University of Montana journalism professor Clem Work was working on research for “Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West” before and after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. After Sept. 11, 2001, Work began to see parallels between that time and the World War I years - so much so that sometimes the hair stood up on the back of his neck, he said.
The sloganizing, demonization of the enemy, the public rhetoric and general atmosphere of fear and hysteria after the attacks recalled the days in Montana that incited a mob in Lewistown to burn German textbooks in a bonfire on Main Street.
After 1917, when the United States went to war, 41 Montanans went to prison for criticizing the war effort. They drew prison terms up to 20 years and fines up to $20,000. Eighty people were convicted, and 150 people were charged.
“We don't even know how many were arrested,” Work said.
Montana newspapers were no help.
The Anaconda Standard, one of the best papers of the time, wrote in an editorial, “When it comes to a question of liberty and patriotism, let liberty go by the board.”
That same week, Work found, the Missoulian wrote, “We limit speech that it may live free forever.”
Work's research and his book inspired some UM law students to begin work on clemency petitions for the Montanans who suffered under the charges of sedition. That has led them to contacts with descendants of eight families that were devastated by the state's Sedition Act. One was the 90-year-old daughter who still remembers her father being jailed.
Work told of a man taken from his wife and 10 children and the shack he built in Treasure County. The family lost their home, their land and the children.
“His imprisonment pretty much ruined the family,” Work said.
The times then were shaped by the U.S. involvement in the war, fears of the radical labor movement and fears of German spies, Work said. Those fears folded into the Red Scare just after the war.
Then things turned, Work said, and the 1920s had people and the U.S. Supreme Court talking about freedom of speech and the First Amendment, which had not been talked about so much since it was ratified in 1791.
Work hopes that remembering the dark days of free speech will remind Montanans and others to guard the right today. Freedom of expression, he writes, is “the bulwark of our liberty, that its exercise is crucial to democratic self-governance and ultimately to the pursuit of happiness and that we alone can preserve it.”
Reporter Ginny Merriam can be reached at 523-5251 or at gmerriam@missoulian.com
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