The United Front, Minnesota, December, 1935
At issue is the triangle defined by the point labeled Plutocrats, New York, at the apex, by the point labeled C.P., U.S.A., at the lower left-hand, and the point labeled the Mob, at the lower right-hand. In the center of the line-segment at the base, is the faction described as Floyd Olson's "All-Party" Machine of Democratic, Republican, and Farmer-Labor elements. Prior to Dimitrov's speech at the Seventh International Communist Party Conference in Moscow, on August 7, 1935, this triangle did not exist. It was then that the sea-change of the United Front of the 1930s was first publicly announced. But still, it took some time - nine weeks - for the implementation of the Party line, announced in Moscow, to percolate out to the American Midwest. In point of fact, during the "Third Period" (1928-1935), the Communist Party continually and characteristically hurled the label "Social Fascist" against Floyd B. Olson - and Franlin D. Roosevelt, too, for that matter. During this phase, the Party Mantra was "United Front from below," and the Modus Operandus was to form clandestine, "cellar" liaisons with under-dog formations characteristically out of power. After the emergence of the "Townley- Liggett Revolt" in 1934, the Communist Party in Minnesota approached the Insurgents, and apparently, the Insurgents went for the bait, probably thinking that in numbers there would be strength. This "alliance," about which next to nothing is now known, lasted until October 18, 1935; when it came to a sudden end. Right up to October 18, 1935, Liggett's journalistic salvos against Olson in the Mid-west American, and the Communist rhetoric, published in United Action, the local C.P. bi-weekly in Minneapolis, were almost identical, except for the Communist party line. Because there was a sub-rosa alliance between the Farmer-Labor Insurgents (the Townley-Liggett faction) & the C.P., at this time, it is probable that the folks at United Action were getting their material about Olson's dirty connections either directly, or indirectly from Liggett, who was an excellent investigative journalist. The C.P.'s series of muckraking articles on Olson, in United Action, ended abruptly after October 18th, 1935. On October 18, 1935, Earl Browder was away from Party headquarters on Thirteenth Street in New York City. He rode the highway West and paid a "secret" visit to the governor's mansion in St. Paul. There, Floyd Olson held an all-night soiree and burying-of-the-hatchet ceremony for Earl Browder. Hence the formal alliance of the Popular Front was formed between the C.P., and Olson's "All-Party" Machine. Arrangements were made to engage in joint activities, and to employ Olson's Farmer-Labor machine as the Communist Party's main front in the American Midwest. In the course of exposing Olson's ties to Mid-western capitalists, and the Liquor Syndicate, i.e., the Mob, Walter Liggett never attacked the Communist Party in the pages of The Mid- West American. That is because, the period from October 18, 1935, when the new alliance was formed and the old suddenly broken, until December 9, 1935, the day of Liggett's assassination, was a very brief space, only seven weeks. Furthermore, Liggett had always been loathe to engage in Red-baiting. After October 18, 1935, when the formal Alliance was made between The C.P., U.S.A. and Olson's Farmer-Labor machine, however, Liggett became "incredibly inconvenient," in the words of Yiddy Bloom, the brother of Kid Cann, vacationing in Paris, in the late 30s - to both the C.P., and the Mob. It was only after Liggett's death, when his articulate voice had been silenced, that the C.P. poured the full fury of its propaganda and journalistic loathing upon his memory.
The Context : A Factional Fight
Walter Liggett had been an early adherent of the Non-Partisan League - in fact, he had been the founder, and managing editor for its news service, during World War One. For several years, before he went to Washington, D.C., in 1922, as the secretary and speechwriter for Senator Ladd of North Dakota, he had been managing fifty-seven Non-Partisan League Newspapers. In 1918, Liggett was the the secretary and speechwriter for the elder Lindbergh, during his run for governor of Minnesota as a write-in "farmer-labor" candidate, in the spring primary. Before that, Liggett had been a secretary and speechwriter for Robert LaFollette, Sr., in his work with the League, back in 1915. Liggett also was a founding member, along with the elder Lindbergh, and A.C. Townley, of the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, in 1920. In 1933, after a busy decade in Journalism that took him barn-storming from Coast to Coast (my mother, Marda Liggett, had been in 35 states by the time she was ten) Liggett took his family back to Minnesota from New York, to purchase a small weekly, The Mid-West American, and to help build the budding Farmer-Labor Party into a national movement. He had many old friends in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and throughout the mid-west, who had been involved in grassroots populism for many years. Liggett's break with Olson, was not the result of a personal vendetta, nor was he "paid off" by the Republican Party, as Olson's press bureau alleged, and the Daily Worker would later echo. Instead, it must be seen within the context of a factional fight within the Farmer- Labor Party. Liggett was a member of the "Committee of 100" who met in the Benson, Minnesota Armory on Labor Day, 1934, as well as a leading delegate of the "Committee of Seven," who went to the State house to present their petitions to Olson, a few days later. These men were all "wheel-horses" from the days of the Non-Partisan League. Among them, were most of the the founders of the Farmer-Labor Party, and they left Olson as a bloc. Their break with Olson became known as the "Townley-Liggett Revolt." A.C. Townley, the founder of the Non-Partisan League, was the leader of the Farmer-Labor dissidents; Liggett was the journalist, his ally. It is an evident token of the measure to which history may be suppressed, that, as Marda Liggett Woodbury writes in Stopping the Presses - The Murder of Walter W. Liggett, "an entire rebellion in the Farmer-Labor Party is largely undocumented outside the Mid-West American," and, furthermore, that that paper, itself, should have been purged from the Library of Congress. The "Committee of 100" had essentially three complaints with Olson, the Farmer-Labor governor of Minnesota. Their main objection was that he was soft-peddling the Farmer- Labor Party Platform, and doing nothing to implement it. The F-L platform, which called for the Nationalization of Banking and Credit, the dismantling of the bond system, and the establishment of a State-Bank, was of primary concern to these men. The second was that he had staffed his administration with the customary professional spoils-men from the Democratic, and Republican Party machines, rather than appointing "tried and true" Farmer-Laborites. Their third complaint was framed as a demand: Olson must break his ties with the bankers and brewers, railroad magnates, grain merchants, and assorted racketeers who were his conspicuous political cohorts. Needless to say, Governor Olson did not heed the petitions of the "Committee of Seven." For the last fifteen months of his life, Walter Liggett strove to expose the reactionary influence of Olson and his "All-Party" gang of political racketeers to the whole Farmer-Labor movement, within & without Minnesota, and to the rest of the country. Shortly before he was murdered, he wrote to his friend V.F. Calverton in a letter:
"You have no idea of the viciousness, ruthlessness, and utter dishonesty of this demagogue Floyd Olson. He not only has close personal connections with the lowest elements of the under-world and professional criminals, but he is on equally good terms with millionaires like Frick Lilly, president of the First National Bank of St. Paul: Louis Hill, president of the Great Northern Railroad; Shreve Archer, local capitalist, and of course, ex-convict Charley Ward..."All of these are significant names. The Lilly family are involved in banking, lumber cartels, and Lilly Pharmaceuticals. Archer-Daniels-Midlands, ADM, the grain- brokers' bank, is an amalgamation, in part, out of Shreve Archer's accumulation of capital. Charlie Ward, a debonair fixer for the Twin Cities mob (who my grandmother asserted had paid for her husband's assassination) was a close personal friend of both F.D.R., and Armand Hammer. (See Hammer, by Armand Hammer, p.269). In the 1940's, Shreve Archer continued to buy promising Minnesota politicians, like Hubert Humphrey, who brokered the assimilation of the Farmer-Labor Party into the Democratic Party in 1943. Over the course of the last fifteen months of his life, Liggett wrote hard-hitting exposes, in issue after issue of The Mid-West American that elaborated the details of Olson's political web. (This is essentially the triangle described by the points, Plutocrats - "All-Party" machine - the Mob). It is fair to say that Liggett's depiction of this half of the greater triangle was accurate. The proof of the pudding is, as they say, in the eating, and Liggett was killed. In 1986, the Mid-West American was preserved in only two places: the 42nd Street Library in New York City, and on microfilm at the Minnesota Historical Society, in St. Paul. How it was purged from the Library of Congress, is a minor mystery. Several months before he was machine-gunned, Liggett was framed, on a trumped-up "girl charge," along with his friend and ally, Frank Ellis, I.U.A.W. Union organizer in Austin, Minnesota. When Liggett appealed to the A.C.L.U. to help in his legal defense, Corliss Lamont, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field, on the board of directors of the A.C.L.U. turned that organization away from coming to his aid. This fact was delivered to my grand- mother, Edith Liggett, after she returned to New York, in 1936. It was stated in Marda Liggett's 1944 thesis on Communism, for her degree in Political Science at Bard College. Corliss Lamont, the son of Thomas Lamont, Sr., the "most powerful man on Wall Street," the CEO of J.P. Morgan, & Company, was also the financial angel for the Communist Party, U.S.A. I feel that it is significant that a man like Frederick Vanderbilt Field, scion of the Field family, number 14 on the list of the top sixty in 1937, (See Lundberg's America's 60 Families, page 26) should be a sub-rosa member of the editorial board [not on the mast-head] of The New Masses in 1935, and it is legitimate to question where his real class interests lay. The answer to this question may be answered by quoting from a passage from the book, Tragedy And Hope, by professor Carroll Quigley; a passage that links these two hidden adversaries of Walter Liggett together:
" ...All the evidence would indicate that Tom Lamont was simply Morgan's apostle to the Left...Tom Lamont, his wife Flora, and their son, Corliss [were] sponsors and financial angels to almost a score of extreme Left organizations, including the Communist Party itself. Among these we need mention only two. One of these was a Communist-front organization, the Trade Union Services, Incorporated, of New York City, which in 1947 published fifteen trade-union papers for various CIO unions. Among its officers were Corliss Lamont and Frederick Vanderbilt Field (another link between Wall Street and the Communists). The latter was on the editorial boards of the official Communist newspaper in New York, The Daily Worker, as well as its magazine, The New Masses, and was the chief link between the Communists and the Institute for Pacific Relations in 1928-1947. Corliss Lamont was the leading light in another Communist organization, which started life in the 1920's as the Friends of the Soviet Union, but in 1943, was reorganized, with Lamont as chairman on the board and chief incorporator, as the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. "During this whole period of over two decades, Corliss Lamont, with the full support of his parents, was one of the chief figures in "fellow traveler " circles and one of the chief spokesmen for the Soviet point of view both in these organizations and also in connections which came to him either as the son of the most influential man on Wall Street or as professor of philosophy at Columbia University. His relationship with his parents may be reflected in a few events of this period. "In January of 1946, Corliss Lamont was called before HUAC, to give testimony on the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. He refused to produce records, was subpoenaed, refused, was charged with contempt of Congress, and was sited by the House of Representatives on June 26, 1946. In the midst of this controversy, in May, Corliss Lamont and his mother, Mrs. Thomas Lamont, presented their valuable collection of the works of Spinoza to Columbia University. The adverse publicity continued, yet when Thomas Lamont rewrote his will, on January 6, 1948, Corliss Lamont remained in it as co-heir to his father's fortune of scores of millions of dollars."- (pp. 945-6, Tragedy And Hope, Macmillan, 1966). In the 20th Century in America, three men: Corliss Lamont, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and James P. Warburg, all born into the Banker-bondholding class, served the interests of the oligarchy, even as they sponsored, or presided over "Left-wing" movements. All three were genial, cultured, and charming gentlemen, possessing considerable personal magnetism; they were also consummate actors. The movements that each of them "shepherded" - the C.P., & its affiliates, the New Deal, and the Institute for Policy Studies - whatever good they might have accomplished, were also designed to do one thing: to steer the Left away from addressing the issue of Monetary Reform, and dismantling the bond system - the nest egg and gravy-train of these gentlemen, and their families. The existence, at the top of the triangle, or pyramid, of this curious phenomenon of "reds in mink," as the French say, is addressed in other books that have come my way. Notably, by Howard Fast, who wrote for The Daily Worker, and left the Communist Party not long after the text of Khrushchev's 1956 speech concerning Stalin's crimes was printed in the New York Times. Howard Fast describes, at some length the existence, and attitudes of this class, on pages 64-66 of his non-fiction account, The Naked God. Another ex-Communist, Bella Dodd, who sat on the Central Committee of the C.P., U.S.A., in the late forties, also alludes in numerous passages of her book, School of Darkness, to the same phenomenon. For the present, merely open your mind to the possibility of there being a line of communication, and of commercial transaction connecting the point described as Plutocrats, New York, with the point described as C.P., U.S.A., in this 1935-vintage triangle. As for the line-segment, connecting the C.P. with Floyd Olson's "All-Party" Machine, that can be documented; it's not a matter of disputation. A good book on the subject is Dubious Alliance, by John Earl Haynes. The line traversing the right hand of the triangle, from Plutocrats to Mob, should be self-evident, even to the uninitiated. This connection is self-evident in Meyer Lansky's famous statement, "We're bigger than General Motors." In 1935, the soon-to-be-indicted Lucky Luciano had his apartment/office near the top of the Waldorf Towers. (Source, Last Testament of Lucky Luciano). This made things very convenient, because it is a matter of record that Herbert Hoover, who was to become the godfather of the N.S.A. and the C.I.A., and J.P. Morgan, Jr. - As well as the "three extremely wealthy American capitalists" [one of whom was Arthur Goldsmith] who Bella Dodd stated were the ultimate arbiters of the American Communist party-line, had their business offices on the top floor of the Waldorf Towers, in 1935. (Source: The Naked Capitalist, by Cleon Skousen). The "Liquor Syndicate" of the 1930s in Minnesota, former bootleggers, had long associated with the Bronfmann gang in Canada, who ran the Canadian end of the liquor pipe-line during Prohibition. The Bronfman family ties with Jewish elements of the Trans-Atlantic ruling class are detailed in the book, King of the Castle, by Peter C. Newman. The gangster, "Kid Cann," whom my grandmother recognized as being the assassin, was one of Lansky's lieutenants, a capo in the Minneapolis Mob. There remains only one more line to connect: the line segment connecting Floyd Olson's "All-Party" Machine to the Mob, with the line-segment connecting The C.P., U.S.A., to Floyd Olson's "All-Party" Machine. The question being, of course, is this a continuous line, or just two line segments, that meet at the same point? And this, in particular, is a very sensitive question, still. As it was, more than two witnesses came forth to confirm this connection. In September of 1986, my mother placed an author's query in The Nation magazine, seeking the testimony of anyone yet living who had known her father. Shortly afterwards, she received a cryptic message on her answering machine that said: "If you want to know who bumped off your father, I can tell you." The caller, Joe Murphy, turned out to be an old I.W.W. organizer who had known Walter Liggett when they both worked on the Tom Mooney Molder's Defense Committee, in 1929. So, armed with a tape recorder, she drove up from Berkeley to Occidental where Joe lived, to interview him. Joe Murphy said, for the record, that he had heard in San Francisco, some time before Liggett was killed, in 1935, that there was a contract out to kill him, and that he was in Minneapolis. The source of this report, which in the context it was spoken, was something of a boast, were two communists from the International Maritime Union, whom Joe spoke with in The Iron Kettle, and Jacopetti's, two bars at the foot of Columbus Street. Their names were Joe Lewis, and Hedley Stone. Joe Murphy said that he didn't know how to get in touch with Liggett, that he had intended to notify the Dunne brothers [Trotskyist union organizers] in Minneapolis, to warn Liggett, but before he could do this, he learned that he had been assassinated. The tape of this interview is on file at the Joe Murphy Library of Labor History, near Occidental. We also learned that D.H. Dubrowsky, Bolshevik defector, and former director of the American branch of the Soviet Red Cross, had mentioned Liggett's assassination in Collier's Magazine, April 1940. Dubrowsky stated, "With the aid of Walter Liggett, who was subsequently murdered in Minneapolis by Communist agents, I organized [in 1921] the American Committee for Russian Famine Relief..." So ther Mob murder of Walter Ligget was committed with the foreknowledge, and complicity of the American wing of the Communist Party. The genesis of the connections between the Communist Party, and the Mob go back to the 1926 strike in the Garment industry in New York. These connections are mentioned in a number of books. For the sake of brevity, I will merely list the books: Gang Rule in New York, by Craig Thompson and Allen Raymond, Dial Press, 1940. The Labor Czars, by Harold Seidman. A Life With Labor, by David Dubinsky, Simon & Schuster, 1977. Also, The Big Bankroll - The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein, by Leo Katcher, Harper Brothers, 1958. In Europe, during World War II, the Communists and the Mafia both fought in various capacities in the Underground on the side of the Allies, against the Axis powers. It is in the nature of the Byzantine world of politics, however, for such relations to be reversed and rescinded. In the post-War period, the Mob was used against the C.P., both in the U.S. and in France. In the U.S., two young up-and-coming Mob lawyers with ties to the Pepsi-Cola Corporation, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, were detailed to implement the Red-Scare paranoia, which was the dominant theme of the Cold War. J.C. Louis and Harvey C. Yazijian describe this in the book, The Cola Wars. It is also detailed in the book McCarthy: The Man, The Senator, The "Ism," by Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May.
That the Franco-Corsican mafia were turned loose on their former comrades-in-arms, the Communists, in post-War Marseilles, is mentioned, in passing in The Yankee and the Cowboy War, by Carl Oglesby. I learned about it myself, when I was in southern France in 1984. The murdered Communists of Marseilles at least have a memorial in a book or two. There is no memorial anywhere for the faction within the Farmer-Labor movement for whom Liggett was the point man. These men, the "wheel-horses" from the Non- Partisan League, had vowed to "clean house" within the Farmer-Labor Party, by removing Olson. They recognized that they had been deceived by Olson, who was in reality, nothing more than a machine politician who had been detailed by the bi-partisan party bosses to penetrate, co-opt, and sidetrack their movement. To these men the Farmer-Labor Party Platform was the main event. They did not want to see their movement "sold" to the Democratic Party, as the Populist movement was sold by William Jennings Bryan in 1896; they wanted the movement to stay pure, and they wanted it to grow, until the Co-operative Commonwealth had become a reality. Olson's purge of his opponents within the Farmer-Labor Party never achieved the sheer numbers - or the notoriety - of Stalin's purges. It was all done quietly, off camera. That's the American way. Never the less, a significant number of Olson's adversaries were killed for their "faith." From the Calverton papers, at the 42nd Street library, we found a letter to "George" (V.F.) Calverton from Edith Liggett dated Feb 3, 1936, stating: "...Incidentally, A.C.Townley warned me about this being run over. He said there isn't a Chinaman's chance of my being shot - but he showed me a long list of anti-Olson Farmer-Laborites who in the past six months have strangely happened to be run over or have their cars wrecked or thrown in the ditch by state Highway department cars..." To my knowledge, no one has ever recorded this aspect of the Townley-Liggett revolt in any book, except Stopping the Presses, the book my mother wrote. And I, who am merely the bearer of a family tradition, am left alone to tell you. I suggest that the issue of the Farmer-Labor Platform may be the real key to the mystery of why Walter Liggett was assassinated. The fact that he was articulately exposing the manner in which Olson was callously betraying the Platform, caused Liggett to become a target. The Farmer-Labor Platform, calling for the speedy liquidation of the bond-system, and the nationalization of the Federal Reserve System, threatened the established economic order, the nest egg of the Plutocracy, in a way that the C.P. never did. The idea of nationalizing Credit is compelling, and actually potentially possible. The "wheel-horses" were expendable because they were weathered activists, and they took the Platform much too seriously. It is the prairie fire aspect of Populism that has always scared the plutocrats - the fact that it could spread like the wind through the corn. That is why the Establishment pays so much attention to all species of Populism now, and seeks to control it. In the thirties it was no different. Olson was their boy; the fix was in, and they did not want any dissidents rocking the boat. After Olson was dead (Autumn, 1936) and the Farmer-Labor Party was safely on the wane, Corliss Lamont published a book in 1940, entitled You Might Like Socialism, in which he suggested, of all things! the formation of a Farmer-Labor party. Conspicuously absent from Mr. Lamont's formula for the suggested platform for such a movement, was any mention of the nationalization of banking and credit. During the Period of the Popular Front, the Class War was downplayed. Various members of the ruling class, like Corliss Lamont, who came from families that had been financing the Communist party since 1920, could "come out," and be represented as "progressive" members of their class - on the side of the workers. To a lesser extent, this was how Franklin D. Roosevelt was represented, also. During the "sixth period" of the C.P. - the second phase of the Popular Front - after Hitler's invasion of Russia {from June 22, 1941 'til May 12, 1945,} the C.P. promoted a no-strike policy, piecework wages, and universal military conscription to continue after the War. In a very real sense, the United Nations was a direct continuation of this second phase of the United Front. The United Nations, the second approximation of World Government, with its sugarcoated poison pill of the International Monetary Fund, was the goal scored by the plutocracy by harnessing the energy, and the momentum of millions of cadre marching off to war with the United Front. This reality is still the dominant blindness of the Left today. - Mark Walter Evans
