary. It is his insights into dramatic self-projection and audience psychology which are both highly individual and chilling in their implications.
Aberhart was not alone in recognizing that the true evangelistic sermon is not a literary but a performing art, 4 one that is at once dramatic in construction and subversive in intent. While few homiletics instructors would claim with the forthrightness of Jerry Vines that a good sermon is structurally akin to a one-act play, 5 most, including Aberhart himself, emphasize that sermons: (1) are written to be performed not read and exist only in that moment of live interplay and communication between speaker and audience; (2) succeed more by their concrete appeal to the senses, emotions and imagination of the listener than by abstract thought; and (3) are inherently subversive in that their purpose is to attack the status quo and drive the listener past apathy, qualms and rationalizations to adopt a radical, life-changing course of action.
Where Aberhart's manuals are unusual is in their uncanny grasp of the art of manipulating both the audience/speaker dynamic and the whole realm of non-rational appeal to incite the action of conversion. Aberhart may not have been alone in insisting that a pleasant platform character aided by good oral and physical expression enhances a speaker's rapport with an audience, but he is unusual in his insistence that the good minister should further strive to become 'a MAGNETIC personality':
A speaker with a good personality has charm, power and attractiveness. Such a personality is said to be MAGNETIC, because it consists of personal attributes which draw people to the speaker and incline them to sympathize with or rally around him. This magnetism or attractiveness resides in the speaker irrespective of what he is saying ... It is an attitude of trustfulness and cordiality towards the audience. The speaker approaches his hearers with a confiding air and treats them as his friends. If the audience can be made to feel the speaker's genuine cordiality, the very atmosphere will vibrate with stimulating good feeling.6
Aberhart is again unusual in the degree
to which he advises his students to concentrate on the non-rational, impulsive
and unconscious drives of the audience. He was hardly the first homiletics
instructor to stress the importance of creating sensually and emotionally
appealing word pictures since 'most people think best in and by pictures'
and many 'not trained or accustomed to logical thought or any of the processes
of reasoning' can 'be only reached by the mental image.' 7
What is striking is that he devotes nearly one-third of Homiletics B
to
showing how such mental images could be first created then effectively
utilized as part of the sermon's crucial 'appeal to action.'
If Aberhart had an actor's understanding of the importance of cultivating observation and sense memory ('so that images can be retained and exactly reproduced'), 8 he had a dramatist's sense of how such images - integrating up to nine different senses including those of temperature, motion and muscular sensation - could be effectively used 'in new combinations and relationships' 9 to further proselytisation. Combined images which reproduced elements of the audience's world were the simplest and most effective, but he felt that even the more whimsical, ridiculous images proper to humour and satire, e.g., Gulliver's Travels, could 'present a truth in a striking way, so as to rouse intense interest and impress the truth upon the hearers.' 10
If mental images were particularly helpful in eliciting the kind of 'impulsive' and 'selective responses' needed to drive the listeners to 'definite action,' another set of non-rational tactics was recommended to solicit the even more easily obtained 'mechanical or unconscious response':
1. Throughout the whole message, the proposed course of action is shown to be in harmony with the [audience's] instinctive and acquired tendencies.
2. The speaker brings his whole personal influence to bear on the audience. The magnetic speaker, by his general attractiveness and particular earnestness, carries his hearers with him, [t]he influence of his presence and voice ... a powerful force in moving an audience to immediate action.
3. [Through] repeated mass action [having everyone sing ensemble or in sections, give a show of hands to simple questions, nod agreement to obvious truths] a group is welded into a mass responsive to the will of the leader [and] accustomed to obeying [his] suggestions.11
It is not that Aberhart dismissed the
importance of rational appeal; warning the would-be minister that appeals
to the purely mechanical and impulsive response are impressive but short-lived
in their effect, and that 'excessive emotionalism' unbalanced by rational
discourse and persuasion is 'dangerous and useless,' 12
he stressed that no lasting personal change could be effected without the
mind's 'careful consideration' 13
of its options and its free and deliberate assent to pursue a new course
of action.
Still, it is telling that he delays instruction in formal argumentation, inductive and deductive reasoning, research, and the presentation of general concepts and ideas until Homiletics C, long after the student has learnt the less rational appeals of effective platform character, voice and gestures (Homiletics A) and the importance of mental imagery, the MAGNETIC personality and repeated mass action in manipulating the audience/speaker dynamic (Homiletics B).
Clearly, the pattern for Aberhart the subversive political dramatist was already set in Aberhart the evangelist; by 1920 his Sunday afternoon addresses had proved so popular that they were moved, appropriately enough, from the church to the Grand and later the Palace Theatre.
Another key piece in the pattern was set in 1925 with Aberhart's decision to exploit the new medium of radio for evangelistic purposes by broadcasting his lectures and services live. He was never really to become a creature of the studio. A huge, energetic man whose striking use of gestures, props, music and visual aids made him as commanding a stage presence as any who had trod the boards before him, he craved the electrical energy of a live crowd, and seldom performed his best radio work without one. At the same time, the master had clearly found his medium. Radio, pre-eminently the theatre of words and imagination, gave Aberhart's superb rhetorical skills an unprecedented range and potency. It gave wings to his natural gifts for allegory, mental imagery, narrative, dramatization and dialogue; what had remained rhetoric on the live stage became more purely drama in the airy theatre of radio. Equally importantly, radio created a whole new and exciting audience dynamic. Described by an admiring contemporary as 'now rising to a tumultuous roar in which was heard the veritable thunder of the elements - now suddenly sinking to the calm of a quiet conversational tone' now expressing ,scorn, sarcasm, witticism, [then] conviction, pathos and tenderness ... each a note woven into the melody of his words,' 14 Aberhart's compelling voice carried his magnetic personality into every corner of the province.
The lonely homesteader in rural Alberta found himself at once part of a large, friendly congregation laughing, singing and applauding over the air, and being talked to intimately in the privacy of his kitchen or living room. 'I cannot get along without you,' the genial voice confessed, 'and I hope you may have some use for me. So now, radio friends, let us sit up close to the microphone and get a little more friendly with the other one. Come on, let's get friendly.' 15
The dialogue did not remain one-sided for long. Aberhart was soon reading from and responding to his rural correspondents over the air, his gift for mental imagery expanding to reflect back ever more sharply the people, land and problems of the rural districts, sometimes in a serious vein, sometimes with folksy geniality:
I am challenging you today then, to do two things. First, to commit yourself to the God of Heaven. Do you think you can do that? Secondly to ask God to maintain the prices of the grain and livestock this year in whatever way He sees best. Are you ashamed to tell your neighbours ... that you have asked the God of heaven to peg the prices? Some people are not ashamed to ask the Federal government! ... Let us ask Him to help us make our religion practical.16
It is difficult to know where Aberhart's
career would have led him without the advent of the Depression. What is
certain is that the latter radically altered his career, and with it, his
use of drama and dramatic technique.
Aberhart's first known venture into playwriting was more theological than political in its response to the Depression. 'The Branding Irons of the Anti-Christ,' co-written with Ernest Manning in 1931, relied for its effect on the popular fundamentalist notion that the Depression probably signalled the onset of the Time of Tribulations. The play, most notable for a talking idol and such stage instructions as 'Anti-Christ . . . laughs exultantly' 17 urged audiences to consider the plight of those who did not embrace Christ soon enough to be taken into heaven before the arrival of the Anti-Christ and his minions. The drama, as performed by the Bible Institute Baptist Church's Young People's Society and toured to neighbouring towns, was not without its effect on the converted. Nonetheless, Aberhart himself soon found such otherworldly responses inadequate to the shocking impact of the hard times on both his radio congregation and his present and former school students. As he confessed in 1935, the overwhelming human misery he witnessed radicalized him politically:
And when [the Depression] continued, I became 'pink' and by that I mean tingeing close to 'red.' Conditions in [Alberta] almost made me a Communist, although I have no use for Communism. Instead I turn [sic] to Social Credit.18
It must be emphasized that in choosing
Social Credit over Communism Aberhart was in no way abandoning his new-found
passion for radical social and economic reform. While associated today
with a particular form of ultra-conservatism, the original movement founded
by Major Douglas in the 1920s demanded a radical restructuring of the existing
economic system. Many Communists and Socialists found themselves in sympathy
with Social Credit's call for an enlightened state to take control of the
nation's cash flow so that it reached needy workers instead of greedy bankers;
and, Aberhart's disavowal notwithstanding, his relations with both groups
were sometimes surprisingly cordial.19
Where Aberhart sharply parted company with most followers of Marx, and indeed, Major Douglas himself, was that he became a political radical without ceasing to be a fundamentalist preacher.20 What might have been a grotesque misalliance of opposites in a lesser man was in Aberhart an effective meeting of complementary skills and forces. Prior to 1932 he had used the evangelical radio sermon as a form of didactic, subversive theatre to win men away from worldly pursuits to an intensely personal salvation and rebirth of the spirit. After 1932 the same persuasive skills in audience manipulation, magnetic character projection and effective use of imagery, dialogue and dramatization were bent towards mobilizing people into an army of the righteous to effect the radical salvation and rebirth of society.
Between 1932 and 1934 Aberhart toiled with the zeal of a missionary to sell the gospel of Social Credit theory to Albertans. While his tactics included personal lecture tours to rural Alberta, it was radio again that proved the key to the campaign. His Sunday afternoon radio services formed the initial beachhead, Aberhart cautiously interjecting a political idea here and there amidst his usual religious commentary. Encouraged by the response, he continued to expand on both the political material - and on analogies between the situation in present day Alberta and in Biblical times.
While Aberhart's grandiose analogies were to be much burlesqued by later satirists, in 1932 the tactic was not as foolish as it later seemed. Aberhart had stressed in his homiletics course the importance of showing that a proposed course of action was in harmony with people's instinctive and acquired tendencies - and for an audience much more Bible-literate than today's, Aberhart's resetting of the troubled, chaotic, disintegrating times of the present within the comforting context of Biblical myth restored, even subliminally, a much needed sense of identity, order and purpose to a people who felt shattered, helpless and insignificant. Times were bad, but they had also been bad for God's chosen people, the Israelites. The Old Testament example assured Albertans that despite their current misery there was still a metaphysical order with a special plan and regard for them, and that God would still intercede materially in their world and lead them to political and personal salvation. They had but to unite against the temptation of the wicked and the outsider, and most importantly, heed the prophet that God had sent to lead them.
Even those who were consciously bothered by the messianic overtones in Aberhart's speeches found the myth itself, with Aberhart himself clearly indicated as the appointed leader, difficult to resist. Aberhart's first converts to the new cause became the organizers of an expanding network of Social Credit study groups across the province, all supplied with radios if they did not already have one. At the height of his popularity, it was estimated that nearly 300,000 people - or close to half the province-tuned in to these broadcasts.
By the fall of 1934 the growing popularity of the Social Credit movement, combined with the increasing wariness if not downright hostility of the mainline provincial parties towards the Aberhart program, was rapidly pushing the campaign towards a critical point. To allow the movement to perish for want of a proper political channel was unthinkable, but to organize his own political party on such short notice for the 1935 election seemed equally untenable.
At this critical point in the movement's fortunes, Aberhart turned with devastating effectiveness to the 'whimsical or fanciful mental images' of satire. He announced on his Tuesday night program dedicated to explaining Social Credit that Calgary would soon be visited by a stranger from another planet intent on examining Earth's civilization. Aberhart noted that he had fortunately been able to persuade this Man from Mars to appear on his program and report regularly on the progress of his mission.
Aberhart apparently got the idea from the same author who had first converted him to Social Credit philosophy. Drawing in his turn on George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Dale Colbourne (an English actor-manager familiar to Canadian audiences for his touring productions of Shaw and later for his scathing comments on the 'dilettantism' of the Dominion Drama Festival) had tried to explain the strangeness of the current economic system by describing how it might strike the impartial eye of 'a party of sightseeing Martians visiting Earth'. 21 If the metaphor was Colbourne's, however, the application was pure Aberhart.
Historians Iris Miller and David Elliott, who probably provide the best description of the series and subsequent campaign, note:
The series of radio scripts was one of the last Canadian political broadcasts to be conducted on a 'no holds barred' basis. (Later, federal legislation was passed to prohibit dramatized political broadcasts ... ) The radio plays, performed before a live audience, began in the form of an inquiry into the causes of the sufferings of Albertans. There was a classroom atmosphere as Aberhart instructed other members of the cast, now and then asking questions of them and joining in discussions ... As the 'Man from Mars' wandered up and down Alberta, he came to the reluctant conclusion that, in the words of Bernard Shaw, 'this earth is the mental asylum of other planets.' 22
The scripts themselves have been lost,
but preserved excerpts and contemporary descriptions suggest the series
was similar to 'The Branding Irons of the Anti-Christ' in its taste for
outspoken didacticism and the black-and-white characterizations in the
morality play/melodrama tradition. However, like his extant sermons and
later political skits, the Mars series was far more striking in its use
of biting satirical humour, sweep of fantastical imagery, and use of radio/live
audience dynamics.
The voyage of Aberhart's gentle extra-terrestrial Everyman struck the imagination and validated the experience of thousands of similarly decent, rational men and women who had wondered if they were alone in imagining that the world had gone malignant and insane. Those looking for bold, simple answers to the larger question of social evil quickly found it in Aberhart's simple, vigorously caricatured figures of greedy, hard-hearted bankers and muddled, ineffectual professors of economics.
Both figures, as developed over the course of the 'Mars' series, were to remain staples of Aberhart's political satire until the end of his political career. While Elliott and Miller suggest that the Professor was initially created to satirize Professor G.A. Elliott, a University of Alberta professor who had recently given an unfavourable review of Social Credit theory, the figure soon came to satisfy a more important dramatic purpose. All too aware that he himself was open to the charge of being an 'eddicated' Easterner trying to fob a strange, unworkable economic system on gullible rubes, Aberhart consciously protected his image as a simple, genial populist by frequently reviving his pompous, slow-witted alter-ego as the dubious champion of traditional capitalist economics: rigid, dogmatic and institution-centred, the Professor served as a perfect foil to the folksy, pragmatic figures of Aberhart and his working class followers.
The Banker, as the representative of the monolithic, oppressive powers of International Finance, was already a favourite butt of much Communist and Socialist art, and he was soon the recipient of some of Aberhart's best Swiftian shots. In one later sketch International Finance, characterized as a rapacious old harridan, chortles with her stooge over their corruption of a tribe of innocent savages. The naked Hydrophobians are first gulled into wearing belts, since civilization demands 'they tighten their belts,' then into shirts 'since no patriotic loyal Hydrophobian could afford to go shirtless ... and only by wearing shirts of different lengths of tails could they ever introduce the class system,' and beyond that, the 'central bank and financial system ... so necessary to civilization.' 23
The 'Mars' series, however, tended to strike closer to home. If Aberhart scored successfully with his broadsides against the International and Central Canadian banking Establishments, he reserved many of his finer shafts for the failures and deficiencies of the existing provincial parties and their leaders. Variously characterizing them as the 'It's-Our-Turn-Next party,' the 'Hold-Them-To-It party,' 'Revolutionville,' 'Mr. Fedor' from 'Ization district,' and 'Mr. C.C. Heifer,' Aberhart, in one particularly Bunyanesque episode, sent them all off to a Convention supposedly to deal with the hardships of the Depression:
Now fellows, go and get your dress suits on, your gold-handled canes and your plug hats ... The conference is called to meet in the town of 'Never Get Anywhere' at the Hotel 'Have A Good Time' on the shore of Lake 'Tantalization.' Now hurry down to the Convention Hall and get into your places. I am going to put my hands on the switch of imagination and transfer control to the Convocation Hall of the Hotel 'Have A Good Time.' 24
The depiction of Aberhart as the shrewd,
benevolent creator and manipulator of this fictive world was hardly accidental.
The implication was unmistakeable that if he could so easily run this allegorical
microcosm of the province, he was well capable of running the real thing.
Moreover, the many opportunities for dramatic interplay with a variety
of imaginative characters and scenarios gave Aberhart an unprecedented
opportunity to display all facets of the MAGNETIC personality - earnest,
confident, empathetic, friendly, morally courageous and radiating vitality
and energy. Having shown the perniciousness of the current system and the
inadequacy of orthodox political methods to solve the problem, Aberhart
may have used the traditional rhetorical methods of logic, argument and
debate to push Social Credit as the solution, but the subliminal message
of the broadcast was that only William Aberhart had the character, passion
and know-how to make it work.
Again, the voice of the radio audience was called for and registered in these broadcasts. Over the winter of 1934-35 200,000 questionnaires were distributed to listeners, asking them if they would vote for a Social Credit candidate in the next provincial election. 'If you do not wish Social Credit,' thundered Aberhart over the radio, 'say so now.' 25 As the Man from Mars duly read the latest results of the straw vote over the radio each week, it became increasingly clear to both Aberhart and his audience that by working together they could transform the mad, fictional Alberta of the radio series into something resembling sanity.
Although the series ended in January both the Martian, portrayed as 'a white bearded old gentleman with . . . bare feet and ancient garments,' 26 and Mr. Kant B. Dunn - a wryly comic portrait of the game, long-suffering farmer - appeared at the United Farmers of Alberta convention in January 1935 to support Aberhart's plea that they re-consider adopting his social credit program. When the answer was negative Aberhart, secure in his support, launched the Social Credit League of Alberta as a separate party and started his campaign.
The Martian continued to appear at Social Credit picnics and rallies, but Aberhart's opponents, who had sighed with relief when the Martian went off the air, soon found themselves up against an equally potent radio enemy - Aberhart's radio speeches from both inside and outside the Bible Institute. A number of Aberhart's opponents in the reigning United Farmers of Alberta had had ministerial training and preaching experience of their own, and as adherents of the 'Social Gospel' they also felt that religious and political reform could go hand in hand. But none had spent ten years learning to cultivate and project a magnetic personality, none had spent ten years mastering the medium of radio and building up an attentive audience that numbered in the thousands; and none were willing to yoke the extremes of evangelism and radical politics with the same flair for the dramatic.
The formal, rolling sentences, the even cadences and relatively abstract language of Reid and Brownlee's earnest, rational appeals to the electorate were no match for the sheer emotional and sensual power of what was emanating from the Bible Institute - the heady combination of forceful argument, exalted exhortations and humble appeals; of folksy colloquial humour and sweeping lyrical images; and of constant communication with a host of rapt platform speakers, live congregation and rural correspondents (present in letters read aloud and responded to over the air) all magnifying and responding to the power of The Voice.27
It is small wonder that Aberhart's opponents cried unfair. By cannily identifying his political cause with the unquestionable powers of God, the Bible and Supreme Good; by offering the magnetism of his own character instead of the anonymous face of a political party; by dismissing conventional wisdom and order as failures, and appealing to the emotional power of his people's outrage over injustice and personal helplessness; by giving his listeners a sense of joyous, purposeful community at a time when they felt lost and disintegrating, Aberhart combined his dramatic instincts, radio expertise and ministerial training into a stunning political coup. In August 1935 the Social Credit League took 56 out of 63 seats in the election; in six months, he had taken a new political party with a radical new philosophy from non-existence to a crushing landslide victory over the older political parties.
There is a saying that you must be careful of what you ask of the gods - because they might give it to you. As the first Social Credit government in the world, the Aberhart administration attracted international attention, and was ruthlessly scrutinized over the following five years by its most ardent friends and enemies alike. As the cold facts of political and economic reality caught up with the government, Aberhart found himself in the unenviable position of having to campaign harder than ever to sell social credit and simultaneously explain away its apparent failure. Drama in general and radio in particular thus remained as crucial to Aberhart after the election as they had been during it.
The same tools were still employed to good effect. Professor Orthodox Anonymous appeared at least five more times between 1935 and 1940: a minimum of three times on Aberhart's regular Sunday radio addresses, once in an undated sketch, and again, this time under the name of 'Professor Muddlepuddle, late professor of miseconomics at the University of Foozelem' 28 in a 1940 stage skit, 'The Great God Gold.' The evil banker also resurfaces with particular effectiveness in another 1940 sketch 'A Popular Loan,' where International Finance is characterized as 'The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street' (significantly garbed in 'very old-fashioned clothes [and] a poke bonnet') and her obsequious accomplice, Sir Aloysius Marblehead of 22 Downing Street, clad in the 'uniform' - monocle, frockcoat, spats and pot-belly - of the monied upper classes. (Not surprisingly, since the stage skits were written at the time of the 1940 election, both the Old Lady and Muddlepuddle evince great dismay over Aberhart's growing threat to 'the whole system' and insist that Aberhart, if not 'the evil Albertans' themselves,' must be suppressed if not liquidated ... in the interests of the intellectual and priviledged [sic] classes.') 29 Dramatization and dialogue also remained among Aberhart's favourite forms of speech construction.
There is a darker aspect, however, to these post-1935 dramas and radio broadcasts. The main distinction between the actor and the preacher, as Aberhart himself had indicated in his homiletics courses, was that the preacher speaks wholly as himself, while the actor adopts a persona. The point at which Aberhart ceased to be a preacher and became an actor remains unclear, but an increasingly wide gap begins to appear between the folksy, self-deprecating martyr Aberhart portrays himself as, and the living politician fighting savagely to survive an ugly caucus and constituency revolt over his 'fascist, dictatorial' tendencies and failure to make social credit workable.
Those inclined to see Aberhart as a posturing actor from first to last could hardly have been reassured by such works as his 1940 sketch 'The Daily Routine of a Premier.' 30 Purporting to show the common people what they would see or hear if they concealed themselves in the premier's office for fifteen minutes on a typical morning, the play presents Aberhart - played by himself - as an exhausted, long-suffering saint; rallying his loyal stenographer with a few inspiring words of scripture, he fights off overwork, abusive anonymous phone calls and the gross ingratitude of the world, to save a number of beggared farmers and old-age pensioners from the incompetence of the federal government, all before racing to make a critical 10:00 a.m. council meeting.
The play's embarrassing self-aggrandizement is less disturbing than its deliberate use of realism to obfuscate the distinction between Aberhart the man and Aberhart the role. To be sure, the distinction between the two Aberharts had also worn thin during the 'Mars' series, but the very conceit or central metaphor of the series automatically situated its action and characters in the fantastical realm of satire and myth where all realities are possible. 'The Daily Routine,' by contrast, asks its audience to accept Aberhart's melodramatic self-projection on stage as a literal, naturalistic presentation of real life.
Not a few of Aberhart's former apostles were to accuse him of deliberately blurring fact and fiction in many other contexts. Still, the effectiveness of the 1935-40 radio work as well as of the live stage skits is indicated by the fact that Aberhart incredibly won a second majority government in 1940. At the same time, the outbreak of the war in 1939 really ended Aberhart's most effective radio, and, by extension, dramatic work. Wartime censorship was shortly to accomplish what his enemies could not: end his effective mixing of religious and political evangelizing before a live and a radio audience. CBC, which had already tightened regulations about dramatized political broadcasts, now also ruled that religious broadcasts could no longer have political content, personal greetings or special requests, and all political speeches had to be given in a studio after a pre-screening of the script.31
Aberhart was never really to regain the promised land of the airwaves. The stage skits he wrote for the 1940 campaign in lieu of radio drama are amusing and score some good hits, but they were a poor substitute for the novelty, the fantastical sweep of image, character and situation, and the regular, province-wide audience radio had bequeathed the 'Man From Mars' series. His correspondence reveals that such skits as 'A Popular Loan,' 'The Daily Routine of a Premier,' and 'The Great God Gold' were repeated at Socred meetings through 1941, and there are also tantalizing references to Aberhart writing dialogue for a skit featuring a 'sheet like a ghost,' 'the false face of an old witch' and a Dopey and a Charlie McCarthy doll wired for sound.32 But these proved to be the final sputters of a dramatic muse ultimately extinguished as much by stress and illness as censorship. His health broken by the strain of eight traumatic years in office, Aberhart died suddenly in 1943 of liver failure brought on by overwork and exhaustion.
The question of whether William Aberhart was ultimately a man of, or a manipulator of the people may never be satisfactorily resolved. Likely, he was a contradictory combination of both. Historians Miller and Elliott suggest that while economic naivety and growing dictatorial and demagogic tendencies marred his later career, his initial passion for reform and desire to end the suffering of little people was genuine. He left behind him some progressive social legislation, but even more significantly he left behind him an enduring myth.
Ranging from simple farm images of snow, hail, crops, cutworms and machinery, to the eternal cycle of the seasons and the thundering apocalyptic visions of Revelations, Aberhart's radio work, at its best, created out of the wireless void a lasting vision of Alberta as an almost Elizabethan universe - at once poignant and vivid in its familiarity, yet shaped and illuminated by vast, metaphysical powers of good and evil - and of a chosen people in a chosen land marching steadfastly on to salvation beneath a vast prairie sky.
Notes
1 HADDON ROBINSON Biblical
Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House) 207
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2 DAVID R. ELLIOTT and
IRIS MILLER Bible Bill: A Biography of William Aberhart
(Edmonton:
Reidmore Books 1987) 15
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3 Homiletics Course
A, Homiletics Course B, and Homiletics Course C, Calgary
Prophetic Bible Institute Papers, Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary, Alberta
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4 This has not always been the case. In her book The Feminization of American Culture, ANN DOUGLAS suggests that the sermon, which was more of an abstract theological treatise in 17th- and l8th-century America, had to popularize its form in the 19th century to compete with mass culture in the form of the novel and the literary magazine. A contemporary of Aberhart's, BRYAN DAWSON, indicates how new advances in the mass media had further altered the form even by the 1930s:
Whether we like it or not, most of us preach to the 'moving picture mind.' It is the mind accustomed to images, pictures, scenes rapidly moving. It is certainly not accustomed to deep thinking or long sustained argument ... we must realize that they regard thinking which is not imaginary and concrete as dull and uninteresting BRYAN DAWSON The Art of Illustrating Sermons (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press 1938) 17. (Quoted in Broadus)
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5 JERRY VINE, A
Guide to Effective Sermon Delivery (Chicago: Moody Press 1986) 107
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6 Homiletics B,
12
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7 Homiletics B, 19
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8 Homiletics B, 20
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9 Homiletics B, 18
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10 Homiletics B,
19
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11 Homiletics B,
10
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12 Homiletics B,
8
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13 Homiletics B,
9
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14 R.A. CANTELON 'The
Premier Speaks,' File 107B, Premiers' Papers, Provincial Archives of Alberta,
Edmonton, Alberta
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15 WILLIAM ABERHART Transcript
of radio address, 12 Dec 1937, File 5, Calgary Herald Papers, Glenbow-Alberta
Institute, Calgary, Alberta
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16 WILLIAM ABERHART Transcript
of radio address 14 July 1938 File 6
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17 L.P.V. JOHNSON and
OLA McNUTT Aberhart of Alberta (Edmonton: Institute of Applied Art
Ltd 1970) 234
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18 Edmonton Bulletin
16
Sept 1935 (ELLIOTT and MILLER)
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19 A Communist friend,
H.B. HILL, helped Aberhart write his first Social Credit manual, and in
1938 Aberhart and the local Communist party even joined forces to run a
Socred federal candidate in a by-election
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20 Not everyone agreed.
Many of Aberhart's older parishioners, unhappy with the social credit dogma
and aura of pragmatic materialism which began to invade his sermons during
the 1930s, felt he had intolerably compromised his evangelistic calling
by entering politics
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21 MAURICE COLBOURNE Economic
Nationalism (London: Figurehead 1933) 91
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22 ELLIOTT and MILLER
151-152
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23 WILLIAM ABERHART 'A
Popular Loan,' File 1051, Premiers' Papers
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24 WILLIAM ABERHART 'Man
From Mars,' 24 Oct 1934 (ELLIOTT and MILLER)
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25 WILLIAM ABERHART 'Man
From Mars,' 18 Dec 1934 (ELLIOTT and MILLER)
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26 Alberta Social Credit
Chronicle,
18 Jan 1935 (ELLIOTT and MILLER)
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27 The transcripts of
the radio addresses by Aberhart and his opponents during the 1935 campaign
can be found in the Walter Norman Smith papers in the Glenbow-Alberta Institute.
Aberhart's opponents also had to contend with other Social Credit political
drama apparently inspired by Aberhart's example. The Killam Social Credit
study group reported performing a play with a cast of 20 men, 'each a leader
in his own line and each with a life experience back of the part he played.
The parts ... consisted of the problems of each of these men, expressed
in his own words and manner. The answers ... are the solutions as we have
worked them out according to our understanding of Social Credit.' (Edmonton
Journal
12 Apr 1935). Another play, apparently more along the lines of an apocalyptic
vision, 'Mothers All,' was performed by a Socred group in Peace River 15
May 1936
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28 WILLIAM ABERHART 'The
Great God Gold,' File 105 1, Premiers' Papers
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29 ABERHART 'A Popular
Loan,' File 1051.
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30 ABERHART 'The Great
God Gold,' File 1051
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31 ABERHART 'The Daily
Routine of a Premier,' File 1051
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32 N. BOTTERILL, the CJCA
Production Manager, informed Aberhart of the new censorship regulations
in a letter dated 20 Oct 1939 (File 1193, Premiers papers). Aberhart fiercely
resisted the new rules and only surrendered after a direct appeal to Mackenzie
King brought no results
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33 Correspondence between
WILLIAM ABERHART and C. PEARCE of Calgary, 23 Sept-19 Oct 1941 (File 1193,
Premiers' Papers)
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Bibliography
A. Primary Sources
Speeches:
Aberhart, William. Transcripts of radio addresses at the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute 1935-1939. Files 4-7 M1621. Calgary Herald Papers. Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary, Alberta
Aberhart, William, John Brownlee, Richard Reid et al. Transcripts of the 1935 provincial election campaign by Social Credit and UFA leaders. Walter Norman Smith Papers M1157, Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary, Alberta
Aberhart, William. Transcripts of Sunday radio addresses and assorted political speeches delivered in Edmonton, Alberta 1935-1943. Files 1047A, 1049A and 1051, Premiers' Papers, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta
Letters:
Aberhart, William. Correspondence as premier of Alberta 1935-1943. Files 1193, 1247A 1254B-1258, Premiers' Papers, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta
Skits and Plays:
Aberhart, William, and Ernest Manning. 'The Branding Irons of The Anti-Christ' (1930). (Johnson and McNutt)
Aberhart, William. Excerpts from 'The Man From Mars' series (1934) (Elliott and Miller)
Aberhart, William. 'The Philosophy of Economic Prosperity' (Professor Orthodox Anonymous skit during Sunday radio address 25 Jan 1937. File 1047A, Premiers' Papers
Aberhart, William. Fragment of untitled, undated sketch. (Professor Orthodox Anonymous lectures crowd of workers on Unemployment. 1940-41?) File 1048B, Premiers' Papers
Aberhart, William. 'Professor Orthodox Anonymous' (skit during Sunday radio address, 1 Feb (?) 1937. File 5, Calgary Herald Papers
Aberhart, William. 'Free-But Afraid,' undated skit. (John Antique of the Board of Commerce debates his wife and Mr. William Forward, an economic reformer, on the merits of conventional and Social Credit economics. 1940-41?). File 1051, Premiers' Papers
Aberhart, William.'A Popular Loan' (1940). File 1051, Premiers' Papers
Aberhart, William.'The Great God Gold' (1940). File 1051, Premiers' Papers
Aberhart, William.'The Daily Routine of a Premier'(1940) File 105 1, Premiers' Papers
B. Secondary Sources
Broadus, John A., On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. 4th edition. Revised by Vernon L. Stanfield. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, rpt 1969 (1st edition, 1870)
Colbourne, Maurice,. Economic Nationalism. London: Figurehead, 1933
Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Sons, 1977
Elliott, David and Iris Miller, Bible Bill: A Biography of William Aberhart. Edmonton, Reidmore Books, 1987
Johnson, L.P.V., and Ola McNutt, Aberhart of Alberta. Edmonton: Institute of Applied Art Limited, 1970
Robinson, Haddon, Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.
Vines, Jerry, A Guide to Effective Sermon Delivery. Chicago: Moody Press, 1986.