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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

29. A Rigged Election

With all county offices on the line, especially that of Sheriff, the stakes for the 1946 elections were high. The veterans were confident that their GI Nonpartisan Party would sweep to victory. However, the incumbents were equally confident that they would win: they knew that who counts the votes matters more than who votes, so all they had to do was control the ballot boxes.

Thus, the election hinged on poll watchers: Sheriff’s deputies for the incumbents, and veterans for the challengers. Trouble began when a black man tried to vote at an Athens precinct, only for deputies to shoot him on the spot. They then shut down the voting precinct, and held the veterans’ poll watchers captive. Soon, the Sheriff and other deputies arrived, sirens blazing, to seize the ballot boxes and move them to the jail. Word then spread throughout McMinn County that voting was to be canceled, and all ballot boxes were to be taken to the jail.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.