Montana had one of the most vicious state sedition laws in the nation. Such laws were designed to punish people for speaking out in ways critical of the United States. In its story of the 78 pardons, the New York Times listed one example in which a traveling wine and brandy salesman was sentenced to 7 to 20 years in prison for calling wartime food regulations a "big joke."

Many Montanans were harassed and persecuted. Fritzi Briner recalls that when she was a little girl, people came to her family's farmhouse and tried to hang her father from the apple tree in the front yard. Her father, Herman Bausch, was arrested, interrogated, and later convicted and sent to prison. He was there for two years.

Many descendents of those who served time lived through the intervening years in silence or shame at the prison history in their families. Dozens of relatives were in Helena on Wednesday for a small portion of closure. Fritzi Briner's farther died in L.A. in 1958; her mother died at age 100 in 1998.