Farmers outstanding in their field : the Ginger Group in politics, 1921 to 1935
Date
1994
Authors
Hansen, James Lyle
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Abstract
The Ginger Group, the ten M.P.s who split from the caucus of the National Progressive Party in June and July, 1924, marked a rare organized attempt in the Canadian Parliament to achieve democracy, or more precisely what Aristotle called polity. The Ginger Group members represented the more radical section of the Progressive movement, the section most distinct from traditional Canadian politics. They influenced fundamentally the inter-war reform movements: without the Ginger Group, the Progressive movement, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Social Credit League would have happened differently.
In the early Progressive party, the Gingerites stood most strongly for constituents' rights, preventing the Progressive party from forming a coalition with the Liberals. For the next two years, they fought increasing central control in the Progressive party. By mid 1924, they believed that the principles of the movement they represented were irreconcilable with the Progressive party and so they broke away from its caucus. Between their secession and the onset of the Depression, a number of the Ginger Group members, most notably the five Alberta members plus Agnes Macphail of Ontario and M.N. Campbell of Saskatchewan, were eloquent and influential Parliamentarians who worked in close co-operation with Labour M.P.'s such as J.S. Woodsworth and Labour/Farmer M.P. William Irvine.
The renewal of political protest in the Depression gave the Gingerites a new opportunity to expand their reform movement beyond the remnants of the Progressives. The Gingerites and their Labour M.P. allies were the parliamentary nucleus from which grew the CCF. More indirectly, the Alberta Gingerites contributed to Social Credit: although they came to be strong opponents of Aberhart's Social Credit League, their outspoken advocacy of unorthodox financial reforms such as Douglas Social Credit prepared the way for Aberhart's crusade.
Despite their contributions to the populist revolt of the 19301s, the Ginger Group's ideology was quintessentially part of the earlier Progressive movement. Their views of political organization, the good society and citizenship were part of the reform movement which grew up towards the end of the First World War and burned brightly for a brief time afterwards. The Gingerites were out of place in the new reform movements; most of their erstwhile supporters moved over to the Social Credit in 1935, and the Gingerites themselves drifted away from the CCF. Nevertheless, the Ginger Group has been interpreted primarily in terms of the later movements, of which they were on the fringes, rather than of the Progressive movement, of which they were the hard core. Furthermore, the Ginger Group bas been presented primarily as a phenomenon of Alberta's political culture, even though its ideology reflected that of many Progressive supporters throughout the Prairies and Ontario. These traditional historical views of the Ginger Group have obscured the depth of the earlier reform movement and its lessons about our political evolution.