An Extremely Corrupt Local Government
Athens, Tennessee, was a small town between Knoxville and Chattanooga. Athens was home to around 7,000 people in the 1940s. The seat of rural McMinn County, Athens was a community that the modern world had seemingly passed. Most streets were still unpaved, and most houses still lacked electricity. The backwards county and its seat exuded bucolic serenity, but beneath the seemingly placid surface, trouble seethed. In the 1930s, new local and regional political machines had cropped up in rural East Tennessee. They lacked the sophistication and finesse of urban political machines. Instead, McMinn’s machine relied on violence and intimidation to control its constituents.
They got away with it for some time, until the end of World War II. That was when returned young veterans, many of whom had experienced combat, decided to stand up to their local oppressors. At the end of WWII, American veterans were often welcomed home with parades and the warm embrace of a grateful nation. Not so the veterans of Athens, Tennessee. The GIs who had left Athens to fight the fascist abroad returned home to the nightmare of a corrupt local Sheriff, Paul Cantrell. The head of the local dirty political machine, he was dirty even by the standards of southern local governments.