On the eighth of July, Marda Liggett Woodbury, a retired library director, died in California. She was 83. News of her death didn’t reach our newsroom until some time later, and I only heard about it this week.

I didn’t know Ms. Woodbury. I spoke to her only once, last year, when I called her after reading her book. But I found myself saddened, because she had been a living link, perhaps the last witness, to a terrible chapter in the history of Minneapolis.

Between 1934 and 1945, three journalists were murdered in Minneapolis. All of them were gunned down on the street in gangland-style slayings. No one was ever punished in their deaths of Howard Guilford, Walter Liggett and Arthur Kasherman. Over the years, the city salved its conscience by remembering these newspapermen as so scurrilous in their methods and reckless with their associations that they deserved what they got. In fact, each of them, with varying degrees of credibility, self-interest and skill, was attempting to expose the rampant corruption and gangster rule virtually ignored by the dailies, the predecessors of the newspaper I work for now. Guilford, Liggett and Kasherman were the bloggers of their day, attacked by the mainstream politicians and media alike.

In 1935, Marda Liggett Woodbury was 10 years old when she saw her father, Walter Liggett, shot to death behind the family’s apartment in Stevens Square. Liggett, editor of the Midwest American, was a vocal critic of Gov. Floyd B. Olson, whom he accused of tolerating corruption and betraying his radical principles. His daughter testified at the February 1936 trial of the notorious Minneapolis gangster charged in his death, Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld. That’s when her picture shown above was taken, her eyes glaring into the news photographer’s lens with a startling ferocity.

Blumenfeld was acquitted and went on to a long and mostly uninterrupted career in organized crime. Walter Liggett’s family moved away from Minnesota. Sixty years later, in 1998, the University of Minnesota Press published Marda Liggett Woodbury’s book, “Stopping the Presses: the Murder of Walter W. Liggett”. It makes a persuasive case that her father was assassinated because of his political beliefs and his willingness to speak out about them. It was the first step, and not the last, of historians re-evaluating the meaning of the three murders.

Journalists are still being murdered around the world. Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists tallied 65 journalist killings, half of them in Iraq. These days, the killing of a journalist in the United States is rare, and typically results in fellow journalists banding together to finish whatever investigation was left undone. The death of Marda Liggett Woodbury is a reminder that for a time, putting words on paper could get you killed in Minneapolis, and the city would shrug.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under Corruption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.