During his late teens and early twenties, he worked as a tavern porter and manager in Eldorado, Illinois, the hometown of the woman he married at age eighteen.
[2] Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Beeny based himself in St. Louis, where he was active in domestic anti-communist campaigns and led local and national efforts directed against civil-rights and student-movement leaders.
Beeny faced constant legal problems over questionable financial practices at his Missouri Youth Ranch and his Denver-area radio station "The Voice of Reason.
"[5] In 1960, accusations of marital infidelity forced Beeny from his position as pastor of the New Testament Baptist Church, which he had founded in a St. Louis storefront five years earlier.
The meetings were intended to instruct members in fire-arms and survivalist tactics in order to fend off what Beeny called "those so-called civil-rights groups now reported to be stocking weapons" in preparation for a revolutionary uprising.
[8] Running for Missouri Lieutenant-Governor as a Democrat in 1968 – one of his many unsuccessful bids for state and local office – Beeny endorsed the presidential campaign of the then-segregationist Alabama Governor George C.
[9] Beeny's own campaign platform, as outlined in his newsletter The Herald of Missouri, urged "states' rights," opposed open-housing legislation and busing for school integration, and advocated a "tough-on-crime" policy that would include ordering police to "shoot to kill" in response to civil disorders.