ABSTRACT
The first part of the study traces an evolution in relationships between vigilantes and federal domestic security agents in the United States of America between 1910 and 1964. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) established an 'American Legion Contact Program' to establish reliable informants, control intelligence gathering from within emigre communities and prevent vigilante operations like those of the APL during the First World War. The chapter examines the FBI's selection of targets for COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, as well as the efforts to disengage vigilantes and other 'extremists' from an emerging network of cooperative law-enforcement agencies, patriotic organisations and system-supportive vigilante groups. Similarly, a 1966 executive level FBI memorandum described the paramilitary Minutemen organisation as 'a militant and vehemently anti-communist organisation which has assumed a negative and unwise approach to the defense of freedom against communist aggression and thereby constitutes a threat to government authority and to law and order'.
