Home Social Landscape Featured Articles 'Their Own Schools of Democracy':  The Visible Remains of Political Practice in Rural Alberta

'Their Own Schools of Democracy':  The Visible Remains of Political Practice in Rural Alberta

by Roger Epp

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The idea that rural communities should be such intensely political places flies in the face of both recent experience and deeper cultural prejudice. The geography of the modern state suggests that political power is concentrated in a metropolitan capital from which legislation emanates. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's wry observation in The Social Contract [1762], that for every stately palace required by this centralization he saw "a whole rural district laid in ruins," is a rare historical protest against what otherwise appears a natural feature of political life. Geography in this case is reinforced by language. Much of our inherited political vocabulary--the civic realm, the citizen--shares its root with the word city. But meanings mediated over millenia are sometimes deceiving. While the ancient Greek polis, most notably, is conventionally translated as a "city-state," the word referred primarily to a way of life, an association, rather than to a certain density of population; and the novel democratic practices of its most famous example, Athens, emerged from a program of land reforms and debt emancipation that created a population of smallholders. Indeed, there is an intriguing recurrence at several points in Western history of strong democracy around small-scale agrarian communities: from the landgemeinde colonies of the late-medieval North European frontier to the homesteading settlements on the northern plains of this continent.

In the early part of this century, American urban reformers had to make the case that a vigorous democratic life could be lived equally in city neighborhoods. The proposition was far from self-evident especially in the shadow of the Great Plains agrarian revolt of the 1890s--what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls the "largest democratic mass movement in American history" and its most vivid "demonstration of what authentic political life can be." The movement embraced smallholders and landless alike. It was organized at a time when "throughout the Western grainary the increasing centralization of economic life fastened upon prairie farmers new modes of degradation." It built cooperatives, sent farmer-lecturers across the continent, made overtures to southern blacks and urban workers, and, mostly in self-defence, fielded political candidates in state and national elections. Goodwyn writes that the 1896 election, in which the populist movement was partly defeated, partly coopted, marked the "political consolidation of industrial culture." This election saw the introduction of corporate campaign financing and mass advertising, and, with it, the "decline of individual political self-respect on the part of millions of people."⁷

The agrarian populism that emerged a generation later in Alberta and Saskatchewan, shaped partly by the U.S. experience, has been described similarly as having "contributed more to Canadian thought about the nature and practice of democracy than did any other regional or class discourse."⁸ Much of that contribution was to highlight the central role of local institutions--cooperatives, municipal and school government, mutual telephone companies, and voluntary organizations--in sustaining participatory practices and creating counter-weights to the external forces against which farm families found common interests. The contrast with the Board-of-Trade boosterism that, at the same time, substituted for municipal politics in neighboring towns is particularly striking.⁹ In 1926, the editor of The UFA proposed that Alberta farmers had "gained a quiet confidence in their own ability to carry on their own affairs in their own way, . . . learned much in their own schools of democracy, [and] obtained a deeper insight into the methods and possibilities of democratic political action."¹⁰ This learning extended to women, who were involved at all levels in the UFA movement and in parallel locals active particularly around issues of medical care. As Nanci Langford writes, the locals "not only encouraged women to develop knowledge and skills for participation in public affairs, they also gave their members opportunity to do so."¹¹ Overall, the period of the 1920s and early 1930s was one of citizen participation in office-holding and democratic political action throughout rural central Alberta to a degree reminiscent of ancient Athens.

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