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Minutemen

Groups willing to use violence to defend presumably threatened "American" values are not new in this country's history. Nevertheless, the state of thinking and information on these groups are undeveloped. This is doubtless partly due to their frequently illegal and usually conspiratorial nature. It is due also to a certain amorphous character of the groups themselves. Paramilitary groups are constantly fragmenting, dissolving, undergoing rapid membership turnover, and forming and breaking alliances with other groups, both illicit and aboveboard. Their disorganized character is an important index of the nature of these groups and of their relation to the larger social and political structure. As one observer has suggested, "The Minutemen are more a frame of mind than an organization or movement." Put differently, these groups could be said to represent a frame of mind in search of an organization, and having little success in finding one.

"Patriotic" paramilitary groups are composed of men whose grievances are not well articulated and who are unable to organize themselves into a coherent political force, partly because of their own ideology and background and partly as a result of the response of the polity to them. Consequently the source of their grievances remains unaltered, while they are driven farther and farther away from normal political life.

"Paramilitarism" here refers to the activities of a group that prepares for coordinated, violent action in order to restore, defend, or create general values, having a technological capacity for collective violence, and existing outside formal legal or military institutions. A number of the are almost pure types of the paramilitary organization, in the sense of dissociation from legitimate political structures and a considerable degree of armament. One such group, the Minutemen, is the largest and best organized of the type.

The Minutemen organization was founded in 1961 out of several local guerrilla-style groups which had arisen during the years 1957 to 1960, at a time when the sense of threat from a growing and ostensibly monolithic international Communism pervaded the country's psyche, conditioned its foreign policy, and dominated its rhetoric. This Cold War atmosphere must be kept in mind in order to recognize that the Minutemen, like other white militant groups of a violent nature, are not so distant from the more respectable elements of the larger society as it might appear on the surface. Rather, the original aim of the Minutemen — to provide guerrilla training in case of an armed invasion of the United States by Soviet forces — may be interpreted as a logical extension of the national security policies of the American government and of a populace that took seriously the issue of whether it was better to be dead or Red.

It was not entirely unnatural, therefore, that when the image of a sharply dichotomized world altered considerably — especially as a result of new perceptions of differences among various Communist nations — some of those with a deeper stake in the earlier image began to ask whether there was not some kind of internal subversion of American commitment, whether in fact "Communists" or their allies had substantially taken control of the American polity. This became the theme of the Minutemen soon after their origin, and remained so. Minutemen believed that Communists were in substantial control of American politics, education, and communication; that liberals and fellow travelers were working hand in hand, knowingly or otherwise, with the hard-core in preparation for a total Communist take-over of the country. This would occur in the near future at an unspecified date referred to as "The Day," at which time patriotic Americans will have to take to countryside, armed, in defense of the country.

Minutemen refer to themselves as "America's last line of defense against Communism" and see violence as justified in view of the depth of the threat to American principles: "When our constitutional form of government is threatened we are morally justified in resorting to violence to discourage Communists and their fellow travelers." They viewed the use of armed force as an explicitly counterrevolutionary measure in the face of a thirty-year, largely nonviolent, bureaucratic left-wing revolution which has been taking place in the USA.

An informed estimate of active Minutemen membership as of 1968 puts it at eight to ten thousand nationally, with heaviest concentrations on the West Coast, especially around Los Angeles and Seattle; the Southwest; and the Midwest, especially the St. Louis-Kansas City area, with a sizable pocket in New York. That the Minutemen were capable of much violence wes undisputed. Minutemen-linked events included an attempted bank robbery, complete with dynamiting of police and power stations, near Seattle; an assault on a peace group in Connecticut; and an attempted assault on three left-wing camps in the New York area. In the last incident, some twenty Minutemen were arrested and a sizable amount of weaponry confiscated.

The weapons included the following: 125 rifles, single or automatic; ten pipe bombs; five mortars; twelve .30 calibre machine guns; twenty-five hand guns; twenty sets of brass knuckles with knives attached; 220 knives of various sorts; one bazooka; three grenade launchers; six hand grenades; fifty 80 mm. mortar shells; one million rounds of ammunition of all kinds; chemicals for preparing bomb detonators, including picric acid; thirty walkie-talkies and various other communication devices including short- wave equipment capable of intercepting police bands; fifty camouflage suits with boots and steel helmets; and a crossbow.

Minutemen trained for guerrilla operations and conducted seminars on weapons use, making of explosives, and so on. A considerable amount of effort was spent on gathering intelligence on potential targets — communications centers, power stations, arms supplies — and this effort included an attempt to infiltrate police and National Guard units. By the late 1960s this had apparently been partly successful. Minutemen infiltration of the New York State Police netted considerable information on police radio communications.

In addition to their own potential for violence, the Minutemen represent what may be the clearest example of a kind of political alienation which could conceivably come to characterize a wider and wider range of groups in American society. The Minutemen membership was largely composed of marginal whites. The founder and leader, Robert DePugh, was a Midwestern small entrepreneur with a history of business failure, who operated a small, largely family-owned veterinary drug concern. The former Midwest Coordinator of the group, now head of a smaller but similar group called the Counter-Insurgency Council, owned and operated a small machine shop and gunsmithy in a small Illinois town.

The group arrested in Redmon, Washington, in connection with the attempted bank robbery included a longshoreman, a grocery clerk, a church maintenance man, a ship's oiler, a civilian driver for an army base, and a draftsman. Those arrested in the New York camp episode included a landscape artist, two truck drivers, a cab driver, a heavy equipment operator, a milkman, a draftsman, a mold-maker, an airport steward, a gardener, a horse groom, a bus driver, a New York City fireman, a plasterer, two mechanics, and a clerk.

Most of these were young, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-one. A close student of the Minutemen described their membership as predominantly male, of Western European ancestry and at least nominal Christianity; at least one-half blue-collar workers, few professionals or salaried white-collar workers, and an over-representation of small proprietors.

It is noteworthy that this distribution parallelled to a considerable extent estimates of contemporary Klan membership. This fact may indicate a similar set of conditions underlying the rise of the two groups, as well as offering an explanation for the failure of the Minutemen to recruit Southern membership.

This distribution also approximates the traditional social base of fascist movements. The standard explanations of "right-wing" militancy in the United States have relied heavily on the notion that such militancy represents a form of "status politics" accompanying the strains of prosperity. This kind of explanation clearly applied fairly well to groups such as the John Birch Society, whose membership tended to be suburban and relatively affluent.

But in the case of "patriotic" organizations as well as organized Southern racism, a certain division of labor was apparent, based on class or at least occupational lines. Just as the Citizens' Councils represented a higher-income membership than the Klans, the Birch Society represented the prosperous and at least quasi-respectable arm of the radical "anti-Communist" movement. At the level of the Minutemen, a different kind of analysis may be required.

While the problem of "status" is doubtless great for the marginal white, his grievances ran much deeper. In an important sense, the small-time, small-town businessman, the urban clerk, or worker had been overwhelmed by social developments beyond his capacity to understand or to control. It can be argued that the source of his complaint is not "Communism" at all; rather, it is a form of capitalism which has been imposed upon him from outside — not the classical entrepreneurial capitalism of early America, which he cherished, but the newer, bigger, corporate capitalism of contemporary America.

The new capitalism, while creating new opportunities and new security for large business and for much of organized labor, and extending an at least rudimentary welfare state apparatus to the poor, largely passed by those in the various occupational backwaters which the Minutemen membership represented. The advantages — tax loopholes, govern- ment contracts, controlled markets, and the like — accruing to large-scale corporate capitalism were not available to them; nor for many were the benefits of organized labor. Increasingly left behind in the thrust of these developments, the marginal white felt all of the strains of modern life without most of its benefits.

This situation is strongly reflected in Minutemen ideology, which, while "anti-Communist" on the surface, is actually much more complex. To begin with, the nature of "Communism" for the Minutemen is considerably blurred, as it is for many extreme right-wing groups: "No matter what the name by which this collective ideology is known; communism, socialism, liberal-ism, progressiv-ism or welfare-ism, it still adds up to the same thing; it is the antithesis of individualism, it is the enemy of freedom."

In a real sense, the "enemy" was a complexity and centralization which went well beyond the meaning of "Communism." For that matter, Minutemen ideology explicitly renounces contemporary capitalism in its espousal of the classical variant; DePugh argues that there is a "great difference between theoretical capitalism (the free enterprise system) and capitalism as a power structure." And again, ". . . the 'power elite' is indeed a strange combination of monopoly capitalism and world communism." These facts are congruent with evidence of the populist character of certain other right-wing phenomena; for example, a study of support for Senator Joseph McCarthy found his support highest among small businessmen who opposed both labor unions and big corporations.

The content of Minutemen ideology leads to the strong suspicion that the agitation against "Communism" represents primarily a muddled political awareness of the nature of a "New Industrial State" in which certain groups have been effectively cut off from appreciable influence. The sense of persecution by an organized conspiracy is heightened by their political exclusion and finds its mode of expression in the ideological preoccupations of the larger society.

Political impotence led the Minutemen to a sense that orderly political activity is not feasible, and the Minutemen — like many militants on the left — renounced existing political parties and call for political purism: "Throughout history all major political changes, violent and nonviolent, have been made by minorities. Logically, then, the patriots must cooperate only with their own kind, not in coalitions with members of the vested bureaucracy, either Democratic or Republican."

In 1966, the Minutemen organized their own political party, the Patriotic Party. This reflected the growing politicization of the group and an attempt, if not to influence the political order substantially, at least to promote a recognition of the political, rather than criminal, character of the group. The Minutemen have insisted on their political identity in the face of numerous criminal prosecutions. "We are not criminals," wrote DePugh while fleeing indictment in connection with the Seattle bank robbery, "we are political refugees in our own land."

The Minutemen were unable to organize themselves for political action in an effective sense. They remained a loose collection of armed guerrilla bands. Their attempts at alliance with other groups met with little success. They were allied with the Birch Society until DePugh was expelled from that organization in 1964. Informal affiliation remained; some of the Minutemen arrested in the New York incident were also Birch members. Individual Minutemen have had connections with the American Nazi Party and the Klan; the National States Rights Party cut off its support of the Minutemen in 1964 on the ground that the Minutemen had "gone too far."

The lack of enduring alliances among such groups was traditional, but in the case of the Minutemen more specific factors may be involved, including the lack of anti-Semitic or anti-Negro elements in Minuteman ideology. The Minutemen's highly individualistic ideology and their loose control over membership severely hinder more effective collective organization. At the same time, the lack of strong organizational control may increase the potential for localized violence by individual members and units.

Lack of effective organization furthered the Minutemen's political impotence. Their effective exclusion from politics in turn influences their perception of the nature of the "power structure" and forced them further into a political limbo where violence becomes increasingly seen as the only effective activity. As Hofstadter has suggested, this kind of political exclusion serves to confirm preexisting conceptions of the polity as being in the hands of a malignant force.

The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular political interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealisible nature of their demands — cannot make themselves felt in the political process. Feeling that they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception of the world of power as omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have little chance to observe its actual machinery.

For decades, violent white militancy represented the rough edge of a wider national nativism aimed at excluding immigrants and blacks, Indians and foreigners, from full participation in American life. By the 1960s, official policy, except in some areas of the South and the more hard-bitten sections of the North, repudiated these aims. Still, a significant minority of white Americans felt driven to the use or contemplation of violence in support of similar aims.

Their protest reflected the failure of American society to eradicate the underlying causes of the disaffection of both blacks and whites. On the one hand, the failure to deal with the roots of racism meant the rise of violent black protest in the cities, which the working-class white feared will spill over into his own neighborhood along with rising crime and sinking property values. On the other hand, the failure to deal with the institutional roots of white marginality has left many whites in a critical state of bitterness and political alienation as they perceive the government passing them by.

For the Minutemen, the Klan, and similar groups, adrift and overwhelmed by the processes of the modern corporate state, the language of racism or anti-Communism structures all discontents and points to drastic solutions. Politically immature groups define the source of their problems in terms provided for them.

This should not obscure the fact that their problems were genuine. Continued political exclusion and organizational fragmentation render such groups increasingly prone to violence as a last political language. An effective response to these groups must transcend mere surveillance and condemnation, which can only aggravate their frame of mind without providing re- dress of their situation.

For the most part, the political response to white militancy has been either repressive or self-servingly encouraging. The current emphasis on "law and order" partakes of both elements. A continued repressive response to the militancy of both blacks and whites could conceivably lead to a state of guerrilla warfare between the races. There are precedents for such warfare in some of the race riots of the first half of the century, and in recent clashes between armed black and white militants in the South.

Of more immediate importance was the growing militancy among white policemen, as evidenced by the recent activity of the Law Enforcement Group in New York, the beating of black youths by policemen in Detroit, and the revelation of Ku Klux Klan activity in the Chicago police force. The new militancy of the police had obvious and ominous implications for the American racial situation, indeed for the future character of all forms of group protest in America. The policing of protest took on a new aspect when the policeman carried with him the militant white's racist and anti-radical world-view.