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Walter William Liggett was an American editor, writer and journalist. During his career he worked at several newspapers in New York City, including the New York Times, The Sun, New York Post, and the New York Daily News.
Background
Walter William Liggett was the third among four children and the second son of William Madison Liggett and his wife, Mathilda Root Brown, natives respectively of Union City and Marysville, Ohio. The father, a volunteer at the age of seventeen in the Union army and later a colonel in the Ohio National Guard, removed his family in 1884 to the newly settled village of Benson, Swift County, Minnesota, United States, where Walter was born on February 14, 1886. Until four years old he lived on his father's twenty-four-hundred-acre farm, which pioneered in purebred Holstein and Shorthorn cattle for the Northwest. The elder Liggett's skill in scientific agriculture led to his appointment as a regent of the University of Minnesota in 1888. Two years later he became secretary of the State Agricultural Society, whereupon the family moved to St. Paul. In 1893 he was chosen acting dean of the University's college of agriculture and director of its experiment station, these appointments being made permanent in 1896.
Education
After graduating from the St. Paul Central High School in 1904, Walter entered the college of which his father was dean. He remained there for a year.
Career
In 1905, when only nineteen, Liggett began his career in journalism as a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. The years 1906 and 1907 he spent on the Minneapolis Journal and Daily News. He then went to the Duluth News-Tribune. The well-dressed six-footer, redhaired, powerful in build and quick with his fists, bested many a lumberjack and longshoreman in payday fights in the rough lake port saloons. In 1908 Liggett was offered the post of managing editor of the Alaskan in Skagway, and the adventurous young newspaperman eagerly accepted. In 1910 he returned to the United States, stopping in Pasco, Washington, where he published the Pasco Progress, 1911-1915.
Removing to Fargo, North Dakota, he was for a time an editorial writer and reporter for the Pioneer Press-Dispatch in the years of American participation in the First World War. This was the period as well as the region of the Non-Partisan League's rise, and Liggett enthusiastically joined with C. A. Townley in forwarding the agrarian revolt against monopolistic control of the grain trade. His newspaper experience brought him a post in the league's promotional organization, and in 1919 he was appointed deputy immigration commissioner for North Dakota.
For a short time he served as secretary to Edwin F. Ladd in Washington after the latter assumed his seat as United States senator in 1921. Restlessness continued to be a dominant characteristic. He became in 1922 an editor of the Socialist New York Call, then a daily newspaper. In the years 1923-1925, he was a copyreader in the sports department of the New York Times and held a series of editorial positions on the New York Evening Post, the Sun, and the New York Daily News. He was from 1923 to 1932 a free-lance writer except for a short period in 1930 when he was editor of Plain Talk, a short-lived magazine which sought to establish muckraking and blunt statement as a journalistic bill of fare. One of his Plain Talk articles provoked a $250, 000 libel suit by Gov. J. C. Walton of Oklahoma.
Previously he had published several books and short stories chiefly based on pioneer life, among them The Frozen Frontier (1927), The River Riders (1928), and Pioneers of Justice (1930). Liggett now returned to Minnesota for three crowded, turbulent years. In 1932 he was briefly editor of the Bemidji Times. Next he went to Red Wing, where he began publication of another weekly which he called the Mid-West American. He soon transferred his printing establishment and with it the Mid-West American to Austin and within a few months shifted them both to Rochester. In 1934 he moved once more, this time to Minneapolis. After issuing a local weekly, the West Lake Neighborhood News, for a short time, he resumed publication of the Mid-West American. Seldom more than six pages in size and never carrying much advertising, this small sheet was Liggett's vehicle for almost unrestrained attacks on state, county, and city officials. He printed one exposé after another of liquor lords, gambling rings, and criminal groups, and their alleged connections with law-enforcing agencies.
At first a warm supporter of Gov. Floyd B. Olson, Liggett broke with Olson in 1934 to follow Townley in an unsuccessful independent candidacy. When Townley lost this fight at the polls, Liggett began a campaign for Olson's impeachment. In November 1935, acting as his own attorney for much of the trial, he was acquitted in St. Paul on charges of misconduct with two minor girls. Pointing out that the reported offense was more than a year old, Liggett told the jury that the proceeding was a "political frame-up. " While awaiting trial, he was severely beaten by several men, and one of his ears was almost torn off. The issue of the Mid-West American for December 6, 1935, which challenged Minnesota either to oust Governor Olson or to indict the editor for libel, was Liggett's last venture in journalism. Three days later, as he and his wife and daughter alighted from his automobile at the rear of their apartment house in Minneapolis, he was shot to death by bullets from a sub-machine gun, fired in a waiting automobile which sped away. His widow identified Isadore Blumenfeld (Kid Cann), notorious police character, whom Liggett had repeatedly assailed in print, as one of the assassins; Blumenfeld was tried and freed on an alibi. Mrs. Liggett also charged four policemen with perjury and accused Governor Olson of having plotted the murder. The federal Department of Justice declined Olson's invitation to go into the case, and state investigations were without results. Estimates of Liggett vary widely. His widow, who was his staunchest defender, called him an idealist and hater of crookedness wherever he found it. The press, which had generally ignored his charges, saw in him, after his death, a crusader-martyr who lost his life for free expression in a war on vice and crime. A fair appraisal now is that he was a man of much talent and tremendous energy, with definite weaknesses, some of whose activities have not been adequately explained. His body was cremated and the ashes were sent to Brooklyn.
Liggett was a bitter critic of prohibition enforcement, and, making a tour of the large cities, he described bootlegging and other evils arising from the illegal liquor traffic. Some of his boldest charges were investigated by a Congressional committee. He also made a specialty of "misgovernment" in American municipalities, the graft and corruption in which he attributed more to public utilities and other businesses which paid for unfair advantages than to the underworld. In 1932 he wrote The Rise of Herbert Hoover, a sensational criticism of the incumbent President on his record as an engineer and public officer.
Connections
In Skagway Liggett met Norma J. Ask, whom he married in 1909. He and his first wife having been divorced. Liggett in 1923 married Edith Fleisher of New York. He was the father of a son, William Wallace, and a daughter, Marda Molyneux, by his second wife.