Missoula News

Documentary: Jailed For Their Words

Free Speech on the Ropes in Wartime

By Robert Struckman , 10-23-08

University of Montana journalism professor Clem Work knew he had the makings of a documentary—after he finished writing his nonfiction book—when he learned that a World War I-era mob had confronted Billings farmer Herman Bausch and threatened to hang him from his apple tree in front of his wife and child.

The mob was in a frenzy of wartime patriotism. Bausch hadn’t bought Liberty Bonds.

“That was enough to get him convicted of sedition,” Work said. Later that year, in 1918, Bausch was sentenced to four years in prison.

The documentary, Jailed For Their Words by Gita Saedi Kiely, airs tonight on Montana PBS at 7 p.m.

Work had been researching freedom of speech issues when he came across a reference to Montana’s sedition law. He looked further and found people who had been sent to prison.

“I followed my nose from there,” he said. He eventually wrote Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West, published by University of New Mexico Press in 2005. The book led to a gubernatorial pardon in 2006 for those convicted of sedition during World War I in Montana.

Of all of the targets of the sedition law, only Bausch left a strong written record, the kind of personal story that works well in the film medium.  Plus, he exhibited great moral courage by not backing down in the face of mob justice, Work said.

“A lot of these documents, I seriously doubt, had ever seen the light of day since 1918 or 1919,” Work said. “They were in quaint jackets, envelopes, with strings wrapped around a little device you had to open up. The paper was crackly.”

Work and his fellow research also uncovered evocative old documents and photographs and even some film reels, including a street scene from Butte.

“It’s a timely story, framed in the larger context of the importance and the fragility of free speech,” Work said. “Like now, it was a period of war. People were criticized about not being patriotic enough. The rhetoric was ‘you’re either with us or against us.’”

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