Manning Era
Social Credit was elected with a slightly reduced mandate in 1940. "Bible Bill" Aberhart died in 1943 and was replaced by his Provincial Secretary and Minister of Trade and Industry, Ernest Manning.
Manning's government was much more pragmatic. Under his leadership, the party largely abandoned social credit monetary theories, though it did issue prosperity certificates from oil royalties in 1957 and 1958. His government was arguably one of the most conservative provincial governments in Canada. Manning moved to purge the party of anti-Semitism, which had been an element of its Christian populist rhetoric for years, but had become far less fashionable after World War II. Several socially conservative laws remained in place, such as the ban on airlines serving alcohol over provincial airspace.
Under Manning, Alberta became a virtual one-party state, winning seven consecutive elections. The party usually won well over 50 percent of the popular vote, and rarely faced more than ten opposition MLAs. He wielded considerable influence over the party's federal counterparts as well. For example, he let it be known that his province would never accept francophone Catholic Real Caouette, leader of the party's Quebec wing, as the party's leader—even though Caouette headed the party's third-strongest faction (behind the Alberta and British Columbia Socreds). This led to rumours that Caouette actually defeated Robert Thompson for the federal party's leadership in 1961, only to be vetoed by Manning and the Alberta Socreds.
The discovery of significant reserves of oil in 1947 transformed Alberta from one of Canada's poorest provinces to one of the country's richest with resource revenues pouring into the government's treasury.
Read more about this topic: Alberta Social Credit Party
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“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)