Miracles and Massacres (29 page)

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.