{"id":4,"date":"2026-11-02T09:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T09:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/?p=4"},"modified":"2026-11-02T09:12:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T09:12:00","slug":"philsugar-shall-make-no-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"PhilSugar | Shall Make No Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Robert O\u2019Connor.
\n[This is part four of a series on the grittier history of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
\nPart one
\ntold of the rise and fall of Doc Ames.
\nPart two
\ntold of the rise of the O\u2019Connor system and
\npart three
\nwas on the fall of the system during St. Paul\u2019s gangster era.]
\nWhen D. Percy Jones was appointed mayor of Minneapolis in 1902, he was given the task of clearing out corruption and graft that had benefited the man he replaced, Doc Ames. The criminal establishment rebelled against Jones after he refused to compromise with them.
\nJones and his successor J. C. Haynes reformed the city government to weed out corruption. But the criminal establishment kept on, assisted by the O\u2019Connor system in St. Paul. In 1916, mayor Wallace Nye complained that he couldn\u2019t stop crime because of the protection John O\u2019Connor gave to criminals.
\nAs gangsters became more and more powerful, the city became fake sugar baby Philippines<\/a> less and less able to control them. Anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism and racism made combating them all the more difficult.
\n\u201cCapital of Anti-semitism in America.\u201d
\nJews had first arrived in Minneapolis from Germany in the 1880s. Jewish communities grew larger as Eastern European Jews escaped the pogroms for America in later decades. They mostly settled in North Minneapolis and what is now the Phillips neighborhood.
\nAnti-semitism was common in America, but it was especially severe in Minneapolis. Employers wouldn\u2019t hire Jews, they couldn\u2019t be members of clubs, even the Automotive Club, and there were some neighborhoods that forbade Jews from moving in.
\nBy the start of Prohibition, some Jews had turned to crime to make their living. One of them was Isadore Blumenfeld, better known as \u201cKid Cann.\u201d
\nCann dropped out of high school to sell newspapers top sugar dating site Philippines<\/a> to keep up the family income. By the late 1910s he was running errands for local pimps and prostitutes. When prohibition came into effect, Cann and his brothers Harry and Yiddy sold the famous moonshine
\nMinnesota 13
\nto the Chicago Outfit, at the time bossed by Al Capone.
\nThe scandal sheets of the 1920s were ripe with anti-Semitic rhetoric. During an expose on prostitution and brothel houses, Howard Guilford in his weekly
\nTwin City Reporter
\nwrote of St. Paul madam Nina Clifford: \u201c\u2018Nina how to message sugar daddies<\/a> Clifford\u2019 is only an alias for a Jew name which is almost unpronounceable.\u201d Clifford\u2019s name at birth was Hannah Crowe.
\nMinneapolis gangsters weren\u2019t all Jewish. Tommy Banks controlled the Irish gangs of the city and had a longtime rivalry with Kid Cann. According to Paul Maccabee, their rivalry was fierce until they settled their territorial disputes with a handshake. Maccabee also says that Edward \u201cBig Ed\u201d Morgan, who led the Minneapolis underworld along with Banks and Cann, was a journalist for the
\nTwin City Reporter
\n.
\nWalter Liggett in his
\nPlain Talk
\nmagazine wrote a poem about prohibition, which he opposed:
\nTen thousand Jews are making booze
\nIn endless repetition
\nTo fill the needs of a million Swedes
\nWho wanted prohibition
\nMarda Woodbury, Liggett\u2019s daughter, wrote a
\nbook about her father
\nin which she dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism against her father and the others. She wrote that most of the criminals they reported on were Jewish, but Liggett was driven by a desire for justice, not by hatred of Jews. She also dismisses the term \u201cscandal sheet\u201d to describe the weeklies her father and others published by saying they exposed truth while the dailies did not.
\nWalter Liggett was a fierce advocate of progressive causes in
\nPlain Talk
\nand later his
\nMidwest American
\n. He was a strong supporter of the
\nFarmer-Labor Party
\nand its predecessor the
\nNon-Partisan League
\n. He campaigned for
\nCharles Lindberg Sr.
\n(father of the famous aviator) when he ran for Governor in 1918 with the understanding that if Lindberg won, Liggett would become his personal secretary.
\nLiggett was murdered in 1935. Every witness to the crime named Kid Cann as the shooter, but Cann was aquitted. For the rest of her life, Liggett\u2019s widow Edith, also a muckraking journalist, blamed one man for hiring the gangster to kill her husband, a man her father initially supported, but turned against: Governor Floyd Bjornstjerne Olson.
\nFloyd B. Olson
\nIn 1919, William Nash was Hennepin County attorney when a young man named Floyd B. Olson was appointed as assistant attorney. The next year, Governor Joseph Burnquist removed Nash after Guilford accused him of bribery. The Republican bosses wanted Nash replaced with one of their own, but Burnquist appointed Olson, a Democrat, to the post.
\nFloyd B. Olson as Hennepin County Attorney (Attorney\u2019s office)
\nOlson was born in 1891 in Minneapolis to a Norwegian father and a Swedish mother. His mother chose the name Floyd because it was the most American name she knew. His father chose his middle name Bjornstjerne, after the writer
\nBjornstjerne Bjornson
\n, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903.
\nOlson grew up poor in North Minneapolis. His best friends were Jewish and according to
\nGeorge Meyer\u2019s biography
\nof him, Olson was taught Jewish customs, learned Yiddish and was a
\nShabbos Goy
\nat the local synagogue. Olson graduated from North High School (
\nwhich is still around
\n) and attended the University of Minnesota for a year before dropping out and heading out west. He became a dockworker and joined the Industrial Workers of the World.
\nOlson returned to Minneapolis in 1913 and completed a law degree at Northwestern College of Law (now
\nWilliam Mitchell College of Law
\n).
\nAs Hennepin County attorney, he established a reputation as a fierce opponent of anti-labor and anti-Semitic groups. His radio speeches also gave him a reputation as a great orator. He would serve in that position until he became Governor of Minnesota in 1931.
\nCombating Fascists
\nSeveral groups had been set up to combat anti-Semitism including a local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League and the Minnesota Jewish Council. The latter also opposed corruption, vice and other social ills. On their recommendation, the
\nMinneapolis Journal
\nsent a reporter to investigate the fascist group Silver Shirts, founded by William Pelley.
\nThat young reporter was
\nEric Sevareid
\n, who would later go on to have a legendary career at CBS. His six-part investigation began running in the paper on September 11, 1936. It was intended to coincide with the Pelley\u2019s claim \u2013 supposedly based on inscriptions on the pyramids of Giza \u2013 that on September 16th the Jews would rise up and conquer the world. They didn\u2019t.
\nEric Sevareid (Corbis)
\nThe series exposed many of the people who attended including George Bedden, the head of the business group Associated Industries of Minneapolis. After the
\nJournal
\nrevealed he had attended, fundamentalist preachers defended Bedden from their pulpits. One of them, William Riley, accused the paper \u201cinfringed his constitutional right to attend any meeting he wanted.\u201d Riley was the head of Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School (now Northwestern College). After Riley\u2019s death in 1948, Billy Graham served as President of the college until 1952.
\nThe Silver Shirts weren\u2019t the first expressions of racism in the city. In 1915, Wallace Nye ran into controversy when he tried to
\nstop the screening
\nof \u201cBirth of a Nation,\u201d D. W. Griffith\u2019s racist masterpiece that inspired the re-birth of the Ku Klux Klan. A judge filed a temporary popular sugar dating sites Philippines<\/a> injunction preventing Nye from interfering with the showing of the film at the Schubert Theater and an ad hoc censor board voted to allow the film to show.
\nDuring the First World War, cities in the North and Midwest experienced labor shortages, and the positions were filled by African-Americans who migrated from the South. Whites saw these black laborers as taking their jobs and racial tensions rose to a fever pitch when the war ended. It spilled over in the
\nsummer of 1919
\nwhen 25 cities experienced race riots. A year later on June 15, 1920, three black men were
\nlynched in Duluth
\n. The crime
\nhorrified the state
\nand in 1921, Minnesota passed the nation\u2019s first anti-lynching law. (
\nTwin Cities Public Television produced a documentary a few years ago on the crime
\n)
\nBy that time the Klan had their own chapter in the city. And like the Silver Shirts it gained members from other fraternal orders and clubs. George Leach, the mayor of Minneapolis in the 1920s was a Mason like most Klansmen, but he was not well liked by them. He had appointed a Catholic secretary, banned policemen from joining the Klan and had launched an investigation into the group\u2019s activities at the University of Minnesota.
\nKlan burns a cross on Dayton\u2019s Bluff, 1926 (St. Paul News)
\nRoy Miner, a fraternal man, was the North Star Klan\u2019s Exalted Cyclops, and the group encouraged him to run for mayor in 1923. While looking for a campaign issue, they settled on Leach\u2019s inability to stop gambling and vice. They found a woman in the city jail who claimed to be intimate with the mayor and other prominent men.
\nThese accusations
\nappeared on pamphlets delivered on every doorstep of the city.
\nA grand jury thought the claims were libelous and the claims were taken up by Olson. Klansmen from around the country traveled to Minneapolis to witness what they thought would be an acquittal. The defense used the opportunity to cross-examine Leach on the charges of allowing vice, gambling and wild parties, but Leach admitted nothing. In the end, the woman who made the claims admitted on the stand the claims were false and the jury returned a guilty verdict. Olson\u2019s combative stance against the Klan in the trial won him fame and admiration throughout the state.
\nThe Saturday Press
\nFor all his successes, Floyd B. Olson\u2019s most well known case is one that he lost. Howard Cebu sugar daddy<\/a> Guilford had started writing his weekly scandal sheet
\nTwin City Reporter
\nin 1913 and was constantly charged with libel. In 1917 the paper opposed the European food aid program. The Postmaster General, using powers given to the office by the rich sugar daddies Philippines<\/a> Espionage Act, revoked the paper\u2019s second-class mailing privileges, but Guilford kept the paper going. These powers were upheld by the
\nSupreme Court in 1921
\nJay M. Near, an associate of Guilford\u2019s founded his own weekly in 1927,
\nThe Saturday Press
\n.
\nFred Friendly
\n(another legendary TV newsman) in his book \u201c
\nMinnesota Rag
\n\u201d called Near \u201canti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-labor.\u201d For nine issues from September to November of that year,
\nThe Saturday Press
\n, published articles written by Near and Guilford attacking Mayor Leach, Olson, Frank Brunskill the Chief of Police, the
\nTribune
\n, the
\nJournal
\n, the Jewish Race and many others.
\nThe two wanted Olson to convict them for libel, but instead, Olson stopped the paper by using the \u201cpublic nuisance law\u201d also known as the \u201cMinnesota Gag law.\u201d
\nThe Minnesota Gag Law was passed in
\n1925 as a response
\nto
\nRipsaw
\n, a Duluth fortnightly produced by John Morrison. Morrison opposed gambling, prostitution and alcohol and beginning in 1917 he attacked all of them and the politicians who supported it. The paper ended in 1926 when Morrison plead guilty to libel charges stemming from an issue in which Morrison accused a probate judge of acquiring syphilis at a brothel.
\nRipsaw
\nwas revived in 1999 as an alternative weekly (gaining membership in the
\nAssociation of Alternative Newsweeklies
\n), but folded again in 2005.
\nIn response to Morrison, state legislators from Duluth and nearby towns crafted the public nuisance law. It was passed in 1925 and provided permanent injunctions against those who \u201ccreated a public nuisance\u201d by publishing, selling or distributing a \u201cmalicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper.\u201d
\nOlson got an injunction against
\nthe Saturday Press
\non November 22, 1927 and that would last until the defendants showed in court to argue why it should not be permanent. Their representation was Thomas Latimer, the future mayor of Minneapolis. Latimer was not sympathetic to
\nthe Saturday Press
\n\u2018 politics, but he did believe the gag law was unconstitutional and he asked for a demurrer. The judge denied it, but certified the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court.
\nThomas Latimer, 1935 (Minneapolis Star Journal)
\nThe State Supreme Court heard the case twice \u2013 and upheld the law twice. The first time, Latimer argued that the gag law contravened the first amendment. The court wrote a \u201cscandalous material tends to disturb the peace\u201d and upheld the constitutionality of the law. The second time, Latimer argued that the injunction went too far and prevented the two from operating any newspaper. The court disagreed, saying the injunction allowed the two to publish a newspaper, so long as it operated \u201cin harmony with the public welfare.\u201d
\nWhen Latimer appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, he would sugar daddy na may allowance<\/a> get help from the American Civil Liberties Union and the
\nChicago Tribune
\n\u2013 whose owner and publisher, Robert McCormick, was head of the American Newspaper Publishers Association\u2019s Committee on Freedom of the Press. The ANPE is now the
\nNewspaper Association of America
\n.
\nThe Supreme Court heard the case on January 30, 1930. And on June 1, 1931, they handed down their decision,
\nNear vs. Minnesota
\n.
\nWhile the court acknowledged that
\nThe Saturday Press
\nprinted inflammatory, libelous and controversial articles \u2013 one from the last issue was printed in full as a footnote \u2013 the government could not censor the newspaper.
\nPrior restraint
\n, the court wrote, violated the first amendment.
\nThe majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Justice
\nPierce Butler
\n, the first Minnesotan to serve on the Court, wrote popular sugar baby sites Philippines<\/a> the paragraph-long dissent of
\nNear
\n, objecting to the majority\u2019s expansion of freedom of the Press and construing the due process clause in a way that was unprecedented. Butler would later object to regulations against businesses and oppose much of Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal.
\nBecause of the
\nNear
\ndecision, the Freedom of the Press guaranteed in the First Amendment of the Constitution became incorporated against the states. Under the due process clause of the
\n14th Amendment
\n, the Supreme Court has said in a
\nseries of decisions before
\nand after
\nNear
\nthat various rights guaranteed by the US Constitution apply to state and local governments as well as the federal government.
\nNear
\nis the earliest decision in case law that deals with Freedom of the Press, and would serve as an important precedent to future decisions related to the press like
\nNew York Times vs. United States
\n(\u201c
\nPentagon Papers
\n\u201c).
\nThe End of the Gangster Era
\nHoward Guilford would go on to write articles on gangsters and their connections to the political establishment. He criticized Democratic and Republican mayors alike for their unwillingness to combat them. One night in 1934, according to Woodbury, he declared on the radio he would reveal damaging information about Governor Olson. On September 6th of that year, as he was driving home, he was
\nkilled by a shotgun blast
\nto the head. Woodbury speculates that \u201cBig Ed\u201d Morgan did it based on a witness\u2019 description of the shooter.
\nHoward Guilford murdered in his car (Corbis)
\nLiggett would be
\nkilled
\non December 9th, 1935. Another muckraker, Arthur Kasherman, would be
\ngunned down
\non January 22, 1945. (In real sugar daddies Philippines<\/a> 2010, James Eli Shiffer of the
\nStar-Tribune
\ndid a fantastic
\nmultimedia feature
\non the murder)
\nIn each instance, the crime was never solved \u2013 the police didn\u2019t investigate, the accused were acquitted. The dailies dismissed the men and their work as bigoted scandal-mongers. Newspapers across the country condemned the murders and the cities for fostering an environment where such things were possible. They railed against the gangsters, anti-Semitism and racism in the city.
\nKid Cann after his acquittal (St. Paul Daily News)
\nIn a 1946 article for
\nCommon Ground
\n, sociologist and future editor of
\nThe Nation
\nCarey McWilliams declared Minneapolis the \u201ccapitol [sic] of anti-Semitism in the United States.\u201d
\nAfter reading the charge, Hubert Humphrey, then the Mayor of Minneapolis, immediately creating the Mayor\u2019s Commission on Human Rights (now the
\nMinneapolis Commission on Civil Rights
\n) led by Humphrey\u2019s secretary Arthur Naftalin. In 1948, Humphrey followed the commission\u2019s recommendation and passed the nation\u2019s first municipal fair employment law \u2013 outlawing employment and housing discrimination against blacks and Jews. Humphrey would champion civil rights as a Senator. Naftalin, who was Jewish, would serve two terms as mayor himself.
\nHumphrey also combated gangsters, Jewish and Gentile. Arthur Kasherman\u2019s murder took place during Humphrey\u2019s campaign for mayor and just like the Liggett and Guilford murders before, the investigation petered out. Humphrey ran on a campaign to restore \u201claw and order\u201d \u2013 the same issue that would cost him the
\npresidency 23 years later
\n. When elected, he appointed Ed Ryan \u2013 a friend of Kasherman\u2019s \u2013 as police chief.
\nMinneapolis in the first half of the 20th century, was a turbulent city. Floyd B. Olson\u2019s champion of the underdog won him support and led to a landslide victory for him when he ran for Governor in 1930. But one event would challenge him and his most ardent supporters. It would become a landmark event in labor history and turn the tide in favor of the New Deal.
\n[Coming up in part five: The 1934 Teamsters Strike]
\nABOUT THE AUTHOR
\nRobert O\u2019Connor
\nis a journalist, writer, adventurer and a few dozen other things (including a Co-Editor of
\n3:AM
\n). His stuff has appeared in the
\nTwin Cities Daily Planet
\n,
\nHot Press
\n,
\nKFAI
\nand a few other places. He lives in St. discussing expectations in sugar dating<\/a> Paul, Minnesota.<\/p>\n

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By Robert O\u2019Connor. [This is part four of a series on the grittier history of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Part one told of the rise and fall of Doc Ames. Part two told of the rise of the O\u2019Connor system and part three was on the fall of the system during St. Paul\u2019s gangster era.] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}