‘We are now a nation of Minute men’: Survivalist Masculinity, Fallout Shelters and
Cold War America
Thomas Bishop
University of Nottingham
Abstract:
This paper will focus on a right-wing militia group, ‘The Minutemen,’ who flourished in early
Cold War America as an evolving apocalyptic imagination came to influence perceptions of
masculinity. Framed by a discourse of readiness to perform violence at a moment’s notice, and
rhetoric of perpetual apocalyptic fear, the Minutemen flourished between 1960 and 1967. For the
Minutemen, fallout shelters were integral to the theory and practice of Armageddon, representing a
spatial zone of male resistance that needed to be well-provisioned and defended against external
threats.
The focal point of this paper will be the 1966 Minutemen conspiracy to blow up three pacifist
centres in New York State. I will illustrate how the phenomenon of fallout shelter preparation and
constant undercurrent of perpetual apocalyptic anxiety mobilised pockets of men across America. I
argue that a pattern emerged in which men ritualistically prepared for the rejection of their
community in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse in favour of individual militaristic family units or
collective bodies of like-minded individuals. Rearticulated in Rick Perlstein’s 2013 article in the
Nation as the origins of modern right wing survivalists, the Minutemen represent a sustained
cultural preoccupation with preparing for the end of the world. By focusing on the Minutemen’s
actions during this important episode, the paper will amplify the changing nature of American
masculinity in a society reconfigured by anxiety over nuclear apocalypse.
*****
Upon walking into phone booths, bars and gas stations across America during the early 1960s, men
were greeted by a startling message. ‘See the old man at the corner where you buy your papers? He
may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. The extra fountain pen in the pocket of the
insurance salesman who calls might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milk man? Arsenic works
slow but sure’. The message above, encased by the symbol of a rifle’s cross hair, appeared stuck to
mirrors in bars, on pamphlets littering college dormitories, and in the classified adverts of gun and
sportsmen magazines across America. Simultaneously evoking a discourse of violent reactionary
fervour and a heroic masculine strength, the sticker was complemented by a single image, an
American Minuteman, rifle ready and iconic Tricorne hat apparent. Below the image was a message.
‘These patriots are not going to let you take their freedom away. They have learnt the silent knife, the
stranger’s cord, the target rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yards. Traitors beware. Even now the cross
hairs are on the backs of your necks.’ The dispatch was clear. War is coming and we need to be
prepared.1
1
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
The above caption found by the Federal Bureau of Investigation stuck to the mirror of a men’s
restroom of a filling station in Iowa in 1961 belonged to a movement that vehemently believed it was
their patriotic duty to gather like-minded anxious individuals around an inherited image of a
masculine heroic revolutionary fighter.2 Mobilising around conspiratorial narratives of communist
invasion and nuclear war this organisation of American men, known simply as ‘The Minutemen’,
valorised a reversion to ‘frontier marital manliness’ built upon ideals of self-reliance, dominance and
violence. Framed by discourse of a readiness to perform violence at a minute notice and rhetoric of
perpetual apocalyptic fear, the Minutemen envisioned a new form of ‘survivalist’ masculinity
constructed around an ethos of rugged violent individualism. As chapters of the organisation sprang
up in Illinois, California, New York and Louisiana, men across the nation were recruited under a new
signifier of manhood, the ability to survive the apocalypse.
The Minutemen were a remarkable phenomenon within Cold War America. From 1961 to 1967 the
movement dominated the headlines of national and local papers, became the subject of an extensive
FBI investigation, and were at the heart of fierce congressional debates over gun control legislation.
Conceived in 1961 under the leadership of Robert Bolivar DePugh, a Missouri resident and owner of
a faltering pharmaceutical business, the organisation was branded by both followers and the
authorities alike as an ‘underground guerrilla movement’.3 The paranoid conspiratorial message of
violence and male isolationism projected by the organisation attracted startling levels of support
during the 1960s. Tasked with preparing the United States for the inevitable apocalypse, DePugh
advocated the widespread adoption of survivalist militarism. Homes had to be fortified, fallout
shelters constructed and men trained in the arts of espionage, infiltration and guerrilla warfare.
Today I will argue that the Minutemen’s actions represent an important but under-analysed episode of
1960s American history.4 Initially focusing on the cultural climate that created the movement, I will
posit that domestic fear of nuclear war fundamentally reshaped masculinity and men during the early
Cold War. I argue that during the 1960s a pattern emerged in which men ritualistically prepared for
the rejection of their community in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse in favour of individual
militaristic family units or collective bodies of like-minded individuals. Terming this model of male
identity ‘Survivalist Masculinity’ I posit that during periods of acute nuclear tension, men will readily
adopt traits of violence and individualism as cultural justifiable means to ensure survival of both self
and family. I will conclude that perpetual anticipation of disaster destabilised both gender and
domestic ideology during this period, becoming embedded within the cultural imagination of the
nation.
2
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
Masculinity and the ‘intimate apocalypse’:
The integration of the atomic bomb into American cultural consciousness was a transition of
contradictory impulse. Academic observers have noted the ‘uneasy legacy’ left by the atomic bomb,
but few have examined the conflicting influence it had on masculinity. 5 The nuclear age was an age of
potential transformation, the promise of a world destroyed or a new age delivered. Revolutionary
medicine, innovative transport, cheap clean energy and household appliances powered by the
untapped potential of the atom--all seemed within man’s reach. However, the presence of the atom as
a weapon of untameable apocalyptic destruction remained. Nuclear testing in Nevada, outcries over
increased levels of strontium-90 in children, Soviet technological advances and publicised nuclear
accidents such as the Lucky Dragon incident in 1954, ensured that the bomb, as an instrument of
destruction, remained at the forefront of public consciousness. Modern man was equally bold,
triumphant and victorious; as he was unsure, vulnerable and impotent These visions of a nuclear
future, both utopian and abstract, punctured a triumphalist post war narrative of American global
supremacy with a ‘primitive fear of the unknown’ of ‘forces man can neither channel nor
comprehend’. Masculinity, it seemed, existed in a paradox of cultural apocalyptic influences.6
This destabilising impact of rapid technological change was matched by an intensification of
international politics around nuclear weaponry. To a domestic background of middle-class affluence,
racial protest and an apparent visibly permissive society, geopolitical developments of the early Cold
War era pushed the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. Coalescing around
stand-offs in Berlin in 1961 and at Cuba in 1962, the nation seemed to face an uncertain future.
At the height of the Berlin Crisis in 1961 President John F. Kennedy reconfigured masculine
responsibility by openly calling on American men to take the ‘what steps he can without delay to
protect his family’ from the potential apocalypse’.7 Valorising a heteronormative patriarchal vision of
the nuclear family as the archetypical unit of survival, Kennedy and the newly reformed Office of
Civil Defense actively marketed nuclear war as an event intimately affecting civilians as individuals.
Home fallout shelters, it was theorised, would provide the centre piece to a reinvigorated domestic
defence’ inspiring citizens to actively participate in the protection of their community.
‘We are now
a nation of Minute men’ President Kennedy told an uncertain public ‘a nation of citizens who are not
only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose
of their daily life’.8 Throughout the 1960s hastily constructed shelters began to spring up across the
backyards of suburban homes as worried men prepared their families for thermonuclear war. Nuclear
3
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
war, ostensibly horrific in the nation’s imagination, had forced the individual to address his own
position within the wider prism of global political realities. It is within this climate that the
Minutemen were conceived.
‘Pledge yourself and your Rifle’: The Minutemen confront the nuclear age
Through a study of the Minutemen, I aim to demonstrate how the phenomenon of fallout shelter
preparation, and constant undercurrent of perpetual apocalyptic anxiety, served to mobilise pockets of
men across the United States. It is my argument that the Minutemen reflected a growing
collectivisation of men around a Survivalist model of masculinity. Furthermore, I posit that a close
reading of the recruitment literature and an examination of the movement’s formation reveals a
complex aggressive dimension to survivalist masculinity. This aggressive dimension was marked by
the prominence of conspiracy narratives of communist infiltration and the need for direct action,
culminating in the attempted fire-bombing of three ‘left wing camps’ in New York State in 1966. By
the open declaration of traitors and the targeting of demonized marginalised groups, the Minutemen
imbued an apparently harmless survivalist fantasy, concerned with building shelter out of familial
responsibility, with an insidious aggressive edge. Justifying their abhorrent actions through the
language of a defensive domestic response - the patriotic duty of American men- the Minutemen’s
actions highlight how the deferral of nuclear attack and the constant anticipation of disaster reframed,
what was deemed, socially justifiable actions of men during periods of anxiety.
Robert DePugh, in an interview conducted by the Kansas Star Reporter Harry Jones, Jr, in 1968,
stated that the Minutemen were born in a ‘little coffee shop just of Lexington Street, in Independence
Missouri’. 9 DePugh and a few friends gathered at this coffee shop during the late 1950s to discuss the
threat of communism. What started as a small group of neighbours quickly gathered steam as DePugh
moved his family and his pharmaceutical business to Norborne, Missouri in 1961. DePugh’s transition
to Kansas was precipitated by the establishment of secondary discussion groups and the construction
of two shelters for his family. Using local libraries, book stores and town halls, DePugh began
advertising meetings for ‘men concerned that our nation is in immediate danger’. 10 Throughout the
latter half of 1961 residents from the outlying towns travelled to Norborne in order to debate and
listen to DePugh’s talks on the state of domestic affairs. It was once again in a café, whilst reading
Kennedy’s speech on the situation in Berlin, that DePugh decided to formalise these discussion
groups as a quasi-political movement, and adopted a suitable name ‘the Minutemen’ before beginning
to pen a recruitment pamphlet entitled ‘Join the Minutemen’.11
4
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
Two important points can be discerned from these early meetings. Firstly, since its inception, the
rhetoric of the Minutemen was interwoven with a mixture of interchangeable conspiratorial narratives
of Federal Government subversion, apocalyptic fears of nuclear attack, and a direct emphasis on
masculine traits of survival. Secondly, the regions around both Norborne and Independence seemed to
provide fertile recruitment grounds. DePugh’s evocation of shelter construction, stockpiling weapons
and ammunition, and his demonization of what he termed ‘big government’, appeared attractive to
anxious residents and DePugh found himself inundated with letters from men across the state asking
how they could join. For local residents anxious about nuclear war and convinced most other people
were simply unable to fully comprehend the threat it posed, there was no obvious outlet for their
concerns. The Minutemen’s bold messages of masculine strength provide an antidote to these
anxieties.
Upon reading ‘Join the Minutemen’ and the movement’s monthly newsletter On Target it becomes
apparent that the adoption of violence and the use of shelter spaces to stockpile weapons were central
tenets of the Minutemen. Initial memos sent from the FBI office in Kansas reported that the
inspiration for the movement came following a hunting trip during which one of DePugh’s friends
espoused the benefits of forming a local guerrilla force, based out of hunting hides and secret fallout
shelters in the hills and forests around Independence. These local units would be able to resist
communist invasion by retreating into the hills, forming militias and establishing the last line of
defence against a domestic Soviet onslaught. By the end of 1961 these ideals of masculine strength,
survivalist skills and apocalyptic imagination coalesced to create a coherent militia movement.
For the Minutemen fallout shelters represented a more robust protected vision of the domestic space,
appropriate for a reality that threatened to explode around them. Yet disturbingly, upon reading the
organisation’s recruitment literature, it becomes apparent that shelters served to ensure not only the
preservation of one’s family, but as spaces designed to keep a hostile invaders out. Shelters for the
Minutemen were spatial zones of conflict, acting equally as strongholds for survival supplies and as
the foundation for a future armed resistance movement. Shelters were individual centres of resistance,
forts of masculine strength and imagined pockets of security in a world on the brink of nuclear
confrontation. DePugh’s rhetoric of survivalist masculinity drew a flurry of interest from other small
survival groups and right wing movements that had been emerging across America during the 1950s.
The Mountain Men of California, and the Rangers of the Christian Defense League, were among the
first to express interest in DePugh’s organisation, and by 1965 a network of around thirty Right Wing
survivalists had collected under the organisational banner of the Minutemen.12
Establishing membership fees of $2 a month, DePugh started extending the reach of the Minutemen.
Placing adverts in the classified sections of papers and in key magazines under the provocative title
‘Wanted Patriot’s’, DePugh looked to court supporters of the Far Right, already preoccupied with
5
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
Soviet technological advances and
infiltration, in the wake of the Rosenbergs’ arrests and the
successful testing of Soviet nuclear bombers during the 1954 Moscow air show.
13
Playing on social
anxieties the adverts offered stark advice to the public. Calling on every man to ‘buy his own rifle…
stockpile supplies and prepare for the battle’, the adverts told men across America to take control and
‘Pledge yourself’ and ‘your rifle’ to the cause.14 Through 1962 and on into 1963, adverts appeared in
Gun and Ammo and Shotgun News and in the classified sections of local papers in St. Louis, Kansas
and Los Angeles. Pamphlets also began to appear in male dormitories in New York and on the campus
of UCLA in Los Angeles, whilst in Washington D.C a crude homemade motor erupted outside the
White House, blanketing the nearby area in Minutemen literature. 15 Upon reading the literature
dispersed, which included such titles as ‘Traitors Beware’ and ‘Our Nation is in Danger’, it becomes
apparent that DePugh sought to rearticulate the same zealous apocalyptic discourse that proved so
appealing in the local coffee shop meetings in Norborne to a wider audience.16
High-profile interviews with DePugh and leading Minutemen figures in Time, Playboy, The Nation
and Life quickly followed the growing public presence of the organisation. Characterising DePugh as
a ‘charismatic figure’, the media coverage situated the Minutemen at the centre of popular discussion
on the ethics and morality of building fallout shelters.17 Depicting the movement as an extreme
phenomenon of ‘shelter culture’ media coverage focused on the performance aspect of Minutemen,
detailing the guerrilla training being conducted on gun ranges and on the ‘secret bunkers’ being
constructed. DePugh’s publicity worked and, by 1966, the estimated membership of those who
claimed affiliation with the Minutemen had reached an estimated 15,000.18 FBI records report
chapters appearing in Illinois, Cleveland, Minnesota, California, Louisiana, Texas, New York and
Connecticut. The Minutemen and their message of survivalist masculinity appeared to be reaching a
wide receptive audience.
Traitors Beware: New York and the Legacy of the Minutemen
On October 30th 1966 New York was rocked by a flurry of arrests as 20 ‘apparently ordinary
individuals’ from ‘all walks of life’ were taken into custody for conspiring to fire bomb three urban
communist camps.19 The men who were ‘dressed for hunting’ were captured during a series of early
morning raids by the Bureau of Special Services Branch of the New York Police department,
following an 11 month undercover investigation that involved 70 of the department’s agents.20 On the
morning of the arrests State Troopers discovered several devices had been planted at ‘left wings’
camps in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. The devices consisted of several jugs half filled
6
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
with gasoline and attached to crude timing devices consisting of cheap watches with their hour hands
bent designed to energise detonating caps. The 1966 New York conspiracy marked a watershed
moment for the Minutemen, and provides an important case study for our understanding of how
masculinity was reconfigured as fears of apocalyptic destruction became more widespread.
In many ways the threat of nuclear war inspires a ‘defensive’ domestic response. Home preparation,
shelter constructions are in essence localised internal domestic practices. Yet in New York a group of
men affiliated with the movement constructed around rhetoric of communist subversion and patriotic
masculine duty, decided to actively seek out and kill a group of people they felt were bringing about
the end of the world. Citing fears that the camps were being used as ‘indoctrination’ centres for the far
left, the Minutemen felt it was their duty, as patriotic Americans, to attack. As information on the
defendants trickled out, it became apparent that their leisure time had been devoted to preparing for
this moment. The suspects had used a local gun range in New Jersey to hone their survivalist skills,
constructed secret shelters around their homes to stockpile weapons and visited local scrap yards,
buying up and repairing broken weaponry. The Los Angeles Times reported that most of the
ammunition had been hidden, buried away in backyards in the South Ozen Park section of Queens’.
Police uncovered over a million rounds of ammunition, an anti-tank missile launcher, six hand
grenades, 125 semi-automatic rifles, 10 pipe bombs, a dozen machine guns, 220 knives of all kinds
and three grenade launchers.21 Radio-equipment and 50 camouflage suits were also recovered by the
New York Police, who deemed that the amassed collection was ‘unprecedented in both ‘variety and
magnitude’.22
The 1966 New York conspiracy is important for two reasons. Firstly, it underpins the aggressive
dimensions to survivalist masculinity. Before this act the Minutemen had remained in many ways a
‘passive’ organisation, stockpiling weapons and building shelters, but divorced from perpetrating acts
of violence. The transition to violence amplifies the manner in which masculinity is often dependent
on ‘othering’. By this I mean that the Minutemen represent the manner in which masculinity is often
constructed through the active demonization of marginalised groups, as either inferior or subversive
models of masculinity that need to be stopped. Moreover, the mobilisation around a dynamic of
violence illustrates the unstable nature of masculinity as a gender construct; one that is viewed as
equally offensive and defensive depending on the perspective of the individual and the power
structures they exist in.
The 1966 New York arrests however marked the decline of the Minutemen and by the early 1970s the
Minutemen had faded from public view. Rumblings in the Dallas State Department that the
Minutemen had supplied Oswald with the ammunition to assassinate Kennedy, a fact that remains
ambiguous, resulted in a federal crackdown on the movement. A string of high profile arrests quickly
followed. DePugh and most of the leadership were arrested for gun trafficking, and the organisation
7
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
buckled under FBI pressure. Yet the ethos DePugh invoked remained strong. Rearticulated in the
Patriot movement in 1990s and in Rick Perlstein’s 2013 article in the Nation on the origins of modern
right wing survivalists, DePugh’s speeches and the literature he produced remains a persistent strain
in modern survivalist thought.23
Whilst the fear of nuclear war may have abated, apocalyptic imagination remains. The rhetoric of the
Minutemen is easy to caricature and dismiss as paranoid ravings of a disenfranchised marginal group,
but to do so is to overlook a key cultural product of the nuclear age. The persistent popularity of the
survivalist male identity, with an undercurrent of racial prejudice, valorisation of violence, a rejection
of authority and a mistrust of the political institution, has repeatedly mobilised individuals.
Survivalist Masculinity remains an uncomfortable cultural spectre in our society – one that deserves
further examination.
Bibliography
Books and Journals:
Beckemeier, Eric. Traitors Beware: A history of Robert DePugh’s Minutemen. Missouri: Hardin
Press, 2007.
Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s early light: American thought and culture at the dawn of the Atomic Age.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Connell, R.W., and James W. Messerschmidt. ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’
Gender and Society Vol.19 No.6 (2005): 829-859.
Cordle, Daniel. States of suspense: the nuclear age, postmodernism and the United States fiction and
prose. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Davis, Tracy C. Stages of Emergency: Cold War nuclear Civil Defense. London: Duke University
Press, 2007.
George, John., and Laird Wilcox. American extremists: militias, supremacist, Klansmen, Communist
and Others. New York: Prometheus Books, 1996.
Mickenberg, Julia. ‘Men on the Suburban frontier: Rethinking Midcentury masculinity’ Review in
American history 34 (2006): 529-536.
Henriksen, Margot. Dr Strangelove’s America: Society and culture in the Atomic Age. Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1997.
Isserman, Maurice., and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
8
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
Jacobs, Robert A. The Dragon’s Tail: Americans face the Atomic Age. Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2010.
Jones, Harry. The Minutemen. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc, 1968.
Karp, Walter. ‘When Bunkers last in the Backyard Bloom-d: The fallout-shelter craze of 1961’
American Heritage 31 No.2 (1980): 84-94
Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion : An American History. New York: Cornell Unversity Press,
1995.
Kimmel, Michael., and Abby L. Ferber ‘”White Men are this Nation” Right-Wing Militias and the
Restoration of Rural American Masculinity’. Rural Sociology 65(4) (2000): 582-604.
Lichtman, Sarah. ‘Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War
America’. Journal of Design history Vol 19. No.1 (2006) : 39-55.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic
Books, 1988.
McEnaney, Laura. Civil Defense begins at home: Militarization meets everyday like in the Fifties.
Princeton: Princeton Press, 2000.
Oakes, Guy. The imagery War: Civil Defense and American Cold War culture. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994.
Rose, Kenneth D. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York:
New York University Press, 2001.
Stroud, Angela. ‘Good Guys with Guns: Hegemonic Masculinity and Concealed Handguns’. Gender
and Society 26 (2012): 216-237.
Traister, Bryce. ‘Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies’ American Quarterly
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Weart, Spencer. Nuclear Fear: A history of images. Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1988.
Primary Material Collection:
(a) Print Media
’2 Right-Wingers Plead Guilty in Plot to kill 158 as Too Liberal’, The New York Time, 14th August
1969: p.28.
‘7 are convicted in Plot on Coast’, The New York Times, 23rd June 1968: p.29.
‘7 in Library Dispute get Death threats’, The New York Times, 19th June 1969.
’16 are indicated in Rightist Case’, The New York Times, 15th December 1966.
’20 Right Wingers Arrested in State Weapons Plot’, The New York Times, 31st October 1966: p.1.
9
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
’20 Anti-Red Groups aim to form Party’, The New York Times, 13th April 1966.
‘A coast ban sought on Rightist Militia’, The New York Times, 7th January 1964.
‘A Milkman with Plastic Bombs’, Life, November 10th, 1966.
‘California urged to Ban extremism’, The New York Times, 13th April 1965: p.15
‘Closer check is planned on members of Rifle Clubs obtaining U.S Arms’, The New York Times, 7th
June 1964:p.41.
‘Crude mortar Erupts near the White House’, The New York Times, 23rd November 1968: p.47.
‘DePugh says he eluded the F.B.I with Hippie Disguise’, The New York Times, 12th July 1969: p.11.
‘Dodd says he put a spy in a gun club’, The New York Times, June 3rd 1965: p.41.
‘Dynamite found near Washington’, The New York Times, 12th June 1965.
‘F.B.I seizes 2 “Minutemen” in Wilderness’, Los Angeles Time, 28th September 1963: p.3.
‘Inquiry ordered on Right-Wing Group ordered in New Jersey’, The New York Times, 23rd October
1965.
‘Kennedy asserts Far – Right Groups Provoke Disunity’, The New York Times, 19th November 1961:
p.1.
‘Letters to editors’, The New York Times, 19th November 1964: p.38.
‘Letters to editors’, The New York Times, 14th November 1966.
‘Lynch says Minutemen membership is falling’, Los Angeles Time, 13th April 1965: p.3.
‘Militants stockpile illegal guns across the U.S’, Los Angeles Time, 28th December 1969: p.42.
‘Minutemen form a political party’, The New York Times, 4th July 1966: p.16.
‘Nothing new under the Wingnut Sun: “Survivialism”’, The Nation, 2nd February 2013.
‘Pacifist at Connecticut farm consider leaving after Minutemen’s attack’, Washington Post, 26th
August 1968.
‘Police undercover unit kept tabs on the Minutemen’, Washington Post, November 1st 1966, p.70.
‘Rifle Clubs denies tie to vigilantes’, The New York Times, 30th August 1964: p.71.
‘Right Wing groups Trains College Students at Camp’, The New York Times, 18th July 1964: p.5.
‘Senator Young asks for curb on Minutemen’, The New York Times, 5th February 1965:p.15.
‘Superpatriots with guns’, The New York Times, 1st June 1968: p.26.
‘Plots Plans and the far Right’, The Nation, 6th November 1966, p.222.
‘The gun collectors’, The Nation, 6th November 1967, p.38.
10
‘We are now a nation of Minute men’
‘U.N plot traced back to Ex-Minuteman’, Pittsburgh Times, 10th November 1966:p.19.
‘Violence erupts at University of Chicago Youth Break into Building occupied by protesters’, Los
Angeles Time, 9th February 1969: p.58.
‘Wanted Patriots’, On Target, 1965
‘Zero hour for the Minutemen’, Life , November 11th, 1966.
(b) Governmental Sources:
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Airtel concerning the Minutemen. 16th November 1966.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bureau teletype concerning the Minutemen. 31st October 1967.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. HSCA Subject file. Minutemen Club, Dallas File FBI# 105-1280160 through to FBI# 62-3395-99.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 31st October 1966. i-48.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 16th October 1966: 1.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 19th January 1967: 15a-15e.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 8th February 1968: 3.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 31st July 1968: section 16a-16d.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 4th November 1969: 14, 18-20.
Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen, 20th October 1971: 1-3.
John F. Kennedy “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Berlin Crisis” 25th July,
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Endnotes:
11
st
1 Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen (October 31 , 1966) p.5
1
22 The Federal Bureau of Investigations conducted a series of investigations from 1966 to 1971 on the actions and
activities of the Minutemen. These records have been obtained through the Declassified Document archives at the
University of Nottingham and courtesy of the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s Warren Commission archive. Both of which
provide extensive coverage of the Minutemen. The reports selected are now readily available to the public.
st
3 Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen (October 31 , 1966) p.1.
3
4 The historiography of the Minutemen is limited to a few books and periphery studies. Studies include Jones Jr., The
4
Minutemen. (New York, 1968) and the recently published Eric Beckemeir, Traitors Beware: A history of Robert DePugh’s
Minutemen (Hardin, 2007). The Minutemen do appear in studies of the New Right in the 1960s, Isserman M, and Kazin.
M (2000), America divided: The Civil war of the 1960s, (New York, 2000) and Churchill W, and Vadner J., The
Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissents in the United States, (1990, South End Press)
pp. 227-229. They also make a brief appearance in relation to Atomic culture and fallout shelters in Rose, K., One Nation
Underground (New York, 2001) pp.112-114 and Margot, A. Henriksen, Society and Culture in the Atomic Age, (California,
1997), pp.210-211. It is important to note that apart from the Beckmeir and Jones studies, there has yet to be a
comprehensive account of the movement in relation to either gender or Cold War anxieties. With the media and
government attention the movement received it’s a startling omission from current domestic American Cold War
scholarship.
5 Quote taken from, Cordle, Daniel. States of suspense: the nuclear age, postmodernism and the United States fiction and
5
prose. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p.12
6 Norman Cousins, Modern Man is Obsolete. New York, 1945, p.7.
6
7 John F. Kennedy “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Berlin Crisis” 25th July, 1961. Public Papers
7
of the Presidents.
8 John F. Kennedy, “Message to those Participating in Roosevelt Day Commemoration” 29th January, 1961. Box 111.
8
President’s outgoing Executive Correspondence, White House Central Files, Subject File, Presidential Papers, Papers of
John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
9 Jones, Harry. The Minutemen. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc, 1968, p. 33.
9
1
10
Ibid.,p51.
11 ‘Join the Minuteman’, On Target, taken from Federal Bureau of Investigations, Report on the Minutemen (October 31st,
1
1966) p.5.
12 Details of groups that claimed affiliation with the Minutemen can be found in the Mary Ferrell Foundation JFK
1
document collection, Federal Bureau of Investigation. HSCA Subject file. Minutemen Club, Dallas File FBI# 105-1280160 through to FBI# 62-3395-99. The collectivisation of right wing groups was also mentioned in the New York Times see
‘30 Anti-Red Groups aim to form Party’ New York Times, 13th April 1961.
1
13
‘Wanted Patriots’ On Target, 1965.
14 On Target, Minutemen Newsletter, quotes taken from Jones, Harry. The Minutemen. New York: Doubleday &
1
Company Inc, 1968, p.99.
1
15
‘Crude mortar Erupts near the White House’, The New York Times, (23rd November 1968), p.47.
1
16
Robert DePugh. Blueprint for Victory, 1966.
17 See Rose, Kenneth D. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York: New York
1
University Press, 2001. P. 121-124
18 Figures from : Beckemeier, Eric. Traitors Beware: A history of Robert DePugh’s Minutemen. Missouri: Hardin Press,
1
2007.
19’20 Right-Wingers arrested in state in weapons plot’ The New York Times, (October 31st, 1961), and ‘N.Y Isolates 20
1
Jailed Minutemen’ The Washington Post (November 1st, 1966).
2
20
‘Zero hour for the Minutemen’, Life (November 11th, 1966)
2
21
‘Bail set for 19 in Alleged fire plot by Minutemen Unit’, Los Angeles Times (November 1st, 1966) p.1.
th
222 Coverage of the New York Bombing can be found in: ‘A Milkman with Plastic Bombs’, Life, (November 10 , 1966).
st
‘Minutemen Seized Plot Smashed’ Los Angeles Times (October 31 , 1966),’20 Right-Wingers arrested in state in weapons
plot’ The New York Times, (October 31st, 1961), ‘Minutemen Guerrilla Unit found to be a Small and Loosely Knit’ The
New York Times (November 12th 1961), ‘N.Y Isolates 20 Jailed Minutemen’ The Washington Post (November 1st, 1966).
2
23
‘Nothing new under the Wingnut Sun: “Survivialism”’, The Nation, 2nd February 2013.