Battle of Athens. By Wikipedia. People cared enough to use violence to defeat vote fraud, in Athens Tennessee in 1946.

In 1936, the E. H. Crump political machine based in Memphis, which controlled much of Tennessee, extended to McMinn County with the introduction of Paul Cantrell as the Democratic candidate for sheriff. … Paul Cantrell was reelected sheriff in the 1938 and 1940 elections, and was elected to the state senate in 1942 and 1944, while his former deputy, Pat Mansfield, a transplanted Georgian, was elected sheriff those years.

The sheriff and his deputies were paid under a fee system whereby they received money for every person they booked, incarcerated, and released. Because of this fee system, there was extensive “fee grabbing” from tourists and travelers. Buses passing through the county were often pulled over and the passengers were randomly ticketed for drunkenness, regardless of their intoxication or lack thereof. Between 1936 and 1946, these fees amounted to almost $300,000.

Citizens of McMinn County had long been concerned about political corruption and possible election fraud, though some of the complaints, especially at first, may have been partisan carping. The U.S. Department of Justice had investigated allegations of electoral fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944, but had not taken action. …

After WWII, GI’s returned to McMinn County:

[GI and veteran Bill White:] “Mansfield had complete control of everything, schools and everything else. You couldn’t even get hired as a schoolteacher without their okay, or any other job.” …

When they arrived home and the deputies targeted the returning GIs, one reported: “A lot of boys getting discharged [were] getting the mustering out pay. Well, deputies running around four or five at a time grapping [sic] up every GI they could find and trying to get that money off of them, they were fee grabbers, they wasn’t on a salary back then.” …

A movie was made in 1992.

Election, August 1946:

Paul Cantrell ran again for sheriff … The GIs were more hostile towards Sheriff Mansfield and his deputies rather than against Cantrell …

McMinn County had around 3,000 returning military veterans, constituting almost 10 percent of the county’s population. Some of the returning veterans resolved to challenge Cantrell’s political control by fielding their own nonpartisan candidates and working for a fraud-free election.

The members of the GI Non-Partisan League were very careful to make their list of candidates match the electoral demographics of the county, choosing three Republicans and two Democrats. A respected and decorated veteran of the North African campaign, Knox Henry, stood as candidate for sheriff in opposition to Cantrell. …

Many of McMinn County’s citizens believed the machine would rig the election. The veterans capitalized on this belief with the slogan “Your Vote Will Be Counted As Cast”. …

Well aware of the methods of Sheriff Mansfield and his associates, the League organized a counterpoise. A “fightin’ bunch” was organized by Bill White “to keep the thugs from beating up GIs and keep them from taking the election.

Sheriff Mansfield also organized for the upcoming election, hiring 200 deputies, most from neighboring counties, some from out of state …

Election day:

At the twelfth precinct the GI poll watchers were Bob Hairrell and Leslie Doolie, a one-armed veteran of the North African theater. The polling place was commanded by Mansfield man Minus Wilburn. Wilburn tried to let a young woman, who Hairrell believed was underage, vote. She had no poll tax receipt and was not listed in the voter registration. Hairrell grabbed Wilburn’s wrist when he tried to deposit the ballot in the box. Wilburn struck Hairrell on the head with a blackjack and kicked him in the face. Wilburn closed the precinct and took the GIs and ballot box across the street to the jail. Hairrell was brutally beaten and was taken to the hospital.

In response to cussing and taunts from the deputies, and the actions so far that day, Bill White, leader of the “fighting bunch”, told his lieutenant Edsel Underwood to take five or six men and break into the National Guard Armory to steal weapons. The GIs took the front door keys from the caretaker and entered the building. They then armed themselves with sixty .30-06 Enfield rifles, two Thompson sub-machine guns, and ammo. …

As the polls closed, and counting began (minus the three boxes taken to the jail), the GI-backed candidates had a three-to-one lead. When the GIs heard the deputies had taken the ballot boxes to the jail, Bill White exclaimed, “Boy, they doing something. I’m glad they done that. Now all we got to do is whip on the jail.”

By 9:00 pm, Paul Cantrell, Pat Mansfield, George Woods (Speaker of the State House of Representatives and Secretary of the McMinn County Election Commission), and about 50 deputies were in the jail, allegedly rummaging through the ballot boxes. Woods and Mansfield constituted a majority of the election commission and could therefore certify and validate the count from within the jail.

The battle:

Estimates of the number of veterans besieging the jail vary from several hundred to as high as 2,000. … When the men reached the jail, it was barricaded and manned by 55 deputies. The veterans demanded the ballot boxes but were refused. They then opened fire on the jail, initiating a battle that lasted several hours by some accounts, considerably less by others. …

The day after the battle, the New York Times front page reported a sheriff had been killed, and that the shooting had started with a shot through a jail window and with the demand the hostages be released. … Arterburn reported shots being fired, 2,000 persons milling around, and “at least a score of fist fights were in progress.”

An attempt by deputies outside the jail to reinforce (or take refuge in) the jail was thwarted by Bill White’s “fighting band”. Some people in the jail managed to escape out the back door …

For the veterans it was either win before morning or face a long time in jail for violating local, state, and federal laws. Rumors spread that the National Guard or state troopers were coming. White made hourly demands for surrender. The GIs attempted to bombard the jail with Molotov cocktails but were not able to throw them far enough to reach the jail. The GIs decided to resort to dynamite. At about that time an ambulance pulled up to the jail. The GIs assumed it was called to remove the wounded and held their fire. Two men jumped in, and it sped off carrying Paul Cantrell and Sheriff Mansfield to safety out of town. …

Then the dynamite was deployed. Bill White said, “We’d put two or three sticks of dynamite together and tape it together and put a cap in there and a fuse. And we’d rear back and throw them. Well, we couldn’t get them all the way to the jail, but we got them out to them cars. They’d blow them cars up in the air and turn them over and land them back on the top. Several cars down there were blowing up. …

As with the beginning of the battle, accounts of the end differ: American Heritage states, “In the end, the door of the jail was dynamited and breached. The barricaded deputies — some with injuries — surrendered, and the ballot boxes were recovered.”

Byrum reported the end of the battle thusly: “By 3:30 am, the men holding the jail had been dynamited into submission, and by early morning George Woods was calling Ralph Duggan to ask if he could come to Athens and certify the election of the GI slate. …

The vote rigging was discovered, and reversed:

Bill White reported that “when the GIs broke into the jail, they found some of the tally sheets marked by the machine had been scored fifteen to one for the Cantrell forces.” When the final tally was completed, Knox Henry was elected. …

The ballots, when tallied, proved a landslide for the GI Non-Partisan League. Scores of veterans were present when Speaker of the state House of Representatives and secretary of the McMinn County election commissioners George Woods was marched into the County Courthouse under the guard of ex-GIs. Speaker Woods had fled after the gun battle. League member Knox Henry received 2,175 votes against 1,270 for Sheriff Cantrell. …

The morning of August 2 found the town quiet. Some minor acts of revenge happened, but the public mood was one of “euphoria that had not been experienced in McMinn County in a long time.” …

In the initial momentum of victory, gambling houses in collusion with the Cantrell regime were raided and their operations demolished. Deputies of the prior administration resigned and were replaced.

And eventually life returned to normal:

The new GI government of Athens quickly encountered challenges including the re-emergence of old party loyalties. On January 4, 1947, four of the five leaders of the GI Non-Partisan League declared in an open letter: “We abolished one machine only to replace it with another and more powerful one in the making.”

The GI government in Athens eventually collapsed. Tennessee’s GI political movement quickly faded and politics in the state returned to normal. The Non-Partisan GI Political League replied to enquiries by veterans elsewhere in the United States with the advice that shooting it out was not the most desirable solution to political problems