Although I never forgot the image of the triangle that my grandmother told
me about, it was not until I was thirty-six years old, that I finally came to
understand what it all meant.  1986 was the year that my mother began researching
into her father's life; in preparation for the biography she had intended her
whole life to write about him. Realizing her own mortality, she decided to bite
the bullet, no pun intended, and to make a beginning.

It became, in a sense, a family project, with my uncle and I extending as much
help in assembling research data, as time would allow. I was in New York in the
spring of 1986 because I had some time.  While I was there I stayed with my sister, 
who was living at 17 West 20th street. I got into the regimen of walking everywhere 
I went in Manhattan.

Almost every morning, I would walk up Fifth Avenue to the Forty-Second street
library, where I would begin by immersing myself in the card-catalogue. Later,
when my book requests came through, I would sit for hours under the enormous
ceiling of the main reading room. It was in this space that I achieved the
breakthrough in my political consciousness, and first realized the vision 
of the continuum of the political spectrum, floating in the stream of history.

It was under that ceiling at the 42nd Street Library that I first set eyes upon
the partially oxidized, bound volumes of my grandfather's last journalistic
venture, The Mid-West American.  In the course of my travels, I had found 
it curiously absent at the Library of Congress; although there are laws 
that state that everything that is published must be registered there, 
and he certainly posted it to them, on a weekly basis.

When I came upon the editorial "Why I No Longer Support Governor Olson,"
with its reference to Charles Lindbergh, Sr., whom Liggett identified as his
mentor, I experienced a powerful rush.  I knew, then and there, that I had
stumbled onto a fact of tremendous significance. The Lindbergh who was my
grandfather's mentor, the forgotten and unsung founder of the Farmer-
Labor movement, had been, in reality, a Radical and a Progressive. 
I realized, also, that I was staring at the annals of a suppressed 
and buried phase of Labor history.

I shall never forget this moment: I saw the whole political spectrum as a vast
Mobius continuum.  What is Radical in one generation may be turned on its head,
in an Orwellian manner, and be repackaged and represented as "Right-Wing," two
generations later. This is particularly true of the elder Lindbergh. In his own
lifetime, he was castigated, by the New York Times, as a "Bolshevik."

Hitherto, in my adult life, I had only seen Charles Lindbergh, Sr., referenced 
in a "conservative" context, in the Bircher book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, 
and in the book, The Federal Reserve Bank, by H.S. Kenan, published 
by the Noontide Press, tied to Willis Carto. These books preserved, at least, 
the significant fact that the elder Lindbergh had spoken articulately, and 
at length in Congress against the Federal Reserve legislation. Later, when 
I learned that Kenan's book, and Lindbergh's books also, had been suppressed, 
I began to see the bigger picture.

For the record: I was raised in a decidedly Left wing cultural milieu.  Not only
did my grandmother sing the Internationale, and the Red Banner to me as bedtime 
lullabies; my mother also became the chairwoman of Women for Peace in Oakland, 
in the sixties. During the Viet Nam War, I was a draft-resister, and an anti-
war activist. I was very familiar with the story of the long uphill Struggle 
for Socialism, because my grandmother had planted it in my brain from my earliest
consciousness, the same way a religious grandmother would implant the tenets 
of her religion.

This was because, for all intents and purposes, Socialism was her religion. 
And it is fair to say, objectively, that my grandmother, and grandfather were
one. They actively shared the same struggles and ideals; there were no divisions
between them. So it was a tremendously eye-opening experience, when I first
learned that the elder Lindbergh had been one of the founders of the Farmer-
Labor Party, because, if my grandmother had mentioned him to me as a child, 
it was a name that I had forgotten...

The focus of my research, my grandfather's life and murder, acted upon my
imagination with the force and mystery of a giant whodunit, a genre that I 
am not generally interested in. In 1986, fifty years after the murder, 
the trail was pretty cold.

My mother's uncle, Walter Fletcher, who had been the picture editor for the New York 
Times during World War II, and who still wrote occasionally for them, advised me 
one day, over lunch, to look up Forrest Davis' series in the World-Telegram 
in December of 1935, and V.F. Calverton's article on my grandfather's assassination, 
in the January 1936 issue of The Modern Monthly.

I stumbled upon the latter in the card catalogue under an item listed as "A
collection of materials relating to the assassination of Walter W. Liggett."
Calverton, an independent, non-sectarian Marxist, and a close friend of my
grandfather, had written shortly after Walter's death, an article entitled
"Who Killed Walter Liggett?"

Under the high ceiling of the main reading room, the question reverberated in my
mind. Calverton wrote, "While there can be no doubt that Walter Liggett was murdered 
by gangsters, there is considerable doubt that gangsters carried out the murder for 
"gangsterish" reasons... What is more plausible... gangsters carried out the murder 
for political reasons..."

And as I read, the halls and the walls of the 42nd street library echoed,
'political reasons.'  Calverton's posthumous assessment of Walter Liggett put me
in touch with the grandfather I had never known, touching chords within my own
genetic being. 

 


 
"...Knowing him for years I can personally testify, as can many others, to his
incorruptible integrity, to the challenging role he played during the War along
with the elder Lindbergh, and then again, in the days succeeding the Bolshevik
revolution, to his courage as one of the first friends of the Soviet Union in
America. As one of the editors of the Socialist Call, and then of the
New York Leader, and later still as editor of Plain Talk, he always
defended the cause of the people against that of the plutocracy..."

Reading these words, my own genes stirred within me, and answered, "Yes, that is
how he was." Calverton's article also put me on the trail of a "vile" editorial
that was published on December 24, 1935, in the Communist weekly, The New Masses.

That editorial began as such: "The use of the murder of Walter Liggett by
United States Senator Schall, the wide national publicity given to what was
probably merely a murder in the bootlegging industry, common enough in America,
is only a sample of the fascist terrorism that will be used against 
a Farmer-Labor Party."

The second paragraph of the editorial in The New Masses stated, in part,
"...It is almost certain no one will be indicted for this murder [As it
was, no one was convicted]. The involvements are too intricate. But it has
served its purpose, to provide a means of discrediting the Farmer-Labor Party, 
to give excuse for the cry of violence and murder against the local liberal
elements..."

Juxtaposed, the statements display glaring, internal contradictions. If the
murder was "merely a murder in the bootlegging industry" - and lets keep in mind
that this was in 1935, two whole years after the Repeal of Prohibition -
how could the authors of this editorial state with such certainty "...no one
will be indicted for this murder. The involvements are too intricate..."

How intricate were the connections? And how could the editors pontificate with
such authority "it [the murder of Liggett] had served its purpose, to provide 
a means of discrediting the Farmer-Labor Party"?

The photocopy machines at the 42nd street library could only produce a negative
from the microfilm of The New Masses.  I sat down for a few minutes, studying 
the white text strutting across a dark field, pondering the malice of the editorial,
amazed and stunned. For truly the words - and the subterfuge and doublespeak 
in which they were framed were dark, as well.

It was then that the memory of the triangle, planted in my brain at the age 
of ten by my grandmother, awoke, and began to speak again to me. I remembered 
the overwhelming intensity of Edith's pain at witnessing her husband's murder, 
and realized the pain she must have felt when she read these words that were 
so very false, and sinister.

From that day forward my research proceeded from a hypothesis that I sought to
test: that the triangle Edith Liggett  had described to me was Real. Corollaries
made possible by accepting this hypothesis included:

(1) That Liggett's assassination had been determined a political necessity 
in circles far higher than the Minneapolis underworld,

(2) That the arbiters and dictators of the Communist party line had indeed been
aware of just how "intricate" the involvements were, because,

(3) They were in collusion with the circles who had ordered the assassination,
and, as my grandmother had said,

(4) The C.P. was instrumental and useful to the plutocracy as a means of influencing 
public opinion on the Left.

From that day, I also sought to understand the political/economic reasons for my
grandfather's assassination. In less than one year I learned that there was at
least one verifiable plutocrat on the editorial board of the New Masses in 1935: 
Frederick Vanderbilt Field, in his own time, one of the benefactors of the Field 
Foundation.

I also realized that I had discovered, through the window of my grandfather's
editorials in the Mid-West American, a species of political-economic analysis 
that had been suppressed in America.

The common thread of this literature, which I came to term the "Lindbergh
Analysis," was the assertion that a private monopoly, the Federal Reserve System, 
holds a lien on all the property and wealth of the United States. The corollary
to this is the Axiom that all money should be issued by the government, in the
name of the People, without interest-bearing debt. This led me into a study 
of that critical institution, the Federal Reserve Bank.

After acquiring a microfilm copy of the Mid-West American from the
Minnesota Historical Society, I made a thorough study of Walter Liggett's
editorials. Reading his prose, midway between the classical  "American modern"
style of Mark Twain, and the lean, mean journalism of Hemmingway, helped me
to find my own voice as a writer. His clear, and succinct criticism of the
economic policies of the New Deal, written from 1933  - until December 9, 
1935, also gave me many valuable insights into the economic ideology 
of the Populist-Socialist (elder Lindbergh) school of the Old Left.

Since I first had the vision in the 42nd street library of the political continuum, 
I have studied the geometry, the angles, and the facets of the "triangle" over 
the course of a decade.  This particular triangle is specifically entitled 
"The United Front, Minnesota, December 1935." It is important to remember 
that the Popular Front of the thirties and forties was a global phenomenon, 
with various manifestations in local situations.

It is not my intent to infer that communists were bad people - many of them were
decent people. I also tend to agree with the Marxists that the principle of Class
War is axiomatic throughout history. The irony is that, in the 20th Century,
communists, well-meaning, idealistic people, possessed of "class consciousness"
were duped into betraying their own human and class-interests, by the Plutocracy,
which manipulated the Communist Party, behind the scenes.

Once you understand the principle, you can see how it is still run in various
scenarios. The coalition called "UNO," that put Violetta Chamorro in power in
Nicaragua, in 1989, is one recent example. Cobbled together to oust the
Sandinistas, with help from the C.I.A., it included every other single faction 
on the ground in Nicaragua, from the Left, Right and Center, with the notable 
inclusion of the Communist Party. It was another United Front.

In the years between 1919, until 1945, the Plutocrats stage-managed the conflict
between Communism versus Fascism. This is how the ruling class continually 
operates, setting oppositional forces in conflict. During this period, 
the New Deal was run as an experimental Synthesis between 
the two extremes.

Since the demise of State Communism, the main conflict is being
orchestrated in the arena of "Old Paradigm" versus "New Paradigm."
In this, it resembles the Kulturkampf that shook Germany under
Bismarck. Ultimately, Bismarck and Rome arrived at a new Synthesis - 
one that was enduring. In spite of the current Culture Wars in America, 
behind the scenes, within the Republican Party, right-wing "Dominion 
Christians," Constitutionalists, and Neo-Cons, form an awkward - and volatile - 
sort of Popular Front with right-wing New Agers. Such is the Kaleidoscopic, 
and Byzantine nature of power politics.

During the 1930s, many of the brightest and best were drawn into the Communist
Party. This was not only because the Depression manifested the obvious
contradictions in Capitalism - the threat of Fascism was also very real. 
It was common knowledge that big business, and big bankers in Europe, England, 
and America were financing Fascism. Ron Chernow's damage-control biography, 
The House of Morgan, acknowledges this, spending many pages speaking 
of [J.P. Morgan lieutenant] Thomas Lamont's relations with Mussolini.

But as I researched the strands relating to my grandfather's life, and death, 
I came upon strong evidence that the same banking houses that were financing
Fascism, were also managing  the domestic Communist Opposition in a scientific,
Hegelian manner. This is not well known, and even today the Establishment has a
vested interest that the facts surrounding this control be either contained - 
as in cults like the John Birch Society, and the LaRouchies - or covered up, 
as in Ron Chernow's biography of The House of Morgan.

It is the old principle of Divide and Conquer, repeated in endless variations. 
The fact is, that the Wall Street power brokers like Thomas Lamont,
and Averill Harriman, who were double-dealing in financial maneuvers
simultaneously, with both the Axis and the Soviets, made World War II
inevitable.

Mr. Chernow's Index doesn't even contain a listing for Max May, the Vice
President of [Morgan] Guaranty Trust, who became the very first director 
of the Foreign Division of the fledgling Soviet central bank, Ruskombank, 
in Moscow, in 1922. Nor does it detail any of the many pro-Soviet activities 
of Thomas Lamont, Sr., beginning in 1917. In the economy of the Dialectic, 
this information has been neatly contained.

Anthony C. Sutton, former senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution,
supplies this information, with references from the State Department decimal
files, in the book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution.  At the present, 
this book has also been suppressed in the U. S., and is only published 
in Australia. Sutton's work proves definitively that the House of Morgan, 
and the Rockefellers, worked hand-in-glove with the Soviets from the
beginning.

It is my thesis that during the 1930s, the plutocracy promoted one form of
radicalism - Stalinism - to crush other forms of radicalism. In the U.S.S.R., 
the old Bolsheviks were purged, almost to a man, during the purge trials. In Spain,
the Anarcho-Syndicalists, and Trotskyists of Catalonia were stabbed in the back
by the Stalinists in Madrid. In Minnesota, it was the old-timers of the Non- 
Partisan League who were led to the slaughter, as Edith Liggett told me 
in 1960. This was confirmed in the course of our research.

In all events the majority of idealistic, anti-Fascist elements in society
followed the bandwagon of the Popular Front. In Spain, the Republic, 
and in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor movement in America, were both shipwrecked
- by the Stalinists - in the process. A careful study of the many contradictions,
flip-flops, and zigzags in the editorial policy of the Daily Worker from
1930 to 1946 should convince any serious student that the Communist party-line
during the 30s and 40s was not dictated in the interest of the People. All the
evidence indicates that the communist rank-and-file were unwittingly duped, 
and that the ruling class was pulling the strings.

Owing to his early sympathies with the Soviet Union, and his strong aversion to
the reactionary techniques of the "Red Scare" of 1919, Liggett was always loathe
to engage in any kind of Red-baiting. Had he ever written an expose' of the
Communist Party, he would have had all his ducks in line, first. My grandmother
indicated to me that he was slowly gathering information, to eventually write 
a series of such articles.

By 1929 Walter and Edith Liggett had "come out" journalistically, as critical 
of the Soviet experiment because they opposed Stalin's policy of Liquidation 
of the Kulaks. They echoed what Emma Goldman first said in 1923: "The Dream 
is dead." Walter and Edith, early and ardent supporters of the Russian Revolution, 
felt that Stalin had wrecked the Revolution, and that the Revolutionary promise 
of Land, for the peasants, had been betrayed.

However, that didn't stop Walter, and the Farmer-Labor Insurgents, during the
period of The Townley-Liggett Revolt (1934-1935) from participating in a very
naive, clandestine - and in the end, fatal - collaboration with the Communist
Party in Minnesota.

[CONTINUED] in "Putting It All Together," Part Three of "An Old Triangle"