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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, April 23, 1963
...With Good Intentions
HERBLOCK'S CARTOON
Robert De Pugh's comments at the Minority Opinion Forum bring to mind that worn but in this case particularly appropriate cliché — the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
His position is tenable, at least on the surface. He fears the Communists will take over the United States, either by invasion or slowly from within. This point is debatable but hardly can be refuted completely. Undoubtedly, the possibility is there. It is the probability that is questionable.
THEORETICALLY, THE Minutemen's only activity before the expected Communist takeover would be to train members in guerrilla warfare and build up a suitable arsenal. The membership is secret, a primary need of guerrilla fighters in a country occupied by the enemy.
Only after the Communist takeover would the Minutemen take positive action. Then and only then would the guerrilla warfare begin in earnest.
This is how the organization would work — theoretically. If there were some guarantee that the Minutemen would work in practice exactly the same as in theory, the organization would be beyond reproach. The theoretical operation — the intentions of De Pugh — is beyond reproach. A well-armed, well-trained, well-organized and widespread guerrilla underground such as the Minutemen could make the difference between a long, grueling term of Communist domination and a relatively short one brought to an abrupt end by the Minutemen.
SO MUCH for what the Minutenen COULD do if their organization precisely follows the theory it is predicated on.
What about the other courses that the Minute- men MIGHT follow on a tangent to the basic theory?
If the communist threat were to wane over a period of several years, the transfer of the "enemy" label from the Communists to some other political group with opinions different from those of the Minutemen would be a short one. The word communist means different things to different people, and to most people its meaning is primarily emotional. The Communist label all too often is used as a catch-all label to cover all those with ideas different from one's own.
DE PUGH SKIRTED around any personal indictment of President Kennedy, but his implications about Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg and Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger were unmistakable. He said Goldberg was involved in several Communist organizations, and that Salinger's mother helped organize a Communist youth organization in Northern California.
Quite possibly De Pugh's information about the connection between Goldberg and Salinger's mother with certain organizations is correct. But whether these organizations actually are Communist controlled is an altogether different question.
DE PUGH says the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are Communist controlled. This indictment gives some insight into his definition of a "Communist" organization. The logical thought process would be: This organization is Communist controlled; therefore I am against it. But it is all too easy to slip into the reverse implication: I am against this organization; therefore it is Communist controlled. This is a common logical fallacy, one that comes easily when mixed with a little emotionalism.
And emotionalism is a basic element in the Minutemen's organization. Patriotism is basic to the Minutemen, and patriotism cannot be separated from emotion—at least not by the somewhat less than academic man-in-the-street who might become a Minuteman.
This emotionalism, combined with the logical fallacy that all those opposed by the Minutemen are Communists, easily could lead to the tangent to the theory — the tangent with the good intentions — the good intentions that lead down the road to hell.
THE DANGER is not that the Minutemen are anti-Communist but that they will define what is Communist. If De Pugh is right, if the Communists actually do take over the United States, then the Minutemen could become our best hope for driving out the Communists. But if De Pugh is wrong, and he admits that he could be, then the Minutemen easily could become just as big a menace as the Communists they oppose.
— Dennis Branstiter
Cartoons by Herblock (Herbert L. Block), political cartoonist for the Washington Post and the Hall Syndicate, will appear daily on the editorial page of the Kansan.
Little Man on Campus cartoons will no longer appear regularly in the Kansan.
Herblock's achievements include two Pulitzer Prizes (1942 and 1954), the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben as "the outstanding cartoonist of 1956," a Heywood Broun Award (1950), National Headliners Award (1940), American Newspaper Guild Awards (1947 and 1948), four Sigma Delta Chi (national journalism society) Awards (1949, 1950, 1952 and 1956), a special Sigma Delta Chi award in 1951, an American Veterans Committee Civil Rights Award and a Sidney Hillman Committee Award. In those blank dates, 1943-45, insert citations for cartoons aiding the war effort—Herblock was drawing for Uncle Sam.
Minuteman Builds Nation-Wide Guerrilla Force
By Fred Zimmerman
In early 1960, Robert Bolivar De Pugh joined a small hunting club. The group leased a lake near his hometown of Norborne, Mo., and on weekends began building duck blinds.
De Pugh, the father of five children, was prospering then as the head of a pharmaceutical company in Norborne. When he wasn't working, his spare time was devoted to his family, church activities, and trying to keep abreast of developments in pharmaceutical research.
BUT JOINING the hunting club changed his life. As he tells it:
"We were working on the duck blinds one day and one of the fellows, in a joking manner, remarked. 'This would be a good place to hide when the Communists take over.' And we started joking about this, just horsing around like fellas do—Yeah, we'll put the .50-caliber machine gun in that blind over there."
"Then we started talking about guerrilla warfare. We got interested in the subject, and started reading some books about it—Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara. Every weekend we would discuss guerrilla techniques. And we started asking ourselves, 'What is happening in this country? Where is it going?' "
AND IN this way, among 10 or 12 friends on the shore of a little lake in Northern Missouri, a strange idea began taking shape. Its culmination would bring De Pugh national notoriety and a public denunciation from the President of the United States.
It would also hurt his business, and mean fewer and cheaper new clothes for his family.
"We decided we wanted to do something about communism, so we had a division of labor to work out a solution.
"One fella joined all the anti-Communist groups he knew of, to see if they had the right idea or not." De Pugh says in his nasal, Missouri twang. "Another subscribed to 15 or 20 liberal magazines and started studying their viewpoint."
"We decided that all these educational anti-Communist groups such as the John Birch Society weren't doing any good." De Pugh says. "They wouldn't be able to prevent a Communist takeover.
EACH MEMBER of the group began working on some aspect of the "solution." After six months of "real good, hard research" the group had a fourday meeting in which each person reported his findings.
"Our conclusion was that the time would arrive when the
American people would decide to revolt against communism. They would be fighting in the streets for their lives and liberty. They would need arms and ammunition, and that's one of the things we hope to provide."
THUS WAS born an organization of civilian "bands" known as the "Minutemen." De Pugh, speaking at the University of Kansas last Friday, estimated there are now 100,000 members.
Each member is expected to own a rifle, a sidearm, and 300 rounds of ammunition. He is expected to be proficient in guerrilla techniques, and to know how to collect and report "intelligence data."
If De Pugh were not so obviously serious about all this it would be easy to conclude that he and his followers are merely indulging a second childhood
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by playing cops and robbers. But there is more to it than that.
"TO ME, the enemy is anyone who tries to deprive me of my personal freedom, or my children of their personal freedom. And I will kill any individual who does this if I think I can get away with it."
"If 10 of our members want to put in $30 apiece and form a corporation and start buying 50,000 Thompson submachine guns, they have a right to do so — and they've been buying a few."
Discussing the legal requirement that anyone who possesses automatic weapons must pay a $300 license fee. De Pugh said:
What would the group do if it became illegal for private individuals to own firearms? "Well we'd go underground," he said matter-of-factly. "This is too important for us to submit to any kind of gun registration."
DE PUGH speaks proudly of a 15-year-old member of his organization who is "a real live-wire." Shortly after becoming a member the young man began sending the Minutemen headquarters the license number of every person going into certain socialist and Communist party offices in Chicago. Sometimes he sent photographs of these people.
"He built an organization in Chicago of seven bands of 12 to
15 members each," De Pugh says. "When I finally talked to that kid I was amazed at his knowledge of foreign affairs and ballistics trajectories, that sort of thing."
Being national coordinator of the Minutemen has taken its toll on De Pugh. The nationwide notoriety that comes to a man who leads what many observers consider the most fanatical of America's right-wing groups has understandably hurt his business.
IN ADDITION, his dedication to the cause of anti-communism has led him to pour an apparently large sum of his own money into the organization.
"I would be ashamed to tell you the budget my family is on now. And every cent between that meager budget and my rather substantial income goes to Americanist activities."
In spite of the hardships, De Pugh seems unperturbed.
"Here's the thing," he says. "Either you believe this or you don't believe it. If you believe it you're going to work hard, work to protect yourself in the clinches. If you don't believe it, well go home and watch the idiot box and don't worry about studying guerrilla warfare.
"People say I'm a member of the lunatic fringe.' But lunatic that I am, I might be right—and if I am, God help us."