[1] 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 to spend to stimulate the economy, by providing needed purchasing power to allow needy customers to buy from waiting businesses.

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.

[4]: 3  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.

[4]: 2  Historian Harold Schultz describes the Aberharts as "prosperous", while biographers David Elliott and Iris Miller says they "lived better than the average family".

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.

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.

[7][4]: 44 [Note 1] Elliott and Miller write that Aberhart took a less rigid approach to discipline at Crescent Heights than he had in Ontario,[4]: 44  though Schultz says that as principal he was "authoritarian in manner and a strict disciplinarian".

[5]: 187 [4]: 46  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.

[4]: 44 [5]: 187  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.

[11] 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.

"[11] Schultz states that the only area in which all 61 people he interviewed in researching Aberhart's career agreed was that he was an excellent high school teacher.

[4]: 9 While in Brantford, Aberhart studied at Zion Presbyterian church,[5]: 186  where he became interested in Biblical prophecy, which in turn led him to Dispensationalism.

[4]: 9  His views were heavily influenced by a correspondence course he took offered by American Dispensationalist Cyrus Scofield; Elliott and Miller speculate that such a course would have appealed to Aberhart by reducing "difficult theological problems to a matter of memorizing questions and answers".

He had been introduced to this system while attending a men's Bible Class at Zion Presbyterian, taught by William Nichol, an elderly physician.

[18] British Israelism had been an element of his theology from an early stage, but assumed further importance following the 1939 royal tour of Canada where he spoke with King George VI on the topic.

[19] The basis of Douglas's A+B theorem is that prices rise faster than incomes when regarded as a flow, and individuals' purchasing power should be supplemented through issuance of new credits that have not derived from the productive system.

[citation needed] Aberhart won the November 4 by-election, held prior to the first sitting of the new legislature after the general election.

[citation needed] Aberhart's government did not implement much of the Social Credit policies promised in the party's election platform, because of the province's very poor financial position in the depths of the Depression.

This, like Tommy Douglas' similar program in Saskatchewan, was later overturned in the mid-1940s by the Supreme Court, although it aided people for a number of years during and (for a short time) after the Great Depression.

Indeed, the only stricter law in Canada at the time was in Prince Edward Island, where the sale of alcohol remained completely banned until 1948.

For its leadership in the fight against the latter act, in 1938 the Edmonton Journal was awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation and bronze plaque, the first time a special citation was awarded outside the United States, while 95 other newspapers including the Calgary Herald, the Red Deer News, Lethbridge Herald and the province's weekly newspapers were recognized with engraved certificates.

By late 1937, relations with the lieutenant governor became so strained that Bowen even threatened to dismiss Aberhart's government, which would have been an extraordinary use of his reserve powers.

An analogous situation occurred in 1932 in Australia between Jack Lang and Sir Philip Game, the premier and governor, respectively, of New South Wales.

[23] Elliott (1978) argues that the Aberhart's Social Credit ideology was clearly antithetical to his previous theology, which was highly sectarian, separatist, apolitical, other-worldly, and eschatologically oriented.

Elliott reports that Aberhart's political support did not come from the sectarian groups as Mann and Irving suggest, but rather it came from the members of established churches and those with marginal religious commitment.

[5] A 1977 book edited by Lewis Herbert Thomas, traced Aberhart's role in the development of Alberta's Social Credit movement.

[25] In his 1978 article published in the Canadian Historical Review, David R. Elliot examined Aberhart's theological and political beliefs.