Tennesse Statesman Harry T. Burn by Tyler Boyd

Author:Tyler Boyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Febb Burn with her youngest grandchild, Harry T. Burn Jr., in 1938. Burn family.

Three months after Febb Burn passed away, Japan surrendered and World War II finally came to an end. “After they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, I had been working nights for the railroad and working my law office in the day, and my health got rather poor, so as soon as the war’s end was apparent I became inactive with the railroad.”50 He practiced law in Sweetwater for the remainder of the 1940s.

Perhaps the only historical event connected to McMinn County as nationally renowned as Burn’s 1920 vote for the Nineteenth Amendment occurred in Athens in 1946. This event and its consequences greatly affected Burn’s next venture into politics. Known as the “Battle of Athens,” it, too, related to the right to vote.

The Battle of Athens occurred as a result of a culmination of frustration that had built up in McMinn County for several years. The Democratic Party’s fortunes began to improve in the 1936 election. Etowah Democrat Paul Cantrell won a close election as sheriff. Like their Republican predecessors, McMinn Democrats installed their own political machine. They soon developed connections to the E.H. Crump machine in Memphis.51 By 1942, Georgia native Pat Mansfield had won election as sheriff and Cantrell had won election to the State Senate.

By the summer of 1946, several GIs had returned home to McMinn County from service in World War II. Having just risked their lives to fight tyranny and protect free and democratic government, they decided that it was time to end the corruption in their home county. A group of GIs, made up of Democrats and Republicans, ran for the county government offices. The group was determined to end the Democratic Party’s machine. They campaigned through the summer of 1946.

The GIs knew that they had a tough fight ahead of them. In the 1938 primary election, a fight resulted in a stabbing death.52 Etowah Democrat George Woods, elected as state representative in 1940, secured legislation in 1941 to reduce the number of voting precincts in the county from twenty-three to twelve.53 Woods became Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1945. In 1943, three McMinn County election officials were convicted of election fraud in a federal court. The court found that they used “the color of their office to deprive certain citizens of their right to vote in the 1940 general election at a rural school polling place.”54 The three election officials closed the precinct at 10:00 a.m. after only forty people voted. They took the ballot boxes with them allegedly “to keep the peace” after a fight broke out.55 In 1944, George Spurling, who had been deputized on the spot by Sheriff Deputy Minus Wilburn, murdered Earl Ford. A Seabee from neighboring Meigs County, Ford had committed no crime.56

The GIs had bipartisan support, and the machine saw its power slipping away. On election day, August 1, 1946, Sheriff Pat Mansfield’s deputies engaged in various voter intimidation tactics at precincts throughout the county.

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