The Rise of Agrarian Democracy: The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 1909-1921

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2002 by Catherine A. Cavanaugh

Bradford James Rennie, The Rise of Agrarian Democracy: The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 1909-1921 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

WATCHING THE SEEMINGLY endless twistings and turnings of the Alliance/Reform Party this past summer was a sharp reminder of what a precarious project third-party politics is in Canada. If longevity is the test, few have negotiated this difficult terrain more skillfully than that other made-in-the-West party, the CCF/NDP. In the current skirmishes for the hearts and minds of Canadian voters, we are learning almost daily that the wreckage of such a bid is at least as interesting as its rise. Yet, great gaps persist in the historical literature. Apparently preferring to focus on the winners, historians have remained largely silent concerning the losers.

This neglect, or oversight, is all the more curious for Western Canada, the birth-place of three third-party challenges to the political status quo within living memory. But, as Bradford James Rennie points out in his study of the rise of the United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta (UFA/UFWA), political rebellion is practically off the screen as a subject of choice among historians of the Canadian West. It is jarring to be reminded that Paul F. Sharp's study of American influences on the farm movement, The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada, was first published in 1948 (and recently reissued with an introduction by William Pratt and Lorne Brown) and that W. L. Morton's The Progressive Party in Canada, still the main source for agrarian insurgency in federal politics, made its debut more than a half century ago. Indeed, Rennie's is the "first scholarly book" focusing on the Farmers in Alberta, putatively the most successful of the agrarian parties of the interwar years.

The book is based on Rennie's PhD dissertation. It is a timely and much welcome addition to a curiously scant literature on a topic that is at the heart of the development of the prairie political culture. This is especially true for Alberta, long seen as the more radical partner in the agrarian revolt. Moreover, by including organized farm women in the title, Rennie promises a thoroughly up-to-date assessment of what he describes as "one of the greatest mass democratic movements in Canadian history and one of the most successful state- or provincial-level farm bodies in North American history." (4)

Rennie may be overstating his case, but despite these and other rhetorical flourishes (he opens and closes the book with a rather melodramatic scene of rural decay as ghostly reminder of past glory), Rennie provides a well-researched, detailed account of the making of a third party in Alberta. Drawing on official UFA/UFWA documents, convention votes, newspapers (particularly letters to the editor), and to a lesser extent, personal correspondence, he traces the development of the movement in three stages: its formation (1879 to 1909), expansion (1909 to 1918), and politicization (1918 to 1921).

Rennie's interest is in the rank-and-file. His purpose is to do for organized farmers what historians have done for the working classes, that is, to provide insight into the "culture" that underwrote their politics. He argues that the UFA/UFWA is best understood as a "mass movement" that "arose because farmers' demands for reform were frustrated by what they felt was an unresponsive political system." (5) To paraphrase a contemporary Alberta politician, farmers wanted in.

Rennie traces farm "movement culture" in the shared values and beliefs that shaped their sense of community and "class opposition," which he attributes to the exigencies of rural life in early-20th-century Alberta and farmers' cumulative political disappointments. In an effort to respond to the forces arrayed against them, from corporate monopolies to "outsider" governments and cronyism, war, drought and other natural disasters, farmers looked to each other for mutual aid and encouragement. In their sense of a common cause and shared grievances, Rennie sees the growth of a political movement. He shows that farm discontent was based on a double disaffection: exclusion from decision-making at the highest levels locally and nationally, and disappointed optimism arising from the heady days of early settlement. Rather than probe these tensions, Rennie focuses on chronicling the struggles to establish a united and effective farm pressure group that culminated in direct political action in 1921.

There is too little written of these crucial years in Alberta's history and Rennie provides a useful and, for the most part, highly readable account of the farmers in politics, but there is little here that is new. His signposts of "movement culture" are long-serving staples in a familiar narrative of political frustration leading to direct action, nursed by a sense of disaffection and moral mission. These include co-operation, communitarianism, activist citizenship, ruralism, social gospel, and social reform. The result is that, at best, the people he is writing about appear naive in their commitment to such radical political ideas as group government, recall, and referenda as cornerstones of a new Jerusalem.