The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — There’s an advantage in gaining wisdom the longer you live, the older you get. There are advantages to staying active on social media.
But there are also drawbacks, like getting blindsided by blasts from the past you do not necessary relish. Like a recent private message I received from a woman I dated briefly in high school in the mid-1970s who was tragically disfigured in a traffic accident after we stopped dating.
This week, one of my friends on Facebook shared a story recently written about the so-called Machine at the University of Alabama, described as “a clandestine student organization at UA that feeds the state’s political system” by Alecia Sherard Archibald, the wife of Birmingham News blog columnist John Archibald.
It’s been a long time since I thought about The Machine. It seems like ancient history now.
And the political problems in my home state of Alabama these days seem to have less to do with a Greek system of political clout by fraternities and sororities than a movement by radical, right-wing MAGA white nationalist and Christian nationalist Republican politicians, and members of the public who support their brand of fascist authoritarianism and the total destruction of the separation of church and state.
But I went back down the rabbit hole to the past and read this revenge hit piece against the Greeks who scarred one young girl’s college experience.
Hey, I’m not going to dismiss such a hit piece. I’m not above doing that myself from time to time. It can be enlightening and might even change some things.
I may get around to a couple of these myself this summer, as I recently wrote in one Sunday column.
Mental Health Series: A Summer of Brutal Honesty
And it took me back in my mind to that formative time oh so long ago, when I too spent most days in The Crimson White newsroom from the fall of 1981 to the spring of 1983, mostly covering politics.
Only for me, becoming a member of a fraternity was never on the table. It never even occurred to me to try. I was there for the express purpose of studying journalism and political science and learning how to report and write news stories, along with taking pictures and processing film, with the goal to one day work for newspapers.
As it happens I interviewed the winners of the Student Government Association elections in 1981-82, and 1982-83.
The first was Tom Campbell, the Machine candidate, who won in ’81. Tom and I are still friends mainly because of Facebook, and the fact that he remained a Democrat after working for Senator Howell Heflin and then creating his own successful law practice in Birmingham.
When I asked him for a comment on Archibald’s story, knowing he is a fan of John Archibald’s columns, he said he thought she “should have stayed focused and not tried to mix in her college experience and commentary about racist stuff in Alabama since 1914.”
“I doubt race was on their mind at all since black folks could not go to school at Alabama for another 50 years,” he said.
The second was John Bolus, who I had lost track of after college. Because of sharing this story on Facebook, however, I discovered that somehow we ended up friends on the social media platform. I see that he is also a lawyer, who went on to study at Vanderbilt Law School and still lives and practices law in Birmingham.
“In 1983, the Machine messed up enough to bring in the feds. A GDI won the SGA president election that year. Soon after, he and his roommate noticed some odd cords leading from his home to the outside phone line. His phone had been tapped. Two Machine guys took the fall, but even with the FBI involvement, they got away with a wrist slap,” Archibald reported in her story.
I was not the reporter who broke that story, but I do recall getting a piece of it by helping out in the coverage. In the headlines, we called it something like “Machine Gate” after the Watergate scandal. It was great fun.
Here’s one story about it.
There’s even a documentary about it.
Porter Pictures Presents – MACHINE: Vivat Apparatus – Documentary Trailer from Becky Beamer on Vimeo.
But not much came of it — except that a story about The Machine that came out before the election, before the break in and bugging were confirmed, drove voter turnout among independents and Bolus won the election. Members of the Machine fraternities went around on campus and stole most of the copies of The Crimson White newspaper from the racks. That made news itself and pissed a lot of people off.
I tracked down and talked to Bolus on Thursday. He said what really drove interest and voter turnout before the election were (1) the breaking stories confirming the existence of, and details about, the Machine from an inside source after he called out his opponent at a debate as a Machine candidate, and (2) the fact that Crimson White newspapers reporting on this were stolen on the Tuesday before the election and found in a dumpster off campus.
“The CW printed a special edition on Wednesday, the day before the election, both reprinting the Machine expose’ and reporting on the stolen papers,” he said.
“That experience certainly opened my eyes. At the time, I thought of a political machine as a thing of the past,” he said in response to my questions. “But to come face to face with it, with the incredible (and ruthless) success rate of Alabama’s Machine, and what clearly were back room deals to reach a slate, made me rethink politics in general.”
It cured him of the political bug, he said, “and made me really think about a substantive career. That was part of the reason I left Alabama for law school, so that I wouldn’t get caught up in ongoing student politics to the detriment of getting on with life.”
After reading Alecia Archibald’s story, he was reminded of just how many young people have made that stand in the face of Machine intimidation over time.
“It doesn’t always make the difference in an election, but without that kind of bravery, you have no hope of defeating the Machine,” he said. “During my election, along with a groundswell of non-Greek support, I had some great friends in fraternities and sororities who took a stand. Some had more serious consequences than others, but they all faced extreme pressure to put aside personal interests, friendship, or a conviction about who would be best for the job, and to simply support the Machine’s choice.”
That kind of pressure might be justified in politics if trying to get someone to stand firm on a great moral issue of the day that needs every vote that can be mustered, he said. “But it is not justified to simply enable a small homogenous group to make all the important decisions on campus.”
Over the years I also became friends with Don Siegelman, who was the Machine president of SGA in the early 1970s when he was also a state campaign manager and delegate for George McGovern, the Democrat who lost to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.
I reached out to Siegelman for a comment on this story, and he responded quickly by email with this quote.
“It is an overblown and is a worthless relic,” he said of The Machine.
In the telling by Archibald, she says there was a student group at UA that had a motto: “little is known and what is known is kept secret.”
“If it sounds sinister, it’s supposed to,” she writes. “As an unintended consequence, it has also trained generations of reporters to recognize corruption and injustice. For more than 100 years, the primary check on the Machine’s power has been the UA student newspaper. The one my sorority advisor advised me to quit. It’s the place where Gay Talese and Harper Lee honed their craft, and where the mettle of prominent journalists from across America was first tested.”
She failed to mention Gould Beech, who went on to edit the Southern Farmer, a progressive populist publication with a million subscribers at one point. Beech helped “Big Jim” Folsom get elected governor in the 1940s. He went on to work for civil rights his entire life.
Populist Gould Beech Dies at 87
“The Machine serves as an incubator for Alabama’s systemic racism and misogyny,” Archibald writes. “Rooted in UA’s Greek system, it makes virtually all decisions impacting the student body. The group has determined who had a voice on campus and who did not. It historically did not stop at the ballot box and activity committees. It held on to power with phone tapping, break-ins, threats of rape and physical attacks against those who fight back. The group drove a successful business into bankruptcy. It cultivated a reputation for intimidation for more than a century.
“Think Illuminati, but with a southern twang,” she says.
Now you know me. I’m not one to chase conspiracy theories.
It’s not clear to me how much power they actually had then, or now. After all, Archibald mentions George Wallace, who ran against The Machine in his day at UA in the 1930s as a “God Damn Independent.”
Hey, I resemble that remark.
Wallace lost, but that seemed to drive his desire to run for future office.
Of course Wallace went on to serve four terms as governor, five if you count the one served by his first wife, Lurleen Burns Wallace. It would be hard to blame The Machine for the rule for a generation by an authoritarian dictator like Wallace.
I wrote about Wallace in The Crimson White, and covered his last term in office for other newspapers in the state. I also wrote about Fob James, who could have beaten Wallace in 1982, but had vowed to only serve one term when he ran successfully in 1978.
Archibald is right about the training that occurred at that student newspaper, however. I was definitely a beneficiary of it. I had been offered a scholarship to study journalism at Troy University. But I opted to attend Alabama instead — yes because of the Crimson Tide football team — but also because I found out the CW had a bunch of VDTs, video display terminals, also known as computers. I was one of the first generation of reporters who wrote news on computers instead of typewriters.
But even the management there had sacred cows, things you couldn’t report on publicly.
Like the time I asked the UA PR people whether the great Paul “Bear” Bryant had Cirrhosis of the liver when he died. He had been known as a heavy drinker, of course, but the official cause of death was “congestive heart failure.”
I tell a version of that story in my book.
Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again
That fact did make the paper in his feature obituary, I believe, but it was buried way down in the jump on the story, where I received a bionote credit for being one of the reporters to work on the story of Bear Bryant’s death. I was in the newsroom when it happened, and worked the phones trying to get information for the story. We knew about it for hours before it was officially announced publicly.
Asking the Tough Questions
On a senior trip to Montgomery during the 1982 governor’s race in the spring, I had my first experience in asking the tough question which was on everybody’s mind but no one else had the guts to ask. This experience would embolden me for the rest of my life and career, and would lead me to question other politicians, including Republican State Senator Trip Pittman of Fairhope, and Republican U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, a Machine member at UA in his day.
When our class went into the office of the Speaker of the House, then a powerful Democrat named Joe McCorquodale, I asked a question that received an audible gasp from the female journalism professor, who had a reputation for being tough. But my question took her aback.
Wallace had decided to run for another term, and the front runner against him in the Democratic Party Primary was George McMillan, who we also met and interviewed on that trip. He lost to Wallace in a very close race, but went onto to fame in Birmingham for starting up and managing the City Stages music festival. I would be remiss if I did not point out that Alabama in those days had no Republican Party to speak of. It was a one-party Democratic Party state, albeit they were conservative, pro-business Democrats, not the liberals who we know of as Democrats these days.
At one point they were called Dixiecrats, when Wallace himself walked out of the National Democratic Party Convention in 1948 in Philadelphia along with Strom Thurmond, when a group of Segregationist Southerners reacted to President Harry Truman’s civil rights program and founded the independent States’ Rights Party, dedicated to preserving racial segregation.
I thought it was appalling that Wallace was running again in 1982, and McMillian seemed smart and competent to me. Wallace had been in a wheelchair in pain since being shot in that Maryland parking lot while running for president in 1972. (I recently rode by that parking lot in a shopping mall on Baltimore Avenue. A National Park Service ranger pointed it out as where Wallace took that fateful bullet).
So in the old state Capitol building in Montgomery, I asked McCorquodale, who told us he had just met with Wallace, this question: “Do you think Wallace is physically or mentally capable of serving another term as governor?” The professor tried to step in and stop him from answering, which must have seemed like a dangerous and embarrassing question. But McCorquodale waved her off and answered it.
“No, I must honestly say that George Wallace is not physically or mentally capable of serving another term as governor,” McCorquodale said.
I have a vague recollection of a breaking news moment, running to the pay phone in the old Capitol and calling in the quote and the story to the wire service UPI. I tell a version of this story in my book.
Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again
But the truth is, I don’t know or recall whether anyone actually ran a story about that. Not even The Crimson White, although it’s possible it ran as a UPI brief.
The Power of the Press
Also while working as a staff writer for The Crimson White, I got my first experiences seeing the power of the press in action. In fact, the first day in September, 1981, when I first set foot on The Crimson White newsroom in the Ferguson Student Center in those days, and told the editor JoAnna Cleary that I wanted to cover politics, she assigned me to go immediately to the room in the student center where the Faculty Senate was about to meet with the new university president, Joab Thomas.
In that meeting, one of the items under discussion was the ongoing plan to transform UA into a full blown “research university,” not just a state funded teaching institution. Thomas discussed his plan to keep the original Tuscaloosa campus as “the flagship” campus in the university system, along with UAB in Birmingham and UAH in Huntsville. Apparently there was big money on the line. But before he said it, he asked everyone in the room to keep it “off the record for now.”
Since I was so new at the reporting game, I was not yet schooled in all the iterations of what “off the record” meant. But I knew enough to know that what he said was probably going to be important news. Anyone who knew anything about Watergate knew that. So I took notes with a pen and reporters pad given to me by the CW editor.
After the meeting was over, I rushed back to the newsroom and told the editor what happened. I told her about the “off the record” comment. But she insisted it was a public meeting of a public body, and simply said: “Sounds like news to me. Write it up!”
The next day it was the lede story in the paper, my first of many.
The Tuscaloosa News reporter who was also in the room honored the off the record request and didn’t report on it in the local daily. All the broadcast TV reporters were outside the room with their cameras, so it didn’t make the local television news that day either. But apparently my story was moved on the wires and was reported on the radio all over the state. It pissed off a bunch of faculty in Birmingham and Huntsville.
To the best of my recollection, the term “flagship university” was never used again, and Dr. Thomas didn’t last very long as president. He did forgive me for breaking that story, however, and granted me an interview in his office later in the year.
I wonder what happened to him? I remember liking him. He seemed smart and competent.
Not much else seems smart or competent coming out of Alabama these days. Even this majority conservative Supreme Court, some call the Roberts Court after Chief Justice John Roberts, just struck down a gerrymandered voting map, ruling that the map is unconstitutional for diluting the power of Black voters.
Supreme Court Rejects Voting Map That Diluted Black Voters’ Power
According to breaking news coverage in The New York Times, the chief justice wrote that there were legitimate concerns that the law “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the states,” adding: “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.”
“The case was part of a pitched battle over redistricting playing out across the country,” the Times wrote. “Civil rights leaders say the redistricting process often disadvantages growing minority communities.”
Republican state officials say the Constitution allows only a limited role for the consideration of race in drawing voting districts, however, although at least in this case, the United States Supreme Court disagreed.
Dog help us all, and especially the poor people of Alabama who can’t seem to catch a break, at least not since Doug Jones won that Senate seat in 2017.
I asked Jones for a comment on this story. But so far at least, he is mum. He too was a member of a Machine fraternity at UA, and they no doubt helped him in 2017, along with some of the unions.
As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. Judge Roy Moore was never a member of a fraternity. So does that make him a God Damn Independent?
Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows, but Jesus. Not this.
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