Immigrants Convicted of Sedition Vindicated

Nearly seven dozen Montana residents convicted of sedition during World War I are finally getting official pardons from the governor, years after their deaths. In a ceremony Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Brian Schweitzer, the grandson of German-Russian immigrants, planned to sign posthumous pardons for 78 men and women convicted in 1918 and 1919 for criticizing the U.S. government or its war effort. Relatives of some of those being pardoned were expected to attend. Montana’s Sedition Act, passed in 1918 but since repealed, was one of the harshest in the country and a basis for a national sedition law passed the same year. Of those convicted, more than 40 were sent to state prison, said Clem Work, a University of Montana journalism professor whose book inspired the pardon effort.

Click here for the full New York Times story, click here.

The book that set in motion the political movement that secured the pardons is Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West by Clemens P. Work and punlcihed by the University of New Mexico Press.  Here is a description of the book:

Two weeks after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the town of Lewistown, Montana, held a patriotic parade. Less than a year later, a mob of 500 Lewistown residents burned German textbooks in Main Street while singing The Star Spangled Banner. In Lewistown’s nationalistic fervor, a man was accused of being pro-German because he didn’t buy Liberty Bonds; he was subsequently found guilty of sedition. Montana’s former congressman Tom Stout was quoted in the town’s newspaper, The Democrat-News, “With our sacred honor and our liberties at stake, there can be but two classes of American citizens, patriots and traitors!” Darkest Before Dawn takes to task Montana’s 1918 sedition law that shut down freedom of speech. The sedition law carried fines of up to $20,000 and imprisonment for as much as twenty years. It became a model for the federal sedition act passed in 1918. Clemens Work explores the assault on civil rights during times of war when dissent is perceived as unpatriotic. The themes of this cautionary tale clearly resonate in the events of the early twenty-first century.

For the website of the Sedition Project, which did much of the legwork to secure the pardsons, click here.  For a recent Voice of America story, click here.

One can only wonder how history will look back on those convicted in recent years of charges of “terrorism,” such as the young Muslim cannery worker in Lodi, California.

KJ