Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

When the third pillbox was cleared of enemy gunners, Bill looked back to the sea. It was chaotic, and the newly arriving Americans were still taking heavy casualties, but something about the scene had changed. Bill saw Marines running down the front ramps of Alligator boats and splashing through the football-field length of ocean that separated them from the beach. There were hundreds of them, hundreds of American boys who would have been dead if those pillboxes had still been in place.

Athens

November 16, 1945

As the bus climbed over mountain roads, it passed signs saying “Jesus Is Coming Soon!” and “Prepare to Meet God!” But when it stopped that evening in Athens, it wasn’t God standing there to meet the passengers. It was Windy Wise and three of his fellow deputy sheriffs.

Friday nights were big for the Cantrell machine. Buses coming through town were packed, and every tourist was a ripe target for arrest in this dry county. If they had a bottle of beer on them, and sometimes even when they didn’t, they were arrestable. It made no difference in Athens. The county paid the sheriff “expenses” for each day that someone was held in jail. Whereas weekend arrests should normally have topped out at about fifteen, arrests in recent years had averaged 115. Over the last decade, Paul Cantrell’s fee grabbers had collected about $300,000 in county expenses, much of it from returning GIs, who were frequent targets of the unfair arrests. Cantrell himself was now a state senator, but the official salary of his crony, sheriff Pat Mansfield, by contrast, was $5,000 per year.

Most of the passengers, many bound for Atlanta, were asleep when their bus stopped in Athens. But not Bill White. The twenty-two-year-old was much too excited to sleep. He had trained in California, fought in the Pacific, and been honorably discharged in South Carolina. But now he was coming home.

As soon as Bill’s bus pulled into the station, Windy Wise bounded up the steps, followed by three other deputies.

“You’re under arrest,” he said. “All you folks is under arrest.”

“Under arrest?” asked a half-awake passenger. “What for?”

“Drunkenness!” shot back Wise. “Don’t worry. A night in jail won’t do you no harm. And you can just pay a lil’ fine in the mornin’.”

“But,” Wise added, turning to the tourist with the gumption to ask the reason for his arrest, “if I hear any more lip outta you, I’ll give you the biggest beatin’ you ever seen. And then I’ll add resistin’ arrest and obstruction and the fine won’t be so lil’—”

“Bullshit!” shouted a young GI, standing up in the back the bus.

The four deputies marched toward the soldier, their hands on their metal batons and their eyes on the boy with the big mouth.

Without the weapons, and without the three extra deputies, a brawl between Windy Wise and this GI might have been a pretty fair fight. Both were big men, not so much in their height as in their build. Both were good athletes. And both had been in a lot of brawls.

But Windy Wise was not without his police baton or his three allies. And the melee that ensued was not a fair fight at all.

March 24, 1946

“Hello?” said Bill, as he picked up the phone in his parents’ kitchen.

“Bill, it’s Jim Buttram. How you doing?”

“Fine, I s’pose,” Bill replied, curious about the local grocer’s reason for calling. “Are you lookin’ for my pa?”

“No, Bill. Looking for you. Some of the GIs are pretty fed up with Paul Cantrell and his gang. They’ve been out of control for a while, but ever since GIs started coming home, Mansfield and his deputies have really had a field day arresting us and beating us for no reason. They’ve even shot a couple boys. So when I heard about your run-in with Windy Wise back in the fall, I thought you might be with us.”

“Hell, yes,” said Bill, recalling the pain he felt from the pounding of Windy Wise’s baton. “But there ain’t nothin’ you or me or no one can do about it.”

“Well, we’ll see about that. There’s a meeting tomorrow night—a secret one. We’re putting together a nonpartisan ticket to run against them in the five races up for election in August.”

“What kind of nonpartisan ticket?” asked Bill.

“An all-GI ticket. You know Knox Henry? Fought in the North African campaign.”

“ ’Course I do,” Bill said. “Everyone knows Knox.”

“Good,” Jim Buttram replied, “because he’s going to be our new sheriff.”

July 3, 1946

It was past midnight when the phone rang at the Whites’ farmhouse. It woke Bill on the first ring, and he bounded toward the kitchen, hoping to catch it before it woke his parents.

“Hello,” he said, slightly out of breath, not so much from the run to the kitchen but from being startled by the unexpected noise in the night.

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?” he asked. “Hello!” he tried again, angrier. “Who the hell is this?”

The silence continued until Bill hung up. He started walking back toward his bedroom, but before he had made three steps, the phone rang again.

“Now listen, here, you son of a bitch,” Bill said into the receiver, before he was cut off by a deep, purposely disguised voice on the other end of the line.

“No, Bill.” A pause. “ You listen here.” The speaker was going out of his way to enunciate every syllable, talking so slowly it sounded like a recording being played at three-quarters speed.

“You have a nice family and a nice future,” the voice continued. “It would be a shame if something happened to them.”

It all clicked together in Bill’s brain the second that last word oozed out of the caller’s mouth: the campaign. Cantrell’s machine was ramping up.

“Stay. Away. From tomorrow’s rally.”

Bill slammed down the phone. He returned to bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the voice. But he did not for a moment, that night or any other, think about quitting the campaign.

July 4, 1946

Flags flew from every shop surrounding the green lawn of the town square, and the white courthouse at the end of the block was covered in patriotic bunting. As soon as the sun set, fireworks lit up the night sky.

Bill White was excited, although he wasn’t exactly enjoying the fireworks. Ever since the Pacific, he flinched at loud noises, and tonight he had an additional reason to feel nervous. This farmer’s son, who had known nothing of politics when he left for war, was about to make his first public speech.

After the fireworks’ grand finale—accompanied by a small local brass band playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”—Bill walked to the front of the county courthouse. Standing behind the microphone, he said, “And now it’s time for the real fireworks!”

The crowd of more than a thousand supporters politely applauded as the young war hero looked out over the densely packed town square. The bankers and lawyers wore ties. The farmers and mechanics wore overalls. And behind them, in the distance, stood deputy sheriffs in broad-brimmed hats with folded arms and arrogant glares.

“You know, folks, there’s an election coming up August first. And I reckon we seen a lot of elections ’round here. And every damn one of ’em’s been stolen right out from under us!”

Paul Cantrell had been “elected” sheriff in 1936, when just enough mysterious votes had materialized at the last minute to give him the victory. He had been reelected through similar election-day shenanigans in 1938 and 1940, and, after being elected to the state senate in 1942 and 1944, he had decided to run for sheriff again this year, after it became apparent just how angry the county was with Cantrell’s crony, Sheriff Pat Mansfield.