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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

32. The Armed Uprising of WWII Veterans Against a Corrupt Southern Sheriff

Returning WWII veterans from McMinn County, Tennessee, went to war against their Sheriff. Pintrest

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.

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.