Montana Historical Society
These mugshots of Montanans arrested under the state’s sedition laws accompany Sauer’s article.
Three days after we published Russell Rowland’s piece about attacks on press freedoms in Montana history, and on the same day we published David Crisp’s column touching on similar subjects, we have learned of a new article of a similar nature.
It is a story at Smithsonian.com, written by Billings native Patrick Sauer, about Montana’s World War I-era sedition law, which was used to imprison people for, among other things, expressing mild opposition to U.S. involvement in the war.
The story has been told before, but this is a good recap, and a timely one. Sauer also tells of the efforts of some really admirable people—with Clem Work and Jeff Renz leading the way—who succeeded in securing posthumous pardons for all the people convicted under the infamously bad law.
If I could add my own two cents to this fascinating piece of Montana history, it would be to note that in 1995, as part of the Billings Gazette’s “History on Your Doorstep” series, I wrote several stories about the labor troubles in Butte, culminating in the occupation of that city by National Guard troops, briefly in 1914 and then for 42 months starting in August 1917.
In a sidebar, (all the stories are too old to have been preserved in the Gazette’s electronic archives) I wrote about another, more obscure law that was passed at the same time, in 1918, as the state’s sedition law. The sedition law was aimed at traitors and slackers who opposed the war.
The other law, the Montana Criminal Syndicalism Act, was, as I said in the article, aimed more specifically at labor agitators, specifically the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the Wobblies. It defined syndicalism as the advocacy of “crime, violence, force, arson, destruction of property, sabotage and other unlawful acts or methods” as a means of achieving industrial or political revolution.
When Wheeler was called out of state, an assistant U.S. district attorney brought a case to trial before Bourquin, hoping to convict Rosebud County rancher Ves Hall of sedition for having said he would rather leave the country than be drafted, and for saying he hoped Germany would win the war.
The fearless Bourquin acquitted Hall on Jan. 27, saying that Hall’s utterances did not violate the Espionage Act. Bourquin said the act was directed at specific crimes, like interfering with recruitment, and was not supposed to “suppress criticism or denunciation … argument or loose talk.”
Less than a week later, Gov. Sam Stewart called a special session of the Legislature, saying the state needed stronger laws for fighting sedition. The Legislature complied. On Feb. 23, Stewart signed into law both the sedition act and the criminal syndicalism act. The latter would have met the needs of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which controlled nearly all the state’s major newspapers and cynically manipulated the machinery of state government.
That was a long time ago, right? And surely Montana scrubbed its books of those odious laws. Well, yes and no. In 1973, when the state criminal codes were overhauled, all statutes were repealed and only those adopted anew became part of the revised criminal code. The sedition act was not re-adopted, but for whatever reason, the syndicalism act was.
And then, 74 years after it was first passed, the syndicalism law was used to convict William Stanton, a Garfield County rancher who was a member of the Freemen, famous for their long standoff with the feds outside of Jordan. Stanton was convicted of criminal syndicalism in 1994 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Newspaper stories at the time said Stanton was believed to have been the first person ever prosecuted under the law. I would love to know whether that is true. This could be the basis for great thesis by a student of Montana history or Montana law.
Anyway, no matter how you felt about the Freemen, it seems a shame that anyone was sent to prison using an antiquated law that should not have been passed in the first place. From what I can see, the law was finally repealed, or changed, in 1997. The only remnant I could find of it in Montana law was a statute outlawing “criminal incitement,” defined as “the advocacy of crime, malicious damage or injury to property, or violence.”
Events in France make it obvious that the fight for free speech is never completely won, but relatively recent events much closer to home, and much less obviously despicable, drive home the same point.
