| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Clemens P. Work. Darkest before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2005. Pp. x, 318. $34.95.
When the U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, a vaguer but potentially more repressive law than the Espionage Act of 1917, it was enacting an almost exact replica of the sedition law adopted eleven weeks earlier by Montana (in the federal version two words were omitted and one changed). The state law was the culmination of an antiradical campaign that sought explicitly to limit free speech. Supporters of the Montana law claimed, among other things, that it showed the state government's resolute loyalty and that it relieved patriotic citizens of the need to take vigilante action against "slackers" and German sympathizers.	1
The patterns of suppression around World War I have been well studied by historians during the last forty years. The value of Clemens P. Work's book lies in the depth of local information it provides and the connections it makes between local anti-German or antiradical reaction and the regional and national temper. The German language and German culture were suspect everywhere, but constraints upon them in schools, libraries, and churches went further in Montana than in other states. Political violence occurred in many parts of the United States, but Montana was especially unruly. Local politicians and journalists grouped into pro- and antiwar camps, as mining interests, organized labor, and anarchism fanned the flames. Representative Jeanette Rankin excepted, the state's delegation in the U.S. Congress led the call for a nationwide crackdown on sedition.	. . .

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