32. The Armed Uprising of WWII Veterans Against a Corrupt Southern Sheriff
In the 1940s Athens, Tennessee, was a small town of 7000 souls between Knoxville and Chattanooga. The seat of rural McMinn County, Athens was a community that the modern world had seemingly passed by without stopping. Most streets were still unpaved, and most houses still lacked electricity. The backward county and its seat exuded bucolic serenity, but beneath the seemingly placid surface, trouble was seething.
During the preceding decade, new local and regional political machines had cropped up in rural East Tennessee. Lacking the sophistication of urban political machines, they relied on violence and intimidation to control their constituents. They got away with it for some time, until the end of WWII, when returning young veterans, many of whom had experienced combat, decided to do something about their local oppressors.