|The Montana Sedition Project| |The Facts||The Book||The
Pardons||The Film||UM School Imagine meeting some friends at
your local brewpub or coffee shop. The talk turns to the war.
You criticize the President and his wealthy supporters. Next
thing you know, a couple of husky fellows at the next table grab
you, hustle you out the door and down to the local police
station. You are arrested on a charge of sedition. Within months
you are indicted, tried and convicted. The judge sentences you
to 5-10 years in prison -- and off you go! Think this could
never happen? Well, it did, and not that long ago --during World
War I -- to scores of ordinary people in Montana. They
discovered very painfully that their free speech rights had been
stripped away by the state legislature. This site is about the
76 men and three women convicted of sedition in Montana in 1918
and 1919. The law they ran afoul of was possibly the harshest
anti-speech law passed by any state in the history of the United
States. Forty of those men -- and