About the only opposition to Ernest Manning after his victory in the election of 1944 came from within his own party. As historian David Leonard explains, some members of the Social Credit Party believed Manning had abandoned the original tenets of their cause:

The Social Credit Party had been remade in the image of Ernest Manning. But after the war, many of the ideological Social Creditors began espousing the old Social Credit policies of Major C. Douglas again. And in 1947, in the Annual Report of the Social Credit Board, there was an editorial warning people about the international Jewish conspiracy. Because they had been opposed to the world?s banks earlier on, it was only natural there would be this element of anti-Semitism in the Social Credit movement. Well, Ernest Manning took issue with that. And in the spring of 1948, he had it out with the ideological Douglasites in the party. And he demanded the purging of every one of them.

Like many people after the war, Ernest Manning became vehemently anti-communist. He used his weekly radio program, Back to the Bible Hour, as well as his speeches in the election of 1948, to campaign against what he called Godless communism.

William Irving, with the Non-Partisan League, Henry Wise Wood, the founder of the United Farmers of Alberta, later on, William Aberhart and Ernest Manning had all been fundamentalist, very strong, religious people. Now communism, as developed earlier by Karl Marx and others, stressed Atheism as one of its fundamental tenets. And in the Soviet Union, which right after the war and after seemed bent on domination of all of Europe, it was bringing Atheistic communism to eastern Europe as well. And this is what, more than anything else, drew the fundamentalist religious minister and Premier Ernest Manning to state his virulent opposition to the government of Joseph Stalin and all that it stood for.

With the fight against communism, the purge of the party?s anti-Semites and the sweet sound of oil royalties filling the provincial coffers, Ernest Manning was a popular fellow. In the election of August 17th, 1948, his party polled fifty-six percent of the popular vote and won fifty-one of fifty-seven ridings.

On the Heritage Trail, I?m Cheryl Croucher.