Here is an interesting story about GIs who had
to resort to violence to regain control of
their county to save it from corrupt
politicians.
In McMinn
County, Tennessee, in the early 1940s, the question was not if you farmed, but
where you farmed. Athens, the county seat, lay between Knoxville and
Chattanooga along U.S. Highway 11, which wound its way through eastern
Tennessee. This was the meeting place for farmers from all the surrounding
communities. Traveling along narrow roads planted with signs urging them to
“See Rock City” and “Get Right with God,” they would gather on Saturdays
beneath the courthouse elms to discuss politics and crops. There were barely
seven thousand people in Athens, and many of its streets were still unpaved.
The two “big” cities some fifty miles away had not yet begun their inevitable
expansion, and the farmers’ lives were simple and essentially unaffected by
what they would have called the “modern world.” Many of them were without
electricity. The land, their families, religion, politics, and the war
dominated their talk and thoughts. They learned about God from the family Bible
and in tiny chapels along yellow-dust roads. Their newspaper, the Daily
Post-Athenian, told them something of politics and war, but since it chose to
avoid intrigue or scandal, a story that smacked of both could be found only in
the conversations of the folks who milled about the courthouse lawn on
Saturdays.
Since the
Civil War, political offices in McMinn County had gone to the Republicans, but
in the 1930s Tennessee began to fall under the control of Democratic bosses. To
the west, in Shelby County, E.H. Crump, the Memphis mayor who had been ousted
during his term for failing to enforce Prohibition, fathered what would become
the state’s most powerful political machine. Crump eventually controlled most
of Tennessee along with the governor’s office and a United States senator. In
eastern Tennessee local and regional machines developed, which, lacking the
sophistication and power of a Crump, relied on intimidation and violence to
control their constituents.
In 1936 the
system descended upon McMinn County in the person of one Paul Cantrell, the
Democratic candidate for sheriff. Cantrell, who came from a family of money and
influence in nearby Etowah, tied his campaign closely to the popularity of the
Roosevelt administration and rode FDR’s coattails to victory over his
Republican opponent.
Fraud was
suspected—to this day many Athens citizens firmly believe that ballot boxes
were swapped—but there was no proof. Over the following months and years,
however, those who questioned the election would see their suspicions
vindicated. The laws of Tennessee provided an opportunity for the unscrupulous
to prosper. The sheriff and his deputies received a fee for every person they
booked, incarcerated, and released; the more human transactions, the more money
they got. A voucher signed by the sheriff was all that was needed to collect
the money from the courthouse. Deputies routinely boarded buses passing through
and dragged sleepy-eyed passengers to the jail to pay their $16.50 fine for
drunkenness, whether they were guilty or not. Arrests ran as high as 115 per
weekend. The fee system was profitable, but record-keeping was required, and
the money could be traced. It was less troublesome to collect kickbacks for
allowing roadhouses to operate openly. Cooperative owners would point out
influential patrons. They were not bothered, but the rest were subject to
shakedowns. Prostitution, liquor, and gambling grew so prevalent that it became
common knowledge in Tennessee that Athens was “wide open.”
Encouraged
by his initial success, Cantrell began what would become a tenyear reign as the
king of McMinn politics. In subsequent elections, ballot boxes were collected
from the precincts and the results tabulated in secret at McMinn County Jail in
Athens. Opposition poll watchers were labeled as troublemakers and ejected from
precinct houses.
The 1940
election sent George Woods, a plump and affable Etowah crony of Cantrell, to
the state legislature. Woods promptly introduced “An Act to Redistrict McMinn
County.” It reduced the number of voting precincts from twenty-three to twelve
and cut down the number of justices of the peace from fourteen to seven. Of
these seven, four were openly Cantrell men. When Gov. Prentice Cooper signed
Woods’s bill into law on February 15, 1941, effective Republican opposition
died in McMinn County.
McMinn
County Court, which was still dominated by Republicans, directed the county to
purchase voting machines. The Cantrell Democrats countered by having Woods get
a bill passed in Nashville abolishing the court and then selling the machines
to “save the county money.” Department of Justice records show investigations
of electoral fraud in McMinn County in 1940, 1942, and 1944 —all without
resolution.
During the
Civil War, deep from within secessionist territory, McMinn County had sided
with the Union; in 1898 she had declared war on Spain two weeks before
Washington got around to it. How could Cantrell have such undisputed control
over a county noted for its independent and cantankerous spirit? One answer
lies in the Second World War: 3,526 young men, or about 10 percent of McMinn’s
population, went off to fight. Most of those left behind—older and perhaps more
timid—contributed to the Cantrell machine’s growth by remaining silent. Still,
as the war dragged on, people began to tell each other, “Wait until the GIs get
back—things will be different.”
In the
summer of 1945 veterans began returning home; by 1946 the streets of Athens
overflowed with uniforms. The Cantrell forces were not worried. The more GIs
they arrested,” one vet recalled, “the more they beat up, the madder we got.”
Bill White
recalled coming home from overseas with mustering-out pay in his pocket: “There
were several beer joints and honky-tonks around Athens; we were pretty wild; we
started having trouble with the law enforcement at that time because they started
making a habit of picking up GIs and fining them heavily for most anything—they
were kind of making a racket out of it.
“After long
hard years of service—most of us were hard-core veterans of World War II—we
were used to drinking our liquor and our beer without being molested. When
these things happened, the GIs got madder—the more GIs they arrested, the more
they beat up, the madder we got …”
At last the
veterans chose to use the most basic right of the democracy for which they had
gone to war: the right to vote. In the early months of 1946 they decided in
secret meetings to field a slate of their own candidates for the August
elections. In May they formed a nonpartisan political party.
As the
election approached, there were few overt signs of impending trouble, although
to the citizens of McMinn County it was apparent that something had to happen:
there was too much at stake on both sides. The Daily Post-Athenian was
characteristically silent. The most significant news item appeared on election
eve, July 31,1946, at the bottom of page one: VFW members in neighboring Blount
County said that four hundred and fifty veterans were ready to respond to any
need in McMinn County. Above this was a report that Tony Pierce had killed a
muskrat in his front yard.
The veterans
fielded candidates for five offices, but interest centered on the race for
sheriff between Knox Henry, who had served in the North African campaign, and
Paul Cantrell. Since the 1936 election Cantrell had gone on to the legislature
as state senator and installed Pat Mansfield as sheriff of McMinn County. A
big, jovial sometime engineer for the Louisville & Nashville, Mansfield had
done very nicely for himself during his term of office: his four years as
sheriff had netted him an estimated $104,000. But now, in 1946, Cantrell was
running for sheriff and Mansfield for state senator.
In the final
week a flurry of advertisements appeared in the Post-Athenian; Cantrell
enumerated the accomplishments of the Democratic party; Mansfield denied that
two men arrested on July 30 with a shipment of liquor were deputies, even
though they admitted they were and had been delivering “election whiskey”;
downtown merchants announced that all stores would be closed on Election Day to
give employees a chance to vote, although this had not been necessary in
previous elections (the merchants were perhaps following the example of the
mayor of Athens, Paul Walker, who would be vacationing on Election Day);
Cantrell warned that the veterans had printed sample ballots with the intention
of stuffing ballot boxes; the veterans offered a one-thousand-dollar reward for
verifiable information about election fraud and repeated a slogan that for
weeks had sounded again and again from their carmounted loudspeakers: YOUR VOTE
WILL BE COUNTED AS CAST.
Two days
before the election the GIs ran an advertisement in the Post-Athenian: “These
young men fought and won a war for good government. They know what it takes and
what it means to have a clean government—and they are energetic enough, honest
enough and intelligent enough to give us good, clean government.” A couple of
pages farther on, the Democrats had their say: “Look at the facts—and you will
vote for the Democratic ticket. The campaign fight is as old as the hills—it is
the story of the outs wanting back in.”
The next
day, the paper reported that veterans from Blount County had offered to come
help watch the polls. Mansfield began building an army of his own. “It has come
to my attention,” he announced, “that certain elements intend to create a
disturbance at and around the polls. … In order to see that law and order is
maintained … I will have several hundred deputies patrolling the county.” He
hired all of them from outside the county, some from out of state. They would
crowd inside every voting precinct. And they would be armed.
August 1,
1946: Election Day found voters lined up early in the largest turnout in local
history. Joining them were some three hundred of Sheriff Mansfield’s special
deputies. Trouble began early. At 9:30 A.M. Walter Ellis, a legally appointed
GI representative at the first precinct in the courthouse, was arrested and
jailed for protesting irregularities.
Sirens
wailed throughout the morning, and police cruisers were seen speeding toward
the jail. GIs began gathering on Washington Street outside L. L. Shaefer’s
jewelry store, which served as an office for their campaign manager, Jim
Buttram, who had seen action in Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. Above the
door a sign read: “Phone 787, Jim Buttram,” the number to which voters were to
report election fraud. Only after prolonged pounding did a harried Buttram
cautiously open the door to his comrades. As more than two hundred GIs filled
the small store, the somber mood of their leader told them they were in
trouble. He showed them copies of two telegrams dated July 22: one he had
addressed to Gov. Jim McCord, Nashville, Tennessee; the other to Att. Gen. Tom
Clark, Washington, D.C. They requested assistance to ensure a fair election.
Neither had been answered.
Otto
Kennedy, not an ex-GI himself but a political adviser to the veterans, entered
the office and announced that Cantrell had posted armed guards at each
precinct. They all knew that this move was in preparation for the 4:00 P.M.
poll closings when the ballot boxes would be moved to the jail for counting. A
small group of the veterans demanded an armed mobilization and called for a
leader. Buttram declined. So did Kennedy, but he offered the rear of his
Essankay Garage and Tire Shop across the street as a meeting hall.
The group
crossed the street, held a meeting, and agreed that those who did not have
weapons should get them and return as quickly as possible.
By 3:00 P.M.
most were back at the Essankay and most were armed. At about this time, Tom
Gillespie, an elderly black farmer from Union Road, stepped inside the
eleventh-precinct polling place in the Athens Water Works on Jackson Street.
Windy Wise, a Cantrell guard, told Gillespie, “Nigger, you can’t vote here.”
When Tom protested, Wise struck him with brass knuckles. Gillespie dropped his
ballot and ran for the door. Wise pulled a pistol and shot him in the back as
he reached the sidewalk. The crowd began to demand the lives of the captives;
some veterans agreed.
The first
shot of the day brought crowds streaming up Jackson from the courthouse.
Sheriff Mansfield’s cruiser turned off College Street and screeched to a halt
in front of the Water Works, and deputies loaded the bleeding Gillespie into
the car. Mansfield ordered the precinct closed, posted four deputies outside to
guard the Water Works, and then took Gillespie to jail. A dozen veterans from
the Essankay started up Jackson toward the Water Works. They were unarmed.
During the
confusion following the shooting, the two GI poll watchers, Ed Vestal and
Charles Scott, had been seized and held hostage inside the Water Works by Wise
and another Cantrell deputy, Karl Neil. When the veterans reached the Water
Works, the crowd began taunting the armed guards. As Wise and Neil stood at a
window watching the angry throng outside, Vestal and Scott plunged through the
plate-glass windows and ran bleeding for the protection of the crowd. Wise
stepped through the broken glass, waving his pistol; several veterans rushed
forward but were quickly pulled back to safety. One of them shouted, “Let’s go
get our guns!” and they left for the Essankay.
In the
meantime Chief Deputy Boe Dunn had his men form a cordon from the building to
his cruiser, and the ballot box was carried out to the car. Wise told Dunn
about the GIs’ threat; the chief deputy ordered two of his men to GI
headquarters to arrest those whom Wise could identify. The rest of the deputies
piled into the cruiser, which sped back toward the jail.
When the two
deputies reached the GI headquarters, they were disarmed and taken prisoner; so
were two others sent later as reinforcements. A crowd began to gather outside;
three more deputies came with pistols drawn, only to be pummeled and dragged
inside. The crowd began to demand the lives of the captives; some of the
veterans agreed. This talk alarmed Otto Kennedy, and he left, vowing to have no
part in murder. The crowd began to disperse, and most of the GIs left; soon a
small nucleus of veterans was alone with seven hostages. The veterans took the
hostages to the woods, ten miles out of town, beat them, and shackled them to
trees.
A polling
place for the twelfth precinct had been set up in the back of the Dixie Cafe,
across Hornsby Alley from the jail, and it was commanded by Minus Wilburn for
Cantrell. Bob Hairrell and Leslie Dooley, who had lost an arm in North Africa,
were assigned as the Gl poll watchers. Throughout the day they had observed
Wilburn letting minors vote and handing cash to adult voters. At 3:45 P.M.,
when Wilburn attempted to allow a young woman to vote despite the fact that she
had no poll-tax receipt and that her name did not appear on the registration
list, Hairrell’s patience gave out. As Wilburn reached to deposit the ballot, Hairrell
grabbed his wrist. Wilburn slapped him across the head with a blackjack and
kicked him in the face as he fell to the floor. Then he closed the precinct,
ordered Hornsby Alley blocked at both ends, and, with a procession of guards,
crossed the lawn to the jail with the ballot box and the GIs as captives.
The Cantrell
forces had calculated that if they could control the first, eleventh and
twelfth precincts in Athens and the one in Etowah, the election was theirs. The
ballot boxes from the Water Works (the eleventh) and the Dixie Cafe (the
twelfth) were safely in the jail. The voting place for the first precinct, the
courthouse, was barricaded by deputies who held four GIs hostage, and Paul
Cantrell himself had Etowah under control.
By 6:00 P.M.
it seemed to be over. GI headquarters was deserted, and unhappy crowds moved
quietly along the streets. Another election had been stolen, and nothing could
be done about it.
At the
Strand Movie Theater across from the courthouse, the marquee read: “Coming
Soon: Gunning for Vengeance.”
Bill White,
who had fought in the Pacific while still in his teens and come home an
ex-sergeant, had gotten angrier as the day wore on. At two in the afternoon he
had harangued the group of veterans in the Essankay, saying: “You call
yourselves GIs—you go over there and fight for three and four years—you come
back and you let a bunch of draft dodgers who stayed here where it was safe,
and you were making it safe for them, push you around. … If you people don’t
stop this, and now is the time and place, you people wouldn’t make a pimple on
a fighting GI’s ass. Get guns…”
In the early
evening White went to get the guns himself. He sent two GIs to get a truck and,
with a few other veterans, perhaps a dozen, he headed for the National Guard
armory. There, he said in a 1969 interview, he “broke down the armory doors and
took all the rifles, two Thompson sub-machine guns, and all the ammunition we
could carry, loaded it up in the two-ton truck and went back to GI headquarters
and passed out seventy high-powered rifles and two bandoleers of ammunition
with each one.” By 9:00 P.M. Paul Cantrell, Pat Mansfield, State Rep. George
Woods, who was also a member of the election commission, and about fifty
deputies were locked inside the jail and going through the ballot boxes. The
presence of Mansfield and Woods meant that a majority of the election
commission was on hand, so the tallies could be certified and validated on the
spot. More deputies were still barricaded in the courthouse, but along the
streets none were to be seen. If the Cantrell forces had been a bit more wary,
they might have spotted some shadows slipping up the embankment directly across
the street from the jail.
Opinion
differs on exactly how the challenge was issued. White says he was the one to
call it out: “Would you damn bastards bring those damn ballot boxes out here or
we are going to set siege against the jail and blow it down!” Moments later the
night exploded in automatic weapons fire punctuated by shotgun blasts. “I fired
the first shot,” White claimed, “then everybody started shooting from our
side.” A deputy ran for the jail. “I shot him; he wheeled and fell inside of
the jail.” Bullets ricocheted up and down White Street. “I shot a second man;
his leg flew out from under him, and he crawled under a car.” The veterans
bombarded the jail for hours, but Cantrell and his accomplices, secure behind
the red-brick walls, refused to surrender. As the uncertain battle dragged past
midnight, the GIs began to have some uneasy second thoughts. They knew that
they had violated local, state, and federal laws that night, and if Cantrell
was not routed before his rescuers arrived, they might spend the rest of their
lives in prison. Rumors compounded their fears: “The National Guard is on the
way!” “The state troopers are here!” “Birch Biggs and his gang are coming!”
(Biggs ran Polk County more ruthlessly than Cantrell ran McMinn.)
If the
veterans had known the truth, they would have been less apprehensive. George
Woods had telephoned Biggs earlier that night for help. Biggs was not there,
but his son, Broughton, took the call. His answer: “Do you think I’m crazy?”
Woods then slipped out of town.
The veterans
were eager to end the battle. Some of them made Molotov cocktails, others went
to the county supply house for dynamite. The gasoline bombs proved ineffective,
but at 2:30 A.M. the dynamite arrived. At about this time an ambulance pulled
around to the north side of the jail. Assuming it was for the evacuation of the
wounded, the veterans let it pass. Two men jumped in, but then, instead of
returning to the hospital, the ambulance sped north out of town. The men were
Paul Cantrell and Pat Mansfield.
At 2:48 A.M.
the first dynamite was tossed toward the jail; it landed under Boe Dunn’s
cruiser, and the explosion flipped the vehicle over on its top, leaving its
wheels spinning. Three more bundles of dynamite were thrown almost
simultaneously; one landed on the jail porch roof, another under Mansfield’s
car, and the third struck the jail wall. The explosions rattled windows
throughout the town; leaves fell from the trees, debris scattered for blocks,
and the jailhouse porch jumped off its foundation. The deputies barricaded in
the courthouse a block away rushed onto the balcony, eager to surrender. The
jail’s defenders staggered from their ruined stronghold and handed the ballot
boxes over to the veterans.
With the
Cantrell forces conquered, ten years of suppressed rage exploded. The
townspeople set upon the captured deputies and, but for the GIs, probably would
have killed them all. Minus Wilburn, a particularly unpopular deputy, had his
throat slashed; Biscuit Farris, Cantrell’s prison superintendent, had his jaw
shattered by a bullet; and Windy Wise was kicked and beaten senseless. Joined
by a number of their fellows, the GIs cleared the jail of the rioters and
locked up their prisoners for the night.
At dawn the
veterans slipped from the jail, made their way through the detritus of the
battle, and dispersed into what they hoped would be anonymity. Miraculously
there had been no deaths. But on August 2 a page-one headline in The New York
Times wrongly trumpeted the news: TENNESSEE SHERIFF is SLAIN IN PRIMARY DAY
VIOLENCE. All day long reporters with cameras and notebooks poured into town to
photograph, question, analyze, and write. And every newcomer passed the sign on
Highway 11:
WELCOME TO
ATHENS “The Friendly City”
The
“victory” of the veterans that night in August 1946 appeared, at first, to have
settled nothing. The national press was almost unanimous in condemning the
action of the GIs. In an editorial perhaps best reflecting the ambivalence of a
startled nation, The New York Times concluded: “Corruption, when and where it
exists, demands reform, and even in the most corrupt and boss-ridden
communities, there are peaceful means by which reform can be achieved. But
there is no substitute, in a democracy, for orderly process.” The syndicated
columnist Robert C. Ruark commented: “There is very little difference, essentially,
between a vigilante and a member of a lynch mob, and if we are seeking an
answer to crooked politics, the one that the Athens boys just propounded sure
ain’t it.” Commonweal cautiously compared the battle to the American
Revolution, then went on to say that “nothing could be more dangerous both for
our liberties and our welfare than the making of the McMinn County Revolution
into a habit.”
In the early
days of August 1946 a power vacuum existed in McMinn County that easily could
have spawned anarchy. Armed GIs patrolled streets that were still tense with
rumors of a Mansfield army poised to reclaim Athens. Hundreds of men were
issued permits to carry weapons, and machine guns on rooftops guarded the
approaches to town. Several times groups of veterans rushed to barricade roads
and occasionally they terrorized innocent travelers in their attempt to thwart
an invasion that never came.
On August 4
Pat Mansfield telegraphed his resignation as sheriff of McMinn County to
Governor McCord and requested that Knox Henry fill his unexpired term, which
would end on September 1. Henry was appointed immediately, and the next day
State Rep. George Woods returned to the county under GI protection to convene
the election commission and certify the election. A cheer rang out in the
courthouse when Woods rose as the canvass ended and announced that Knox Henry
was elected sheriff by a vote of 2,175 to 1,270. After their victory, GIs with
machine guns waited for a Cantrell counterattack.
On August
11, 1946, the five GIs elected to office in McMinn announced that they would
return to the county all fees in excess of five thousand dollars. Elsewhere in
Tennessee, E. H. Crump and his machine were finally on the way out, with the
election of Gov. Gordon Browning and a young United States senator, Estes
Kefauver.
For a full
year afterward the national press seized upon the most insignificant news from
Athens as evidence of the veterans’ “lawlessness.” There was, indeed,
remarkably little criminal prosecution in the wake of that violent night. Only
one man had charges brought against him: Windy Wise, the deputy who shot the
old black farmer, Tom Gillespie, drew a sentence of one to three years.
As for the
larger results of the Athens rebellion, the GIs universally hailed the return
of the “independent vote” to the community and the election of “fine people” to
lead it. The national press continued to show interest in what had happened
(the best, if incomplete, account of it at the time was a Harper’s article by
Theodore White).
Finally, on
the first anniversary of the violent election, the Times reported, “Today it
appears that this political coalition of World War II veterans for direct
action in community affairs, which many at the time regarded as a factor likely
to develop nationally in the postwar period, was purely [a] local phenomenon in
which veteran participation was incidental.” With this epilogue the press
turned away from tiny Athens.
Knox Henry
served two terms as sheriff of McMinn County and was succeeded by Otto Kennedy.
Paul Cantrell, after seeking temporary asylum in Chattanooga, returned to
Etowah and continued to operate the bank there with his brothers. They are all
dead now, as is Jim Buttram. Otto Kennedy still lives in Athens. Pat Mansfield
returned secretly to Athens on August 8, 1946, to resign his membership on the
election commission. He met with Otto Kennedy for two hours, apparently with no
ill feeling on either side, and then announced: “I’m through with politics for
good. It’ll sure mess you up sometimes. I’m going back to railroading.”
Athens has
not changed that much in forty years. There is a new courthouse, an imposing
structure that is too large for its site. The old one burned down during
renovations in 1964. Farmers no longer gather on the square; there is no place
for them. An effort at downtown renovation can only be described as timid, a
cautious imitation of similar projects in the larger cities. They have a new
jail, an austere building that seems to embody the adage that crime does not
pay. The Daily Post-Athenian is alive and well and still comfortably
middle-of-the-road.
In the
mid-fifties Athens was isolated by a new highway that intercepts Highway 11
south of Niota and rejoins it at Riceville. Along it a new Athens grew, a town
of McDonald’s, Kawasaki, and Pizza Hut. If you ask people along the street
about the election of August 1946, they will point up White Street and mumble
something vague about a shoot-out. There are no signs or monuments to
commemorate the event; people have forgotten or do not wish to remember. But
the graying manager of a local store, a friendly sort and so gentle with his
grandchildren, squeezed off round after round at the jail that night. And the
driver snoozing behind the wheel of his cab, not really caring whether he
catches a fare or not, helped wrap and toss the deadly bundles of dynamite that
sailed through the night air. You can bet they remember.
A native
Tennessean, Lones Selber was seven at the time of the events he describes here.
He watched the battle from the corner of White and Washington streets.
The editors wish to thank Thomas J. Baker, Jr.,
whose study of the McMinn County political machine provided valuable additional
information.
