All photos courtesy of Boston Public Library
Provincetown’s History Told Through Artifacts
by Steve Desroches
Walter Liggett was an investigative journalist in the early 20th century who excelled at uncovering government corruption and the inner workings of organized crime. Originally from Minneapolis, Liggett worked at newspapers around the country until settling into writing for multiple outlets in New York City. Once living in the Northeast, he found his way to Provincetown, likely following those with similar political leanings as he was a member of the American Socialist Party and the Outer Cape at that time was loaded with socialists, communists, anarchists, and other left-wing affiliations, as captured in the 1981 movie Reds, starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson.
Liggett frequently wrote about the corruption brought on by Prohibition, critiquing the laissez-faire politics of Herbert Hoover, and the dealings of various organized crime outfits. He also became a celebrated novelist working his left-wing politics into the narrative of his books. But he was especially well known for his active role in advocating for the release of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, two Italian immigrants and anarchists who were charged with murder and armed robbery of a shoe company in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920.
Many, like Liggett, thought the imprisonment, conviction, and death sentence of Sacco and Vanzetti was motivated by anti-immigrant, anti-Italian sentiments, and as a warning to other left-wing activists. Communications from Liggett to the Boston-based Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee while he was organizing support in Provincetown are now part of the archives at the Boston Public Library. Alas, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison on August 23, 1927 in what Liggett described as a “brutal judicial lynching.” Liggett himself met a grisly end when he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Minneapolis at the age of 49. Jacob Blumenfeld, a figure in the well-known Romanian-Jewish crime family in Minneapolis, whose family had tried to bribe Liggett into silence was acquitted of the murder, in what is generally considered to be a court controlled by a network of organized crime families.
