MonDak
History Makers
R.L. Wyman and the Council of Defense
1 Feb 2006
by Curt Heimbuck
Charged| Response | Old Scores | County Council | War Effort | Sources
February marks the 88th anniversary of Montana’s special legislative session that passed the Sedition Act (which would be the model for the federal Sedition Act that Congress would pass in May) and extended quasi-legal powers to the newly created Council of Defense. The council’s task was to support the war effort through promoting liberty bond sales and increased agricultural production. In some pockets of the state, the Council of Defense took its power to extremes and began accusing Montanans (many of them immigrants from Germany or Austria) with sedition and clamoring for trials and convictions. In all, according to research done by Clemens P. Work, seventy-two Montanans were convicted under the Sedition Act and forty-one of those, including one woman, served time in Deer Lodge. Among those who served jail time was R.L. Wyman: one of Sidney’s pioneers, a sheepshearer on the Charlie Stierle crew, former schoolteacher and Clerk of Court in Dawson County in 1900, 1904, 1908.
"..no better or worse..."
According to the website www.seditionproject.net, Wyman was accused of responding to news of German atrocities by saying that America’s troops would have done much the same thing and that German soldiers were no better or worse than America’s own. Wyman spoke those words on March 15, 1918. In October, Wyman was sentenced to 6-12 years in prison. He ended up serving 32 months. According to information supplied by Sherry Larson on the family history website www.wyman.org, Richard and his wife Cecilia moved to Coeur D’Alene, Idaho in the early 20’s (shortly after Richard was released from prison). Wyman died there in 1928 at the age of sixty. His wife, the former Cecilia Obergfell died in 1962, also in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. They had two children, Albert and Rose, both of whom followed their parents to the Northwest. History seems to have conveniently erased R.L. Wyman from this area, as there is little mention of Wyman after his conviction.
Responding to the charges
In a political advertisement Wyman paid for and circulated, and which appeared shortly after the sedition charges against him, Wyman refuted those charges and claimed they were part of a political scheme against him: “Those who have sought to defeat me…by putting in circulation…malicious reports reflecting upon my character and reputation, hoping that they would be able to obtain through the course…what they could not hope to accomplish at the polls.” In that same circular, Wyman defended his patriotism with the following: “My mother was born in London, England, and my father is of Scotch-Irish parentage and I was born in Levant, Maine.” I have little information about the legal proceedings against Wyman. I need access to old Glendive papers for that, but it seems that any attention Wyman took away from super-patriotism, such as his claims about county corruption that he made in the advertisement in the newspaper in 1918, were ignored. In fact, focusing on anything besides the war effort seemed almost treasonous, as if the individual were not putting his entire being into the war effort. Failure to adhere strictly enough to the super patriots’ ideal of patriotism led to accusations of “slackerism” and often times led to coerced pledges of allegiance, flag kissing, and loyalty oaths. In the case of the German Mennonites, whose pacifist views put them in the disfavor of the super patriots, out migration even resulted. Never mind that the Mennonites were some of the most successful farmers in the region, said one Council of Defense secretary: “I think it just as well that Montana and all other states lose a class of people who are so selfish and as absolutely self-centered and as lacking in love of country as these Mennonites” (as qtd. in Toole 188).
Settling old scores common
However, and as Burton K. Wheeler mentions in his autobiography, sedition charges were often a convenient means of addressing other grievances, many of them personal. Wheeler described many of the cases that came across his District Attorney desk in 1918 and 1919 as “feuds among neighbors who seized on the spy scare to try to settle old scores” (as qtd. in Toole 139). In the case of R.L. Wyman, at least from Wyman’s perspective, political revenge seemed the motive of the sedition charges. While historians should not underestimate personal motives in these sedition causes, it is nearly impossible to overestimate the paranoia that drove much of the super patriots’ hysterics. Fueled by fear driven editorials from the Helena Independent’s editor Tom Campbell (who once asked in an editorial “Are Germans to Bomb the Capitol City?”) as well as reported sightings of German aircraft in Hamilton, Helena, and Missoula, the paranoia of many Montana citizens was very real. Those fears led to destruction of property, civil liberties, and, in the case of R.L. Wyman and the other 41 Montanans who served jail time, livelihoods.
Richland County Council of Defense
The Sidney newspapers of the era are relatively quiet about the hysteria that World War One and the Council of the Defense created. The March 1, 1918 Sidney-Herald reported straightforwardly the business of the special legislative session in Helena, but added no editorial comments to show where its sentiments lie. In fact, the only mention of the Richland County Council of Defense that I could come across in my searches was its announcement of the prohibition against “the serving of milk, ice cream, or soft drinks” as a protection against the Spanish Influenza. Augustus Vaux was the chairman of the Richland County Council of Defense. No citizens of Richland County served jail time because of sedition convictions (Wyman was from Dawson county. Custer County also was a hotbed for sedition convictions, sending seven people to prison on sedition convictions). However, a recurring editorial in the Sidney-Heralds of 1918 that came from the Providence Journal began with “Every German or Austrian in the United States, unless known by years of association to be absolutely loyal, should be treated as a potential spy.” While there surely were Germans in America who did support their homeland and who tried to actively suppress the American war effort, most of the victims of the patriotic fervor were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
State support for war effort strong
Perhaps the conflict was inevitable. There was a state that overwhelmingly supported the war effort where it mattered most (10% of Montana’s population was enlisted, much more than any other state and nearly 1000 Montanans died during the war) and one that was home to a large immigrant population, many of them of German descent. Started by labor struggles in western Montana and fueled by battles between progressive farmers and conservative businessmen on eastern side of the state, the conflict escalated and snared many an unsuspecting innocent in its too wide net. The plight of R.L. Wyman brings that history close to home.
Sources:
- Correspondence with Rose Wyman led me to the genealogy website www.wyman.org that had lots of good photographs, documents, and information about R.L. Wyman and his immediate family. Much of the information on that site was provided by Sherry Larson.
- Courage Enough. 1975, p. 1040.
- Malone, Roeder, Lang. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.
- Sidney-Herald. 22 Feb. 1918, 1 March 1918,
- Toole, K. Ross. 20th Century Montana: A State of Extremes. Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1972.
- University of Montana School of Journalism. www.seditionproject.net. Clemens P. Work, project director. 17 Jan 2006. This site is dedicated to obtaining posthumous pardons for all 73 Montanans convicted under the state’s 1918 Sedition Act. The students’ cause has been well chronicled in newspapers all across the country. See Possley, Maurice. “Jailed for their words.” Chicago Tribune. 28 Dec. 2005; Johnson, Charles S. “Horse sense: Project reveals dark part of Montana’s past.” Billings Gazette. 1 Dec. 2005.
- Walter, Dave. “Patriots Gone Berserk: The Montana Council of Defense, 1917-1918.” Montana Magazine. September/October 2001. pp. 78-85.
- Work, Clemens P. “Good night with the Stars and Stripes, Army, Navy, and Mister damned Wilson.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History. Winter 2005. pp. 16-35. This is article is an excerpt from Work’s recently published book Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West. 2005.
- Wyman, John. Wyman Genealogy. www.wyman.org. 31 Jan 2006.