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 gun-rich plans, they were arrested by federal officials on a number of illegal weapons possession offenses, and a few Minutemen served federal time upon conviction.

Robert Bolivar de Pugh, founder and leader of the group, was born in April 1923, in a sparsely populated area of Independence, Missouri. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II but was discharged prior to the war's end on recommendations from an army psychiatrist. During one of his trials for gun running in 1967, the prosecution entered as evidence the army's official medical report that compelled his release. According to the army, de Pugh suffered from “psychoneurosis, mixed type, severe, manifested by anxiety and depressive features and schizoid personality [making this] solider unable to perform duty due to anxiety, nervousness and mental depression.” The report went on to state that “This condition is chronic and for 3 years has been attended with vague auditory hallucinations and mild ideas of reference,” meaning that de Pugh admitted to hearing someone call his name but never discovered who it was.

After the war, de Pugh held a succession of low-paying jobs, mostly in sales. He attended Kansas State University for a semester and a half and a few years later enrolled at Washburn University of Topeka, again not completing a degree. In 1953, he created the Biolab Corporation, whose sole product was a dog food vitamin supplement called “Fidomin.” Biolab floated between peaks and valleys of irregular cash flow, but when the company did well, de Pugh used its Independence, Missouri, offices as a mailing address from which he sent archconservative literature to anyone who responded to handbills or flyers.

A key issue with de Pugh was gun control legislation that he felt curtailed Americans' rights to own weapons. Curiously, de Pugh was never a hunter and only rarely engaged in target shooting, but he was seized of the gun issue. By 1964, he had joined the John Birch Society, a group of ardent anti-Communists who feared the American government was full of treasonist Russian sympathizers. Though he boasted in 1961 that the Minutemen membership exceeded 20,000, in 1964, he admitted that the total was slightly more than 600; by 1968, Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover estimated the number to be less than 500.

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