William Aberhart (December 30, 1878 – May 23, 1943), also known as "Bible Bill" for his radio sermons about the Bible, was a Canadian politician and the seventh premier of Alberta from 1935 to his death in 1943. He was the founder and first leader of the Alberta Social Credit Party, which believed the Great Depression was caused by ordinary people not having enough to spend. Therefore, Aberhart argued that the government should give each Albertan $25 per month ($565.97 in 2025) to spend to stimulate the economy, by providing needed purchasing power to allow needy customers to buy from waiting businesses.
During his premiership, Aberhart campaigned for and instituted several anti-poverty and debt relief programs, and other governmental reforms, such as consolidation of Alberta's numerous small school districts into centralized school divisions, and natural resources conservation. His attempts at banking reform met with less success, facing strong opposition from the federal government, the courts, privately owned newspapers and a coalition of the Liberal and Conservative parties. Aberhart's government did successfully establish the Alberta Treasury Branches (now ATB Financial), a government-owned financial institution to provide an alternative to existing banks, which continues to operate as a Crown corporation of the Alberta government.
Childhood, education, and family
William Aberhart was born December 30, 1878, in Kippen, Ontario (now part of Bluewater, Ontario) to William (c. 1844 – 1910) and Louisa (c. 1850–1944) (née Pepper) Aberhart. William Aberhart Sr. had immigrated to Canada from Germany with his family at the age of seven, while Louisa Pepper was born in Perth County, Ontario. Historian Harold Schultz describes the Aberharts as "prosperous", while biographers David Elliott and Iris Miller says they "lived better than the average family". The fourth of eight children, William Aberhart Jr. delivered milk to his father's customers before school each day. At school, he was a hard-working but average student. Mathematics was one of his strengths, though his approach involved more rote learning than reasoning. Elliott and Miller suggest that this tendency stayed with him his entire life, and that he "never really acquired an appreciation for inductive intellectual analysis". Aberhart was not a social child. Though he excelled at soccer, he generally preferred solitary pursuits such as reading or teaching himself to play musical instruments.
In 1896, Aberhart attended three months of model school in Mitchell. Although this training qualified him to work as a schoolteacher, he instead enrolled in business college in Chatham, from which he withdrew after four months of successful study. In 1897–98, Aberhart attended Seaforth Collegiate Institute, where he was nicknamed "Whitey" (for his blond hair) and broadened his athletic prowess to include the long jump, shot put, 100-yard dash, high jump, cycling, and football.
On July 29, 1902, Aberhart married Jessie Flatt, whom he had met in 1901 at a football game. A daughter, Khona Louise Aberhart, was born in the winter of 1903, and a second, Ola Janet Aberhart, followed in August 1905.
On July 20, 1910, William Aberhart Sr. died in an accident at a pharmacy owned by his son (William Jr.'s brother) Charles. Prohibition was in effect, but pharmacists were permitted to provide alcohol for "medicinal purposes". Charles kept a bottle of whiskey for William Sr. to drink whenever he was in the store. One day a clerk rearranged the bottles, and the illiterate William Sr. took a swallow of carbolic acid; he died within minutes. William Jr., by now in Calgary, did not make the trip east to his father's funeral. Louisa Aberhart died February 20, 1944, outliving her son, William Aberhart Jr., by less than a year.
In 1911, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
In the fall of 1901 Aberhart was hired as a teacher at the Central Public School in Brantford, for which he was paid $60 per month. He fast won a reputation as a strict disciplinarian: he addressed his students by number rather than name and was liberal in his use of the strap. By his own account in a 1903 essay, he viewed the classroom as a battlefield, and admired Oliver Cromwell's military organization. While his tactics divided his students—some loved him, while others recounted that "he did everything he could to break the spirit of a child"—his supervisors gave him uniformly positive reviews.
His school's principal died in 1905, and Aberhart was selected to replace him; his salary increased to $1,000 per year. This figure had reached $1,200 by 1910 when, in response to glowing reviews from his colleagues, the Calgary Board of Education offered him a principalship at $1,400 per year. In response to a petition from his staff and students that this offer be matched by Brantford, Aberhart was offered a raise to $1,300; he declined it, and moved to Calgary that spring. His family followed later, after he purchased a two-storey wooden house and Khona finished her academic year in Brantford. 1910 Calgary was a frontier town that smelled of horse manure and in which public drunkenness was common; though Aberhart's sensibilities were less shocked by this than his wife's were, he also had to make some adjustments: in Brantford he had always attended church in a silk top hat and frock coat, but he quickly abandoned this custom after discovering that he was the only one in Calgary to do so.
Aberhart was to become principal of Mount Royal School, but it was not yet complete at the time of his arrival, so he became the principal of Alexandra Public School immediately on his arrival. Mount Royal was still not completed by the fall, so he took over the principalship of Victoria School, which he held until becoming principal of the new Crescent Heights High School in 1915.
Elliott and Miller write that Aberhart took a less rigid approach to discipline at Crescent Heights than he had in Ontario, though Schultz says that as principal he was "authoritarian in manner and a strict disciplinarian". His love of organization persisted, and his penchant for it enhanced his reputation as "an able administrator". Crescent Height's students scored very well on departmental examinations, though some members of the school board believed that he achieved this at least partly by culling weaker students with a preliminary qualifying examination.
One way Aberhart applied his organizational prowess was in creating one of Calgary's first and largest parent–teacher associations, which had an average of two hundred parents attend each meeting; Aberhart had a generally good relationship with parents. His standing with his staff was more mixed: he had a habit of "talking down" to them, dominated the school to the point that teachers were left with little initiative, and, as Elliott and Miller put it, "never entered the staff room except to issue an order". Many of his teachers, while respecting his abilities as an administrator, thought very little of him as a man, and some believed that his domineering approach stemmed from a fear of people smarter than him. In 1919, eight Crescent Heights teachers wrote the school board requesting an investigation into Aberhart's work; the resulting inspection led to the transfer of three male teachers—with whom Aberhart had a particularly poor rapport—to other schools, and stated that persisting problems would lead to a request for Aberhart's resignation. A follow-up investigation two years later found a substantial improvement in conditions and reported favourably on Aberhart's abilities. Despite this uneven relationship, Aberhart was not all together closed-minded, and would entertain—and sometimes even be convinced by—arguments from his staff.
Besides his administrative duties, Aberhart taught English and math. True to form, in doing so he emphasized rote memorization at the expense of independent reasoning, to the point that one of his teachers once likened him to a dog trainer. He cared for his students and provided extensive extra tutoring, especially for students in whom he saw a genuine interest in learning the material. Outside of the classroom, he applied his talents to organizing picnics and games, and in 1922 organized an elected student council years before the concept became widespread in Calgary. When some students wanted the school to purchase a movie projector not provided for in the school's budget, Aberhart organized a company into which students could buy for ten cents per share; the company put on movies for which it charged admission, and at the end of its first year of operation it declared a dividend of 25 cents per share. He urged his students to adopt four axioms he followed in his own life: "be enthusiastic, be ambitious, develop a distinctive personality, [and] have a hobby and ride it hard."