United Farmers of Alberta
Description
Steven R.D. Henderson:
"For the pioneers of Western Canada—the last, best West—the settling of this land was infused with utopian idealism. For them the West was the Promised Land: the land of milk and honey. It was with this vision in their minds that hundreds of thousands of immigrants flocked to the Canadian West, believing that it was a land where a real, viable utopia could be created. Broadly speaking, the unique form of utopianism found in Western Canada assumed three forms. The first was that of a fecund, Edenic paradise—that of a vision of a land of abundance and of commune with nature. The second form was that of the West as a perfect society where only the virtuous would reside. This image is typical of the social gospellers, who believed that the West was destined to be a New Jerusalem or the Kingdom of God on Earth. The last form was a secular utopia: that of the West as a tabula rasa—a blank slate—a place of new beginnings. All three of these visions of utopia were present in the Alberta farm movement, which reached its apex in the United Farmers of Alberta.
While throughout this essay I plan to discuss certain elements of the farm movement which I find admirable, there are other aspects that must be categorically rejected as having no place in a future free society. To name only the most obvious, this includes the role of the Alberta farm movement in colonisation and its attendant racism. Likewise, the movement’s embrace of eugenics with its zoological denigration of our humanity. Yet the purpose of revisiting this history is not to nostalgically pine for a lost traditional Alberta farmer, but rather to illuminate the aspects of this history which can reinvigorate our utopian dreams in the present. A further discussion of the parochial aspects of the farm movement, while necessary, is outside of the scope of this short essay and will be explored in the future.
On January 14th, 1909, the convention of the Alberta Farmer’s Association took place at the Mechanics’ Hall in Edmonton. With the announcement of the amalgamation of the Alberta Farmer’s Association and the Society of Equity the hall erupted with a chorus of “For They Are Jolly Good Fellows”, and three hearty cheers filled the air. The United Farmers of Alberta was born. None of the delegates at the founding meeting of the UFA could have imagined the future that the new organisation would cultivate—that the UFA would be one of the greatest grassroots democratic movements in Canadian history, and one of the most successful farm movements in North American history. They could not have predicted that in the coming decade UFA membership would grow into the tens of thousands; that the organisation would spawn a great co-operative movement culminating in the creation of the Wheat Pool; that it would be responsible for important achievements in women’s rights; and would be responsible for immutably changing the political culture of Alberta, forming a permanent populist bias that lingers to the present. Nor could they have predicted that the UFA would form a majority provincial government and ignite a populist wave—a Prairie fire—that would burn across the provinces from West to East.
Although the UFA would form government at the provincial level and be involved at the national level, it would be a mistake to look at the movement as merely a provincial or national one. Within the UFA these levels of government were understood only as two arenas of organisation. The creative, radical, and oppositional energies of the UFA found other outlets as well. One was the Wheat Pool, with its parallel structure based on delegate democracy. The other was, as Roger Epp tells us, “the entire range of local institutions—municipal councils and school boards, mutual telephone companies, creamery and other co-operatives—that constituted the fabric of self-directed community affairs in which democratic politics was an experiential reality.” Unbeknownst to many, the Alberta farm movement was in this regard intensely municipalist, reminiscent of New England town meetings. If the Greeks of ancient Athens had their ekklesia, and the New Englanders had their town meetings, it can be said that the pioneers of the Prairie West had their schoolhouse meetings." (http://social-ecology.org/wp/2018/10/the-utopian-democracy-of-the-alberta-farm-movement-by-steven-r-d-henderson/)