STOPPING THE PRESSES:
It took Marda Liggett Woodbury more than 50 years to return to Minneapolis. In 1986, while attending a library convention, she found herself "an inveterate researcher" at the Minnesota Historical Society one afternoon, perusing old documents about her father's murder in 1935 (which she had witnessed-at ten years old), and the subsequent defamation of his reputation. That quiet afternoon eventually stretched into more than eight years of painstaking research and writing. The result is STOPPING THE PRESSES: THE MURDER OF WALTER W. LIGGETT. Tracing the life and journalistic career of her father, Walter W. Liggett, Woodbury presents a vivid and accurate picture of the time in which he lived and worked, the era of gangsters and Prohibition, when organized crime syndicates co-existed with machine politics in cities like New York, Chicago-and even Minneapolis.
Though Chicago is well-known for the infamous exploits of its legendary gangsters and long history of corrupt and tyrannical politicians, few realize that Minneapolis once enjoyed the same unsavory reputation. In a single ten-year period, no less than three "muckraking" journalists (including Liggett) were gunned down, most likely by mobsters tolerated-if not actually backed-by elements of the state government, district attorney's office, and local police department. "This is a unique record for an American city," states Woodbury . "Although journalists have occasionally been threatened, jailed, or beaten, they have rarely been murdered. That usually draws too much heat."
During the brief period that they lived in Minnesota, Liggett and his family experienced all of these terrors firsthand. They were repeatedly threatened; Liggett was severely beaten and his wife almost run down;, and just months before his death, he was framed and nearly convicted of sodomy after being wrongfully accused of abducting two young women. At the time of his murder in December 1935, Liggett was editor/publisher of the Midwest American, a struggling local weekly that provided him with a public forum for his tireless campaigns against government graft and corruption, specifically the unholy alliance between the office of Gov. Floyd B. Olson and the Minneapolis underworld.
For the previous thirty years, Liggett had been dedicated to the dual causes of radical journalism and political activism. He was active in the defenses of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s and labor leader Tom Mooney later in that decade, who, in the heat of war hysteria in 1916, had been jailed on false charges of planting a bomb at a San Francisco parade. Liggett promoted third-party politics in Minnesota, was an ardent supporter of the Nonpartisan League in its early years ("perhaps the most successful democratic mass movement in American history"), and wrote a prodigious volume of well-researched articles and longer works, including an unflattering book on President Herbert Hoover.
STOPPING THE PRESSES is divided into three parts. In Part I, Woodbury lovingly reconstructs her father's early years in rural Minnesota, his home state, and traces his colorful career as a journalist, political organizer, and freelance writer through a succession of cities, including New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. Part II concerns the events leading up to Liggett's murder and its traumatic aftermath. Part III is devoted to the ordeal of her mother, Edith Liggett, during the careless investigation and cursory trial, culminating in the acquittal of the man she had identified as Liggett's murderer. It is also a testament to Edith's heroic struggle to clear her husband's good name, which Woodbury effectively ends up doing, including successful criminal and civil libel suits against the Communist Daily Worker newspaper.
In her portrayal of her father, Woodbury struggles to achieve that difficult balance between personal memoir and historical biography, though (as she hints in the preface) it is the latter that generally prevails. This is hardly a criticism, however, since even the factual descriptions read like a novel, and she succeeds in bringing these characters from a little-known corner of American history back to life with integrity, flair, and an admirable degree of emotional control.
STOPPING THE PRESSES is reminiscent in many ways of Jim Garrison's seminal work, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS, in its ability to relate a complex series of interconnected political events through a personal focus, while maintaining a level of journalistic objectivity that is consistent with its subject. Both books are rigorously well-researched, provide an annotated index to help sort out the names of the players, and perhaps most importantly, succeed in imparting the reader with a profound change of consciousness. In their straightforward handling of the facts, they both demonstrate that the Official Story of an event, often rife with contradiction and false logic, is seldom the Truth-in spite of where we read it or who tells us to believe it.