Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

10

The Battle of Athens: Repeated Petitions, Repeated Injuries

Athens, Tennessee

August 3, 1936

On the outskirts of a small mountain town in east Tennessee, twelve-year-old Bill White picked berries. By force of habit, he walked on the inner sides of his soles. The outer sides had begun to wear out, and his parents wouldn’t have money for another pair until Christmas. Not that he was complaining. He earned a dime a day for picking his neighbor’s blackberries from sunup to sundown. He could have saved up for some new clothes if he cared to.

Instead, the dime always went toward a movie ticket. On a good day, one of the two theaters in town was showing a western. Bill loved John Wayne. His cause was always just, his aim always true. The Daily Post-Athenian called the young actor’s early films B-movies, but Bill didn’t pay much attention to the newspaper. He could neither afford a copy nor read much of it. There were schools in McMinn County, but not good ones.

After about twenty minutes, a voice from the distance called, “Billy! Dinner!”

The broad-shouldered boy kept picking the berries.

“Billy!”

It had become a familiar routine for Ma White, who had already walked a quarter of a mile to call him home. She knew he liked to daydream, and she didn’t mind hiking all the way past the outhouse and past the neighbor’s barn with the “Paul Cantrell for Sheriff” sign on it to shake her son back into the here and now.

“Billy!” she tried one last time. But there was no response. The music of The Lone Ranger was playing in his head, and scenes from last night’s radio show were flashing through his imagination: The hero’s galloping horse, the silver bullets flying through the air, and the victory over a brutal band of cutthroats who had been terrorizing a small town. “I believe,” said the Lone Ranger’s creed, “in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.”

It was Bill White’s creed, too.

Five years later: December 8, 1941

Clifford “Windy” Wise opened the door of the Dixie Café and strolled confidently to the soda counter. Lunch was over, and the restaurant was closed to customers. But the bagmen for the current three-term sheriff Paul Cantrell’s political machine were no ordinary customers. The rules—be they store hours, or the county’s sundry prohibitions on liquor, gambling, and prostitution—did not apply to them.

“You fellas are like clockwork, ain’t ya,” said the café’s skinny, gray-haired owner, pulling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from under the counter and pouring Wise a shot. “Here we are, under attack from the Japs. Whole country is signing up to fight. And here you are, collecting Cantrell’s kickback.”

Wise drank the shot of whiskey in a single gulp. Without looking up, he tapped his finger next to the empty glass. It was filled, and then gulped down again.

“Let me ask you a question,” Wise said, finally deigning to look up at the restaurant owner. “It’s about that back room. Behind that closed door. Now, I’m not sayin’ there’s ever any drinkin’ back there. I’m not sayin’ there’s ever any whorin’ back there. And I’m not sayin’ there’s ever been a single one-armed bandit back there. But supposin’ there was.” He tapped the bar, and the shot glass was refilled. “My question is: Are you plannin’ to put an end to it, just because there’s a war on?”

The café owner said nothing. He simply reached for the floor and pulled up a small satchel of cash.

Wise took another drink.

“I didn’t think so,” the deputy sheriff said, grabbing the satchel and turning to leave. “See you next month.”

Tarawa, Central Pacific

November 20, 1943

Bill White was floating in the ocean, a hundred yards from shore. He wasn’t dead, but he was pretending to be. All around him were angry splashes of bullets from Japanese machine guns, along with hundreds of American Marines, bleeding and lifeless, bumping into him. The explosions of artillery launched from the shore punctuated the relentless pounding of the machine guns. Strangely absent was the barking of orders heard at the Marines’ prior amphibious landings, where Americans had faced no serious opposition.

After what seemed like an eternity, Bill finally floated his way to within a few yards of the shoreline. He sprang out of the water and raced for the four-foot seawall that separated land from water. Beyond it were the Japanese snipers and pillboxes, the low concrete structures that protected the Japanese machine gunners responsible for the carnage that extended several hundred yards into the sea. So long as Bill stayed crouched behind the wall, he was safe—at least for the moment.

Bill scanned up and down the shoreline. He expected to find at least a few of his fellow Marines alive. He didn’t.

My God, he thought, there ain’t none of them gonna get in here. I’m all alone.

Bill had been in tough scrapes before. One night, after a shell from a Japanese destroyer had knocked him out of his small Higgins boat, a rescue ship had to be called to save him from the sharks that had already started to prey on his comrades. He had also managed to survive six months of hell on Guadalcanal. But never before had things looked so desperate.

Finally, through the smoke and bullets, he saw a figure dashing out of the ocean. Another Marine, who had also survived by pretending to be dead, was running through waist-deep water, his back bent forward and his hands covering his head. And he was not the only one. Bill watched more Marines emerge until an even dozen had made it to the protection of the seawall.

By this time, Bill was furious at the Japanese. “We can stay here and die,” he shouted above the din of gunfire to the dozen Marines crouched behind the wall with him, “or we can move out and die. But let’s move out and take these damn sons of bitches with us!”

Without waiting for a response, Bill jumped up on the seawall. The others weren’t sure why this crazy squad leader with a strong country accent had chosen to expose himself on a spot that was, at that moment, the most dangerous place in the most deadly war in the history of human conflict. Bill wasn’t sure, either. But when he jumped back down—just moments before machine-gun fire laced his section of the wall—he had a plan.

“Start shooting them trees and knock some of them snipers out of them trees up there.” No one moved. The stunned Marines just stared at him as though he were insane.

“Start throwing grenades at these pillboxes in front of us here.” Again, no reaction.

“Listen, if we don’t knock these pillboxes out then no other troops gonna be able to get in here to help us!”

Bill pulled the pin from his grenade and heaved it toward the closest pillbox. Then he crouched behind the wall—not on top of it this time, as there were some limits to his madness—and fired at the pillbox directly in front of them. Others followed his lead and the first fortification was soon destroyed. The dozen Marines then leapt over the wall and knocked out two more.

When the third pillbox was cleared of enemy gunners, Bill looked back to the sea. It was chaotic, and the newly arriving Americans were still taking heavy casualties, but something about the scene had changed. Bill saw Marines running down the front ramps of Alligator boats and splashing through the football-field length of ocean that separated them from the beach. There were hundreds of them, hundreds of American boys who would have been dead if those pillboxes had still been in place.

Athens

November 16, 1945

As the bus climbed over mountain roads, it passed signs saying “Jesus Is Coming Soon!” and “Prepare to Meet God!” But when it stopped that evening in Athens, it wasn’t God standing there to meet the passengers. It was Windy Wise and three of his fellow deputy sheriffs.

Friday nights were big for the Cantrell machine. Buses coming through town were packed, and every tourist was a ripe target for arrest in this dry county. If they had a bottle of beer on them, and sometimes even when they didn’t, they were arrestable. It made no difference in Athens. The county paid the sheriff “expenses” for each day that someone was held in jail. Whereas weekend arrests should normally have topped out at about fifteen, arrests in recent years had averaged 115. Over the last decade, Paul Cantrell’s fee grabbers had collected about $300,000 in county expenses, much of it from returning GIs, who were frequent targets of the unfair arrests. Cantrell himself was now a state senator, but the official salary of his crony, sheriff Pat Mansfield, by contrast, was $5,000 per year.

Most of the passengers, many bound for Atlanta, were asleep when their bus stopped in Athens. But not Bill White. The twenty-two-year-old was much too excited to sleep. He had trained in California, fought in the Pacific, and been honorably discharged in South Carolina. But now he was coming home.

As soon as Bill’s bus pulled into the station, Windy Wise bounded up the steps, followed by three other deputies.

“You’re under arrest,” he said. “All you folks is under arrest.”

“Under arrest?” asked a half-awake passenger. “What for?”

“Drunkenness!” shot back Wise. “Don’t worry. A night in jail won’t do you no harm. And you can just pay a lil’ fine in the mornin’.”

“But,” Wise added, turning to the tourist with the gumption to ask the reason for his arrest, “if I hear any more lip outta you, I’ll give you the biggest beatin’ you ever seen. And then I’ll add resistin’ arrest and obstruction and the fine won’t be so lil’—”

“Bullshit!” shouted a young GI, standing up in the back the bus.

The four deputies marched toward the soldier, their hands on their metal batons and their eyes on the boy with the big mouth.

Without the weapons, and without the three extra deputies, a brawl between Windy Wise and this GI might have been a pretty fair fight. Both were big men, not so much in their height as in their build. Both were good athletes. And both had been in a lot of brawls.

But Windy Wise was not without his police baton or his three allies. And the melee that ensued was not a fair fight at all.

March 24, 1946

“Hello?” said Bill, as he picked up the phone in his parents’ kitchen.

“Bill, it’s Jim Buttram. How you doing?”

“Fine, I s’pose,” Bill replied, curious about the local grocer’s reason for calling. “Are you lookin’ for my pa?”

“No, Bill. Looking for you. Some of the GIs are pretty fed up with Paul Cantrell and his gang. They’ve been out of control for a while, but ever since GIs started coming home, Mansfield and his deputies have really had a field day arresting us and beating us for no reason. They’ve even shot a couple boys. So when I heard about your run-in with Windy Wise back in the fall, I thought you might be with us.”

“Hell, yes,” said Bill, recalling the pain he felt from the pounding of Windy Wise’s baton. “But there ain’t nothin’ you or me or no one can do about it.”

“Well, we’ll see about that. There’s a meeting tomorrow night—a secret one. We’re putting together a nonpartisan ticket to run against them in the five races up for election in August.”

“What kind of nonpartisan ticket?” asked Bill.

“An all-GI ticket. You know Knox Henry? Fought in the North African campaign.”

“ ’Course I do,” Bill said. “Everyone knows Knox.”

“Good,” Jim Buttram replied, “because he’s going to be our new sheriff.”

July 3, 1946

It was past midnight when the phone rang at the Whites’ farmhouse. It woke Bill on the first ring, and he bounded toward the kitchen, hoping to catch it before it woke his parents.

“Hello,” he said, slightly out of breath, not so much from the run to the kitchen but from being startled by the unexpected noise in the night.

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?” he asked. “Hello!” he tried again, angrier. “Who the hell is this?”

The silence continued until Bill hung up. He started walking back toward his bedroom, but before he had made three steps, the phone rang again.

“Now listen, here, you son of a bitch,” Bill said into the receiver, before he was cut off by a deep, purposely disguised voice on the other end of the line.

“No, Bill.” A pause. “You listen here.” The speaker was going out of his way to enunciate every syllable, talking so slowly it sounded like a recording being played at three-quarters speed.

“You have a nice family and a nice future,” the voice continued. “It would be a shame if something happened to them.”

It all clicked together in Bill’s brain the second that last word oozed out of the caller’s mouth: the campaign. Cantrell’s machine was ramping up.

“Stay. Away. From tomorrow’s rally.”

Bill slammed down the phone. He returned to bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the voice. But he did not for a moment, that night or any other, think about quitting the campaign.

July 4, 1946

Flags flew from every shop surrounding the green lawn of the town square, and the white courthouse at the end of the block was covered in patriotic bunting. As soon as the sun set, fireworks lit up the night sky.

Bill White was excited, although he wasn’t exactly enjoying the fireworks. Ever since the Pacific, he flinched at loud noises, and tonight he had an additional reason to feel nervous. This farmer’s son, who had known nothing of politics when he left for war, was about to make his first public speech.

After the fireworks’ grand finale—accompanied by a small local brass band playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”—Bill walked to the front of the county courthouse. Standing behind the microphone, he said, “And now it’s time for the real fireworks!”

The crowd of more than a thousand supporters politely applauded as the young war hero looked out over the densely packed town square. The bankers and lawyers wore ties. The farmers and mechanics wore overalls. And behind them, in the distance, stood deputy sheriffs in broad-brimmed hats with folded arms and arrogant glares.

“You know, folks, there’s an election coming up August first. And I reckon we seen a lot of elections ’round here. And every damn one of ’em’s been stolen right out from under us!”

Paul Cantrell had been “elected” sheriff in 1936, when just enough mysterious votes had materialized at the last minute to give him the victory. He had been reelected through similar election-day shenanigans in 1938 and 1940, and, after being elected to the state senate in 1942 and 1944, he had decided to run for sheriff again this year, after it became apparent just how angry the county was with Cantrell’s crony, Sheriff Pat Mansfield.

The crowd clapped in agreement. Bill reminded himself to keep his language in check. He didn’t want to embarrass the political ticket hosting the rally.

“But this election is gonna be different.” He told the crowd the story of a secret meeting of veterans in March in the basement of a Studebaker dealership. He explained how they had decided to run a nonpartisan ticket of GIs, including Knox Henry, against Cantrell’s Democrats and of how word had been spread throughout the county’s three thousand GIs, risking the wrath of the Cantrell machine.

“It ain’t been easy,” he continued. “I’ve gotten them phone calls in the middle of the night. Threatenin’ me. Threatenin’ my folks.” Heads nodded among men, women, and even children who had received the same calls.

“I’ve opened my mail. Seen them nasty postcards. Tryin’ to intimidate us.” The crowd murmured its agreement.

“Those sons-a-bitches even arrested a boy who was puttin’ up a Knox sign on that tree right over there,” he bellowed, pointing toward one of the many maple trees lining the town square, “even though they would have just torn the sign right down anyway!” There was more nodding and clapping.

“Well, I say the hell with all of ’em!” Bill shouted, pointing his thumb over his shoulder like an umpire calling a runner out. “We went over there to fight for American freedom. But when we came back to Athens, it was like Nazi Germany right here in Tennessee!”

Now the applause really began to build. There were three thousand veterans in McMinn County, and many of them were in the audience, growing angrier with every word Bill said.

“Our county is controlled by a damn bunch of Gestapo thugs, beatin’ up GIs! Drunk as skunks most of the time!” The crowd’s applause continued to grow louder, as did Bill.

“And then there’s our very own Hitler, Mr. Paul Cantrell!”

The group roared even louder at the first mention of Cantrell’s name, and by now the cheering was almost louder than the words coming from the loudspeaker by Bill’s side.

“He’s so used to money and power. That’s all he cares about. And I say it’s high time we clean out the kickbacks, and the phony arrests! I say it’s high time we throw these gangsters right out of office, once and for all!”

There would be other speakers that night, many of them more eloquent than Bill White. But all of them—candidates and supporters, young and old, rich and poor—ended with the same promise: We will not allow another stolen election! Your vote will be counted as cast!

From the back of the town square, at every repetition of the GIs’ promise of a fair election, Windy Wise smirked. He knew all the tricks: how to put phony ballots for the Cantrell ticket in the ballot box before the first vote was ever cast; how to intimidate voters with armed guards; and, most important, how to take the ballot boxes from the key precincts to the county jail, a place where only Cantrell supporters could watch the counting. The square, redbrick building on White Street had been built to keep law-breaking people in. But on Election Day, it served as the perfect place to keep law-abiding people out.

July 25, 1946

“Dear Director Hoover,” the letter from the people of Athens began. “We are writing to request FBI observers to ensure an honest and fair election on August 1.

“Every recent election has been stolen by ward-heelers, ringsters, and the boss of the county, Mr. Paul Cantrell. They and their supporters have flagrantly voted minors, voted more than once, bought votes, stuffed ballot boxes, blocked poll watchers, and excluded opponents from buildings where the votes were counted.

“We complained of fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944, but the Department of Justice never responded. We challenged elections in court, but the local judges are part of the Cantrell machine. This year, we are hoping you will take action ahead of time, before it is too late.”

One hundred fifty-nine GIs signed the petition.

A similar plea was sent to both the attorney general of the United States and the governor of Tennessee.

Bill White, well aware of the governor’s loyalties and the federal government’s indifference, did not expect to receive a response.

Election Day: August 1, 1946

8:20 A.M.

Downtown Athens was only about nine square blocks, but that was plenty big enough for the city’s seven thousand residents, many of whom farmed and lived on the outskirts of town. In the town center, things seemed to come in twos: two banks, two movie theaters, two Methodist churches. And in the summer, the city was always green—green bushes in front of local stores, green trees along the streets, green grass on the town square.

As Bill White walked toward the town square he passed the marquee for the Athens Theater, which advertised a Gary Cooper western called Along Came Jones. He’d been too busy with the election to watch any movies recently, but he put it on his to-do list. After today, his schedule would change.

After today, he told himself, a lot of things will change.

Bill passed Woolworth’s and caught up with his friend Fred Boone, who delivered orders for Athens Hardware. “Big day,” said Bill.

“Absolutely,” Fred replied. “I’ll sure be glad when it’s over. For two weeks, I’ve been running all over the county.” He stopped walking. His voice became a little quieter. “Everybody’s stockin’ up on ammo, Bill. Shotgun shells. Rifle cartridges. Even some bullets for pistols. People can’t get enough.”

He added, laughing, “One feller told me, ‘Got some big huntin’ to do—some big huntin’.’ But nobody’s foolin’ nobody. I don’t have to tell you. You of all people know best. You GIs are expectin’ trouble from Cantrell today, aren’t ya?”

Bill’s eyes narrowed. There was nothing he wanted more than a peaceful, fair election, but he doubted it was possible with Cantrell involved.

“Stay tuned,” said Bill, before walking ahead, aware that no one from the government had bothered to respond to their petitions for neutral election monitors.

When Bill came to the corner of Washington and Jackson streets, his hopes and fears for the day were both confirmed simultaneously. To his left was a line of voters stretching for half a block out of the Eleventh Precinct—the City Waterworks. The polls were not even open yet, but Athens was a town of early risers. Bill looked at the white-haired old-timers, the farmers in blue denim, and the mothers holding the hands of their children, and he knew at least two out of every three were there to vote for the Knox Henry/GI ticket. There weren’t many secrets in a town as small as Athens, and the GIs knew who their friends were.

They also knew who their enemies were, and when Bill looked to his right, he saw a pack of forty out-of-towners marching toward the Waterworks, swaggering with every step. Most of them carried a rifle or shotgun, and all of them had obvious bulges in their coats where sidearms were holstered. They were silent, but their faces—especially their eyes—did plenty of talking. These were cold men—cold and cocky. They were the last battalion to arrive, the final troops in the two-hundred-man army Paul Cantrell was assembling to intimidate voters. Their purpose, Bill knew from previous elections, was to block the view of election monitors, and, most important, keep GI supporters out of the jail, where key ballot boxes could be “counted” in secret.

Bill stared at the oncoming horde and thought, I reckon it looked somethin’ like this, in all them little towns, when the Nazis first arrived.

But Bill wasn’t scared. He and his fellow GIs had something the unarmed townspeople of Europe never did. There’s more of us than them, said Bill to himself.

And we’ve got more guns.

3:00 P.M.

Tom Gillespie walked by Windy Wise and up to the ballot box at the City Waterworks. He was a quiet man, a hardworking farmer who had lived most of his life in Athens. There were many southern towns where a man with Tom Gillespie’s skin color wouldn’t be allowed near a ballot box, but Athens was different. It had always played by its own rules—like siding with the Union during the Civil War and declaring war on Spain in 1898, two weeks before Congress did. And even though white supremacy ran deep in Athens, it wasn’t pervasive enough to keep Tom Gillespie from voting. But things were different this year.

Windy Wise watched Gillespie with a growing fear. He wasn’t scared of Gillespie necessarily, but of the GI supporters he represented. Wise was hot—there was no air-conditioning on this steamy August day—and tired. The tension had been rising throughout the day right along with the temperature. GI election monitors had already been beaten and arrested and the whole city felt like a tinderbox. Wise started developing a fierce headache when he began to worry that the quantity and enthusiasm of GI supporters was going to make stealing this election far trickier than expected.

Just as Gillespie was about to place his ballot in the box, the deputy sheriff grabbed his wrist and snatched the paper from his hand.

“You can’t vote,” Wise said. He sounded relatively calm, despite his growing fears.

“He can too!” shouted a GI supporter, who knew Gillespie was on their side.

For a moment everyone froze. The silence was finally broken when Tom Gillespie quietly asked Wise, “Why’s that, Mr. Wise?”

The “Mr.” part of his question was calculated. Blacks did not ask whites “why” very often in the American South, and Athens wasn’t progressive enough for Tom Gillespie to do so without showing as much deference as possible.

“Boy,” said Wise, his volume increasing, “you can’t vote here today!”

Gillespie opened his mouth to protest, but Windy Wise had heard enough. He reached into his pocket, slipped brass knuckles onto his right hand, and slammed his fist into the left cheekbone of Tom Gillespie’s face.

Gillespie fell to the ground, his face bleeding from where the metal on Wise’s knuckles had cut through flesh and chipped away bone. Suddenly his head jerked back, propelled by the force of Windy Wise’s boot, which sent Gillespie rolling out the door.

The stunned crowd outside the Waterworks, which had been gathering by the hundreds in the streets all afternoon, assumed Gillespie would remain on the ground, or at least outside the polling station. But Tom Gillespie had worked hard for the respectability he’d earned over a lifetime. He believed he deserved the right to vote for the men his conscience compelled him to support. He wasn’t finished fighting for that right.

It had been shocking when Gillespie talked back to a white man—especially to a Cantrell man. But what he did next was even more stunning. The proud, bleeding farmer stood up, wiped the dust off his denim overalls, and walked back into the Waterworks.

And that’s when Windy Wise grabbed his pistol and shot the defiant, would-be voter who was walking past him right in the back.

7:00 P.M.

All day, vast crowds had gathered in downtown Athens, hoping to show the Cantrell machine that this election would not be stolen while they sat idly by. Many were GIs, but some were simply supporters and patriotic Americans who believed in clean government and honest elections. Others were people who had been shaken down by the Cantrell machine over the years and were sick and tired of it.

The largest of the crowds gathered outside a local garage and tire shop called the Essankay, across the street from the GIs’ campaign headquarters. It was this crowd, which included Bill White, that Jim Buttram, the GIs’ campaign manager, reported to on the events of the day.

“Early this morning, at the courthouse precinct, Walter Ellis asked to look inside a ballot box before the voting began, just to make sure it was empty,” said Buttram, standing on an oversized tire. “Now, that was Walt’s right under Tennessee law, but Cantrell’s boys beat him up and arrested him. He’s still locked up in the county jail.”

Bill White liked Buttram, the tall grocer with the big jaw, who was wounded twice in a war that took him all the way from Tunisia, to Sicily, to Normandy. Buttram had a just-the-facts style to his speaking that Bill appreciated.

“Throughout the day, we’ve seen repeat voters for them,” Buttram continued. “And intimidated voters for us. And I don’t have to tell you what happened at the Eleventh to Tom Gillespie. He’s recovering from his bullet wound at Foree’s clinic now.”

The crowd broke into a brief moment of conversation, partly in anger at the reminder of Gillespie’s shooting and partly in relief at the good news that he would likely survive.

“Then, at the Twelfth Precinct, Bob Hairrell protested when a young girl tried to vote. He’d made challenges to those kinds of stunts all day. He’d been ignored every time, but this time Bob knew she was seventeen. She even admitted she was seventeen. That’s when Minus Wilburn just hit him across the skull with a blackjack! Then he kicked Bob in the face and let the girl vote!” Bill White had had a few run-ins with Wilburn, and he knew more than enough about the deputy sheriff’s baton and boot.

“Now, the good news is that we’ve won by a three-to-one margin in precincts where the vote’s been counted honestly, in the open.” The crowd applauded tentatively, knowing there was more to come.

“But the bad news,” said Buttram, waving his hands to quiet the crowd, “and it’s very bad news, is that Cantrell’s got most of the rest of the ballot boxes locked up in that jail.” The crowd booed.

“He can count them behind closed doors however he wants, and he’s got his cronies on the election board inside there to certify it. Once that happens there’s no court around here that’s gonna change it. We’ve been down this road before and we know where it leads. The question is, what are we gonna do about it this time?”

Bill White had heard just about enough. He didn’t know what the crowd intended to do, but he had a pretty good idea what they should do. Bill thought back to everything he’d been through: killer sharks; months of starvation; the Imperial Army of Japan. He saw the faces of all the dead Marines he’d buried with his own hands and the enemy troops he’d killed in the name of freedom. It all boiled over.

“Listen!” Bill yelled over the noise of the crowd, which had taken Buttram’s last question as an invitation to argue over an answer.

“Listen to me, dammit!” He didn’t have Jim Buttram’s natural talent for projecting his voice, but Bill White could be heard when he wanted to be.

“I fought with the bravest of the brave and the best of the best.” His voice softened, just a bit. “Nobody could have been any better or braver.” Bill had never talked about the war before.

“They fought for democracy,” he said. “All of us fought for democracy. And I’ll be damned if I can figure out why you’d fight for it over there, and not over here!”

Bill wasn’t sure whether he was moving the crowd, but he could feel his own emotions building.

“You call yourselves GIs?” He looked his fellow veterans in the eyes, repeating the question he’d asked a smaller group earlier in the day. “You go over there and fight two or three years, but you are gonna let a bunch of yellow-bellied draft dodgers push you around? A bunch of hoodlums who stayed here while we watched our friends die?”

By now the applause had begun, and Bill was fighting to be heard over the “Hell no’s!” of an increasingly animated crowd.

“If you people don’t stop this, and now is the time and place,” shouted Bill, “you wouldn’t make a pimple on a fightin’ GI’s ass!”

As the crowd accepted the challenge with a thunderous roar of applause, Bill ordered his friends and neighbors to exercise one of the rights they had all fought so hard to protect.

“Get your guns, boys!” ordered Bill White. “And then meet me at the jail.”

9:00 P.M.

The common law of Tennessee provides that every citizen has the right to stop a criminal in the act of committing a felony. In a similar spirit, the state constitution’s Declaration of Rights says: “That government, being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

These abstract doctrines, however, were as far from Bill White’s mind that night as they had been at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. He was no lawyer or philosopher; Bill White was a fighter, and he didn’t need anyone or anything to tell him whether to fight for the things he believed to be right.

Bill stood across the street from the McMinn County Jail and shouted, “We’ve come for the ballot boxes!” The redbrick fortress now protected Paul Cantrell, Windy Wise, sixty deputies, and the ballot boxes that, if counted fairly, would hand the Cantrell machine its first political defeat.

Behind Bill White, in the darkness, was a semicircle of five hundred armed veterans and GI supporters. Farmers held shotguns that had hung peacefully above their fireplaces for decades. Hunters carried their .22s and veterans their .45s. There was even a contingent of skinny, baby-faced teenagers who’d come with BB guns and visions of glory. More ominous for the Cantrell machine was the collection of military rifles taken from the local armory and divvied among men who had last used them in places like Bastogne and Iwo Jima.

“Bring out those damn ballot boxes!” Bill called again.

Perhaps because of the darkness, Windy Wise didn’t realize the size of the force opposing him, or perhaps he was simply so accustomed to having his way that it never occurred to him to hold his tongue. He had earned his nickname, after all, for being long-winded as a boy. Whatever the reason, Wise’s next words made it clear that those in the jail were not taking the situation as seriously as they should have.

“Why don’t you call the law?” Wise called out a second-story window as the “law” inside the jail laughed along with his joke.

“There ain’t no law in McMinn County!” Bill fired back, not amused.

A brief silence followed, broken by the unmistakable locking sound of a shotgun’s barrel snapping into its handle.

“Aw, go to hell!” shouted the deputy who had loaded the weapon. Bill had only a moment to wonder which deputy it was before the man aimed into the crowd of GIs and pulled the trigger.

The blast echoed down White Street, past the Dixie Café and the county courthouse beyond. Fifteen of the pellets found GI supporter Edgar Miller’s shoulder and eight more lodged into supporter Harold Powers’s neck. Like Tom Gillespie’s, their wounds were not fatal.

Powers refused to leave the jail, but he did take cover, as did Bill White and the hundreds of men around him. Several dozen ran into a boardinghouse directly opposite the jail, where the windows of guest rooms provided the perfect cover from which to fire back at the thieves and bullies across the street.

Before those running for the boardinghouse could make it up the stairs, a barrage of gunfire rang out from those on their side who had found protection outdoors, behind cars and trees and the short walls of a nearby hillside. Glass windows shattered, and sparks punctuated the darkness.

Bill White fired both cartridges from his double-barreled shotgun, emptied the rounds in his rifle, and then shot his pistol until no bullets remained.

Then he reloaded all three weapons and repeated the cycle.

One more time, he thought to himself. One last fight for what’s right.

The battle for Athens had begun.

August 2, 1946

1:15 A.M.

Windy Wise had seen Paul Cantrell many times, but never like this. On a normal day, Cantrell strode down the streets of Athens with the most confident of airs and the most distinguished of looks. This look featured a walking cane that he did not need, rimless glasses and suspenders, and the hat of a southern gentleman, always tipped off to the side just so. The political boss had been so sure of his position, so invincible in his own mind, that he’d named his prize bird dog “Lady Fee-grabber.”

But four hours into the Battle of Athens, with bullet holes in the walls and several deputies on the floor bleeding and dying, Paul Cantrell was feeling something he hadn’t felt in more than a decade: fear. The hat and cane were gone, the fidgety twitch he’d tried to suppress since childhood had returned, and sweat was streaming down his large head and onto his small neck.

“Any word from the governor?” asked Wise, walking into Cantrell’s makeshift office, where torn and crumpled ballots lay strewn across the floor. Their markings were irrelevant to the vote count Cantrell would report if he could survive the siege.

“Don’t know,” Cantrell said in his slow southern drawl. “The GI boys shot out the phone lines fifteen minutes ago.” He wiped a stream of sweat from his forehead. “Last we heard, the National Guard was on its way.”

Since their first volley, the GIs had kept up periodic barrages of fire. Their ammunition, which they’d retrieved from homes, hardware stores, and the local armory, seemed endless. In contrast, Cantrell’s men had spent most of their bullets in the first half hour of gunplay. They needed to save the rest to defend against what they believed to be an inevitable storming of the jail.

The state guard, which was under the command of a politically loyal governor, was the Cantrell machine’s best hope, though many in the jail doubted whether the governor in Nashville would risk his reputation to save a mountain county boss fighting a band of popular and heroic war veterans.

“Think they’ll come?” asked Wise.

Cantrell wiped his forehead again and fidgeted with a pipe.

When he finally looked Wise in the eye, he looked as afraid as his deputies cowering in the jailhouse.

“No.”

2:45 A.M.

Crouched behind a copse of trees he had been using all night for cover, Bill White knew that time was not on his side. The GIs had been winning the battle, but the siege could only last so long. How many armed supporters, brave enough to stand by him in darkness, would cautiously melt away at dawn? And what about the rumors of the National Guard coming to Cantrell’s rescue?

“There’s an old saying,” Jim Buttram said to Bill. “If you’re gonna shoot at the king . . .” Buttram paused. “Don’t miss.”

Bill knew he was right. If reinforcements from the governor arrived before Cantrell surrendered the ballot boxes, his regime would somehow survive. And if it did, his vengeance would be sure and swift. Bill White knew that he would likely be the first to experience it.

“I had a few boys go out and get some dynamite,” Bill said, pulling a couple of sticks of the explosives from his jacket pocket. Then, for the first time that night, he flashed a wide smile. “I think it’s time we end this thing.”

Buttram nodded in agreement, and within minutes Bill had taped three sticks of dynamite together and heaved the first bundle toward the jail.

As soon as the dynamite left Bill’s hand, he knew it was going to land short of the jail. It did, sliding under a deputy sheriff’s Chrysler in the no-man’s-land of parked cars separating the jail from the GIs. The massive car lifted into the air, turned over, and crashed back to the pavement, its windows shattering.

Before the wheels on the upside-down sedan had stopped spinning, White reared back and heaved another bundle of dynamite toward the jail.

There was another earsplitting explosion, but once again, the dynamite had landed too far short of the jail to seriously damage it.

“We’re going to have to get some charges up there on the building,” Bill said to Buttram. Both men knew the risks inherent in that proposition. The last time any GIs had exposed themselves in the area near the jail, a single shotgun blast had taken out Edgar Miller and Harold Powers. But compared to what he’d faced in the jungles of Guadalcanal and the beaches of Tarawa, this current mission seemed almost safe.

Bill put together another bundle and crawled under the cover of the earlier explosions’ smoke. He slid right up to the overturned cars, lit a fuse, and pitched the dynamite onto the jail’s front porch. This time he was plenty close enough. The blast shook the jail to its foundation and wooden porch planks flew into the night sky. Windows in neighboring stores rattled.

With the floors beneath them shaking and the ceiling above them trembling, the jail’s defenders, except for Sheriff Mansfield, who had previously managed to sneak into an ambulance that had come to carry away wounded deputies, came rushing out of the battered building they had once been so confident would protect them. With smoke in their eyes and white handkerchiefs held high, the once-arrogant group of deputies tumbled out into the street.

5:45 A.M.

It would be a day before Paul Cantrell, who skipped town in disguise, conceded defeat. And it would be longer than that before Windy Wise felt safe showing his face again in Athens. Not that he had much choice. Wise was tried and sentenced to one to three years in prison for the shooting of Tom Gillespie.

It had taken several hours to deal with the other Cantrell deputies who surrendered to Athens’s GIs that morning. Largely for their own protection, the men, most of whom were out-of-towners, had been returned to the jail they’d fled and locked away until it was safe for them to go home.

Somehow, in a six-hour gunfight involving hundreds of people, no one had died, and in the predawn hours after the shooting stopped, the mature and less vindictive of the GIs made sure it stayed that way.

Bill White finally headed from the city center to his parents’ farm, past the old sign that read “Welcome to Athens, the Friendly City.” He moved at a slightly quicker pace than normal, even though his body ached from almost twenty-four hours on his feet. Some of the speed came from the adrenaline that still flowed through his body. War was hell, but it also provided an unparalleled rush.

As the sun rose over the Smoky Mountains and Bill rounded the bend toward home, the tired young man slowed just a bit. He began to wonder what he would do with his life now that the campaign was over. He’d tried the GI Bill for a few months, but college wasn’t for him. He wanted to find something else like the campaign, a corner of the world where he could right wrongs and stand up to crooks and thugs. He wanted a job that came not just with a paycheck, but also with a purpose.

There was a familiar tune playing in his head as he pondered his prospects; the same melody that had kept coming to mind throughout the night’s battle. It was a song he had heard many times, but one whose title, the “William Tell Overture,” he would never have been able to identify if asked.

“Maybe I’ll be a lawman,” Bill said to himself, holding his shotgun over one shoulder and resting his rifle on the other. “With a silver star on my shirt and a loaded gun in my holster.”

He stopped and looked back toward the town he loved.

After all, Bill thought with a smile, Athens is gonna need some new deputy sheriffs.