Christmas has come and gone. Y’all know what this means, right?
Right. I have a new stack of books to read.
One of them was a recent book that was a present from Mike the Musicologist, and one that I was not aware of before he sent it to me: The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution by Chris DeRose (affiliate link). (I have not read it yet, though it is very high up on my stack: I would have started it already, but I got stuck into Mike Duncan‘s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic right before it showed up.)
After WWII, a group of veterans returned to their homes in McMinn County, Tennessee. (Athens is the county seat.) The veterans found that McMinn County was run by a corrupt local machine, and assembled their own slate of reform candidates. However, the crooked local government decided that they were going to rig the elections in their favor. The machine, though, had not realized some facts of life:
You can figure that many (if not all) of those men were familiar with firearms, had combat experience, and at least some of them knew something about explosives.
So when the election took place on August 1, 1946, and the machine tried to rig the vote counting (even going as far as to beat and arrest GI poll watchers), the veterans took up arms and rebelled, in what is now known as “The Battle of Athens“.
Here are two short versions of the story:
A somewhat longer video, which is based in part on Mr. DeRose’s book:
This is a long video (about an hour) of a talk by Matt Green (a former judge in Alabama: as best as I can tell, he’s in private practice now specializing in DUI and constitutional law) about the Battle of Athens.
There’s a made for TV movie that you can find on the ‘Tube, but which I’m not embedding here for policy reasons.
I very much enjoyed Duncan’s “The Storm Before The Storm”
I’m about halfway through, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it myself.