His father, William Madison Liggett, had served in the 96th Ohio Infantry Regiment of the Union Army during the American Civil War.

They had moved to a stock farm in Swift County, Minnesota after William Liggett, who was serving in the Ohio state militia, was severely wounded while suppressing the Cincinnati riots of 1884.

[4] After leaving college, Walter Liggett worked for a succession of newspapers in Saint Paul, Skagway, Alaska, Pasco, Washington, and in New York City.

In 1929–1930, he vaulted to national prominence with a series of articles for Plain Talk magazine which described the corruption wrought by Prohibition on American cities such as Washington, D.C., Boston and Minneapolis.

Walter Liggett's interactions with Herbert Hoover dated back to the Russian famine of 1921 when, after being hired as head of a famine relief organization by Ludwig Martens, a Soviet spy under diplomatic cover, Liggett was investigated as a possible CHEKA mole by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Hoover's request as Secretary of Commerce.

They are "The River Riders", about the Timber Interests in Northern Minnesota; "Pioneers of Justice", about the North West Royal Mounted Police; and "The Frozen Frontier" based on his own experiences in Alaska at the end of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Floyd B. Olson had been elected governor of Minnesota on the Farmer-Labor Ticket in 1932, while Liggett was comfortably writing novels in an easy chair living with his family in a flat at Kew Gardens in Queens.

But he was soon dismayed by evidence of rampant corruption in the Farmer-Labor Machine that had developed during the twelve years that he had been in the east, and barnstorming around the country engaged in muckraking journalism.

A.C. Townley and his following were concerned about the blatant corruption in the Leadership of the Farmer-Labor Party centering in the person of the titular head of the FLP, governor Floyd B. Olson and his political "Machine".

In a series of articles in the "Mid-West American", Liggett accused senior Farmer-Labor politicians of collusion with the leaders of the Twin Cities both the Irish mob and Jewish-American organized crime.

He especially focused on their alleged connections to the North Minneapolis-based Romanian Jewish crime family and led by Jacob Blumenfeld and his older brother Isadore Blumenfield, alias "Kid Cann".

Liggett also repeatedly called in his articles for the United States Federal Government to become actively involved in investigating and prosecuting organized crime in the Twin Cities, as they had recently done so successfully against Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone.

Soon after, at six p.m on the evening of December 9, 1935, Walter Liggett was slain in a drive by shooting with a Thompson submachine gun, as he stepped out of his car, groceries in his hand, in the lane behind their apartment in Minneapolis.

In an April 1940 article, D. H. Dubrovsky, the former head of the Russian Red Cross, alleged that the murder of Walter Liggett had been committed by the Soviet secret police.

[7] Then, shortly before Liggett's murder, the Minnesota District Committee of the CPUSA had met and, in a complete reversal of their former position, they pledged their support for Olson's administration and denounced the Ligget-Townley Revolt as a Capitalist Plot to disrupt the Farmer-Labor Party from within.