Book of the Day: Major Douglas and the Social Credit Movement

* Book: Major Douglas. The Policy of a Philosophy. Social-Credit.com, 2015

Here’s the description from the publisher:

“The year is 1934. Montague Norman is governor of the Bank of England, Sir Otto Niemeyer is at the Treasury. The Great Depression is on the wane but the industrialized world is still reeling from its effects. In Britain John Hargrave’s Green Shirts march in the London streets. An obscure English engineer, Major C.H. Douglas, and his wife Edith, have embarked on the RMS Maloja. They are bound for New Zealand via Australia but their tour will subsequently move on to the North American continent. Their Mission is to persuade those countries to renounce the money market and finance prosperity using their own credit. ‘Dividends for all’ is the Douglas slogan. Amazingly, many people are listening. Douglas talks to 12,000 people at an open air mass rally at Sydney stadium at Rushcutters Bay. Yet there are no takers for his idea among the governments of the world. Except in Alberta. There the Social Credit party wins the Provincial election with a landslide majority and an unlikely Premier, ‘Bible Bill’ Aberhart, prepares to implement the theories of the engineer economist.

In 1924 his small Social Credit movement had, on paper, 46 branches in British towns and cities and correspondents in South Africa and Canada. By the early thirties its founder was filling the largest halls in the country with attentive crowds. A host of literary figures were on its periphery. Orwell alluded to it in his letters. Pound and MacDiarmid, on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, gave their allegiance to it. Bonamy Dobrée, T.S. Eliot, Eric Gill and Edwin Muir were sympathetic to it. It had a militant movement with marching men, drums, banners and flags. Like Marxism it had a theory of history. Denounced by every major economist, it shook Canada in 1935 by winning the provincial election in Alberta causing no small alarm to bankers and businessmen.

Who was the driving force, Major Douglas, and what was this phenomenon called Social Credit? Where did it come from and what did it mean? This books sets out to answer these questions.”

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