Green Scare: Seditious Irishwomen in a War Industry Town

On June 1, 1917 Hanna Sheehy Skeffington - feminist, socialist, revolutionary - stepped off the train at Butte, Montana - a town in high passion. Federal troops patrolled its streets, so valuable to the war the United States had just entered was the cooper in its hills, so fierce the struggle for workers' rights, and so tenuous the loyalty of its Irish citizens. Waitresses and shop girls, teachers and clerks for the mining executives would soon move into leadership positions in the panoply of Irish Republican organizations in the city. These women had a decade earlier formed the Women's Protective Union, a union representing female workers across all industries in the city. They sent representatives to the founding conference of the International Workers of the World and had thick networks of links to U.S. suffragists and socialists. Irish and Irish American women in WWI Butte, Montana were active agents in a transnational female network that sought to advance workers' power, achieve women's suffrage and win self-determination for a colonized people. These intersecting and mutually animating allegiances put the network in seditious conflict with a U.S. government and ruling class determined to rout out dissidents and disloyal foreigners. Montana's Sedition Act of 1918, written in reaction to the Irish and anarchist disturbances in Butte, became the basis for the U.S. Sedition Act adopted in May 1918, targeting anti-war and anarchist activity. Within months of Sheehy Skeffington's visit dozens of Butte's citizens would be under investigation by the local branch of the American Protective Union, a body of prominent citizens – including the mine owner and newspaper publisher – empowered by the federal government to route-out disloyal Americans. This paper seeks to recover a history of radical Irish American women's resistance that's been lost to the amnesia of empire and misogyny.