George McClellan Bourquin was born to French emigrees in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1863, just a few days before the Battle of Gettysburg a couple hundred miles to the south. He came to Butte in 1884 when he was 21 years old.
On his retirement in 1934 from active status after 22 years as federal District Judge, his varied career was recalled as a school teacher, cowboy, miner, smelterman, mill man, hoisting engineer and lawyer. His first work in Butte was as a laborer in the mines at Walkerville. Before his appointment to the federal bench he served as the state district judge for Silver Bow County, “one of the very few republicans that have been so honored in this county.”
Bourquin also sat at times on federal courts in California, Idaho, and Washington, and on the federal court of appeals in San Francisco. He became a lawyer in 1894 and was nominated by President Taft and appointed judge for the United States District Court for the District of Montana in 1912.
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Richard I. Gibson
Judge Bourquin was an outspoken civil libertarian, while sometimes expressing contempt for the “masses.” During the hyperpatriotic hysteria of World War I and the ensuing anti-communist Red Scare, he was one of the few judges nationally to defend individual liberties. In the first case in Montana under the federal Espionage Act of 1917, Ves Hall, a rancher accused of saying he hoped Germany would “whip the United States,” Judge Bourquin acquitted him in the name of freedom of expression of opinions.
The Ves Hall case led to Montana’s state sedition act, passed to circumvent both the federal judiciary in the state in the person of Bourquin, and the U.S. District Attorney, Burton K. Wheeler, known to have socialist leanings.
Seventy-nine people were convicted in Montana under the sedition law in 1918 and 1919. All were finally pardoned by Governor Brian Schweitzer in 2006.
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This photo of George Bourquin appeared in The Standard on November 28, 1933.
In their petition supporting the pardons, historians Clemens Work and Jeffrey Renz recalled that “Judge Bourquin’s views later became the law of the United States,” reflecting “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
The Bourquin home at 223 North Excelsior, the southwest corner with Quartz Street, is still standing. Judge Bourquin’s son, George R., also became a lawyer and served as Silver Bow County Attorney at age 27 and Silver Bow County District Judge at age 31. He died tragically from a brain hemorrhage at age 37 in 1930.
George M. Bourquin died in Pennsylvania in 1958.
Matthew Kiewiet is the managing editor of the Independent Record and The Montana Standard.