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Medford resident receives exoneration for her father's sedition charge 84 years after his deathNearly 84 years after her father died, Medford area resident Marie Van Middlesworth was in her native Montana on Wednesday to receive a posthumous pardon in his name. Van Middlesworth, 90, is the daughter of Fay P. Rumsey, a farmer in Rosebud County, Montana, who was one of 79 Montanans convicted under that state's harsh sedition law during World War I. "This should have been done a long time ago," Gov. Brian Schweitzer told Van Middlesworth and others gathered for the pardon ceremony in Helena, according to The Associated Press. "In times when our country is pushed to our limits, those are the times when it is most important to remember individual rights," he added. The Montana law criminalized nearly anything negative that was spoken or written about World War I. The law made it a crime to utter or print anything "disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous or abusive" about Uncle Sam, the Constitution, the American flag or anyone wearing a military uniform representing the nation. A hard-working farmer with a dozen children living on a homestead in the Sarpy Creek area about 50 miles east of Billings, Rumsey, 49 at the time, apparently wasn't impressed with the law. He is alleged to have said that "he wished the Germans would come in and clean up the U.S. and especially Sarpy Creek; that President Wilson was in cahoots with the money power of this country; and that if he was drafted he would not fight for the U.S. but would fight for the Kaiser." His story is among those told in the book, "Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West" University of New Mexico Press, 2005, written by Clemens Work, a University of Montana journalism professor. After the book was published last fall, law professors at the Montana university launched a project obtaining the pardons for those arrested of sedition as part of a criminal law clinic. Begun in January, the project included petitioning the governor and locating relatives of those arrested. A letter sent to Schweitzer late in March asked 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." Schweitzer, whose ancestors were ethnic Germans who migrated from Russia to Montana nearly a century ago, pardoned 75 men and three women. Another man convicted under the state law was pardoned shortly after World War I. "I am just stunned," Work told the Mail Tribune. "Getting these people pardoned was a glint in my eye when I wrote the book. But I had no idea it would come to pass." In his book, Work observed that some were arrested after making casual comments in saloons. Some were turned in by friends, acquaintances, bigots or in some cases by people interested in their land holdings, he wrote. Liquor salesman Ben Kahn spent nearly three years in prison after giving a hotel owner his negative view of the war. "This is a rich man's war, and we have no business in it," he reportedly proclaimed. "The poor man has no show in this war. The soldiers are fighting the battles of the rich." Rumsey, whose three oldest daughters testified on his behalf during the September 1918 jury trial, served only a year on his two- to four-year sentence. But his wife, Sarah, lost the family farm, which had a stream running through it, while he was imprisoned. The farm was foreclosed on for a few hundred bucks and the Rumsey children sent to orphanages or farmed out to friends and relatives, according to Work's book. It would be years before all the children were reunited. Their father, released from prison on Oct. 12, 1919, died in his native Michigan on May 11, 1922, of heart disease. For further information, check out www.seditionproject.net Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com. |
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