Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
During World War I a crowd in Lewistown, Montana, removed all German language textbooks from the high school and burned them while forcing the principal to kiss the American flag. Elsewhere in Montana, residents were convicted of sedition for uttering casual remarks about the inefficiencies of wartime food rationing or refusing to buy Liberty Bonds. German-speaking residents of Montana were fined and imprisoned for voicing their pacifism, socialism, or even their skepticism, whether in a beer hall or from the pulpit. With newspapers declaring that there were "but two classes of citizens: patriots and traitors," the state and the nation descended into a nationalistic fervor whose excesses violated the nation's most important ideals of personal liberty. This timely book tells this important story in a way that puts the Montana experience squarely at the center of this national tragedy.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:4 (Fall 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.