From the Abbeville Institute:
The Battle of Athens, Tennessee
On August 1, 1946, a group of Southern World War Two veterans in Athens, Tennessee, fought and won the only successful armed insurrection in the United States since the War of Independence. These brave men embodied that irrepressible Southern spirit, that martial valor and moral sublimity that suffused the souls of Dixie and her children for generations upon generations, stretching backwards in time through the annals of Indo-European civilization — that constitution which we fervently hope has not drained from our blood forevermore. The Battle of Athens stands, then, as a monumental event in the history of Southern, and thus Western, civilization, the fulfillment of an ancestral promise; so, too, does the Battle of Athens represent a call echoing through the ages to fall on modern ears that must not remain deaf — a call to actualize the destiny that our forefathers spilt so much blood, both their own and their enemies’, to leave to us.
Athens is the seat of McMinn County, which, at the time, was the nerve center for Sheriff Paul Cantrell, a major lieutenant of a corrupt Democratic machine which stretched from Tennessee to the District of Columbia. Though we will eschew labeling Cantrell or his machine politics “evil,” as this was simply the way things were done in many American polities, it is worth noting that before and especially during the Second World War, Cantrell presided over corruption and graft on an industrial scale. As Chris DeRose details, the Sheriff drew salaries of nearly sixty thousand dollars per year over his first six years that were worth well over one million dollars in today’s purchasing power. He was also appointed superintendent of the county workhouse for an additional salary of over two thousand dollars; DeRose notes that “McMinn County did not have a workhouse, making its superintending easy.” This at a time when the median Tennessee home was worth less than two thousand dollars and the starting salary for enlisted men was fifty dollars per month. Despite strict rationing, McMinn machine men never wanted for cars, tires, or fuel. Illegal casinos, speakeasies, and whorehouses payed thousands of dollars per month in protection money. Dozens of county employees were listed on the payrolls for the sole purpose of providing cover for a vast money laundering operation.
The story is pretty amazing - deep deep levels of corruption and returning soldiers banded together to put a stop to it. The article closes - in part - with this:
Letters inundated the local papers, with messages of encouragement such as: “To the GI Patriots, Athens, Tennessee: Thank you indeed for restoring the faith in America which so many of us had lost. Keep pitching and firing when necessary.”; “We have chicken-stealers and hog-stealers! House-stealers and auto-stealers! But the lowest, dirtiest of all are our election-stealers!”; and, “I congratulate you in the memory of my son, who lies buried in the South Pacific.” One GI carried a small paper with him everywhere, which read: “Remember…that no American can afford to be disinterested in any part of his Government, whether it is county, city, State, or nation.” The Tennessean praised what “has happened in the beautiful little city of Athens in McMinn County,” which “undoubtedly has awakened a thrill of pride throughout this machine-ridden state. Make no mistake. The McMinn County veterans and their supporters had first won their victory at the polls. Then they fought, with their bare fists and such weapons as they could seize, to protect their election from the theft attempted by force of arms before their eyes. This was no ‘riot’—unless Bunker Hill was a riot.” The “Boston Tea Party of Tennessee [caused] by a decade of election corruption and thievery, has stamped upon a brutal farce it had determined to endure no longer.” The battle was “what always has happened where men not born of a craven race have been pushed too far by tyranny.”
Similarly, a Commonwealth editorial read: “Since, after all, our American nation was founded by virtue of revolution, and since such revered figures as Jefferson evidently thought that revolution had valuable tonic effects on the body politic, it would be a trifle hypocritical for Americans to raise their hands in horror at these goings-on in the shadow of the Great Smokies.”
We need the same spirit now. Clean out Washington. What the last four years has shown me is that it is not just a few bad actors. The entire system is corrupt. They keep talking about a Reset? Let us give them a Reset they will remember for the rest of their lives. As they enjoy it from behind bars.
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