The Minutemen

Flourishing in the 1960s, the Minutemen was a paramilitary group established by a member of the John Birch Society, Robert de Pugh, of Independence, Missouri. Convinced that Soviet Communists were planning to invade the United States, de Pugh and his followers actively sought to create an armed militia that would both resist the Communist invaders and then help establish a more democratic America. Former Kansas City Star newspaper reporter J. Harry Jones, in his biography of the group, titled The Minutemen, details how the organization was fascinated by weapons and created weapons caches in many places east of the Mississippi, which led to consistent friction with federal law enforcement officials. Though the Minutemen are not believed to have actually executed any of their violent or ...