The Battle of Athens

When Americans think of armed response to government oppression, we naturally harken back to the Revolutionary war, where a once-loyal population threw off the chains laid upon them by their despotic Monarch and the rapacious appetites of his Parliament.

The American Revolution stands apart from others in that wicked retribution against loyalist opposition was the exception, not the rule, as it is in nearly all armed insurrections. The post-war reconciliation of the Loyalists and the Rebels inserted an essential strand into our national DNA that would prove invaluable a little less than a century later as we bound the wounds of Civil War.

The lessons of both conflicts are deeply significant to the discord of today. The regrettable paths chosen; the golden opportunities left fallow, never to produce a crop of peace despite ideal conditions. However, the totality of events from then to now is often intimidating to the ordinary citizen. Unused to tracing the origins of present woes to past events, the lessons of history are dismissed as too complex, anachronistic, and ultimately, just too distant to be applicable to our modern condition.

This is an unfortunate reality for far too many of our fellow citizens; having been separated from the wisdom of their own past, they blunder about, knocking over remnants of an older world, without which, ironically, this newer, shinier version would not exist.

But what if we needn’t plumb the depths of the past so deeply to learn the same lessons? What if we have the benefit of events within living memory to guide our future; might we then experience anew the travails and triumphs of our grandparents? Will such a review engender a familial intimacy within us as we relive the events witnessed by people we may look in the eye?

I believe so, and we are fortunate to have just such an event to consider, from a scant 70-odd years ago. Tell me, what do you know of the “Battle of Athens?” Perhaps you know of it by an alternate name, the “McMinn County War?” If you answered yes to either, I applaud you for your historical acuity, as the event has almost completely receded from our national consciousness.

In August of 1946, in Athens, Tennessee a pitched battle was waged between citizens and their government, lasting more than 6 hours, fought with high-powered rifles, automatic weapons, pistols, shotguns, and ultimately, dynamite. Was this a revolution? Not exactly; perhaps a better description would be a “reckoning.”

The early decades of the 20th century were the days of machine politics. Each county had a “Boss” who recruited and ran a hand-picked slate of candidates for election. People voted for entire slates, not necessarily individual candidates, and the slate was beholden to the Boss and his machine once elected.

While this arrangement was not in itself always corrupt, the insular nature of it made corruption far more likely and greatly inhibited outside scrutiny.

Politicians, Sheriffs, and agency heads were frequently bought by criminal elements seeking to attach an air of legitimacy to their illegal, immoral, or unconstitutional acts. Gambling, prostitution and bootlegging thrived under the machines, but were by no means the only crimes facilitated by centralized, monolithic control of government.

The wheels of business and development were also greased, with the machine who rubber-stamping permitting processes, and sidestepping regulations in return for a share in the spoils. The well-constructed machines of the South brought everything “in-house” by installing themselves in positions of authority with no consideration given to conflicts of interest.

The arrangement facilitated a multi-million-dollar graft industry that made the participants quite wealthy while preventing competition or opposition from upsetting the apple cart with every election. In Tennessee, the machine was run out of Memphis by E.H. Crump, a Congressman who already controlled much of the state, but decided to extend his reach further by bringing McMinn County and the towns of Athens and Etowah into his orbit.

Shortly before the outbreak of WWII, Crump ran his slate in McMinn County with his candidate for County Sheriff, Paul Cantrell, at the head. Cantrell, a man from a well-known, wealthy family with deep roots in the county rode the coattails of FDR in an election known as the “vote grab of 1936,” amid numerous allegations of vote fraud. Crump (via Cantrell) consolidated his power over the following years, until 1942 when he ran Cantrell for State Senate, with a Cantrell-chosen toady, Pat Mansfield replacing him as Sheriff. Different faces, same machine.

Crump and Cantrell wasted no time in ensuring their victories would not be overturned. Through a series of legislative maneuvers at the state level, they managed to slash the number of state voting precincts and state Judges by half, with the majority of those remaining under Crump’s control. Allegations of election irregularities could now be reliably dismissed and endless reelection assured.

The looting began in earnest with Sheriffs and Deputies paid by a “fee for arrest” arrangement. The more arrests, the more money they earned. This led to the “fee grabbing” for which the corrupt southern Sheriffs became known, pulling over tourists, random travelers, even drivers transporting goods by truck to extort a “fee” from them or else face time in the county jail. The practice was so ubiquitous it became a feature in numerous motion pictures, entering the national mind as a reliable stereotype of southern law enforcement.

Over a period of ten years, these extorted fees brought more than $300,000 ($12 million in today’s dollars) to the machine in McMinn county alone. With the majority of the county’s young men away fighting WWII, the corruption grew more brazen as banks “foreclosed” on land and homes that had no mortgages. Ginned up “delinquent tax sales” permitted the well-connected to select a property they wanted and buy it for a fraction of its value by paying the fictitious “back taxes,” to the county, which in reality was simply a bribe.

The machine-controlled jobs, schools, newspapers, and commerce with complete impunity. It was this climate of rapacious greed which greeted returning GI’s at war’s end, with several discovering their homes, farms and property now “belonged” to someone else.

Worse yet, the GI’s arrived with their mustering out pay in their pockets, which led Sheriff’s Deputies to target them with their fee grabbing schemes to wrest that money away. Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with the roughly 3000 GI’s fresh from the hard-core combat of Europe and the Pacific theaters.

Resolving to set things right, the GIs organized their own slate of candidates and began actively campaigning against the machine. Constituting roughly 10% of the total county population themselves, the veterans posed a genuine threat to the future of the machine, prompting a campaign of intimidation against the GI candidates and their supporters that frequently featured physical beatings and threats against their families.

As would be expected of men who had faced down the armies of Germany and Japan, the attempts at intimidation had the opposite effect, leading to the GIs organizing their own protection force from some of the saltier vets among them.

This group, known as the “Fightin’ bunch” numbered about 30 full-time men, but swelled to several hundred in response to circumstances. Each well-armed and well-trained from their years overseas, these men kept the GI slate of candidates (and their families) safe during the campaign.

With Election day looming, Cantrell and Mansfield assembled a bribery-swollen cadre of “deputies,” many coming from other counties or out of state, drawn to a daily wage of fifty dollars, more than $650 in today’s money. On Election day, this mercenary force numbered in excess of 200 men under the command of Cantrell and Mansfield. The stage was set and the players on the field.

The morning of August 1st, 1946, polling places opened across the county, with the 200 deputies spread out across the county performing a duty usually handled by 15 men. Knox Henry was the GI candidate for Sheriff. He was a wildly popular decorated veteran with a reputation for being a straight arrow. All indications that morning pointed toward a landslide victory for the GI slate and an end to the machine in McMinn County, however the machine had no intention of conducting a fair election.

GI poll watchers swiftly learned that questioning ANYTHING, would lead to their immediate arrest and removal from the polling place, followed by a severe beating.

Voter intimidation was rampant and brazen. In one instance, an elderly black voter was told by one of Mansfield’s deputies he could not vote. When the voter and a GI poll watcher objected, deputy struck the voter, Tom Gillespie, in the face with brass knuckles, then shot Gillespie in the back as he tried to flee.

At another polling place a Cantrell deputy attempted to let a clearly underage girl cast a ballot. When the GI poll watchers physically prevented him from inserting the fraudulent ballot into the box, he struck them with a blackjack and arrested them; promptly declared the polling place closed and took both the GIs and the three ballot boxes to the county jail.

They held these men and others hostage in the county jail building, taking turns beating them. One man beaten so severely he required hospitalization for several weeks.

Recognizing the danger, the GIs got the keys to the National Guard Armory from the caretaker and armed themselves with 60 30.06 Enfield rifles and several Thompson submachine guns, with a bandolier of ammo for each man. By now, the polls were closing and counting had begun. When it became clear that the GI slate were amassing a 3-1 lead, the Sheriff ordered his deputies to halt the count and bring all ballot boxes to the jail, where the counting would be conducted by Cantrell’s men.

With two of the three members of the election commission present, (both Cantrell men) the results could be certified on the spot. Sheriff Pat Mansfield, State Senator Paul Cantrell and the two members of the election commission then barricaded themselves inside the jail building with about 50 or so deputies on watch while they rummaged through the ballot boxes.

At 9pm the GIs arrived on the scene and demanded the release of the ballot boxes. As the standoff continued, hundreds of veterans continued to arrive, joining the “Fightin’ Bunch,” bringing their own weapons with them. Some reports place the number of veterans as high as 2000 at one point.

The deputies were outmanned, outgunned, and entirely overmatched by the GIs who were schooled in tactics, strategy, and possessed extensive combat experience. Their ultimatum ignored, the GIs made good on their threat and opened fire. They had taken positions of concealment and established fields of fire covering the entire jail. A number of people tried to escape from a back door and were permitted to flee, as they were tossing their weapons aside, posing no immediate threat.

At one point, an ambulance arrived at the front of the jail. Assuming it was there to retrieve the wounded, the GIs ceased fire, only to see two men dash out of the jail and into the waiting Ambulance which swiftly sped away. Those two men were Sheriff Pat Mansfield and State Senator Paul Cantrell. Both safely made it out of McMinn county. Among the back-door escapees was George Woods, the chief election commissioner who attempted to call in reinforcements from nearby machine-controlled counties, only to be rebuffed once the scale of the GIs assault was learned.

By 3AM the GIs had resolved to end the battle before any reinforcements could arrive. They made three bundles of dynamite and positioned them at the jail door, the roof, and the front wall. The three bundles detonated, and the battle was over.

The remaining deputies surrendered, and the ballot boxes were retrieved along with evidence of hundreds of falsified ballots hastily filled out, lying in stacks around the rooms. These fraudulent ballots had been filled out to reflect a 17-1 victory for the machine candidates and were intended to be certified as the legitimate result by Woods and his fellow commissioner. They never got the chance.

When the final tallies were made, the entire GI slate had been elected by more than a 2-1 margin, with the result promptly certified by none other than George Woods, who had to be brought in under guard for the task.

The Battle of Athens had indeed upset the apple cart. After gaining access to county records, the newly elected officials made the malfeasance of their predecessors public and worked to reverse many of the fraudulent foreclosures and to return stolen property.

The GIs were mindful of the principles for which they fought and taking the Revolutionary War and the Civil War as their examples, ensured there was little revenge taken against the supporters of the machine. Many were driven out of the county, while others moved away on their own volition. Those willing to “set things right,” were permitted to do so and eventually rejoined the community.

Even Pat Mansfield and Paul Cantrell found a form of redemption following the battle. Mansfield quietly resigned from all his public duties and responsibilities and relocated to his home state of Georgia, never to return.

Paul Cantrell, eventually opened a bank and a car dealership in nearby Etowah, where he remained for the rest of his life. Neither held public office again. Boss Crump lived long enough to see his machine crumble and his influence wane.

Neither he, nor Cantrell or Mansfield suffered any criminal prosecution for their crimes. The only man to see the inside of a courtroom (and ultimately a jail cell) was C.M. "Windy" Wise, the patrolman who had shot and killed the elderly black farmer Tom Gillespie for having the nerve to want to vote for the GIs. He served 3 years in prison.

The “Battle of Athens,” as it came to be called, drew national attention to the fundamental deficiencies of machine-style politics. Although it would be another 25 years before the full power of the machines would be overshadowed by the emerging Primary system and individually-conducted campaign model we have today, the effect of the Battle of Athens was profound and the lesson of it enduring.

In our present, politically-charged atmosphere, a question hangs in the air unanswered – what happens when your government not only fails to protect your rights, but actively works to abrogate them?

Governments are nothing more than people who have joined together to follow an agreed upon set of rules. When these rules are disregarded or deliberately undermined, as they were in McMinn County Tennessee, then it is no longer “government” you are facing, but rather a collection of people behaving unlawfully.

What to do? The Battle of Athens is a great place to start.