How UA’s Machine changed me:

I was 21. A child, I now see, summoned urgently to the real estate office of the alumni advisor at my sorority at the University of Alabama.

I thought she wanted to talk about her daughter, my Phi Mu little sister. But she didn’t.

She wanted to talk about me. And my job. And my boyfriend — a God Damn Independent (GDI) with no fraternity affiliation. And how none of that fit my Phi Mu expectations.

I had disgraced the sisters, and the institution, she said, to my shock. She gave me a choice. I could “break up with that boy” and quit my job as a reporter at the student newspaper, The Crimson White, or I could turn in my sorority pin and disappear, as if I had never been a Phi Mu at all.

Decide now, she said. No time to think about it. No time to talk to anyone. No point in arguing. Come back into the fold. Or go away.

~~~

I had no idea what to expect when I signed up to be a Greek in 1983. I was the first child in my family, on either side, to go to college. I was headed to UA, the school with the football program my dad built a shrine to in a spare room, where family members gathered around the radio or the TV on fall Saturdays and cheered as if lives depended on it.

My mother was thrilled. For her it was not about football. She wanted me to succeed, and was starry-eyed over the Greek world. She saved for months to buy my pin, a lovely little crest with tiny rubies encircling it. We talked about the opportunities and the connections, the fun I would have and the people I would meet.

I didn’t know then — and she would never understand — that all of this was bigger than me. So much bigger.

~~~

There is a student group at the University of Alabama that has a motto: “little is known and what is known is kept secret.” If it sounds sinister, it’s supposed to. The Machine is a clandestine student organization at UA that feeds the state’s political system. It impacts US politics and policy.

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.

The Machine serves as an incubator for Alabama’s systemic racism and misogyny. 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.

~~~

The Machine was founded at UA in 1914 by U.S. Senator and fighter-of-civil-rights, Lister Hill. It is the Theta Nu Epsilon (or ONE) chapter of the national Skulls political group. Their logo included demons and fire, and their ritual was akin to the Freemasons. It was a white guy-only, testosterone-driven kind of club. Hill was joined by a handful of Alabama’s brightest. That likely included lifelong friend and fellow UA alum Hugo Black, the only Alabamian to ever serve as a Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. Black disavowed his KKK membership before he became a justice, but he had been a member all the same. He also wrote the Court’s majority opinion upholding Japanese internment, did not believe the Constitution provided a right to privacy and opposed anti-lynching legislation.

The Machine took cues from the Alabama State Constitution, which was written in 1901 for the stated purpose of incorporating white supremacy into the rule of law. According to historian Wayne Flynt, the convention opened with remarks from its president John Knox:

“And what is it that we want to do? Why, it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State. This is our problem, and we should be permitted to deal with it unobstructed by outside influence. But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law - not by force or fraud.”

Women were forbidden from voting in the state and had few rights. There was a general consensus for years that the ladies of Alabama were too frail to participate in such a rigorous proceeding as casting a vote.

After a period of relative openness, the Machine went underground during a malfeasance investigation by the National Interfraternity Council. This is when Machine members were taught to deny, deny, deny the group’s very existence. Some still do. A 1992 exposé in Esquire under the headline “The Most Powerful Fraternity in America” reported the group "believed that secrecy guaranteed selfless leadership.”

Secrecy actually protected members, allowing them to run free of the law, the wicked GDIs, and any who dared oppose them.

I did not know any of this when I joined Phi Mu. Sorority, to me, was pink bows and ladybugs, friendship and fashion and girl talk about the things college girls talk about. I had visited campus my senior year in high school and stayed at various sorority houses. I was enchanted by the sisters — so much hair and makeup, mid ‘80s, remember — and by the promises of parties, and study halls, and songs, and candlelight ceremonies, formals, and laughter. Lots of laughter.

~~~

By 1928, the Crimson White decried the work of the “secret” group and alleged voter corruption. Albert Boutwell, later Birmingham mayor, won the student government presidency that year. As mayor in the 1960s, he spent a good bit of time working to prevent school integration. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail cited Boutwell, saying he may have been “more articulate and gentle” than the infamous Bull Conner, but “they are both segregationists, dedicated to the task of maintaining the status quo.” Boutwell remained an advocate of the Machine for the rest of his life.

George Wallace lost the SGA presidency to the Machine twice, but he learned lessons. As governor, he tried to block three Black students from enrolling at UA, leading to the famous face-off with the national guard. Wallace put his Machine learning to work and pandered to the state’s political majority, the worst among us. I’m always struck by the photos of the screaming, spitting-mad crowds of whites. It would take many years for Black people to attain any kind of power on campus or in statewide political affairs. When they did, the majority sought again to take it away.

When the first Black man was elected to lead the SGA in 1976, the Machine knew it was in trouble.

Following that election, fraternities went full-on Klan. As many as 15 men “cloaked in white sheets burned crosses, threw bottles and chanted various revolutionary tunes,” in reaction to the vote, reported the CW. The students brazenly left their frat house and walked up fraternity row singing “We Shall Overcome,” a repugnant use of the stirring civil rights hymn. The campus police wrote up a report, including information on the 8-foot cross burned in front of the Zeta Beta Tau house, a Jewish fraternity. The cloaked frat guys screamed “Kill the Jews!” No one was apprehended or held accountable. University officials passed it off as a prank but acknowledged the Machine was upset. They were merely “letting off steam,” according to one UA administrator.

The Machine knew that sorority women, tired of being told who to vote for without representation, aligned themselves with the rest of campus to elect the Black GDI. That’s when the group finally welcomed select sororities to the club. They needed more votes, and the move effectively doubled their bloc.

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.

~~~

During my Phi Mu honeymoon, my grades were good, and the sorority delivered on all those implicit promises. On home game days, we invited friends and family for meals of fried chicken, potato salad, homemade rolls and monster cookies, a house specialty. We dressed in our Sunday best for games and would welcome our parents for the day. Football games were the center of each fall, around which all activities were built, including class. Weeknights, we ate dinner together and draped ourselves over couches and each other in the upstairs den to watch Designing Women or Dynasty. Except Thursday. Every Thursday we had a party with a different fraternity. Plenty of booze. And drugs if you wanted them.

The comradery seemed real.

I enjoyed it for a time, though I immediately came to understand the power of the Machine. My rebellion against the group began early in my freshman year. My roommate, a friend from home and a GDI, ran for a campus-wide office, so I took her to the Phi Mu house to campaign. The sisters did not like that. After a stern talking-to, my sorority withdrew my application to Freshman Forum, which the University describes as “a network of freshman students seeking personal and professional development through interactive discussion, leadership training, and civic engagement led by former members who strive to unlock participant’s unique potential.” I was punished by losing my chance to network and be mentored in FF, because I campaigned with my friend.

Next, on the eve of the election, we were given cheat sheets that told us how to vote. If we failed to vote, the sorority fined us up to $100 – or $280 in today’s dollars. I believed Phi Mu would find out who I voted for, because the polls were run by members of each Machine house. Like Slytherin administering the Hogwarts House Cup.

The girls were cowed into voting the straight ticket, told the GDIs wanted to “take our way of life” from us and shut the Greek system down. It was a preview of the pervading politics of fear we see today. “They hate us,” we were told. The only way we could keep our sororities and fraternities intact, according to house leadership, was to vote our slate. I got away with voting for my friend.

Then I had another headbutt with Phi Mu as a sophomore when I experienced rush for the first time as a sorority member. During rush each fall, women visit the sorority houses over the period of a week, hoping for invitations to join one of the groups. It was brutal going through rush, but the other side was downright barbaric. At night, about 150 “sisters” would sit in a room together with a projector — again, it was 1986 — and review photos and resumes of rushees. Then, we’d vote on who we would invite back for the next round. The process gutted me.

Girls who I thought I knew as sweet or helpful would call out reasons to cut young women: “She looks like a dog” “Look at that nose” “Did you see her dress?”

One of my friends from home came through and I thought she was a cinch to get in. This was a smart, talented, thoughtful person. They cut her the first day because she sweated too much. In August. In Alabama. I asked for a “courtesy” invite for the next round, meaning she didn’t technically get cut the first round, but was predetermined as a goner for the second. Courtesies had to be approved by the rush committee and only a handful were permitted each year. My friend was granted one. Before the approval, I went to the bathroom and vomited. She came to the house the next day not knowing she was already gone. It was just a weird fucking world.

The next fall, I went to work for the Crimson White. I truly didn’t begin writing there because I wanted to get back at Phi Mu or the system. I did not know that history. I was a journalism major, and I needed clips. I had no way of knowing that my first day there placed me face-to-face with my future. I fell in love with reporting, and with John Archibald. I was smitten with both before my first CW meeting was over.

~~~

Our alumni advisor, the one who called me to her office, was a fixture at the house when she wasn’t running her real estate company. She spoke with a tooth-clenched drawl that suggested magnolias and plantations, and she always wore hats, like a member of the British royal family. Her heart was broken when her daughter chose a sorority other than Phi Mu. She enlisted some of us to help persuade her second daughter to choose our house. The daughter was convinced, and became my official “little sister,” which is to say I was chosen to be her mentor. She was a nice girl — if a little embarrassed by her mother.

Her mom had encouraged me to give up writing for the Crimson White from the start. The CW was and always will be the natural adversary of the Machine. But my reporting wasn’t all about the Machine. Before the year was over, I had broken through the Secret Service to interview Barbara Bush, had a sit-down with Henry Kissinger and wrote about a street preacher who yelled “whore” to any girl walking by with her legs exposed. I wrote a column from the perspective of a sorority girl, urging Greeks to integrate. An unpopular take.

Once I started covering the student government association, my sorority advisor’s pleas became more fervent. She recruited girls around the house to carry her message. Some took it quite seriously.They told me the last Machine girl who wrote for the paper “got her tires slashed.”

“You don’t want to mess with them,” they said.

Some girls stopped talking to me, wouldn’t sit by me at dinner. If I would only stop “this silliness” I would be welcomed back into everyone’s loving sisterly graces.

But I didn’t want to do that. I was learning too much about the Machine. And myself.

~~~

The Machine was particularly active during my time at UA. A GDI running for student government president reported that his wife was called and threatened with rape if he didn’t drop out of the election. One of his campaign aides ended up in the hospital with broken ribs, allegedly beaten by frat boys outside his dorm. The candidate, John Merrill — later Alabama Secretary of State and chief vote suppressor — caught two guys “rummaging around” in his office. I happened to be working down the hall that night. The would-be burglars were arrested by the Tuscaloosa City Police, but the incident was handled by campus administration — meaning, like most Machine incidents that involve the law, it went away. I don’t have to tell you what would have happened if the Tuscaloosa police had arrested two Black men breaking into someone’s campus office. Repercussions would not have been limited to calling their daddy. At the jail that night, looking for a quote, I ran into one of my sorority sisters. She was dating one of the perpetrators and had come to bail him out. A singularly awkward situation.

Another non-fraternity candidate guy, Joey Scarborough, ran for office that year but gave up in disgust. There were actual tears during his CW interview. Joe has said that he also learned all he needed to know about politics at UA. He became a young congressman from Florida and has prospered on his MSNBC morning political talk show. About a month later another GDI, this time a mild-mannered Black man running for SGA treasurer, said he was chased in his car and run off the road. Last I heard he was a federal agent in the western U.S. That night, he feared for his life.

One night after a date, John was driving me back to the house but we couldn’t turn up the one-way street because of the commotion — the most police cars I’d seen in one place and people crowding the street. There was a cross burning on sorority row. It had been announced that a Black sorority would be given the vacant sorority house that backed up to the Phi Mu property, making it the first Black sorority amid the white houses. Of course, even in 1986 that couldn’t happen without Machine outrage.

I ran into the back door of the Phi Mu house to grab a notebook and pen. It was a big story. A sister, who happened to be the Phi Mu Machine rep, stopped me on the back stairs. What was I doing? Was I trying to sneak “that boy” into the house (no boys were ever allowed upstairs)? What was I pulling? I told her about the cross burning, but she wouldn’t allow me to pass. I finally barreled toward my room with her on my heels. That entire year I was barreling past them one way or another. She was convinced I was up to mischief and did not care about the cross burning behind the house.

The more the Machine showed itself, the more I wanted to write about it.

~~~

One deadline evening, as we were working on a big Machine exposé – seemingly an annual tradition at UA – I was told of a meeting of all the Machine representatives for each of the fraternities and sororities. It was to be held at a Machine fraternity house across University Boulevard from a favorite wing joint.

John and I, and our editor Jan Crawford – later the Supreme Court reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a national TV network – staked out the house. This “secret” meeting provided the chance to confirm the identities of the Machine representatives that a source slipped me.

I knew them, and would recognize them, validating the list. We waited across the street until the meeting broke up. We ran over and tried to interview representatives as they left, and the reps (two per house) lost their minds. They ran back inside while simultaneously trying to run us off. First year fraternity brothers (pledges) pulled cars around back to pick up the reps. They filed out with coats over their heads to hide their identities. Real cloak and dagger proceedings — well, cloak anyway. We followed some in our car, still hoping for interviews. Then, they started chasing us. They followed us to our office in the student center and circled the building for what seemed like hours. Knowing the group’s reputation, we were legitimately frightened.

We made deadline, and our “exposé,” such as it was, appeared in the following day’s edition, on the eve of the election.

The papers were promptly stolen from the racks. the Machine had more manpower than we did.

Still, we imagined it as an unprecedented exposure of the Machine. And enough people paid attention for that GDI to be elected SGA president. Even now, only a handful of non-machine people have held the position. GDIs could win every year, if they would only show up. They represent the vast majority of students but are weighed down by apathy and real life. It takes shenanigans – in this case, a break in, a cross burning, an assault and rape threat – to get GDI voters to the polls. Which is another political lesson.

~~~

At the end of the academic year, my sorority advisor gave me that call and asked me to come see her at her real estate office in town. She told me the National Phi Mu organization had determined that if I did not break up with John – who she blamed openly for my reporting, as if I had no brain or free will – and quit writing at the Crimson White, they would expel me from the sorority. She gave me the choice. Dump them, or we dump you.

In my experience with Phi Mu, no girls had been kicked out by National. This seemed preposterous. I told her I would fight it. She told me I would lose. I told her that I’d never heard of a rule like this, but I had heard of the no drugs rule, and there were plenty of girls with weed and ecstasy in their rooms at that very moment. She told me I had broken the most important rule – I had done damage to the chapter and it would not be tolerated.

I told her that since I planned to marry the boy and become a journalist, I would not give those things up for a place in a freaking sorority.

She told me to turn in my Phi Mu pin – the one my mother had saved for months to purchase for me. I told her I had just lost it. I gathered the pink confetti of my dignity and left without a goodbye.

~~~

The Machine did nothing but tighten its grip on campus. After the GDI won while I was in school, it would take 30 years to elect the next non-Machine SGA President.

During those years, the Machine kept busy. In 1993, another Phi Mu, this time the daughter of a U.S. Representative, ran for SGA President without their endorsement. She remained stubborn. They threatened, bullied and manipulated, but she didn’t give in. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that she found an X burned into her front yard and threatening notes pinned to her door: "Tonight Crossbones Burn, Next Time Your Skeleton Head Will Burn.” Finally, her house was broken into and someone held a knife to her throat, telling her to drop out of the race. This time, though, the Machine had focused its energy in the wrong direction. The Representative (and later Governor) flew home that night and shut down the entire SGA. For several years. It took a while for the Machine to regain its mojo. But it did.

In 2013, it was reported that only one “white” sorority had admitted one Black student in 50 years. Of course, the point was moot prior to that because Blacks were prevented from attending the school. You can see why many believe the Machine is largely responsible for maintaining Alabama’s pernicious racial tensions, along with myriad vestiges of segregation at the school and in the state.

~~~

On my 10th wedding anniversary, John got a tattoo of my name across his ankle, and I called my sorority advisor to let her know how we were doing. It was my petty gift to myself. By then, we had three kids and I was real estate editor at The Birmingham News. The irony was not lost on me — she was a Realtor who would have loved to be featured in my section and I was in that position because I did not take her advice. I told her John and I were doing just fine. She said I sounded smug, and I did. Because I was. I don’t think she was thrilled to hear from me.

~~~

When I first sat down to write this, both of Alabama’s U.S. Senators were Machine boys. There have been numerous senators, governors, CEOs and political operatives who learned about politics and dirty tricks while associated with the organization. Republicans. Democrats. Machine membership, believe it or not, counts for more than party affiliation. The reach is long. I continue to find them terrifying.

~~~

After John won his first Pulitzer in 2018, for covering social issues in Alabama, he received a lengthy letter from that sorority advisor of mine, though they had never met or spoken. She offered congratulations, but no apology. She did express regret that she couldn’t tell the whole story about the pressure she had endured because of me. She intimated that she would tell it now, if he would but call her. He said he did not want to hear it.

I still have my pin. It’s an odd keepsake, gathering dust in my rarely opened jewelry box under the bed.

Last year, John and I were in Tuscaloosa for a communication school event. Simultaneously the annual Historical Society convention was at our hotel, complete with a book sale. An editor at the University of Alabama Press approached John about writing the definitive book on the Machine – because there really isn’t one.

John and I talked about writing it together, and the lady said she would speak to the decision-makers about getting it made. The next week, she emailed to tell me the University had turned the book down. She offered to help us find another publisher, on the sly. The people in charge at the University of Alabama don’t want a Machine book, and never will. It would reveal the school’s complicity and outright endorsement over the years of a group that is racist, misogynistic and just wrong.

The University does not want that story told.

“Little is known and what is known is kept secret.”