After a couple of months of planning, I finally went and bought myself an Alberta Prosperity Certificate. Normally I don't go for expensive paper money, but I had to buy one to satisfy my interest in provincial history, and because these issues are unique I now have a complete collection of Albertan paper money.
If you're not familiar with the story behind the Prosperity Certificates... in 1935, William "Bible Bill" Aberhart led his Social Credit Party to a shocking victory in Alberta. This was the first victory for a Social Credit movement anywhere in the world, and the provincial election attracted international attention. "Social Credit" is a fairly obscure ideology, first developed by one Major Douglas, involving the treatment of money as a social construct. After Aberhart's death, his successor Ernest Manning purged the party of those who actually believed in Social Credit - the ideology had anti-Semitic overtones and proved to be unworkable in a provincial framework anyway.
In his efforts to implement Social Credit during the Great Depression, Aberhart issued these Prosperity Certificates, used to pay government employees and for other monetary purposes. 250,000 $1 certificates were issued. The charismatic Aberhart had drifted apart from Major Douglas, and the Certificates are more closely based on the economic theories of one Silvio Gesell.
What's immediately visible about the Certificates is the grid of stamps on the back. This idea had previously been used with some success in the Austrian town of Wörgl. Basically, the Certificates were a form of currency that discouraged hoarding without resorting to inflation - every week, you had to affix a 1-cent stamp to the back for the certificate to maintain its validity. After 104 weeks, you would be able to turn the certificate in to the government and receive a real Canadian dollar in return. The idea was that these would be monetary hot potatoes. Nobody would want to keep them, so they would circulate at great speed, benefiting everybody - this idea still exists in a chain e-mail that goes something like this:
"A person from [wealthy area] visits [poor area]. Eventually that person leaves a [valuable] tip at the bar. The bartender uses the tip to pay off his debt to his friend who did some construction work for him. The friend then buys his groceries for the week, the grocer is then able to fix his broken car, the mechanic is then able to..." and the moral of the story is that this single transaction is able to benefit an entire community. (I have seen the story told with Germany and Greece, but it is pretty clear that anybody can add their own countries to this story without changing the basic narrative.)
In reality, the stamp glue turned out to be very poor, so the stamps started to fall off. Furthermore, people would wait until the last possible moment before rushing to the store to buy a dollar's worth of things, leaving shopkeepers with piles of certificates at closing time on Friday, all of which needed new stamps applied. So, although the program generated profit for the government of Alberta, it was also highly unpopular. The government admitted defeat and accepted all the certificates early. Reportedly, all but 19,639 were redeemed, and those few thousand survivors are almost all heavily circulated.
Although some catalogs say that the value of a Certificate varies based on how many stamps are attached to the back, it is possible to find unused 1-cent stamps on the market - so Certificates with fully-stamped backsides were most likely stamped years after the program officially ended. However, I am pleased with this Certificate because it has no evidence of any missing stamps and the four stamps on it form a solid row.
Before buying it, I did some hunting... I came across a stack of three in Edmonton, but told myself that before spending more than $100 on one of these notes I would have to check Calgary as well (after all, they were printed in Calgary, so I didn't want to buy a note in Edmonton and then find out that they were much more common in Calgary). However, I didn't locate any. When I returned to Edmonton, the stack of three had grown to four... so I bought the one that was in the best condition. Because they're from the Depression and were designed to be passed through many hands, these certificates circulated very heavily, so apparently ones in XF and better go for many hundreds of dollars.
If you
are familiar with these certificates... do you think $160 was a good price for this note? It's the most I've ever spent on a single collectible item, so I've been consumed with doubt - I have to reassure myself by saying that that's only $120 American. Are these things commonly seen outside of Alberta? Are they ever in demand outside of Alberta?
Posted 08/08/2015 03:33 am
