These WWII Veterans Came Home and Launched an Insurrection Against Corrupt Politicians
Story by Jerad W. Alexander at Narrative my
http://narrative.ly/wwii-veterans-came-home-launched-armed-insurrection-corrupt-politicians/
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But the mood amongst some of the GIs as they marched down North Jackson Street was somewhat less than jovial. Trouble had long been brewing at home. While they battled the Nazis and the Japanese they had received word from across the county of malfeasance and outright criminal behavior by the sheriff’s deputies.
Sherriff Mansfield, a transplant from Georgia, had come into the office on the coattails of newly elected State Senator Paul Cantrell. Mansfield quickly turned the county into a veritable cash register for himself and the deputies. In a later interview, Marine veteran and Athens native Bill White said, “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.” There were endless instances of shakedowns and fee grabbing — a policing policy whereby deputies were paid solely by arrest. The more arrests they made, the more money they earned.
All this came to a low boil during the war when two service members on leave were killed by deputies while at a pair of nearby roadhouses, according to a 1946 article by Theodore H. White in Harper’s. While McMinn County GIs were fighting to preserve democracy, they were hearing about their friends and neighbors — even fellow GIs — getting shaken down, beaten, and murdered by “draft dodgers,” as one veteran called them. In the same article, veteran Ralph Duggan explained he “thought a lot more about McMinn County than he did about the Japs. If democracy was good enough to put on the Germans and the Japs, it was good enough for McMinn County, too!”
The problems in the county only compounded once the GIs returned home flush with savings. “When I got off the bus there was four deputies standing there flipping over all the service members,” remembered Bill White. “A lot of boys getting discharged were getting the mustering out pay. Well, deputies running around four or five at a time grabbing up every GI they could find and trying to get that money off of them… They were kind of making a racket out of it. When these things happened, the GIs got madder — the more GIs they arrested, the more they beat up, the madder we got.”
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