Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

by Michael Punke

The National Sedition Act—with its direct lineage to events in Butte—stands as one of the most sweeping violations of constitutionally protected freedoms in modern American history, “a severe over-reaction based on excessive and ill-informed fear.” Two thousand Americans were prosecuted under the act for expressing political opinions deemed unlawful, and hundreds were sent to prison for terms of up to twenty years. An embarrassed U.S. Congress repealed the law on December 20, 1920.45