Cross Country
Righting Wrongs in Big Sky Country
Montana's sedition law made it a crime to publish or say anything "disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, or abusive" about the U.S. government, soldiers, or the American flag. It was unanimously passed by the state legislature in February 1918, during World War I. Over the next two years or so, 79 residents of the Big Sky State, many of them ethnic Germans, were convicted of violating the law, including 41 who were sent to prison. But last week, in a ceremony at the state capitol in Helena, Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a descendant of ethnic Germans, granted posthumous pardons to 78 of them (one was pardoned after the war). The gesture grew out of a book on sedition laws in the American West written by University of Montana journalism Prof. Clemens Work. Law students at the university then took up the cause of those convicted, leading to a petition for pardon being sent to the governor last month. In an earlier letter to Schweitzer, a group of more than three dozen professors, historians, and lawyers nationwide urged him to grant the pardons "to affirm Montana's commitment to free expression and to bring a measure of justice and redemption to these people and their living descendants."
With David E. Kaplan, Liz Halloran, Bret Schulte and Associated Press
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