In the 1930s, Elon Musk's Saskatchewan Grandaddy was in the CCF with Tommy Douglas

He knew Alberta's Social Credit Premier Ernest Manning, too. And man, was he racist.

I read recently that Elon Musk’s mother was supposedly sharing election misinformation online - then remembered hearing that she was originally from Saskatchewan, Canada.

When I checked, I found I was correct, and came across this fascinating article by Joshua Benton “Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather” - Joshua N. Handelman. Handelman had been a successful chiropractor in Saskatchewan. He was involved in politics as well, with a range of political parties - the CCF, which had “social gospellers” and later became Canada’s New Democratic Party as well as Social Credit, which was seen as almost fascistic, and was certainly virulently anti-semitic.

The article is fascinating because of the unvarnised look it offers of the kinds of politics that were playing out before and during the Depression in Western Canada - especially Saskatchewan and Alberta. Benton is unaware of the colossal role the Ku Klux Klan played in Saskatchewan in the 1920s and 30s. For one thing, in the 1929 Saskatchewan Election, the KKK worked with two parties - the Conservatives and the Progressives - to topple the then-governing Liberals, and succeeded. In 1928, there were 25,000 members of the KKK in Saskatchewan, and they ultimately included Mayors, Members of the Legislative Assembly, Members of Parliament, and clergymen.

Benton notes that Haldeman only takes up a page and a half of Walter Issacson’s biography of Musk, and that his politics were described as “quirky.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.

At various times, Haldeman found himself entranced by the promises of several very different movements. The first was on the political left. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was an amalgam of various socialist, labor, and farmer groups that advocated for greater state involvement in the economy to alleviate Depression-era suffering. Haldeman was one of the federation’s strongest supporters in the mid-1930s, becoming the local party chairman for the Canadian equivalent of a congressional district.

[ Social Credit] The minor political party that Haldeman had led in Canada was notorious for anti-Semitism. In 1946, when one of the party’s newspapers printed the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—arguably the most consequential conspiracy text in the modern world—he defended the decision, arguing “that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.” A local rabbi described Haldeman’s political speeches to the local newspaper as “shot through with anti-Semitic talk.”

Haldeman replied in a series of letters to the editor in which he maintained that the Social Credit Party was not anti-Semitic—while saying some rather anti-Semitic things, including the outrageous claim that Hitler had been installed as German führer by “money … supplied by international financiers, many, but not all of them, Jewish.” He claimed that Jews created anti-Semitism to generate sympathy. And in multiple letters, Haldeman argued that whether the Protocols were fake was beside the point—the ideas they contained were true, even if they were a forgery. “The point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,” he wrote. “This should be fair warning to all of us.”

When you come across something really awful, we may think it’s one and done. But there’s a great - and much more realistic - saying: “There’s never just one cockroach.” It’s not just one person’s weird views - when, in fact, they’re part of a community that believes those views.

The one thing that appears to be an outlier is Haldeman’s support for the CCF, which is supposed to be socialist, internationalist and so on. However, it’s important to remember that the social gospellers were white British Protestant evangelical prohibitionists, who supported eugenics and generally were opposed to Catholics, Jews, Immigrants who were not British.

They are thought of as do-gooders and standing up for the downtrodden - but it’s important to remember, CCF Leaders like Woodsworth and Douglas were preachers - and that was a way for them to appear selfless and noble in politics, and be that much harder to criticize. They’re possibly the last two Christian Ministers in the world that we’re still forbidden to criticize.

Citing CCF “values” has been a way of expecting readers to take it on (protestant Christian) faith that the people who spout values of tolerance and equality actually live by them. We are supposed to take their political virtues and speeches at face value, while ignoring their record.

So, just to make it clear - the KKK’s rhetoric and actions were both poisonous and terrifying.

“The town of Biggar and environs were awash in Orange Lodge rage, Ku Klux Klan recruiting and a tangible sense of threat to the Catholic community. Crosses were burned on the lawns of Catholics across the district that spring and early summer of 1929. The Mother Superior of the sisters of the Assumption confessed her relief when fire escapes were installed on the new Catholic school outside Biggar. “We will now be less afraid of the local fanatics should they take a notion to set fire to our house,” she wrote in her journal.”

Nevertheless, this terror is minimized. One historian tries to argue that the Klan were not a threat because they were treated “as a lobby group” by M.J. Coldwell when he was a city councillor and the Klan wanted to rent a hall.

“It is evident that the Klan was not generally regarded as an outcast group or disreputable organization; rather, it was perceived as just another civic body, entitled, like any other, to use city hall for its meetings. There was no thought, except among Catholics, that the Klan should be ostracized from polite society. Alderman M.J. Coldwell (future leader of the national Co-operative Commonwealth Federation [CCF]) maintained that the hall should be available to any group provided that it respected the “decencies of language and parliamentary procedure.”

Coldwell had run in the 1927 Federal election for the Progressives, but lost, and ran for Alderman in Regina instead. By 1928 he was blaming immigrants.

“Coldwell stated that the unemployment situation was very serious in Regina and was being made worse by untrammeled immigration. He maintained the railway companies were making exorbitant profits out of “bringing people from all over Europe.”

Pitsula’s book also cites William Calderwood’s thesis, which discusses connections between the Progressives and the KKK at length:

“In the little that has been written about the Klan in Saskatchewan, the organization is depicted as the Conservative party's friend and the Liberal party 's enemy; almost nothing is written about the Progressives, the official party of opposition in the Legislature. Yet with regard to membership in the Klan, the Progressives probably ran a close second to the Conservatives. The names of some prominent Progressives appear in the Klan membership lists:

Rev. A. J. Lewis, former Progressive M. P., defeated in the 1925 election, Kligrapp of the Strasbourg Klan; Thomas Teare, a charter member of “The New National Policy Political Association,” later the Progressive party, member of the Moose Jaw Klavern; E. Jones, Secretary-Treasurer of Rosetown Progressive party organization, member of the Harris Klavern; J. W. Vandergrift, a member of the executive of the Progressive party for Maple Creek constituency, member of the Pontiex Klavern; John McCloy, a former Progressive candidate and a member of the Board of Directors of the U. F. C. (Saskatchewan Section), member of Kinistino Klavern; J. Balfour, a delegate to the Progressive Convention in January 1926, member of the Balcarres Klavern; and John Evans, another Progressive M. P., addressed a Klan rally at Saskatoon. One can assume that if some Progressive leaders were members of the Klan, then many of the rank and file would follow suit.

As the author of an “Open Letter To Premier [Jimmy] Gardiner” observed:

“Sir, you have devoted a lot of time to the Tory party and the Klan. But your speeches contain very little about the Progressive party. I know you think you killed it when you ridiculed the Regina Convention. I am afraid it did not stay dead, and I am told that since then there has been an infusion of new blood by means of the Klan whose vote you said you did not want; other parties may not despise them.”

Daniel C Grant in Manitoba

In 1928, the Klan expanded into Manitoba. Winnipeg at the time was the third largest city in Canada, and had significant Jewish as well as French, Ukrainian and Polish Catholic Communities.

The major organizer for Manitoba was “Daniel Carlyle Grant, the Moose Jaw-based Klan Kleagle, now calling himself the “Organizer for the Western Division of the Ku Klux Klan of Canada.” Grant, a shrewd and capable organizer with ““the instincts of a shark,” knew how to attract attention.”

Grant was based out of Brandon, and like other KKK organizers was getting from place to place by rail. On May 25, 1928, the Brandon Sun reported that a giant cross had been burned on the north hill of the city.

“The cross was 18 feet above the ground and had a span of 12 feet. No less than 110 tires were used in building it, and it was soaked in 80 gallons of crank case oil for some time previous, and later another 60 gallons of oil and 10 gallons of coal oil. It weighed about 2700 pounds and burned for about five hours.”

It was one of more than 150 KKK cross burnings that took place across the prairies in the late 1920s, especially on the “Empire Day” long weekend in May, now renamed Victoria Day.

“On Empire Day (24 May 1928) a cross was burned just outside the Kerrobert town limits.” That same night, crosses were burned in communities all across Saskatchewan. One of the largest gatherings was near Melfort, where the crowd was estimated at between seven and eight thousand people. Over twelve hundred automobiles were parked around the platform.

Klan organizer R.C. Snelgrove gave an address, which garnered much applause. He said that Klan demonstrations were being held that day at 161 different locations in Saskatchewan, including Regina, where, he said, a crowd of between thirty and forty thousand people was expected to attend the cross burning. (According to press reports, the number was only fifteen hundred. The cross was twenty-four metres high, and a steam tractor was required to elevate it.)”

As a KKK organizer, Grant had had some success in Manitoba – about 2,000 members, which was nothing like the 25,000 Klan members in Saskatchewan. At meetings, he used racist epithets for Blacks, Asians, Jews, and Catholics.

The Manitoba Historical Society’s website has an entire page dedicated to Grant’s efforts to organize the Klan in Manitoba. Grant had his first meeting in Winnipeg just a few days after the long weekend cross-burning in Brandon, on June 1, 1928, at the Royal Templars’ Hall at 360 Young Street.

“In this meeting, his attack on Roman Catholics and Jews set the pattern for his future Winnipeg campaign. In his speech, Grant informed his audience that the Roman Catholic Church controlled the Dominion and that the Jews had crucified the Son of God. Shortly after this meeting, Grant returned to Saskatchewan believing that the Klan could take hold in Winnipeg.

By autumn 1928, Grant was back in Manitoba once again, basing himself in Brandon. Grant, now calling himself the Manitoba Organizer of the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, plotted the Klan invasion of Winnipeg. In October, Grant shifted his activities to Winnipeg and set himself up at the Marlborough Hotel on Smith Street just north of Portage Avenue. He was joined by Charles H. Puckering and Andrew Wright, a local Klansman. The trio soon made their plans of action for their Winnipeg campaign.”

On October 16, 1928, at the Norman Dance Hall on Sherbrook in Winnipeg, Grant told an audience of 150 that:

“The Klan strove for “racial purity. We fight against intermarrying of Negroes and whites, Japs and White, Chinese and Whites. This intermarriage is a menace to the world. If I am walking down the street and a Negro doesn’t give me half the sidewalk, I know what to do.” He then lashed out at the Jews and said that “The Jews are too powerful ... they are the slave masters who are throttling the throats of white persons to enrich themselves.” Grant claimed that the federal Liberal government was allowing the “scum of Papist Europe to flood the country and refuse to allow immigrants into the country who are not Roman Catholic ...” 

Grant said he was going to go to St. Boniface, the city’s largely Catholic French quarter next.

“Reaction to Grant’s statements came immediately. The Priest in charge of St. Boniface Cathedral, Monseigneur Wilfred Jubinville, accused Grant of being a coward, and warned him to stay out of St. Boniface. The priest stated that the Roman Catholic Church would fight the Klan to the full extent of its power. Monseigneur Jubinville summed up the Klan’s activities in Winnipeg as a “scheme to raise a little ‘easy money’.”

St. Boniface police chief Thomas Gagnon stated that, “There is nothing in St. Boniface to attract the Klan,” and furthermore, he denied that the city “was held in a grip of vice.” Police chief Gagnon went on to say that if the Klan “raided” St. Boniface, drastic police action would be taken.”

Winnipeg mayor Daniel McLean, a businessman and distinguished soldier who was Colonel-in-command of the Canadian 101st Battalion in France, 1916–1918, dismissed all the Klan’s charges and noted that “when outsiders come into Winnipeg and criticize as these people have done, we simply pay no attention to their remarks.”

After a rough go of it in Winnipeg, Grant ended up returning to Saskatchewan, where he was an organizer and sometime driver and bodyguard for J. J. Maloney, a Catholic-turned-Klansman who headed up the Saskatchewan KKK, who spread hate with all the enthusiasm of a convert during the 1929 election. (Maloney later set up shop in Alberta).

Anthony Appleblatt writes that under the two leaders of the Saskatchewan KKK, Hawkins and Maloney,

“the Klan became violently anti-Catholic and stirred up old prejudices and hatreds… During 1928 three issues came to the fore: crucifixes on public school walls, nuns teaching in public schools, and the teaching of French in public schools. The Liberal party led by James Gardiner continued their traditional policy of defending separate school privileges and maintaining the minimum amount of French permitted by the law.”

“Grant withdrew from Manitoba and returned to Saskatchewan where he campaigned for the Klan against Premier James Gardiner and the Liberal Party in the 1929 provincial election.

After the Anderson Conservative Party victory, Grant was given a job in charge of the Weyburn Employment Bureau. Soon after the Liberal Party’s return to power in 1934, Grant was sacked from his job.”

Grant would emerge again to play a pivotal role in the Federal Election campaign of 1935, when he “came into prominence once again as one of Tommy Douglas’ Co-operative Commonwealth Federation campaign workers in the federal election of that year.”

The Saskatchewan Election of 1929

in 1929, the Liberal Government in Saskatchewan was defeated, and Conservatives elected, because of the Saskatchewan KKK. The KKK’s leaders were present at the Conservative convention when members chose their new leader, Dr. J. M. Anderson.

“The Conservative party provincial convention was held in Saskatoon on March 15 and 16, 1928. A total of three hundred and four delegates were present, averaging five for each of the sixty-three constituencies in the province. At this convention the Conservatives and the Ku Klux Klan had managed to find each other. Dr. Rosborough, the Imperial Wizard, Mr. Ellis of Regina, the Klan Kligrapp (secretary) and Dr. Hawkins were all present at the convention. Dr. Hawkins was an observer, the other two were delegates, and Klan literature was available at the door and inside the convention hall.

The convention elected the M.L.A. for Saskatoon, Dr. J.M. Anderson, leader of the provincial party.”

The Conservatives and the Klan were not the only two parties who were teaming up. As Calderwood writes,

“Progressive-Conservative collaboration began officially at the time of the Conservative Convention at Saskatoon in March, 1928.

Before the Convention closed, it received the following cable from Dr. Tran, the Progressive leader in the legislature:

“Heartily concur in the spirit of your deliberation. Gladly accept any democratic principle re co-operation.”

Behind this cable lay secret negotiations conducted on March 4th between Dr. Anderson, J. F. Bryant, and Howard McConnell and Progressive members of the Saskatchewan Legislature and the Provincial Progressive Committee.

The negotiations were planned “with a view to arriving at some compromise” by which they could conduct the next election.

The following compromise was reached at the meeting: the Conservatives would run a Conservative candidate in certain constituencies (about fifty per cent) and have the Progressives run a candidate in each of the other constituencies where the Progressives were the strongest.

If in any constituency neither the Progressives nor Conservatives would accept any suggestions from the Central Committee, then an open convention would be called of all opposing the Government and the strongest man get the nomination.

A resolution embodying this compromise was to be brought before the Conservative Convention.

If the motion passed, then Progressive members of the Legislature were to be contacted by telegram to determine whether they would support a co-operative government if the Liberals were defeated, replies were to be read to the Convention. The Liberals were shocked that the “liberal” Progressives would even think of an alliance with the “reactionary” Conservatives.”

Calderwood goes on to suggest that the Progressives were more willing to work with “co-operative” Conservatives in government than un-cooperative Liberals – but doesn’t mention eugenics, which was a common “concern”.

In the 1929 Saskatchewan Election, future National CCF Leader M. J. Coldwell supported the Progressives, whose platform against the Liberals, and Catholics, was even more like the Klan’s than the Conservatives.

“On the other pet themes of the Klan lecturers - immigration, education, and the influence of the Quebec hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church - the Progressives were in complete agreement. This is best illustrated by the Progressive platform of 1929… When the same planks in each platform are compared … the wording of the Progressive planks were more emotionally tinged than the Conservative.

The Conservative plank on immigration, for example, was “Aggressive immigration policy based on the selective principle”; while the Progressive counterpart was “An Immigration policy which will insure the permanency of British Institutions and Ideals.”

On the education issue, the Conservatives requested a “Thorough revision of the educational system of the province;” the Progressives desired the “Freedom of our public schools from sectarian influence, with increased emphasis on moral training.

The Progressives also shared the Klan's suspicions of Quebec.” (Calderwood, 234-35)

In effect, Pitsula is allowing Coldwell to “play dumb” about not knowing about official Klan involvement either in the Conservative Party, or his own party, the Progressives.

John Diefenbaker was a Conservative candidate for MLA in Prince Albert in the 1929 election and was accused of being a member of the Klan. Diefenbaker refused to answer directly. However, his campaign made it clear where he stood:

“The day before the election, the Conservatives ran an ad in a Prince Albert newspaper, declaring “A vote for a Gardiner candidate will ensure a continuation of indiscriminate dumping of immigrants into Saskatchewan with resulting workless days and lower wages for you.”

There was a clear overlap between the leaders and followers of the CCF, the KKK, Orangemen, Conservatives, Social Credit, Farmers and labour. They were almost all white British or American protestants, some of whom were religious zealots - who opposed non-British or American immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and Quebec and who all supported eugenics because they believed themselves to be superior.

The condition of the Progressives supporting the Conservatives was that they call an inquiry into alleged Liberal patronage at the Weyburn Mental Hospital.

It’s worth saying, briefly that despite Weyburn being a “small town” the Weyburn Mental Hospital was not just the local hospital with a ward for mental patients. When it was built and opened in 1921, the Weyburn Mental Hospital was the single largest building ever built to date in the British Empire.

Not just the largest building in Saskatchewan, or Canada, or North America. The largest building in In the British Empire.

“The Progressive Party, with which Coldwell was then allied, threw its support to the Conservatives, which along with that of the independents enabled Anderson to take over the government.

The price of Progressive support was a commitment by Anderson that a royal commission would be established to investigate the relationship of the civil servants with the Liberal Party machine. Anderson also gave his assurance that none of the government’s employees would be fired while the inquiry was proceeding. Coldwell was appointed chairman of the commission.”

To repeat: the price of Progressive support was for the Conservatives to call an inquiry into the Liberals, and M. J. Coldwell was appointed chairman.

In Martin Robin's Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada 1920-1940 he cites a truly chilling passage:

“Klan membership lists were filled with the names of Tory supporters, and their meetings attended and harangued by party activists. According to Dr Walter D. Cowan, the Klan treasurer, Regina Conservative elected for Long Lake to the House of Commons in the general election of 1930, and columnist for the Regina Standard, the Klan was 'the most complete political organization ever known' in the West. 'Every organizer in it is a Tory,' he wrote R.B. Bennett. 'It cost over a thousand dollars a week to pay them. I know it for I pay them. And I never pay a Grit. Smile when you hear anything about this organization and keep silent.”

Coldwell maintained he had seen no concrete proof of connections between Conservatives and the Klan until after the election. That is despite his having witnessed events like this:

“Coldwell himself recalled being introduced to [Dr. John H.] Hawkins at the Kitchener Hotel during the 1929 election campaign. He was leaving a radio studio in the hotel when [Conservative Leader J. T. M.] Anderson and Hawkins were coming in, and after the introduction they chatted about the campaign for a while. It was only later that Coldwell learned that Hawkins was the Imperial Wizard of the Klan.”

According to Pitsula, hard proof of Conservative - Klan collusion was only confirmed later, in the form of a membership list that came to light as a side-effect of Coldwell’s inquiry.

“Two employees were fired and the wife of one appealed to Coldwell to get her husband's job back. He had, she said, joined the Ku Klux Klan on instructions from the government to provide it with inside information. She gave Coldwell a complete membership list of the Regina organization.

“I was astounded at the number of highly placed Conservatives who were on that list,” Coldwell said, adding that he had destroyed the list when he left Regina for Ottawa twenty years later.”

You would think that the Leader of the CCF might want to leverage that list by shining a light on it. Nope.

The phenomenon of the KKK in Saskatchewan is portrayed as a sudden storm that blew up and disappeared, when their ideas were being mainstreamed into government. The odious political views shared by most political parties in Saskatchewan and Alberta in the 1930s are being portrayed as a temporary aberration, when they were held for years or decades and KKK organizers tipped the balance in provincial and individual federal election campaigns in Saskatchewan in 1929, 1930 and 1935.

It's also important to get our history straight: the KKK’s popularity in Saskatchewan happened before the Great Depression. After the market crash of 1929, the soaring price of wheat – the major basis of prosperity in Saskatchewan and Alberta – collapsed. During the Depression, Canada had one of the worst economic collapses of any country in the world, and in Western Canada it was worst of all. There was unemployment of up to 75% in some towns.

“The Great Depression wrought great economic hardship throughout the world, but few places suffered so sharp a decline in income or required so much government assistance to survive as the Canadian prairie provinces. From 1928 to 1932 Canada's agricultural economy declined 68 per cent while the Prairies ' declined 92 per cent. In Alberta the average per capita income in 1928-29 was $548 ; in 1933 it decreased by 61 per cent to$ 212. The Canadian average per capita decrease during the same period was 48 per cent.”

It is no secret that financial crashes and the mania that precedes them radicalize people. The idea that people were driven to extreme politics and beliefs by the Depression has to be challenged – the extremism preceded the crash. Again, the KKK’s involvement in the Saskatchewan 1929 election pre-dated the crash. So did Alberta’s passage of sterilization laws in 1928, which stayed on the books until the 1970s. Over 2,000 people were sterilized.

Prohibition & The Law

Another “shared interest” leading to accusations of corruption was alcohol and prohibition. Because of the truly shocking levels of drinking that were happening before prohibition, the issue of prohibition created common ground with “progressives” including women’s rights advocates, the Ku Klux Klan, and many Protestant churches who were concerned about drunkenness, prostitution, pregnancy, disease and violence against women.

When it came to who was being blamed, there was an element of bigotry:

“The fight to keep Canada dry was related to the fight to keep Canada British since foreigners and Catholics were portrayed as the primary culprits of the liquor traffic. It was noted that Jews, such as the Bronfmans, were prominent bootleggers, and press reports of drunkenness, and the mayhem that went with it, regularly featured persons with foreign-sounding names. St. Peter’s Messenger, a Catholic newspaper, reported: “The leaders of the prohibition league are ... filled with a virulent hatred of the Roman Catholic church and all that belongs to it.”

Pitsula writes:

“Part of the Klan’s organizing techniques was to approach Protestant ministers and enlist their support, which many were happy to give since the Klan’s concerns about crime and vice mirrored their own…

William Calderwood identified twenty-six Protestant ministers in Saskatchewan who belonged to the Klan or who were directly involved in it. They included 13 United Church ministers, 4 Baptist, 4, Anglican, 3 presbyterian, 1 Lutheran and 1 Pentecostal. They were attracted to the Klan not only became it was anti-Catholic but because of its stand on moral reform … reverend W. Titley of Imperial, maintained that the Klan existed to defend Protestant rights and truths, and he urged “every true Protestant to support it.” Baptist Ministers T.J. Hind and William Surman, both active in the Klan, were elected, respectively president and secretary of the Baptist Convention in Saskatchewan. In 1930, three members of the Klan were appointed to the Social Services Committee of the Assiniboia Presbytery of the United Church.”

He continues:

“In the United States it is estimated that as many as 40,000 fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan… Many clergymen drawn to the Klan in Saskatchewan were frustrated by the Gardiner’ government’s failure to properly enforce the prohibition laws. This was a charge echoed by the Anderson Conservatives, which forged yet another link between moral crusaders and the anti-Liberal forces in the province.”

Here, Pitsula is making a mistake - quite a significant one - when he suggests that clergy were being driven to the Klan because the Gardiner government didn’t enforce prohibition. That is because prohibition ended in Saskatchewan in July 1924, five years before the 1929 election, in fact before Gardiner was Premier at all.

During that time, making and selling alcohol in Saskatchewan was legal. It was even legal to export that alcohol to the U.S. Harry Bronfman’s US customers were living under prohibition – not him.

The Klan and the clergy may have been frustrated about the Liberals’ stance on prohibition, but not by a lack of enforcement of laws that no longer existed.

Dan C Grant & Tommy Douglas

“Daniel Carlyle Grant, the Klan worker rewarded by the Conservative Saskatchewan government in 1929 with a job in Weyburn, did not fare well as the Depression hit its depth. The new Liberal government fired him in 1934. Grant wanted revenge, and he sought it by working for Tommy Douglas, the firebrand candidate representing the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a political formation that found Klan ideals abhorrent.”

Tommy Douglas, the “Greatest Canadian,” the “Father of Medicare” the first CCF Premier, was elected to parliament for the first time with the help of Daniel Carlyle Grant, the chief organizer for Western Canada for the Ku Klux Klan. This was completely ignored in the film “Prairie Giant” which cast Liberal Jimmy Gardiner as the villain. Gardiner was portrayed as a drinker (he was a teetotaler) and as a gangster, and falsely portrayed him having police fire machine guns at striking workers, and delivering an anti-immigrant speech, none of which was true. The Premier who was actually in charge when workers was shot was Conservative.

From today’s perspective, there was always an uncomfortable overlap in shared values between many “Progressives,” CCF-type social gospellers, and the Ku Klux Klan. They were white, Anglo-Saxon protestants who could agree on multiple fronts: they all supported votes for women, eugenics and forced sterilization, and prohibition. They all opposed “vice” and the people they considered to be inferior that they blamed for it - Catholics, (whether French, Polish, Ukrainian or other), Jews, immigrants, alcohol - and the only political party they associated with them - Liberals.

The fact that Grant was a KKK organizer is freely conceded in a 1974 biography of Douglas Tommy Douglas, by Doris Shackleton. Shackleton was

“was active in the CCF youth movement in the province and she worked as a teacher before moving in 1945 to Ottawa. There, she worked as a freelance journalist, then as an editor for the Department of Labour, as a journalist for the CBC, and, in 1971, as public relations assistant to the NDP caucus.”

The context here being that this is a person writing the friendliest possible take.

“[Tommy Douglas] took into his entourage a colourful fellow named Dan Grant, who enlivened the campaign and taught Douglas a great deal. Grant was dapper in appearance, with a little bowler hat and high collar, He was a fountain of ideas, all of them attention-grabbers. It was before the days of “PR”, but Grant had nothing to learn in that department. He had done some organizing for the Ku Klux Klan during the crazy days of its conflagration in Saskatchewan. When that passed he got a job with the Anderson government in charge of the Weyburn labour or employment bureau. When Gardiner beat Anderson, Grant was fired. Unemployed in 1935, he asked Douglas if he could drive for him in the campaign, and Douglas accepted the offer. Undoubtedly Douglas profited by the arrangement, though he always regarded Grant as amusing, but not very “deep”.

Talking about the KKK in terms of the “Crazy days of its conflagration” its both dismissive, and a mistake - conflagration means a huge and destructive fire. It acts as if it was a brief period of madness, when it was “the most complete political organization in the West.”

By contrast, in “The Making of a Socialist” Douglas speaks at length about the campaign, about Grant and his impact, but never mentions the link to the KKK, even when pressed about Grant’s background. The book is a series of transcribed interviews conducted in 1958 with political journalist Chris Higginbotham.

“[Higginbotham] “Where did your friend Mr. Grant come from?

[Douglas:] He had been in Weyburn. Prior to becoming unemployed he was in charge of the Labour Bureau for the Anderson administration.

The provincial government kept a labour office, then after the Liberals came in, in 1934, he was dismissed and without a job.

Did you know anything about his background?

Very little. When he had been in the provincial labour office in Weyburn, I used to have quite healthy battles with him over relief schedules and things of that sort. But it wasn't until the election that I got to know him quite well, and grew to be very fond of him.”

For many reasons, it is difficult to believe that Douglas was unaware of the KKK association - especially given the fact that it was openly disclosed in Shackleton’s 1974 book Tommy Douglas, published when Douglas was still alive.

Grant helped Douglas in every way: he was a fundraiser for his campaign, taking donations through a lottery for a campaign car that could be used during the campaign, then awarded at the end. He gave Douglas communications advice - taught him how to focus on “wedge issues,” created pamphlets and taught Douglas not to use “academic” speeches but to tell funny stories.

This technique was drawn right from the Klan campaign playbook. As historian James Pitsula wrote:

“The Klan offered a populist type of British Protestant nationalism, such as the Orange Lodge did not provide. The Klan went out to the people. It held public meetings and sent out charismatic lecturers, almost in the style of evangelical preachers. It created drama and excitement with a hint of romance and danger. Crosses burned on dark hillsides, fiery spectacles visible for kilometres around. There was something darkly primitive about the Klan, and yet it also had a comic side. Klan lecturers told funny stories and used humour as a weapon. A Klan rally was entertaining, vulgar but not boring.”

As Shackleton described it, Douglas had “discovered political shorthand,” but the way in which the story is presented is doubly dishonest and deceptive. She writes:

“You cannot explain at length to thousands of people. You cannot tell them in detail how the Liberals, as he believed, were restricting the economy instead of expanding it to meet the challenge of the depression. One significant statement had to say it all.

He would be accused of being simplistic. He mastered the art of finding the one exciting circumstance that immediately transfers a whole body of fact.

He learned in 1935 that drama belongs in politics, that it is a political crime to be dull. He had been a fervent and compelling preacher, and he had been a skilled entertainer. He put the two parts together.

“I began telling jokes,” Douglas said, “because those people needed entertainment. They looked so tired and frustrated and weary. The women particularly. They had all the back-breaking work to do. So I used to tell the jokes to cheer them up.”

“And when they're laughing they're listening.”

The first misleading statement is subtle, because saying that Douglas “had discovered political shorthand” shifts responsibility for learning these campaign techniques away from Grant, and makes it seem as if Douglas developed them himself. Grant, after all, had seen and used campaign techniques of the Klan up close and first hand – both as a recruiter himself and as a bodyguard and organizer for KKK’s leader J. J. Maloney.

The other misleading statement is a significant error in fact and history: when Shackleton says, “the Liberals, as he believed, were restricting the economy instead of expanding it to meet the challenge of the Depression,” is untrue for the simple reason that the Liberals were not in power.

In the 1935 election, the incumbent government of Canada was Conservative, not Liberal. The Prime Minister was R. B. Bennett. The Liberals, led by Mackenzie King, were the opposition, seeking to defeat the Conservatives, which they did.

When you consider who Douglas and Shackelton reflexively see as allies and opponents in the 1935 campaign, it is revealing. The party that had been running Canada for the first years of the Depression were the Conservatives. But Shackleton has Douglas blaming the Liberals. Douglas and his campaign aren’t modern-day progressives aligning with Liberals against conservatives – they are anti-Liberal, and aligning themselves with everyone else who was, too.

For Douglas and the CCF, this is a regular pattern. In the 1938 provincial election in Saskatchewan, the opposition parties were despairing at the possibility of another Liberal victory. Douglas, in The Making of a Socialist, says:

The “provincial election in 1938 … That was a terrible schemozzle from our standpoint. George Williams got the idea that the government would be almost impossible to defeat, and that to prevent the C.C.F. from being annihilated, he should enter into an arrangement with the Conservatives and the Social Crediters to saw off seats. The result was that we only ran thirty-one candidates.”

This is an interesting comment from Douglas, because the strategy is exactly the deal that the Progressives (and Douglas’ ally, M. J. Coldwell) had used effectively to get into a Coalition with the Conservatives in 1929. However, it’s also clear that Douglas has an axe to grind – because Williams tried to get Douglas removed as a candidate in the election he had won in 1935.

That’s because not only did Douglas have a KKK organizer as a driver, fundraiser, advisor, and organizer in Grant, Grant successfully secured an endorsement from Bible Bill Aberhart, the recently elected far-right Social Credit Premier of Alberta.

The endorsement from a Premier of a party some saw as fascist nearly got Douglas fired as a candidate, but may have also won him the election.

Social Credit was seen as a hard core ultra-right party. Aberhart was a radio preacher and evangelical who had worked with the United Farmers of Alberta before coming across some Social Credit theories of guaranteed income. There were a couple of problems with the whole scheme. One was that social credit as a movement was undermined by the antisemitic conspiracy theories of its proponent, Major Douglas. Another was that for the scheme to work, it would have to be legal for the province of Alberta to print its own money, which it is not. That did not stop Aberhart from trying.

Aberhart was dragged into Tommy Douglas’ 1935 campaign for MP in Saskatchewan, because there had been a rumour that the Liberals were going to pay a phony Social Credit candidate to run to split the vote. Grant took the news to Aberhart, who was appearing in Regina. Aberhart agreed that if the candidate was fake, he would denounce them and endorse Douglas instead.

Aberhart’s endorsement caused a split in the CCF party, with farmers and labour calling for the CCF to cut ties with any candidate who was endorsed by Social Credit. One CCF candidate, Jacob Benson of Yorkton, “lost his farmer-labour credentials.”

Tommy Douglas was spared by M.J. Coldwell, who was now the CCF Party President in Saskatchewan, and was also running as a candidate for MP. Here is Douglas telling the story himself in The Making of a Socialist.

“[Daniel C Grant] said, “I'm going to talk to Aberhart.” So off he went. He told Aberhart that if the Social Credit wanted to run a candidate against me, that was their business and their privilege, but that he did object to the Social Credit party allowing its name to be used by the Liberal dummy candidate.

Aberhart got quite indignant, said he certainly wouldn't stand for this, and asked, “Would Douglas run as Social Credit?” Grant said, “Certainly not.” Then he said,

“Are there any Social Crediters there at all?” Grant said. “There may be some, I think we could find them.”

“Well,” said Aberhart, “would the Social Credit people there endorse this candidate? Because if they will, I will denounce this Liberal stooge as a fake.”

So Grant came back to the Weyburn constituency and rounded up twenty or thirty people who proceeded to hold a Social Credit convention, at which they said there wasn't any Social Credit candidate running, and that they had written authority from Mr. Aberhart to say that the alleged Social Credit candidate wasn't Social Credit at all, but was being financed by the Liberal party. They called on any Social Crediters in the constituency to support me. This was published and played up by the press that I was running as the C.C.F. Social Credit candidate.

But at no time was I ever in any way associated with the Social Credit party, except that I did accept their endorsement and their C.C.F politician support, although there weren't actually many Social Crediters in the constituency.”

Shackleton’s book Tommy Douglas tells a slightly different story.

She makes it clear that the Social Credit meeting to denounce the phony candidate was a sham – the “Social Credit convention” was “packed, it was said, with CCFers” who repudiated the Social Credit candidate and endorsed Douglas instead. In today’s terms, this would be “astroturfing” – completely hijacking an organization to create the false impression of grassroots support.

What’s more, while Douglas says in 1958 that he did accept the Social Credit endorsement, Shackleton says he didn’t – and that is what saved him from being removed as a candidate.

“Douglas never acknowledged the endorsation, and this saved his skin when George Williams got the provincial Farmer-Labour executive to agree to disown any candidates who had entered into an alliance with the monetary reformers from the next province. One CF candidate, Jacob Benson, nominated in Yorkton, lost his Farmer-Labour credentials for this reason. Williams, hearing of the Weyburn situation, wanted M. J. Coldwell as provincial president to issue a statement also repudiating Douglas. Coldwell refused to do so.”

Douglas won by less than 300 votes and went to Ottawa. Later, as he mentioned, he blamed George Williams for the 1938 election loss– the CCFer who wanted Douglas fired as a candidate for taking a Social Credit endorsement. The Social Credit connection had deeper roots.

From “The Making of a Socialist”

The way I heard, while the meeting was called a Social Credit nominating meeting, there weren't any Social Crediters there and they nominated you as their candidate.

No, they didn't nominate me, they simply endorsed my nomination. Their resolution said that since they were not running a candidate, they would endorse my nomination and call on the people of the constituency to support me.

From that time on there was quite a lot of perturbation among the C.C.F. hierarchy, because at least one newspaper reported that you were in serious trouble from your ties with the Social Credit party. I presume they didn't know the story at all.

That's right, they didn't know the story. In those days we had no central organization. Every candidate ran on his own. We had little or no money for organizers or expense money to call candidates in to candidate schools. So, it was a matter of every man for himself, and Mr. George Williams, who at that time was leader of the opposition in the Saskatchewan Legislature, became very much perturbed about these reports that I was running as a C.C.F.-Social Credit candidate, and at one time he wanted the executive to expel me.

Mr. Coldwell, who was still provincial president and provincial leader of the C.C.F., would have no part of it until he heard my side of the story. When the election was over, and I laid all the facts before them, the copies of the resolution, and the other data, the whole matter was dropped.

That's haunted you, though, hasn't it?

Oh, yes.

I suppose that many people in Saskatchewan never really got the true story.

I'm sure most of them didn't know it.”

Douglas’ saw Social Credit as potential allies, even when some considered it to be fascist.

“The confusion over Social Credit as a kindred or a hostile doctrine lingered for a few years - probably until John Blackmore began antisemitic barrages in the name of Social Credit. In the beginning, several Alberta CCF members including William Irvine had been instrumental in bringing Major Douglas, head of Social Credit in England, to speak in Canada. Monetary reform was a strong mutual concern. But Woodsworth denounced Social Credit as one more capitalist party and Coldwell, at least at a later date, saw fascist elements in it. Douglas took a softer approach.

In a letter to Coldwell in 1936 he said:

‘I cannot altogether agree with your expressed strategy in dealing with the Social Credit forces. My experience throughout this province is that while there is a general admission that Aberhart is bound to fail, there is a feeling on the part of those who supported him that they want some place to go. The last place they are likely to go is to the people who have held them up to ridicule .. when those who have supported Social Credit come to realize its inherent weakness they will find a more comfortable home in the ranks of the CCF.’”

Douglas’ prediction of the collapse of the Social Credit Party took a lot longer than he might have expected. The Social Credit Party in Alberta stayed in power for 36 consecutive years, until 1971, one of the longest unbroken runs in government at the provincial level in Canada.

Radicals & the Politics of Disgust

This gives you a better idea of the historical and political context that Elon Musk’s prosperous, political, Canadian grandfather Joshua Handelman was living and working in.

In a province where the KKK had elected the two parties that formed government - the conservatives and the progressives, which later merged to become the Progressive Conservative Party, which has governed Canada and regularly governed in every province in Canada except Quebec and BC.

The extremism of those parties in the past exposes the extremist roots of some of these parties today. It’s been said that for a decade in Saskatchewan you couldn’t get elected without the KKK.

What we’re seeing in today’s politics is a straight reversion to the KKK playbook.

As Lonnie Jackson, mayor of Central City, Kentucky in 1923 said.

“The Ku Klux Klan comes wrapped in the American flag, as it were, advocating the American principles openly, with a Bible in its hand, and the very next day they are passing their neighbors with a mask over their faces. My conception of the fundamental principles of Americanism is that a man should have nothing to be ashamed of.”

This is all done in the pretense of purity and cleanliness on the one hand vs contamination and filth on the other, which is happening again today.

The fact that they are transgressive drive their appeal to followers and fear from those they target.

Disgust is weaponized, because disgust is the easiest feeling to evoke, and it makes people more conservative. That was the finding of this amazing Ted Talk by Dave Pizarro; that the experience of disgust affects our sense of morality as well as our political judgment.

These feelings of disgust and horror are usually directed at “others”. The conspiracy theories. Taking about blood purity, and violence. Anything to do with sex. Claiming that children are going to be corrupted in schools. Lies about murdering babies. Claiming people are eating pets. Demonizing and hatemongering against immigrants, and continually accusing people of crimes against children, the vulnerable, dismemberment that are disgusting.

We are vulnerable to this emotional pressure because our instinct, quite literally, is better to be wrong and safe than sorry and dead.

There is a critical point to make here - which is the confusion of disgust and morality. There are things that are immoral that are disgusting - they are repulsive, revolting crimes. However, there are a lot of things that are disgusting, including basic bodily functions, that are not inherently immoral or criminal.

There is a paradox here - that the greatest intensity of emotion may be tied to ideas that are simple and pure that are certain in a way that reality never can be because they cannot be assailed.

The power of these ideas is that they are impervious to challenge by evidence or reason. This allows for a pure intensity of feeling which elevates people above others and gives them a sense of higher mission and purpose, at a time when they feel downtrodden - and have suffered genuine losses.

It also sets up the believer as someone who is pure and perfectly moral, no matter what they do or say. They have defined themselves as good, and others as bad.

It has to be said that within the Christian context, there are two very different interpretations. There is one important difference in belief between these radical protestants and the Catholic Church, which the protestant churches and the KKK in particular generally despised. For Catholics, the hypocrisy and the sin of pride are supposed to be among the worst moral transgressions. Hypocrisy specifically means that you are holding others to a standard that you do not apply to yourself, including standards of justice - it’s related to the sin of pride, the sin that drove Lucifer himself to resist God.

These ideas are more than religious - they are ideas that are important to be able to ascertain truth about the world - with humility, not pride,

There is a reason why, in the Bible, there are many warnings against ‘False prophets” and why there are laws against swindlers and fraud.

“I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people” (Romans 16:17-18).

If the hood fits -

The puzzlement people experience when they hear that Elon Musk’s radical Saskatchewan Grandfather was part of a supposedly progressive movement in the 1930s is based on the propaganda and re-writing of Canada’s history after the fact.

In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the political culture of Western Canada was being forged and new political parties came into being that are now national parties, and parties that have governed provinces for decades - Conservatives, Progressive Conservatives, the CCF, the NDP and Social Credit.

KKK organizers were involved in electing Members of Parliament for the CCF and Conservatives, as well as at the provincial level, and none of these parties want their electoral triumphs to be associated with the Ku Klux Klan.

In the 1930s, Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett was told that the KKK had elected some of his MPs. In 1929, future Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was a candidate when the KKK was openly collaborating to elect his party. M.J. Coldwell, who was a National Leader of the CCF, was a Progressive when that party was also collaborating with the KKK in the 1929 election. CCF Premier and first National Leader of the NDP, Tommy Douglas, was first elected MP with support from the Dan C Grant, KKK organizer for Western Canada, and an endorsement from the Social Credit Premier of Alberta.

Unsurprisingly, this history is not featured in official biographies, and it is absent from many freely-available sources on the Internet - despite being a history that puts the “western alienation” of Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. in a starkly different social and political context.

Anti-semitic conpiracy theories about finance; a hatred of Immigrants, Jews, Catholics, French, Quebec; pseudo-scientific theories around medicine, race. Conspiracies about being controlled by “globalists” - Jews and the Catholic Church - which have now been replaced with the WEF and the U.N.

These are all being invoked today in so-called “dog whistles” but the idea they are appealing to are not “new”. In Saskatchewan, they were foundational to the success of Canada’s parties of the left and right.

Some people have compared this year to 1929 when they talk about a potential collapse in the stock market. What it’s really similar to is the election in Saskatchewan in 1929.

People make the mistake of thinking that extremism followed the market crash: it preceded it, as a symptom of an economic system that is starting crumble, but the rot is concealed by - and caused by - speculation in soaring stock and real estate markets.

The 1920s was like the last ten years. To stimulate the economy, Mellon, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, pushed down interest rates for years of “easy money” - big loans with low interest rates driving an economy with lots of debt, huge, high-risk bets with massive losses for most and massive gains for a few. When it all fell apart with the Wall Street crash and a global financial crisis in 1929, Mellon and others recommended “liquidating” the economy to start fresh.

Responding to Need, Not Rhetoric

The question is how to respond to all of this. The dynamic is mutually polarizing: when attacked, people defend, and the result is escalating conflict.

These ideas find fertile ground because it allows people to find a simple (and wrong) explanation for why they are suffering.

The economy has left people feeling disempowered.

Mark Blyth has noted that support for radical politics of the left and right - for Donald Trump and his Trumpettes around the world - is strongly associated with the following economic changes.

• “incredibly strongly with areas that have been exposed to Chinese import competition.” Areas that are exposed to competition from China in trade or services have very, very high support.  

• "With health inequalities. If you are poor and unhealthy you are more likely to vote for a right wing party - and a left-wing party.”

• Incredibly well with “Job insecurity - it’s not the fact that you are being paid less and less, it’s that you have no control.”

This lack of control is being driven by economic insecurity and people’s lack of control is directly related to their lack of money.

This year is like 1929, both in terms of its radical politics, as well as the risk of a serious market event, because of the way central banks have been messing with interest rates and trying to fight inflation with higher interest rates when private debt is already at an all-time high? In the 1970s and early 80s, when Paul Volcker hiked interest rates to 20%, household and government debt was low.

Central bank interest manipulations without fiscal relief are driving voters into the arms of radicale.

When people consider what the response to this must be, it tends to be focused on escalation. The economic and political answer must be to respond to people’s real needs, which is absolutely within the capacity of governments to do - and that means relief & empowerment. That is why austerity is doomed to failure, and why re-investment and giving people more control over their lives is an essential solution. That, ultimately, is why the New Deal worked (slowly) as a response to the Depression, while austerity failed.

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