An Old Triangle

There are many devices in the political bag of tricks of the arbiters of
the political economy. Some of them  are old tricks that are discerned after
being utilized. Some tricks, after a generation or so of disuse, can be dusted
off and recycled again in another context. The definitive treatise on the "Theory
and Practice of the United Front" has yet to be written. Because I am the bearer
of a family tradition that has given me precious light on the subject, I will
tell what I know.

When I was eight, in 1958, our family,  consisting of my mother, stepfather, 
and I, moved to Lawton Avenue in the Rockridge district of North Oakland. We 
had lived on Fulton Street in Berkeley from late 1956, when my mother remarried,
until mid-1958. During most  of this period, my grandmother, Edith Fleisher
Liggett, lived in Berkeley, in a third floor flat at the corner of Shattuck
Avenue, overlooking Dwight Way. When I was nine and ten, sometimes I would ride
my bicycle back to Berkeley on Saturdays, to visit her. It was during one of
these visits she told me about my grandfather's assassination, and the 
complex political apparatus behind it.

My grandmother knew that the child is father to the man, and that her words were
like seeds that would eventually spring and grow up in my mind. Well versed in
the popular psychology of her era, she had an intuitive understanding of human
nature and often spoke to me as if I were already an adult. She presented the
template of the message in one sitting, as a mental time-capsule to be digested
and realized later - the whole elaborate tableau of what she had seen and
experienced in the events that led up to her widowhood at the tender age of
thirty-four.  Edith must have realized that in telling me these things, she ran
the risk of abbreviating my innocence, and prematurely truncating my childhood.

But she told me anyway, and to this day, I don't blame her. Of all people, she
knew how hard life is, and that, to grow up, I must be steeled to the reality of
its hardness. She also knew that time was against her. Edith had already had one
stroke, and must have known that more would come. She had always been a very
serious person. So she placed on me the burden of hope, and of consciousness. And
I suppose, in her mind I became the link to the future, the bearer of a family
tradition, and the scribe of her solitary, and unique witness of the turbulent
history of the Thirties.

In those days, when I used to visit Edith, I would leave my bicycle inside the
foyer of the building, on the ground floor landing. The site, at the corner of
Dwight and Shattuck, was the location, in the 1890s, of a duck-pond on a large
estate.  In 1960, my grandmother lived on the third floor, on the southern flank
of the building.  Her apartment, indeed her whole train of apartments that run
like baggage cars in the compartments of my early memory, always had a peculiar 
smell of musk.

It was an old world smell, a Viennese be-knighted intelligentsia kind of odor,
composed of the amalgam of the various elements of her life: of cats, of old
furniture, of memories, and old rugs and tapestries, of reams of oxidizing pulp
magazines containing the short stories Necessity  had relegated her to write in
order to raise her two children, and old books and Encyclopedias on the
bookshelves that lined the walls.

I had learned at the age of six, on Woolsey Street, that my grandfather, Walter
W. Liggett, radical journalist, editor and publisher, had been assassinated by
the  Mob in Minneapolis at six p.m. on December 9, 1935.  My grandmother had
told me the story of how it happened, and I'll never forget the day she told me
either, for she had been present, in the back seat of their car.  Her husband had
just parked the car in the alley behind their apartment, and stepping out of the
car, had turned his back to the alley to allow another car to pass by - A car
that had been parked down the  alley with its headlights  on, and its engine
running low. And as the car passed, she saw the leering laugh of the gunman at
the moment he raised the machine-gun to the open window of the back seat of the
getaway car as it rolled down the alley in the dusk of twilight, and left six
bullets in her husband's back, five of which went straight through his heart. She
was thirty-four years old at the time. My mother also, who was ten, saw the
entire scene from the back seat, at her mother's side.

The awareness of this, together with the celluloid images on television of
bomb-bay doors opening to drop bombs over populous cities, and of mushroom clouds
(news-reel footage from World War II that was employed in T.V. commercials for
fall-out shelters), coupled with other celluloid footage from the Red Chinese
revolution in October 1949, (part of the train of logic for the same commercials
for fall-out shelters), showing hundreds of civilians being lined up on the banks
of the Yellow River, only to be machine-gunned down & fall dead into the river, 
and  gray images  of  the Yellow River running with  blood, and thousands of
bodies floating down to the China Sea, (thus was propaganda mingled in the
Commercials in the early years of the Cold War before color television) had 
been a  rude awakening from the relatively blissful ambience of my earlier
childhood, and remain distinctly associated in my memory of the Summer 
of '56.

So the facts of my grandfather's death were not new to me in 1960. My grand-
mother had already initiated me into this trauma when I was six. It was, necessarily,
her own basic trauma, and angst. Again, I do not blame her for having done this. She 
lived for her children, and the pain of her life had been overwhelming. She found it 
necessary to share this pain  with her descendents. And truly, it was a pain we already 
shared; for it was in our genes. She was judicious enough to initiate me  into the 
Mystery  of Walter's  death slowly,  so as to limit the
damage.

The second installment of this initiation occurred in 1960, when I came to visit
Edith one Saturday in Berkeley. I do not remember just how the conversation
began, but elements of what she said that day were powerful images that I never
forgot. Years later, in 1986, when I began to assist my mother in doing research
on the biography of her father, the full significance of what my grandmother had
told me in 1960, came back to me in a crescendo of quickened understanding. With
a little water  of knowledge, the  skein of the time capsule dissolved, and the
seeds my grandmother had planted in my brain grew up, and bloomed overnight into
a Century plant of comprehension.

She told me that her husband, Walter Liggett, had been fighting the United Front,
as it just came into being in Minnesota, in 1935.  She said that he had died
fighting this "United Front," which she had never mentioned before, and which she
described as a kind of a Triangle. She told me that when she returned to New York
in the Spring of 1936, after the death of her husband, and saw the Radicals
marching  down the Avenue of the Americas twenty abreast on May Day, with Red
banners waving, and banners proclaiming "United Front Against War and Fascism,"
it was a very stirring  sight.  She stood there, transfixed, on a corner of the
Avenue, fascinated by the stream of human faces, remembering all the May Day
parades of her past, and torn, because she could no longer march with her
comrades. She also, was against War and Fascism, and she was a Socialist. But
back on the prairie, where she had just been, and where she had just lost her
husband, the United Front presented a different aspect.

In Minnesota, under the big sky of the prairie, and on the periphery of the
United Front, you could lift up the carpet of the United Front, and see all the
corruption that was underneath. Under the clear prairie sky, you could also see,
unencumbered, the strings and wires that led from the base of the "United
Front," which she likened to the base of a Triangle, to the tops of the towers
on Wall Street, which was something the marchers in the May Day parade in New
York could not see. For in New York, she said, among the canyons of stone towers,
there were very few who were able to see the forest for the trees.

Floyd B. Olson was the titular head of the Farmer-Labor Party, and the governor
of Minnesota, whom  my  grandfather had originally supported when they went back
to Minnesota from New York in 1933. The base of the "triangle," as she described 
it, consisted of Floyd Olson's "All-Party" machine, of Democratic, Republican, 
and Farmer-Labor elements, with the Communist party on the left, and, over in  
this corner,the Mob, thrown in for good measure, to insure "enforcement."

Connections led from all of these formations to the top of the triangle, which
she likened to the top of a	pyramid to the people she called the "Plutocrats." 
Most of these connections to "the top," as she put it,  were relatively easy to 
probe and to document in the Minneapolis of 1935. Liggett, who was a veteran 
investigative  journalist, and who edited  and  published his own newspaper as
well, had exposed all of these ties, but one, in their  little weekly, The 
Mid-West American.

Liggett fought Floyd Olson's "All-Party" machine, because he came to believe 
that it was a reactionary formation that had co-opted the authentic Farmer-Labor
movement.  He had been present at the birth of the Farmer-Labor Party, which grew
out of the Non-Partisan League in the Dakotas. Born and bred in Minnesota
himself, he had taken his family back to Minnesota from the east in 1933, to help
build the Farmer-Labor Party, for since Olson had become governor in 1930, there
was a certain hope that it could become a major Party, and play an historic role
in the struggle to bring genuine Socialism to America.

But they learned, slowly and sadly, through many undeniable circumstances, signs
and occasions that Olson was hopelessly corrupt, and in league with the very men
that he, as a Farmer-Labor governor, should not be beholden to. So Liggett
reluctantly broke with Olson, and allied himself with A.C. Townley, the original
founder of the Non-Partisan League, who had also come to the nascent realization
that Olson had sold out the movement.

Liggett first carefully investigated, and then published, the charges of Olson's
ties with the bankers and brewers of the Twin Cities, with the grain brokers, 
the timber barons, the railroad magnates, and the bi-partisan Party-bosses. 
He also tried to expose Olson's ties with the Mob, with the gangsters and veteran 
bootleggers  of the Liquor Syndicate. He was a dedicated idealist, she said, 
a courageous man, whose every fiber breathed with the struggle to make the world 
a better place to live.  He wanted to save the Farmer-Labor movement, to salvage 
it from the influence of Olson and his "All-Party" gang of political spoils-men 
and racketeers, who had taken over and corrupted what had once been a fine 
and promising movement, with a marvelous platform, led by honorable men.

But they killed him, she said, and they killed others, too, during the winter 
of '35-'36. It was intra-mural  killing, very much like what happened in Russia 
in the years to come.  A lot of good men were killed, she said, old-time members 
of the Farmer-Labor Party, the "wheel-horses" of the Non-Partisan League days, 
men who wouldn't abide Olson's "All-Party" dictatorship over the Party. 
Many good men died, many run off the road on desolate stretches in the snow 
in the interior of Minnesota, and a few hit and run.

"But they shot Walter," she cried. Though she tried "like the  blazes" to
persuade him to sell the paper, (which was the main, and pitifully small voice of
the Farmer-Labor opposition) and to leave the State, he would not give up the
struggle against Olson, or abandon his commitment to his colleagues who also
struggled to save the movement, as long as there was a chance that  the movement
could still be saved.

There was a trial after the murder, for she had been able to identify the
gangster, Kid Cann, whom  she had seen before, as the  assassin  in the back seat
of the getaway car. There had also been another witness, who testified at the
trial, that he had seen Kid Cann in the murder-vehicle. But Kid Cann had an alibi
that he had been in a barbershop during the time of the murder. This barber, she
alleged, and the other "witnesses" at the Barbershop were on friendly terms  with
the Mob.

She was also sure that it had not been Kid Cann, but his younger brother, who had
been the one sitting in the barber's chair during the killing. In the end, the
jury acquitted Kid Cann. After the acquittal a big party was thrown, at which
many prominent people and politicians were in evidence, also members  of the jury
and members of the police force, also much liquor was drunk, and there was great 
celebration.

It was then that Edith knew that she must sell the newspaper, leave Minneapolis,
and take her children, who were ten and twelve,  back to the relative  safety  of
Brooklyn. Just after the trial,  there  was an incident in which she narrowly
missed being run over by a hit-and-run driver. She kept the newspaper going by
herself for ten weeks after her husband died, in spite of the stress and strain
of the murder trial. But by March of 1936, she had found a buyer for the press,
the name, and the other meager assets of The Mid-West American, and she bundled
up her two children, a very small collection of possessions, took the highway
east, and moved back to her girlhood home, her mother's two-storey house in
Flatbush.

Back in New York, she sometimes felt as if she had come from the frying pan into
the fire. Many of her old radical friends whom she had known since the 'teens
and the 'twenties shunned her, or were very cold and distant. Rumors about
Liggett were rampant. Articles had been printed in the Communist  weekly, The New
Masses  in December of 1935, and a series of articles in The Daily Worker,  in
February of 1936, which libeled the reputation of Walter Liggett.

These articles averred that he had been a "blackmailer," who had "fallen into
shady dealings with the underworld," and finally, asserted that she, Edith
Liggett, had been "selling her  husband's dead body limb  by limb, to the
highest bidder in the Republican Party." The United Front was now in full swing,
and an enemy of Floyd Olson, a Popular Front ally, was equated with being an
Enemy of the People. Edith felt that  the only way she could clear her own name,
and the name of her deceased husband, was by suing The Daily Worker for libel.
Which she  proceeded to do. So, one Spring day in Manhattan in 1936, she began
making the rounds, knocking on doors, trying to find a lawyer who would take her
case pro bono, for she had next to no money. The general climate  of  alienation 
and distrust towards her person that prevailed amongst most of the radical
intelligentsia in New York, was mercifully not universal, and a few of her
close friends were very faithful and loyal. Otherwise, and she told me this
frankly, she would not have been able to go on.

One of her old friends from Greenwich Village in the 'teens, Max Eastman,
steered her onto his lawyer, Morris Forkosch. Who, upon learning the full facts
of the case, agreed to take the case. They stayed with that lawsuit for five
years, before they were able to get a judgment. All during this time,  she
supported her two children by writing  short stories.

In the course of pursuing this lawsuit against The Daily Worker, and Comprodaily,
the holding company behind the publication, she and her lawyer came upon some
very convincing circumstantial evidence to the effect that the Communist Party
was run by the "Plutocrats," as she put it. When Edith finally  won a small
judgment of $2500, Comprodaily declared bankruptcy, and went into receivership.
It was then that Edith and Morris had a glimpse at  the labyrinth  of dummy
corporations, and shell holding companies in a hall of mirrors behind the facade
of Comprodaily. The money-trail led from Party headquarters on Thirteenth Street
to Wall Street.

So the "Triangle" was complete, she said, "On the one hand, you had the
Communist Party, in the middle, the Democratic, Farmer-Labor, and Republican
"All-Party" Machine, and over here, "the Mob," she gestured with her hands, "Up
above, at the top, the Plutocrats." It was more than a triangle; it was a
pyramid, a mountain, really. Liggett had been trying to fight one aspect of the
triangle, like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but the triangle was in
reality, a mountain, and it had crushed him.

At this point in our conversation, Edith sank into her chair, weeping, and softly
sobbing. "You can't fight City Hall, you know." I tried to console her, for I
loved my grandmother deeply. The bond between us was one of complete empathy, and
its source lay not only in blood, but also in the deep waters of our common loss.
Walter's death had left Edith in a state of recurrent, and unrelieved mourning
that broke from time to time, like waves over her soul. It had left all of his
offspring orphans.

I often thought about our conversation over the years, and I could never forget
the geometric image of the Triangle, especially since the cutting edge of this
shape had delved so deeply into Edith's soul. She remained able to experience the
poignancy of joy, and her laughter was wonderful. She had many admirers, friends,
and even suitors.  But her experience in the Thirties had stigmatized her, and
left her uniquely isolated, with a consciousness that was both a blessing and a
curse. I accepted this consciousness, as her gift to me. It has often kept me
from becoming a Fellow Traveler, or a joiner. It has rendered me unwilling to
follow leaders, and always, to question the sources of mass-movements.

                               [CONTINUED]

                         - Mark  Walter  Evans