“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 w
as 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 be
en 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?