In 1909, Missoula, Montana, became the site of one of the IWW’s earliest free-speech fights. When the city moved to suppress the Wobblies’ street-corner speaking — their principal means of reaching itinerant loggers and harvest hands — the union called on members to flood the town and defy the ban.
As IWW speakers mounted soapboxes one after another and were arrested, the jails filled and the cost of prosecuting and feeding the prisoners mounted. After roughly forty arrests, the authorities relented, and Wobblies resumed speaking and selling their newspapers on the streets. The young Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her husband Jack Jones were among the organizers; the tactic pioneered at Missoula — deliberately filling the jails until repression became too costly — would define the free-speech fights that followed.