Speak of the Devils: A look at an interesting phenomenon in three articles.
Editor's note: If camaraderie marks all TNE chapters, some are exclusively for that purpose. Other TNE chapters have been proponents of student empowerment and administrative reform, being the original force behind the very institutions of student government and student trustees. Chapters have been vocal and sometimes devilish, or impish critics at their schools. The articles below (which we reproduce but do not endorse as factual) focus on TNE or "the Machine" at the University of Alabama. The articles are critical, probably unfairly so. 
The Machine today: menace or myth?
Ryan Hickman, special projects editor
March 31, 2006
Has the Machine, like Foster Auditorium, just become part of the University of Alabama's folklore?
March 31 Dateline Alabama tracks the contemporary political climate at the University of Alabama to gauge whether the historically mysterious Machine is more mythology than menace.
When the high sun of spring goes down at the University of Alabama, the campus whispers with history. You can hear Gov. George Wallace’s voice outside Foster Auditorium, the chatter of Union troops as you walk past the president’s mansion, and murmurs of the Machine coming from fraternity and sorority rows.
But, like the other tales that have made UA the South’s most historical grounds for learning, has the concept of the Machine simply devolved into university folklore?
Like all good legends, the group of traditionally white fraternities and sororities, as the Machine is most generally defined, has maintained its legacy through the assortment of stories that follow it around. With many things in the South, history dictates the present.
By all accounts, The Crimson White began referring to a select group of student organization representatives at the university as the Machine in the 1920s, and that became part of the newspaper’s terminology during the 1940s. The campus publication has been the narrative of the group since. The pseudonym for the fraternal sect stems from their mechanical efficiency in placing and winning Student Government Association elections and other politically charged competitions, like homecoming, at the university.
The Machine’s occult characteristics stem from its bloodlines with Theta Nu Epsilon. The fraternity, which has its origins in secretive societies from the Bones at Yale, was initiated at UA by Lister Hill in 1914. Hill followed the lead of the original chapter of TNE formed at Weslyan University before the turn of the 20th century.
Overtime the mission grew- to initiate student government, to coordinate student bodies, select and run candidates for student government and to tie together various pre-existing student groups nationally. While maintaining a highly selective, exclusive membership, the TNE-backed candidates became sure-things in all university elections. According to most accounts TNE nationally is not centralized and there are several different coordinating bodies and even more independent groups.
Due to the shrouded history of TNE and today’s Machine few are sure if it is the old organization just going by another name publicly (it was also once called "the Group"). Regardless, the Machine or TNE represents a combined greek organization to promote candidacy within the SGA.
The perpetual success of the Machine in SGA elections, combined with its rigidly fraternal and publicly cloaked structures, furthers the underground and secretive traits that loom today. Speculation of the Machine’s participation in tactics behind each negative political incident on the campus has turned into automatic assumption because of the group’s hush-hush persona.
Each new story of cross burnings, physical intimidation and wrongdoing in SGA elections only whips the winds of conspiracy into a greater frenzy. Although Minda Riley’s assault in 1992 is no matter to disregard; and John Merrill’s office break-in cannot be disputed; and the cross burning on the Kappa Kappa Gamma house lawn following the electing of Cleo Thomas as SGA president in 1976 should not be scoffed at, these events have piled up on each other and taken on a life of their own.
The stories are part of the Machine legend at UA and continue as evidence for non-greeks to substantiate the deeper cabalistic presumptions of the group—ritualistic initiation and secretive meetings to decide the moves of the SGA in the basements of fraternity and sorority houses (on Wednesdays or Sunday nights, depending on which report you ascribe to) —that the group’s critics like to dwell on.
Skeptics, and many greeks, will say that the stories of the past have been taken to extremes, and like a bad game of broken telephone, have aggrandized into exaggerated, hyperbolized tales constantly rehashed just to sell newspapers.
Racist death threats, verbal and physical harassment and shadowy organizations at an already historically inflamed campus in the Deep South are not just good fodder for The Crimson White, The Tuscaloosa News and harangues in the blogosphere, but are engaging stories for national audiences.
Outside Affirmation- The tales of the UA Machine brought Philip Weiss to Tuscaloosa to investigate his now infamous Esquire cover story from 1992, and the Machine’s reputation of racism through the segregated greek system lured Jason Zengerle of The New Republic to town for his article in 2002.
Preservers of Machine mythology will point to the CNN piece in 1999 about SGA presidential candidate Fabien Zinga’s death threat and the mention in the 2004 Newsweek story surrounding hardball campus politics as evidence of external eyes confirming an internal phenomenon.
The national attention tacitly legitimizes the influence that the Machine wields today in people’s minds. The past props up the present with folklore and sometimes the mental perception of a political group’s power can be more daunting than what they actually are. With a dogmatically private organization like the Machine where outsiders have no real knowledge of their decision-making, particular incidents that occurred in the past are the only evidence that can substantiate critics’claims of misdeed by the group today. Every disparager of the greek-backed Machine uses the mythical past to generalize the present and future.
A murky past feeds today's critics- In an opinion piece on Feb. 27 in The Crimson White, Matt Dover lambasted the present Machine for its alledgedly racist actions in the past. Matt Dover is the chairman of the ethical government watchdog group and anti-Machine activist Capstone Political Action Committee, (the Machine is also said to be connected to a number of Political Action Commitees that have grown into statewide political entities.)
Dover wrote, referring to the local Machine representatives of TNE. “The Machine has never supported a single candidate of color and has bitterly opposed the advancement of minorities on campus at every step.” However, a day later though, following a presentation by Cleo Thomas, the only black SGA president in the school’s history, Dover played down his sweeping strokes of racism attributed to the Machine in his editorial.
“I don’t think it is institutionally racist,” Dover said. “Their actions have been racist. The University of Alabama has been racist. It’s hard to distinguish between individual and institution.”
Dover did state that the Machine has been exclusive since its inception, predating any racial strife on the UA campus. Examining the issue of race might be more suited to an investigation of the segregated greek system, rather than SGA elections. But associating racism with the Machine furthers the air of malicious secrecy.
Intimidation rather than racism- For Nick Beadle, the Machine is more about intimidation than racism.
“The whole thing is driven by fear,” Beadle said. “They are flamboyant about it. They let you know that they are out there.” Or at least that is his perception.
Beadle, the current managing editor for The Crimson White, has been a chronicler of the Machine as a reporter and student life editor of the campus newspaper. Beadle was responsible for the candid article “You don’t want to mess with us” that ran two years ago in the CW detailing accounts of intimidation and stiff structure within the greek system for electing SGA members.
The story stood on the accounts of Emily Aviki, a member of Chi Omega, and Emily Lumpkin, an Alpha Gamma Delta sister. It detailed how the sorority was pressured by Machine members and the greek system as a result of Aviki’s successful SGA senate campaign in 2003.
Beadle knew that his story was going to incite some rumbling across the student population, especially from fraternity and sorority members, but the worst part for him was not when the story ran, but rather the anticipation leading up to it.
“We didn’t let anyone else know, so that it wouldn’t get out,” Beadle said, referring to himself and only one other staff member at the CW that knew about the impending story in 2004. “We couldn’t take the chance.”
Beadle explained that he was worried that Machine members would catch wind of his interviews with Aviki and Lumpkin, who both have transferred to Duke University (where there is also a TNE chapter), and inflict some of the same heavy-handed tactics that have been synonymous with the group in the past and felt by his two sources.
Beadle said that he slept at night with a baseball bat the entire time he was working on the article.
But nothing happened to Beadle. No intimidation. No physical harm. No crosses burned on his lawn. He took the precautions because of events that have compounded themselves into a menacing thought, at least in his mind.
Most greeks probably don’t mind the perception of their power. It draws people in and keeps the allure of the system’s power alive. Even Lumpkin admitted that she was captivated with the mystique surrounding the Machine, quoted in the CW article as saying, “I was intrigued by its mysteriousness.”
Does the lust for power from members within the greek system become so emotionally overwhelming that certain individuals feel they need to uphold it by administering acts of violent intimidation? It might be an explanation for the specific incidents that have transpired in the past that have transformed into mammoth tales surrounding the Machine today.
“[The] stories from the past—true or not—are stories,” said Justice Smyth, the 2006-2007 SGA president-elect, in his VP of student affairs office during this year’s campaign.
This spring’s election ran blemish-free, with Smyth taking the presidential race by a substantial margin.
Of the four candidates for SGA president this year, Smyth, a member of Old Row fraternity, was the only one with greek affiliations. That pretense automatically put Smyth as the Machine-backed candidate.
“I don't know about the Machine. If you want to say I’m the Greek candidate, you can say that, but I’m not,” Smyth said regarding his relationship with the Machine. “I didn’t join a fraternity for political reasons.”
As much as Smyth may have denied it, the history of the greek system, the Machine mythology and the SGA presidency dictated the perception of Smyth in the race.
“I like to say that he is what a traditionally Machine-backed candidate looks like,” Smyth’s presidential opponent Corbin Martin, said about him.
Smyth’s results indeed followed suit with the outcome of Machine candidates in the past. He eclipsed second place finisher Adam Rankin by almost 1,500 votes and left additional candidates with minimal support on the ballot.
As the race unfolded, it was clear the two strongest candidates, also with the most SGA experience, had risen to the top in essentially a two-man race. Rankin, a SGA senator, ran an impressive campaign, garnering an endorsement from the CW. Smyth, the current SGA VP of student affairs, showed his polish and experience in elections with an effective campaign of his own.
With Rankin, not a fraternity member, possessing no strong associations to the greek system and Smyth in one of the traditionally most politically powerful houses, the race appeared on the surface in the familiar University of Alabama political divide—Machine vs. Independent.
“I think it is funny that the students here cannot conceptualize elections except in relationship to the Machine,” said Margaret King, the University’s vice president of student affairs. fin
"The Most Powerful Fraternity in America
Philip Weiss
Esquire Maga
zine
It controls life at the University of Alabama, but nobody can see it. Its influence extends to the statehouse, but nobody can touch it. It is, simply, the Machine.
In the dining room of the Delta Tau Delta house, Chad Green stops and stares hard at the picture of the bearded soldier. Chad is tall and dark with an occasional fierce glare in his eyes, and right now he looks vexed. Abruptly he turns toward the opposite wall. There are another three portraits of soldiers there, six in all.
"No, I think that's A. P. Hill," he says with sudden conviction, pointing to the far wall. "This one I don't know. But of course that's Jeff Davis. And that is definitely Stonewall Jackson. And that one's got to be A. P. Hill."
Chad pauses again. He's stumped on the names of the other three Confederate generals. It seems to bother him. But giving me a wink, he approaches Jeff Davis and lifts the portrait from the wall. On the back he can still find the number that he penciled there as a freshman fraternity pledge three years before, matching the number he put on the picture hook. He did it so he could put the portraits back in the right places after a party.
"You'd get in trouble if you put them back wrong," he says.
My tour of the Delt house at the University of Alabama is a rich schooling in Southern tradition. Chad shows me the picture of Miss Ruby, the housemother who taught several generations of Delts etiquette. I see the hunting prints and the teak parquet floors of the living room — "It looks like home," says Chad. And there's the pocked, cinder-block wall on the basement landing, where boys throw champagne bottles as hard as they can on the night they're initiated.
"It's the best night of their life," Chad says, vigorously miming the way he threw his bottle.
Only when we're talking politics does Chad lose his cool. We've come outside, onto the semicircular porch of the brick Georgian mansion. It's a beautiful late fall day on fraternity row in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In the light breeze a pine bough grazes the round portico of the house. Two houses away, at Sigma Chi, pledges are bagging pine needles from the front yard of their brick mansion. In the other direction, at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, pledges are readying a red carpet for the Stockholders' Ball. They're putting up twenty gaslight torches.
Chad's just mentioned all the Delts who've gone into politics when I ask him about the Machine. He gets that cross expression. "I'd rather not comment on that," he says. "I just won't comment."
I press him and he looks away. Ruddy color rises in his cheeks. "There are a lot of secrets to people outside but there are not a lot of secrets inside," he says.
The organization Chad won't talk about is a secret society that for eighty years has controlled student politics at the University of Alabama: the Machine. Its real name is Theta Nu Epsilon, whose Greek letters spell TNE, and it acts as the political arm of twenty-seven leading fraternities and sororities at the school. Machine representatives meet secretly once a week. There are thirty or so members — Chad is said to be one — but most Greeks on campus don't know who their rep is.
On election day in February, the Machine buses its voters to the polls and penalizes people who don't vote. Almost all the time, it wins. On election night it spends a chunk of its $27,000 secret budget it raises each year from members on a blowout party at the Jaycee fairgrounds for the fraternities and sororities. The Machine reps can be seen there, ducking in and out of a tent with a private bar. Some of them wear a lapel pin with the Theta Nu Epsilon logo, a skull and crossed keys.
The Machine is said to share roots with Skull & Bones of Yale, but it has more of an impact on its campus than its northern cousin. Greeks make up only 20 percent of the nineteen-thousand-member student body, but they manage to control almost all student government offices and along with that a student activity fee budget of more than $800,000. Honorary organizations like Mortar Board also seem to be under Machine sway.
But what's most striking about the Machine is the extent of its influence. U. S. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama is said to be a former Machine president and many of the leading politicians in the state have been products of this organization. They have even successfully ran students and new graduates for office in Tuscaloosa. The Machine's power lies not only in the people it turns out but in the lessons it offers on how power is won and wielded. Indeed, it has helped remake state politics in its own shadowy image.
The Machine today faces a crisis involving race. Though they lease university land, the Greek organizations are segregated. The blacks I saw inside the white Greek houses over ten days at Alabama were blowing on horns in the band at a fraternity party or carrying boxes of frozen vegetables to the kitchen. It's an embarrassing situation in a state that is more than 25 percent black. The university is trying to force integration, but it has met enormous resistance from Chad and others who justify their segregation by invoking the great traditions of Greek life at Alabama.
If you follow the national discourse, the only issues in higher education today are political correctness and multiculturalism. But in Tuscaloosa those arguments seem like the noodlings of a bunch of parochial intellectuals. Here far more is at stake than the power to change reading lists. To a lesser extent, the same holds true at dozens of other leading state schools and institutions that play an important role in the political lives of their states. The elites that govern local society often take form and groom members on campus.
Nowhere is this more starkly the case than with the Alabama Machine. "There was never any kind of phone call. I was never personally told; there just came to be an understanding that they were going to endorse me," says Trey Boston, the outgoing Student Government Association president, of the way the secret organization brought him along. "But if you look at the list of men and now a woman who have been endorsed by the Machine and elected SGA president at the University of Alabama, you see those who have went on to be U. S. senators, you see congressmen, you see doctors, you see lawyers, you see businessmen. You see people that, when I consider that my name is going to be thrown on the bottom of that list, it's like, 'What am I doing here?'" No wonder he spent $8,000 on his campaign.
It's not hard to spot the Machine representatives at a meeting of the student senate. Forty of the fifty senators are Machine. They're good-looking kids, and a lot of them have on the same sort of clothes — Duck Head pants and party Tshirts: Kappa Order Knight Out; Deke Undertakers' Ball; Kappa Kappa Gamma's Eleventh Annual Black Widow Blast. When I asked one sorority alumna whether you paid a social price for dressing differently, she explained my error : "No, because nobody would want to dress differently. We wanted that form of identity and connection."
Up for consideration today is a bill to fund the Fantasy Games Club, an offbeat independent group. The club's leader makes the mistake of passing out its tasteless Dungeons & Dragons-style literature. It includes anti-Greek jokes: "Do not molest the sorority girls. They have sharp nails." The senators respond in an orgy of disgust.
"Smut. I wouldn't show this to a good woman."
"I'm offended, too. It seems like you've offended everyone in the room.""I'm scared of what fantasy games y'all are playing."
The reaction goes on and on. It seems mean. There isn't much thought for whether anyone else on campus might enjoy the club. It's obvious that these senators are used to getting their way, and just as obvious that their air of entitlement intimidates other students on campus. And anyway, when all is said and done, this public debate is meaningless: The Machine senators reportedly meet secretly the night before each open session to discuss important issues. Over the years the secret meetings have taken on a sinister air. Rumors have the Machine meeting at the old gravel pit or in the woods near the old Confederate train tunnel.
One of the only senators to speak up for the club is a skinny guy in goggling glasses with a receding chin. He stands out among all the T-shirts in his red tie and dark blue suit. Chuck Hess is the leading opponent of the Machine. A third year law student, he's a little rustic. He speaks in a honeyed drawl and has a folksy wit. His suit hangs loosely off his narrow shoulders.
Chuck's political intelligence and communication skills are well acknowledged. A veteran university administrator named Melford Espey says Chuck's ability to simplify a complicated issue reminds him of the young Huey Long. Later I meet up with Chuck at his little room with a bunk bed in a non-Machine fraternity, and I can see that gift. I'm struggling to express what was obnoxious about the treatment of the Fantasy Games Club, (whom they expressed obvious and smug disdain of) when Chuck breaks in.
"There's a saying: Why do dogs lick themselves? Because they can," he says. "Well, there are some things they do that are stupid, politically stupid. They have to know before they vote the way they do that it will be unpopular, but they do it anyway. Because they can."
The Chi Omega house on sorority row feels like the home of a rich and elegant couple. Out back there are topiary bushes, in the window a fresh flower arrangement. I'm the guest of Stephanie Miller, a pretty and delicate senior with shoulder-length blond hair. She's an appointee of Machine backed president Boston. I saw her frowning during the debate over the Fantasy Games Club. She shows me the poster size photo rosters of sorority members, and points out the small-town girls with "big hair," girls whose fathers might own half of towns like Jasper or Opp but who developed unfortunate habits growing up where they did. Their sorority sisters gently break them into more sophisticated ways.
The marchers were protesting an incident last October in which two white pledges of Kappa Delta, the oldest sorority on campus, went to a "swap" party at a fraternity costumed as pregnant black women and white "trailer trash". The two pledges had on blackface, wigs with curlers, and house slippers. They'd stuffed basketballs under their T-shirts. The theme of the party perfectly expressed the snobbery you encounter among some Greeks: "Who Rides the Bus?"
When word of the swap became public, angry blacks pointed out that a local photo agency had several photographs of other Greeks in blackface. Indeed, I had heard about fraternity members dressed as Flavor Flav.
The boys who started the fraternity nationally thought that fraternity and non fraternity men needed a framework to achieve and distinguish themselves. And yet fraternities regularly got into terrible squabbles, often of a snobbish variety, as an early TNE yearbook complained. TNE was to be a suprafraternity. The men of TNE would quietly seek out future leaders when they were sophomores and then sort out campus honors among them.
Students in those years had few honors to choose from. Universities were rigidly led by their presidents and faculties and there were few student governments, student trustees, independent publications or independent student bodies. Fraternities in particular were barely tolerated or even forbidden and universities demanded that there operations were overseen by faculty and administrators. TNE urged its chapters to start student governments as a proving ground. Competition, reform, independent student leadership and camaraderie were the watchwords of the group.
The organization was never supposed to take credit for its good works. From its origins in 1870 at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Theta Nu Epsilon believed that secrecy guaranteed selfless leadership. The organization has a handful of leaders known only to themselves and even members are not aware of exactly who the alumni are. Logos showed a group of devils in hell, with flames licking around them. The fraternity's rites instilled secrecy with medieval earnestness.
"All Malachiks [candidates] should be brought into an outer or ante room as they arrive at the place of initiation," the group's official ritual reads. "As they enter, they should thrust their left hand into a bucket of blood (Mercurochrome)." The Nuktelius, or president, warned that if they ever violated the oath of secrecy, blood would reappear on their hands, "never to be removed."
Over the years, TNE had varying degrees of success at keeping itself secret. But with the onset of the Sixties, TNE like most fraternities was in precipitous decline and had almost had petered out. Except at Alabama, where TNE had grown into the Machine and fraternity life flourished.
The day I visit Kappa Alpha [Order], someone has a Confederate flag hanging in a back window, and there's a nervous feeling in the air. That's because fraternity leaders are holding strategy meetings to plan their defiance of the school administration. The university is trying to force reforms on the fraternities and sororities through a self-evaluation procedure called the accreditation plan. The university has no timetable; but the threat is that stubborn fraternities will lose official recognition — and be forced, some say, to rebuild their houses off campus.
Christopher "Boo" Haughton, the Kappa Alpha president, can't really talk for a couple of days, not till the fraternity has figured out its plan of action. He is tall, has tousled reddish-brown hair and big, heavy-lidded eyes. He wears boots and jeans and a T-shirt.
He does tell me a little about tradition. Greek life at Alabama goes back to the time after the Civil War, he says, when the plantation owners sought a place closer than Europe for their boys to learn how to conduct themselves. Boo grew up in Haleyville, a town of five thousand. He's from old money and says so openly.
"Southerners are a very proud people," Boo says. "My grandmother tells stories of her mother being a child and throwing day-old biscuits at Union soldiers walking by their house in Pine Apple, Alabama." He shakes his head. "That sends chills up my spine to think of that. Any association with that war — with what they wanted and what they went through."
I get up to go, and on the way back to the center of campus I stop at the north entrance of Foster Auditorium, a Georgian building with six big pillars. The silent march over the blackface incident ended here in October. It's the spot famous for then-governor George C. Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door. On June 11, 1963, Wallace briefly defied the federal government’s efforts to force the enrollment of the first two black students at the school.
Foster is also known as the place where 'Squeal Day' takes place every September. That's when a thousand young women, all white (except a handful are Asian Americans accepted by one sorority but barely tolerated by others), having passed through a week of high highly ritualized rush events, pick up numbered envelopes from the seats and at a signal rip them open — then squeal or cry with the news of the sorority that has chosen them.
A year or so later, some of those girls will be secretly tapped to "go downstairs for the house," or "go underground." They will become Machine reps.
The Machine has struggled with the role of these women. Traditionally it was able to take for granted the sororities' docility. But in the mid-Seventies women began to clamor for power, and in 1976 sororities helped elect as president a black independent.
The Machine wised up. By the early Eighties Theta Nu Epsilon had made room for the sororities. And the next time a sorority woman dared support an independent candidate, her sorority tried to pull her pin. Even so, the Machine has since only once nominated a woman for president — by a reported 14 - 13 vote.
That was in 1988, and the Machine was, arguably, under added pressure. It had not been able to reliably deliver to sorority girls a position they had taken for granted in the past : homecoming queen. In 1986 and 1987, black women won the campuswide elections for homecoming queen by riding a bloc vote of their own.
The Student Government Association introduced legislation in the student senate to change that. Bill 25 was a clever means of breaking up bloc votes. It polarized the campus, and the student paper, The Crimson White, gave the bill a Wallace era name: The Negro Queen Exclusion Act. Bill 25 didn't make it in the end, but the SGA ultimately did succeed in changing the rules to put the queen back in Greek hands. (Continues after pic)
Ray Cole was part of the SGA administration that wrote Bill 25. He's since moved into a wider world, working on statewide campaigns, trying to get black votes. Now he's a lobbyist in Huntsville. When I ask Ray about the homecoming queen mess, I can hear him taking a deep breath at the other end of the line. "I made a mistake when I authored Bill 25," he says. "But I wasn't alone. My name may be on the front, I may take the fall."
"Where did the bill come from?"
"People were scared. They felt threatened," he says. "It didn't come out of feelings of confidence."
"Did it originate from the Machine?"
There's a long pause. "Yeah..."
On several occasions, I had heard polished Machine types making fun of Chuck Hess, the independent senator. And you can see why. He seems very alone. During our conversation he prompts himself by saying, "No, Chuck" (or "No, Charles," if it's a serious error). Friends say that sometimes he studies on a couch in Ferguson Center, hoping people will come along and talk.
Social isolation is the lot of the independent politician. Machine tactics, like party politics are overwhelming. After vans hired by the Machine take voters to the polls, "someone sticks a beer in your hand and says, 'These are the people you're supposed to vote for,'" Chuck says. "At least we have gotten them to remove the kegs from the vans."
Independent candidates for president do best when they call on students' hatred of the Machine. John Merrill, a natural politician with a religiously forthright manner, was the last man to beat the Greeks, in 1986. He put his anti-Machine slogan up on billboards "Let's draw the line" — and made an issue of TNE's exclusivity.
Merrill was so threatening that Machine members broke into his office and were caught (just as Machine minions had bugged the phone of the last successful independent before him). "I got statewide coverage," Merrill says. "My folks back in Heflin saw that I won on the ten o'clock news."
The next independent with a following was Joey Viselli, in 1989. Viselli had moved to Tuscaloosa from Buffalo when he was eight. His father, Fran, was a community favorite. He owned Bama-Bino Pizza. Every time there was a blood drive, the big, bearded, pizza man gave out pies. His hugely likable son was defeated in a close vote. Tuscaloosa County election supervisors attested to irregularities, but the administration ruled against a new election.
A lot of bitterness remained, and the big loser was Bama-Bino's. Some Greeks organized a boycott against Viselli's dad after the election. In the past, Bama- Bino's had gotten large orders from the SGA and for Greek parties. Those ended. Some fraternities reportedly fined their members for ordering Bama-Bino's pizza. Business dropped sharply and, after a couple of pizza chains began giving Viselli stiff competition, Bama-Bino's went under.
When I asked one Old Row fraternity member what to make of the boycott stories, he shrugged. It was "just dumb business" for Viselli not to understand that Bama-Bino's was at risk if his son attacked the Machine. "His daddy must have been dumb not to realize, 'Hey son, don't be stirring the waters up,'" the fellow said.
Fran Viselli sighs as he drives past the shuttered Bama-Bino's on Hackberry Lane. "I was being targeted by a group of students who I really liked and still do, and I lost my desire to continue to serve," he says.
Chad Green tells me to meet him at the Delt house so we can go to lunch. It's a day when defiance of the school's accreditation plan is at a fever pitch. The opponents have called a press conference to denounce the plan. Meanwhile, the university has hosted a forum on the blackface incident at which a lot of independent students vented their anger toward the Greeks.
Boo comes out and we sit in two armchairs under the portrait of the K. A. Rose, the fraternity's co-ed of the year. A tall guy in a red baseball cap sits on the couch across from us. He's dark-haired and movie-actor good-looking. Boo introduces him as Billy Ray Casteel, a K. A. from Florence, Alabama. (K. A. has one "foreigner," I had heard — a boy from Florida).
It doesn't take long for Boo to warm up. He talks about the small-town Alabama way of life. "You can have anything you want here with a certain amount of money," Boo says. "Land. All the adult toys you could want. A big house. I've been to California and I've been up north. If I can't walk out my back porch and shoot a gun without someone calling the police — drink a beer and use the bathroom if I want and step out onto my land... I love the land, being able to walk barefoot with my feet on the grass, hearing the birds and crickets chirp, fishing, barbecuing, laying out in the sun and swimming with friends... I don't like being closed in."
Boo believes it will be awhile before blacks are included. "I'd love to be president when there's one who's right," he says. He seems sincere. "But I don't see it in the next couple of years. I'd love to give him a break. Someone who really, really wants to be a K. A."
Billy Ray says, "Someone who's not a racist." "Someone who appreciates southern heritage," Boo goes on. "Someone with the same view I have, that there's niggers and there's blacks and there's rednecks and whites."
Everyone at Alabama says the fiercest opponents of integration are alumni, especially the men from small towns who are most involved, who come to homecoming games and jam their fraternity houses, the ones who say that after family, fraternity played the biggest part in their success. Alabama vice-president Harry Knopke says it was alumni who blocked one fraternity — he won't say which — from accepting an Asian American.
More diversity than that makes him uncomfortable. Black fraternities, he points out, have different traditions. Some don't allow alcohol at their parties. They place a greater emphasis on achievement and service than do white fraternities. Their hazing process is highly regimented and they induct distinguished graduate students and professionals who are not hazed. Charles McPherson tells an anecdote he heard from someone involved with the accreditation process.
McPherson gets an exasperated look when I bring up the Machine. "I'm real disappointed that the Machine has not taken an aggressive, active stand," he says. Others say the same thing. In the old days, the accreditation plan never would have broken the surface; Theta Nu Epsilon should have seen the threat early on and dealt with the problem privately before anything got in the papers. The Machine should have made sure no Greeks went along with it. As Chad Green said to me, if he as a Greek supported accreditation, "I would have blood on my hands." It sounds like the old Machine curse.
The problem is that several Greeks have aided the administration. The university's most impressive recruit is Joe Strength, a Sigma Chi who helped write the accreditation plan. He's short, boyish looking, and has scrub-brush short hair — and is one of the most thoughtful students I met on campus. Joe is in Army ROTC at Alabama. "I've grown up in a black and--white world, and the experience through the ROTC was almost a liberating one," he says, choosing his words carefully. "You begin to appreciate someone more on their actions. Your judgment is based on their commitment to the same cause, the same beliefs. You learn to depend on each other. You are thrown into a situation — the common bond, your uniform, means more than skin. You might say everyone is green."
When I asked Joe whether blacks and whites can share in the tradition of the Southern gentleman, if they could stand for the same values, he didn't have to ponder the question.
"Certainly," he said.
Even some old-line Greeks on Alabama's board of trustees are said to have agreed it's time. The injustices of the Greek system as it stands today are too obvious and painful. I met several middle-class black kids at the university who measure themselves by mainstream benchmarks — white benchmarks, if you will. Kids for whom the Montgomery bus boycott is fuzzy history, who have a lot of white friends, who want to be included in the social elite represented by the line of red-brick mansions.
I could imagine the damage to their self-esteem when they spoke about being turned away from Greek parties by pledges guarding the door, or about school friendships with whites, especially girls, ending freshman year because their friends' "big sisters" said it would be uncomfortable for everyone if the black girl came to lunch at the sorority. It's not the same as Bull Connor, but it's a real inequity. It might even have been a factor in the recent federal case against Alabama's university system, which charged that the unequal funding of historically white and historically black schools violates blacks' civil rights.
The Machine has always, if grudgingly, accommodated large social forces. It made way for urbanized, New South whites (and in doing so lost control of The Crimson White). Someday it will make way for blacks. As this article was going to press, the defiant fraternities and the administration seemed to have hammered out a compromise on accreditation. Maybe someday black kids or black fraternities and sororities will be in the Machine. Stranger things have happened. In 1970, after a humiliating loss to the University of Southern California and its star black tailback Bear Bryant integrated the football team.
As I finish my conversation with Charles McPherson, I ask him about Lamonde Russell, a black student from Oneonta who is an Alabama football star. McPherson's face lights up.
"Number 81!" he says. "He worked for me and my family two summers. I took him down there when he got his scholarship. Me and another guy recruited him away from Auburn. We did everything we could to help him on."
McPherson's dog walks over. She's named Daisy (from the movie Driving Miss Daisy). I feed her a peanut.
"He's a hero here," McPherson goes on. "Not because he played ball but because of the kind of person he is. Intelligent. First class as far as right and wrong, a true Christian. He doesn't just preach it. He lives it. He's shy and quiet." He trails off as he considers the obvious question.
A student politician who's trying to explain Chuck Hess's oddness tells me about the choir incident. The Afro-American Gospel Choir came to the Senate last year to ask for $2,500 to attend a Houston retreat. The Senate cut the grant to $1,000. As the choir leaders started out of the room, a top Machine senator asked amiably if they couldn't bring the whole group back sometime to perform for the Senate.
Chuck Hess exploded.
"Y'all make me sick," he cried. "You sit here and cut the bill and then have the gall to ask them to come back and sing! I feel something moving inside me, and it isn't the spirit of Jesus."
The Machine senator was deeply embarrassed. He hadn't meant to be demeaning.
I'm impressed by Chuck's political awareness, and before I leave Tuscaloosa I stop in on him again. I go to the night desk of the law school, where he works as a security guard. As no one else does, Chuck grasps the dangers and responsibilities of power.
"I had a landlady who told me about a man who swindled her out of money, 'He's not a bad man, he wouldn't jump into hell for a nickel. But he sure would dance around the edges trying so hard to get it he would fall in,'" Chuck says. "[Machine loyals] are not bad people. They don't want to be labeled as elitist or racist or even undemocratic. But it doesn't matter whether they dislike independents or blacks or international students, the actions they're taking have that effect. And I'm tired of seeing them try and walk that line. I want them to take a couple of steps away from the fire, away from the heat. Or jump in. Either way they will create a solution."
Behind him a black-and-white security monitor is flickering with a long shot of a distant hallway, but Chuck is focused on politics. He takes his argument further, to the problems of the state.
Just about everyone with a college degree in Alabama today will tell you that the state faces great difficulties involving poverty and education. The state has by far the lowest property taxes in the country. It is doing such a bad job of educating its young that you often hear leading officials, such as university president Roger Sayers, liken the state to a Third World country. This system of haves and have-nots may have worked for centuries for the well-off, but even Boo Haughton concedes that his children may not be able to live off the fat of the land in rural Alabama the way he has.
Still, fundamental change is unlikely. The legislature is in gridlock. The governor is a Baptist minister and former Amway salesman without a good idea of how to change things, and the Democrats who've run against him are progressives who've been out of touch. Black politicians have been working with conservatives to create party registration voting for primaries, effectively ending any black/white coalition building and stifling the chances of white progressive candidates.
The Machine is the academy for people going into state politics, so it's part of the problem. First off; Greeks leave Tuscaloosa with too many like minded friends to ever be effective reformers. They aren't going to campaign against the network they raise money from.
For another thing, the Machine is entrenched at this university with no real competitors. The people who are brought up in this fashion are good organization men, and very polished to boot; but they aren't necessarily good politicians. They tend to feel entitled and few have a sharpened sense of hunger and ambition. Neither do they have the progressiveness and belief in competition, the ideas which initially gave rise to the Machine through its TNE origins.
Even when Machine candidates disagree with traditional politics or trends they are not able to stir enough of a public outcry. And without an outcry the politicians are going to be like that dog Chuck told me about — doing what they can get away with. fin
(Where are they now- Boo Haughton, who works for a regional building contractor is on the Winston County, Alabama school board, after a 2005 election win and victory over a court challenge on issues of voting irregularities. He is in charge of contracts and he is looking for a 2010 state race. Billy Ray Casteel worked in lumber sales before using his client base of contacts to start his own company, Lumber One. He is running for town council this year. We will leave the rest for another article. Or probably not.)
The Machine today: menace or myth?
Ryan Hickman, special projects editor
March 31, 2006
Has the Machine, like Foster Auditorium, just become part of the University of Alabama's folklore?
March 31 Dateline Alabama tracks the contemporary political climate at the University of Alabama to gauge whether the historically mysterious Machine is more mythology than menace.
When the high sun of spring goes down at the University of Alabama, the campus whispers with history. You can hear Gov. George Wallace’s voice outside Foster Auditorium, the chatter of Union troops as you walk past the president’s mansion, and murmurs of the Machine coming from fraternity and sorority rows.
But, like the other tales that have made UA the South’s most historical grounds for learning, has the concept of the Machine simply devolved into university folklore?
Like all good legends, the group of traditionally white fraternities and sororities, as the Machine is most generally defined, has maintained its legacy through the assortment of stories that follow it around. With many things in the South, history dictates the present.
By all accounts, The Crimson White began referring to a select group of student organization representatives at the university as the Machine in the 1920s, and that became part of the newspaper’s terminology during the 1940s. The campus publication has been the narrative of the group since. The pseudonym for the fraternal sect stems from their mechanical efficiency in placing and winning Student Government Association elections and other politically charged competitions, like homecoming, at the university.
The Machine’s occult characteristics stem from its bloodlines with Theta Nu Epsilon. The fraternity, which has its origins in secretive societies from the Bones at Yale, was initiated at UA by Lister Hill in 1914. Hill followed the lead of the original chapter of TNE formed at Weslyan University before the turn of the 20th century.
Overtime the mission grew- to initiate student government, to coordinate student bodies, select and run candidates for student government and to tie together various pre-existing student groups nationally. While maintaining a highly selective, exclusive membership, the TNE-backed candidates became sure-things in all university elections. According to most accounts TNE nationally is not centralized and there are several different coordinating bodies and even more independent groups.
Due to the shrouded history of TNE and today’s Machine few are sure if it is the old organization just going by another name publicly (it was also once called "the Group"). Regardless, the Machine or TNE represents a combined greek organization to promote candidacy within the SGA.
The perpetual success of the Machine in SGA elections, combined with its rigidly fraternal and publicly cloaked structures, furthers the underground and secretive traits that loom today. Speculation of the Machine’s participation in tactics behind each negative political incident on the campus has turned into automatic assumption because of the group’s hush-hush persona.
Each new story of cross burnings, physical intimidation and wrongdoing in SGA elections only whips the winds of conspiracy into a greater frenzy. Although Minda Riley’s assault in 1992 is no matter to disregard; and John Merrill’s office break-in cannot be disputed; and the cross burning on the Kappa Kappa Gamma house lawn following the electing of Cleo Thomas as SGA president in 1976 should not be scoffed at, these events have piled up on each other and taken on a life of their own.
The stories are part of the Machine legend at UA and continue as evidence for non-greeks to substantiate the deeper cabalistic presumptions of the group—ritualistic initiation and secretive meetings to decide the moves of the SGA in the basements of fraternity and sorority houses (on Wednesdays or Sunday nights, depending on which report you ascribe to) —that the group’s critics like to dwell on.
Skeptics, and many greeks, will say that the stories of the past have been taken to extremes, and like a bad game of broken telephone, have aggrandized into exaggerated, hyperbolized tales constantly rehashed just to sell newspapers.
Racist death threats, verbal and physical harassment and shadowy organizations at an already historically inflamed campus in the Deep South are not just good fodder for The Crimson White, The Tuscaloosa News and harangues in the blogosphere, but are engaging stories for national audiences.
Outside Affirmation- The tales of the UA Machine brought Philip Weiss to Tuscaloosa to investigate his now infamous Esquire cover story from 1992, and the Machine’s reputation of racism through the segregated greek system lured Jason Zengerle of The New Republic to town for his article in 2002.
Preservers of Machine mythology will point to the CNN piece in 1999 about SGA presidential candidate Fabien Zinga’s death threat and the mention in the 2004 Newsweek story surrounding hardball campus politics as evidence of external eyes confirming an internal phenomenon.
The national attention tacitly legitimizes the influence that the Machine wields today in people’s minds. The past props up the present with folklore and sometimes the mental perception of a political group’s power can be more daunting than what they actually are. With a dogmatically private organization like the Machine where outsiders have no real knowledge of their decision-making, particular incidents that occurred in the past are the only evidence that can substantiate critics’claims of misdeed by the group today. Every disparager of the greek-backed Machine uses the mythical past to generalize the present and future.
A murky past feeds today's critics- In an opinion piece on Feb. 27 in The Crimson White, Matt Dover lambasted the present Machine for its alledgedly racist actions in the past. Matt Dover is the chairman of the ethical government watchdog group and anti-Machine activist Capstone Political Action Committee, (the Machine is also said to be connected to a number of Political Action Commitees that have grown into statewide political entities.)
Dover wrote, referring to the local Machine representatives of TNE. “The Machine has never supported a single candidate of color and has bitterly opposed the advancement of minorities on campus at every step.” However, a day later though, following a presentation by Cleo Thomas, the only black SGA president in the school’s history, Dover played down his sweeping strokes of racism attributed to the Machine in his editorial.
“I don’t think it is institutionally racist,” Dover said. “Their actions have been racist. The University of Alabama has been racist. It’s hard to distinguish between individual and institution.”
Dover did state that the Machine has been exclusive since its inception, predating any racial strife on the UA campus. Examining the issue of race might be more suited to an investigation of the segregated greek system, rather than SGA elections. But associating racism with the Machine furthers the air of malicious secrecy.
Intimidation rather than racism- For Nick Beadle, the Machine is more about intimidation than racism.
“The whole thing is driven by fear,” Beadle said. “They are flamboyant about it. They let you know that they are out there.” Or at least that is his perception.
Beadle, the current managing editor for The Crimson White, has been a chronicler of the Machine as a reporter and student life editor of the campus newspaper. Beadle was responsible for the candid article “You don’t want to mess with us” that ran two years ago in the CW detailing accounts of intimidation and stiff structure within the greek system for electing SGA members.
The story stood on the accounts of Emily Aviki, a member of Chi Omega, and Emily Lumpkin, an Alpha Gamma Delta sister. It detailed how the sorority was pressured by Machine members and the greek system as a result of Aviki’s successful SGA senate campaign in 2003.
Beadle knew that his story was going to incite some rumbling across the student population, especially from fraternity and sorority members, but the worst part for him was not when the story ran, but rather the anticipation leading up to it.
“We didn’t let anyone else know, so that it wouldn’t get out,” Beadle said, referring to himself and only one other staff member at the CW that knew about the impending story in 2004. “We couldn’t take the chance.”
Beadle explained that he was worried that Machine members would catch wind of his interviews with Aviki and Lumpkin, who both have transferred to Duke University (where there is also a TNE chapter), and inflict some of the same heavy-handed tactics that have been synonymous with the group in the past and felt by his two sources.
Beadle said that he slept at night with a baseball bat the entire time he was working on the article.
But nothing happened to Beadle. No intimidation. No physical harm. No crosses burned on his lawn. He took the precautions because of events that have compounded themselves into a menacing thought, at least in his mind.
Most greeks probably don’t mind the perception of their power. It draws people in and keeps the allure of the system’s power alive. Even Lumpkin admitted that she was captivated with the mystique surrounding the Machine, quoted in the CW article as saying, “I was intrigued by its mysteriousness.”
Does the lust for power from members within the greek system become so emotionally overwhelming that certain individuals feel they need to uphold it by administering acts of violent intimidation? It might be an explanation for the specific incidents that have transpired in the past that have transformed into mammoth tales surrounding the Machine today.
“[The] stories from the past—true or not—are stories,” said Justice Smyth, the 2006-2007 SGA president-elect, in his VP of student affairs office during this year’s campaign.
This spring’s election ran blemish-free, with Smyth taking the presidential race by a substantial margin.
Of the four candidates for SGA president this year, Smyth, a member of Old Row fraternity, was the only one with greek affiliations. That pretense automatically put Smyth as the Machine-backed candidate.
“I don't know about the Machine. If you want to say I’m the Greek candidate, you can say that, but I’m not,” Smyth said regarding his relationship with the Machine. “I didn’t join a fraternity for political reasons.”
As much as Smyth may have denied it, the history of the greek system, the Machine mythology and the SGA presidency dictated the perception of Smyth in the race.
“I like to say that he is what a traditionally Machine-backed candidate looks like,” Smyth’s presidential opponent Corbin Martin, said about him.
Smyth’s results indeed followed suit with the outcome of Machine candidates in the past. He eclipsed second place finisher Adam Rankin by almost 1,500 votes and left additional candidates with minimal support on the ballot.
As the race unfolded, it was clear the two strongest candidates, also with the most SGA experience, had risen to the top in essentially a two-man race. Rankin, a SGA senator, ran an impressive campaign, garnering an endorsement from the CW. Smyth, the current SGA VP of student affairs, showed his polish and experience in elections with an effective campaign of his own.
With Rankin, not a fraternity member, possessing no strong associations to the greek system and Smyth in one of the traditionally most politically powerful houses, the race appeared on the surface in the familiar University of Alabama political divide—Machine vs. Independent.
“I think it is funny that the students here cannot conceptualize elections except in relationship to the Machine,” said Margaret King, the University’s vice president of student affairs. fin
"Roots of The Machine seen in outlawed TNE"
The Crimson White, University of Alabama's Student Daily
The clandestine campus political organization called The Machine has its roots in an older, once national, fraternity which had the same goal as its object--the gain of political power for its own sake.
Theta Nu Epsilon, or TNE, was founded at Wesleyan University in 1870 allegedly as a chapter of Skull and Bones at Yale. Eventually it became an independent organization. Its history is clouded, since at least some of its chapters appear to have been transparent, while others served as another mode of identity for secret political organizations and pre-existing groups.
It was in the second case that TNE masqueraded as a drinking fraternity and promoter of student participation in campus activities which accepted members from established social fraternities. The real purpose of the chapters was to gain political control on their campuses. Where student government did not exist they promoted it.
The next step in the grand plan of TNE was, after securing campus politics, to move into state, and then national, government. "We used to joke that, while we were holding our meetings in some fraternity basement, there must be another one going on [in] the basement of the Capitol," said a former member of the local group.
TNE was unmasked during the middle 1930s, however, and came into general disrepute as a result of investigations by various fraternal councils and campus administrations. It was outlawed on many college campuses. In fact there were many manifestations of TNE, including a New York University based leadership sanctioned and led by the head of that university's business school, John T. Madden; a midwestern group; and many more independents.
Though the formal national organization of TNE withered away under the pressure, political activism of the individual chapters continued as many went underground.
The early days of TNE were not without humor, however. A dean of the University of Illinois once declared that "There seems to be little doubt that in the early days, TNE was promoted by unscrupulous jewelry salesmen who secured badges from small, unknown manufacturers of fraternity jewelers."
It is now obvious that TNE on many campuses, as on this campus, changed its public name when it went underground. While here it took the name of The Machine, similar organizations at Nebraska, the University of North Dakota and the University of Virginia have been unmasked this year under the names "The Iron Mask" and "The Society of the Yellow Rose." Many "Skull and Keys", "Skull and Dagger" and like named societies grew from or were associated with TNE. As a legacy many greek letter fraternities with no current connection continue to use their iconography.
TNE at the University of Alabama, though it has gone under the names The Machine, The Group and The Society of Friends, has continued to operate under the old TNE constitution and rituals since its arrival. More importantly, TNE actually instituted student government (from the days of the cotillion committees) at the University of Alabama giving it a greater notion of authority.
The documents and records of the local group are now in the hands of the current president. The initiation ritual reads much like that of any other Greek organization, with elaborate and flowery speeches involved in the actual initiation, still followed by the Machine. A pledge is made as to the initiates belief in the "miracle of Jesus Christ" (apparently signifying the central tenants Christianity, in the virgin birth and Savior of Man.)
The shield of the organization is a skull with crossed keys below. Other images include daggers, feathers and wings, crosses, hieroglyphics, skeletons, flames, serpents, imps or "devils" which are used in various chapters names.
Meetings are held at whatever place that the students can procure as there are no houses for the secret group. Various customs are observed at these meetings including that members hold their beer in their left hand so that the right will remain warm and ready for shaking.
Though in the ritual members are called "Nuktogogi," local members call each other "Malacheeks." Initiates are called "Neophytes." There is an outdoors ceremony also said to be involved.
The Machine here has endured two major crises, one in 1947, the other in 1961.
In 1947 Machine membership was composed almost equally of fraternity and independent representatives. Apparently the original Theta Nu Epsilon felt it was important to have a membership of independents as well as greeks. A quarrel between the two groups arose in April of that year however when the independents became dissatisfied over the number of prime appointments going to members of the big fraternities despite supposed equality of those who were greeks, honor society members or independents.
The independents withdrew and The Machine was supposedly dissolved. However, the fraternities immediately formed a new Machine and continued to function.
The independent faction retained some of its organization for a few years, giving strong opposition to The Machine, but when the strong members graduated, the independent group folded.
In 1961 the Crimson-White exposed the inner working of The Machine for the first time in public.
Though the organization stumbled for a time and lost, through a series of circumstances, its leverage in campus politics, the organization itself remained. The Machine has made considerable gains, especially in the last two years, and now has unquestioned prominence over the less formalized, election-time-only political structures on campus. fin
"The Most Powerful Fraternity in America
Philip Weiss
Esquire Maga
zineIt controls life at the University of Alabama, but nobody can see it. Its influence extends to the statehouse, but nobody can touch it. It is, simply, the Machine.
In the dining room of the Delta Tau Delta house, Chad Green stops and stares hard at the picture of the bearded soldier. Chad is tall and dark with an occasional fierce glare in his eyes, and right now he looks vexed. Abruptly he turns toward the opposite wall. There are another three portraits of soldiers there, six in all.
"No, I think that's A. P. Hill," he says with sudden conviction, pointing to the far wall. "This one I don't know. But of course that's Jeff Davis. And that is definitely Stonewall Jackson. And that one's got to be A. P. Hill."
Chad pauses again. He's stumped on the names of the other three Confederate generals. It seems to bother him. But giving me a wink, he approaches Jeff Davis and lifts the portrait from the wall. On the back he can still find the number that he penciled there as a freshman fraternity pledge three years before, matching the number he put on the picture hook. He did it so he could put the portraits back in the right places after a party.
"You'd get in trouble if you put them back wrong," he says.
My tour of the Delt house at the University of Alabama is a rich schooling in Southern tradition. Chad shows me the picture of Miss Ruby, the housemother who taught several generations of Delts etiquette. I see the hunting prints and the teak parquet floors of the living room — "It looks like home," says Chad. And there's the pocked, cinder-block wall on the basement landing, where boys throw champagne bottles as hard as they can on the night they're initiated.
"It's the best night of their life," Chad says, vigorously miming the way he threw his bottle.
Only when we're talking politics does Chad lose his cool. We've come outside, onto the semicircular porch of the brick Georgian mansion. It's a beautiful late fall day on fraternity row in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In the light breeze a pine bough grazes the round portico of the house. Two houses away, at Sigma Chi, pledges are bagging pine needles from the front yard of their brick mansion. In the other direction, at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, pledges are readying a red carpet for the Stockholders' Ball. They're putting up twenty gaslight torches.
Chad's just mentioned all the Delts who've gone into politics when I ask him about the Machine. He gets that cross expression. "I'd rather not comment on that," he says. "I just won't comment."
I press him and he looks away. Ruddy color rises in his cheeks. "There are a lot of secrets to people outside but there are not a lot of secrets inside," he says.
The organization Chad won't talk about is a secret society that for eighty years has controlled student politics at the University of Alabama: the Machine. Its real name is Theta Nu Epsilon, whose Greek letters spell TNE, and it acts as the political arm of twenty-seven leading fraternities and sororities at the school. Machine representatives meet secretly once a week. There are thirty or so members — Chad is said to be one — but most Greeks on campus don't know who their rep is.
On election day in February, the Machine buses its voters to the polls and penalizes people who don't vote. Almost all the time, it wins. On election night it spends a chunk of its $27,000 secret budget it raises each year from members on a blowout party at the Jaycee fairgrounds for the fraternities and sororities. The Machine reps can be seen there, ducking in and out of a tent with a private bar. Some of them wear a lapel pin with the Theta Nu Epsilon logo, a skull and crossed keys.
The Machine is said to share roots with Skull & Bones of Yale, but it has more of an impact on its campus than its northern cousin. Greeks make up only 20 percent of the nineteen-thousand-member student body, but they manage to control almost all student government offices and along with that a student activity fee budget of more than $800,000. Honorary organizations like Mortar Board also seem to be under Machine sway.
But what's most striking about the Machine is the extent of its influence. U. S. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama is said to be a former Machine president and many of the leading politicians in the state have been products of this organization. They have even successfully ran students and new graduates for office in Tuscaloosa. The Machine's power lies not only in the people it turns out but in the lessons it offers on how power is won and wielded. Indeed, it has helped remake state politics in its own shadowy image.
The Machine today faces a crisis involving race. Though they lease university land, the Greek organizations are segregated. The blacks I saw inside the white Greek houses over ten days at Alabama were blowing on horns in the band at a fraternity party or carrying boxes of frozen vegetables to the kitchen. It's an embarrassing situation in a state that is more than 25 percent black. The university is trying to force integration, but it has met enormous resistance from Chad and others who justify their segregation by invoking the great traditions of Greek life at Alabama.
If you follow the national discourse, the only issues in higher education today are political correctness and multiculturalism. But in Tuscaloosa those arguments seem like the noodlings of a bunch of parochial intellectuals. Here far more is at stake than the power to change reading lists. To a lesser extent, the same holds true at dozens of other leading state schools and institutions that play an important role in the political lives of their states. The elites that govern local society often take form and groom members on campus.
Nowhere is this more starkly the case than with the Alabama Machine. "There was never any kind of phone call. I was never personally told; there just came to be an understanding that they were going to endorse me," says Trey Boston, the outgoing Student Government Association president, of the way the secret organization brought him along. "But if you look at the list of men and now a woman who have been endorsed by the Machine and elected SGA president at the University of Alabama, you see those who have went on to be U. S. senators, you see congressmen, you see doctors, you see lawyers, you see businessmen. You see people that, when I consider that my name is going to be thrown on the bottom of that list, it's like, 'What am I doing here?'" No wonder he spent $8,000 on his campaign.
It's not hard to spot the Machine representatives at a meeting of the student senate. Forty of the fifty senators are Machine. They're good-looking kids, and a lot of them have on the same sort of clothes — Duck Head pants and party Tshirts: Kappa Order Knight Out; Deke Undertakers' Ball; Kappa Kappa Gamma's Eleventh Annual Black Widow Blast. When I asked one sorority alumna whether you paid a social price for dressing differently, she explained my error : "No, because nobody would want to dress differently. We wanted that form of identity and connection."
Up for consideration today is a bill to fund the Fantasy Games Club, an offbeat independent group. The club's leader makes the mistake of passing out its tasteless Dungeons & Dragons-style literature. It includes anti-Greek jokes: "Do not molest the sorority girls. They have sharp nails." The senators respond in an orgy of disgust.
"Smut. I wouldn't show this to a good woman."
"I'm offended, too. It seems like you've offended everyone in the room.""I'm scared of what fantasy games y'all are playing."
The reaction goes on and on. It seems mean. There isn't much thought for whether anyone else on campus might enjoy the club. It's obvious that these senators are used to getting their way, and just as obvious that their air of entitlement intimidates other students on campus. And anyway, when all is said and done, this public debate is meaningless: The Machine senators reportedly meet secretly the night before each open session to discuss important issues. Over the years the secret meetings have taken on a sinister air. Rumors have the Machine meeting at the old gravel pit or in the woods near the old Confederate train tunnel.
One of the only senators to speak up for the club is a skinny guy in goggling glasses with a receding chin. He stands out among all the T-shirts in his red tie and dark blue suit. Chuck Hess is the leading opponent of the Machine. A third year law student, he's a little rustic. He speaks in a honeyed drawl and has a folksy wit. His suit hangs loosely off his narrow shoulders.
Chuck's political intelligence and communication skills are well acknowledged. A veteran university administrator named Melford Espey says Chuck's ability to simplify a complicated issue reminds him of the young Huey Long. Later I meet up with Chuck at his little room with a bunk bed in a non-Machine fraternity, and I can see that gift. I'm struggling to express what was obnoxious about the treatment of the Fantasy Games Club, (whom they expressed obvious and smug disdain of) when Chuck breaks in.
"There's a saying: Why do dogs lick themselves? Because they can," he says. "Well, there are some things they do that are stupid, politically stupid. They have to know before they vote the way they do that it will be unpopular, but they do it anyway. Because they can."
The Chi Omega house on sorority row feels like the home of a rich and elegant couple. Out back there are topiary bushes, in the window a fresh flower arrangement. I'm the guest of Stephanie Miller, a pretty and delicate senior with shoulder-length blond hair. She's an appointee of Machine backed president Boston. I saw her frowning during the debate over the Fantasy Games Club. She shows me the poster size photo rosters of sorority members, and points out the small-town girls with "big hair," girls whose fathers might own half of towns like Jasper or Opp but who developed unfortunate habits growing up where they did. Their sorority sisters gently break them into more sophisticated ways.
Stephanie is still upset about something that happened nearly a month before. There was a silent, candle-lit march by a thousand people down sorority row, past the wrought-iron balconies and fountains, past the Tri-Delt house, which is shaped like a wedding cake. When some sorority girls came out of the houses to show their sympathy with the marchers, they were mocked, in one case spat on.
The marchers were protesting an incident last October in which two white pledges of Kappa Delta, the oldest sorority on campus, went to a "swap" party at a fraternity costumed as pregnant black women and white "trailer trash". The two pledges had on blackface, wigs with curlers, and house slippers. They'd stuffed basketballs under their T-shirts. The theme of the party perfectly expressed the snobbery you encounter among some Greeks: "Who Rides the Bus?"
When word of the swap became public, angry blacks pointed out that a local photo agency had several photographs of other Greeks in blackface. Indeed, I had heard about fraternity members dressed as Flavor Flav.
The boys who started the fraternity nationally thought that fraternity and non fraternity men needed a framework to achieve and distinguish themselves. And yet fraternities regularly got into terrible squabbles, often of a snobbish variety, as an early TNE yearbook complained. TNE was to be a suprafraternity. The men of TNE would quietly seek out future leaders when they were sophomores and then sort out campus honors among them.
Students in those years had few honors to choose from. Universities were rigidly led by their presidents and faculties and there were few student governments, student trustees, independent publications or independent student bodies. Fraternities in particular were barely tolerated or even forbidden and universities demanded that there operations were overseen by faculty and administrators. TNE urged its chapters to start student governments as a proving ground. Competition, reform, independent student leadership and camaraderie were the watchwords of the group.
The organization was never supposed to take credit for its good works. From its origins in 1870 at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Theta Nu Epsilon believed that secrecy guaranteed selfless leadership. The organization has a handful of leaders known only to themselves and even members are not aware of exactly who the alumni are. Logos showed a group of devils in hell, with flames licking around them. The fraternity's rites instilled secrecy with medieval earnestness.
"All Malachiks [candidates] should be brought into an outer or ante room as they arrive at the place of initiation," the group's official ritual reads. "As they enter, they should thrust their left hand into a bucket of blood (Mercurochrome)." The Nuktelius, or president, warned that if they ever violated the oath of secrecy, blood would reappear on their hands, "never to be removed."
Over the years, TNE had varying degrees of success at keeping itself secret. But with the onset of the Sixties, TNE like most fraternities was in precipitous decline and had almost had petered out. Except at Alabama, where TNE had grown into the Machine and fraternity life flourished.
The day I visit Kappa Alpha [Order], someone has a Confederate flag hanging in a back window, and there's a nervous feeling in the air. That's because fraternity leaders are holding strategy meetings to plan their defiance of the school administration. The university is trying to force reforms on the fraternities and sororities through a self-evaluation procedure called the accreditation plan. The university has no timetable; but the threat is that stubborn fraternities will lose official recognition — and be forced, some say, to rebuild their houses off campus.
Christopher "Boo" Haughton, the Kappa Alpha president, can't really talk for a couple of days, not till the fraternity has figured out its plan of action. He is tall, has tousled reddish-brown hair and big, heavy-lidded eyes. He wears boots and jeans and a T-shirt.
He does tell me a little about tradition. Greek life at Alabama goes back to the time after the Civil War, he says, when the plantation owners sought a place closer than Europe for their boys to learn how to conduct themselves. Boo grew up in Haleyville, a town of five thousand. He's from old money and says so openly.
"Southerners are a very proud people," Boo says. "My grandmother tells stories of her mother being a child and throwing day-old biscuits at Union soldiers walking by their house in Pine Apple, Alabama." He shakes his head. "That sends chills up my spine to think of that. Any association with that war — with what they wanted and what they went through."
I get up to go, and on the way back to the center of campus I stop at the north entrance of Foster Auditorium, a Georgian building with six big pillars. The silent march over the blackface incident ended here in October. It's the spot famous for then-governor George C. Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door. On June 11, 1963, Wallace briefly defied the federal government’s efforts to force the enrollment of the first two black students at the school.
Foster is also known as the place where 'Squeal Day' takes place every September. That's when a thousand young women, all white (except a handful are Asian Americans accepted by one sorority but barely tolerated by others), having passed through a week of high highly ritualized rush events, pick up numbered envelopes from the seats and at a signal rip them open — then squeal or cry with the news of the sorority that has chosen them.
A year or so later, some of those girls will be secretly tapped to "go downstairs for the house," or "go underground." They will become Machine reps.
The Machine has struggled with the role of these women. Traditionally it was able to take for granted the sororities' docility. But in the mid-Seventies women began to clamor for power, and in 1976 sororities helped elect as president a black independent.
The Machine wised up. By the early Eighties Theta Nu Epsilon had made room for the sororities. And the next time a sorority woman dared support an independent candidate, her sorority tried to pull her pin. Even so, the Machine has since only once nominated a woman for president — by a reported 14 - 13 vote.
That was in 1988, and the Machine was, arguably, under added pressure. It had not been able to reliably deliver to sorority girls a position they had taken for granted in the past : homecoming queen. In 1986 and 1987, black women won the campuswide elections for homecoming queen by riding a bloc vote of their own.
The Student Government Association introduced legislation in the student senate to change that. Bill 25 was a clever means of breaking up bloc votes. It polarized the campus, and the student paper, The Crimson White, gave the bill a Wallace era name: The Negro Queen Exclusion Act. Bill 25 didn't make it in the end, but the SGA ultimately did succeed in changing the rules to put the queen back in Greek hands. (Continues after pic)
Ray Cole was part of the SGA administration that wrote Bill 25. He's since moved into a wider world, working on statewide campaigns, trying to get black votes. Now he's a lobbyist in Huntsville. When I ask Ray about the homecoming queen mess, I can hear him taking a deep breath at the other end of the line. "I made a mistake when I authored Bill 25," he says. "But I wasn't alone. My name may be on the front, I may take the fall."
"Where did the bill come from?"
"People were scared. They felt threatened," he says. "It didn't come out of feelings of confidence."
"Did it originate from the Machine?"
There's a long pause. "Yeah..."
On several occasions, I had heard polished Machine types making fun of Chuck Hess, the independent senator. And you can see why. He seems very alone. During our conversation he prompts himself by saying, "No, Chuck" (or "No, Charles," if it's a serious error). Friends say that sometimes he studies on a couch in Ferguson Center, hoping people will come along and talk.
Social isolation is the lot of the independent politician. Machine tactics, like party politics are overwhelming. After vans hired by the Machine take voters to the polls, "someone sticks a beer in your hand and says, 'These are the people you're supposed to vote for,'" Chuck says. "At least we have gotten them to remove the kegs from the vans."
Independent candidates for president do best when they call on students' hatred of the Machine. John Merrill, a natural politician with a religiously forthright manner, was the last man to beat the Greeks, in 1986. He put his anti-Machine slogan up on billboards "Let's draw the line" — and made an issue of TNE's exclusivity.
Merrill was so threatening that Machine members broke into his office and were caught (just as Machine minions had bugged the phone of the last successful independent before him). "I got statewide coverage," Merrill says. "My folks back in Heflin saw that I won on the ten o'clock news."
The next independent with a following was Joey Viselli, in 1989. Viselli had moved to Tuscaloosa from Buffalo when he was eight. His father, Fran, was a community favorite. He owned Bama-Bino Pizza. Every time there was a blood drive, the big, bearded, pizza man gave out pies. His hugely likable son was defeated in a close vote. Tuscaloosa County election supervisors attested to irregularities, but the administration ruled against a new election.
A lot of bitterness remained, and the big loser was Bama-Bino's. Some Greeks organized a boycott against Viselli's dad after the election. In the past, Bama- Bino's had gotten large orders from the SGA and for Greek parties. Those ended. Some fraternities reportedly fined their members for ordering Bama-Bino's pizza. Business dropped sharply and, after a couple of pizza chains began giving Viselli stiff competition, Bama-Bino's went under.
When I asked one Old Row fraternity member what to make of the boycott stories, he shrugged. It was "just dumb business" for Viselli not to understand that Bama-Bino's was at risk if his son attacked the Machine. "His daddy must have been dumb not to realize, 'Hey son, don't be stirring the waters up,'" the fellow said.
Fran Viselli sighs as he drives past the shuttered Bama-Bino's on Hackberry Lane. "I was being targeted by a group of students who I really liked and still do, and I lost my desire to continue to serve," he says.
Chad Green tells me to meet him at the Delt house so we can go to lunch. It's a day when defiance of the school's accreditation plan is at a fever pitch. The opponents have called a press conference to denounce the plan. Meanwhile, the university has hosted a forum on the blackface incident at which a lot of independent students vented their anger toward the Greeks.
Boo comes out and we sit in two armchairs under the portrait of the K. A. Rose, the fraternity's co-ed of the year. A tall guy in a red baseball cap sits on the couch across from us. He's dark-haired and movie-actor good-looking. Boo introduces him as Billy Ray Casteel, a K. A. from Florence, Alabama. (K. A. has one "foreigner," I had heard — a boy from Florida).
It doesn't take long for Boo to warm up. He talks about the small-town Alabama way of life. "You can have anything you want here with a certain amount of money," Boo says. "Land. All the adult toys you could want. A big house. I've been to California and I've been up north. If I can't walk out my back porch and shoot a gun without someone calling the police — drink a beer and use the bathroom if I want and step out onto my land... I love the land, being able to walk barefoot with my feet on the grass, hearing the birds and crickets chirp, fishing, barbecuing, laying out in the sun and swimming with friends... I don't like being closed in."
Boo believes it will be awhile before blacks are included. "I'd love to be president when there's one who's right," he says. He seems sincere. "But I don't see it in the next couple of years. I'd love to give him a break. Someone who really, really wants to be a K. A."
Billy Ray says, "Someone who's not a racist." "Someone who appreciates southern heritage," Boo goes on. "Someone with the same view I have, that there's niggers and there's blacks and there's rednecks and whites."
Everyone at Alabama says the fiercest opponents of integration are alumni, especially the men from small towns who are most involved, who come to homecoming games and jam their fraternity houses, the ones who say that after family, fraternity played the biggest part in their success. Alabama vice-president Harry Knopke says it was alumni who blocked one fraternity — he won't say which — from accepting an Asian American.
More diversity than that makes him uncomfortable. Black fraternities, he points out, have different traditions. Some don't allow alcohol at their parties. They place a greater emphasis on achievement and service than do white fraternities. Their hazing process is highly regimented and they induct distinguished graduate students and professionals who are not hazed. Charles McPherson tells an anecdote he heard from someone involved with the accreditation process.
McPherson gets an exasperated look when I bring up the Machine. "I'm real disappointed that the Machine has not taken an aggressive, active stand," he says. Others say the same thing. In the old days, the accreditation plan never would have broken the surface; Theta Nu Epsilon should have seen the threat early on and dealt with the problem privately before anything got in the papers. The Machine should have made sure no Greeks went along with it. As Chad Green said to me, if he as a Greek supported accreditation, "I would have blood on my hands." It sounds like the old Machine curse.
The problem is that several Greeks have aided the administration. The university's most impressive recruit is Joe Strength, a Sigma Chi who helped write the accreditation plan. He's short, boyish looking, and has scrub-brush short hair — and is one of the most thoughtful students I met on campus. Joe is in Army ROTC at Alabama. "I've grown up in a black and--white world, and the experience through the ROTC was almost a liberating one," he says, choosing his words carefully. "You begin to appreciate someone more on their actions. Your judgment is based on their commitment to the same cause, the same beliefs. You learn to depend on each other. You are thrown into a situation — the common bond, your uniform, means more than skin. You might say everyone is green."
When I asked Joe whether blacks and whites can share in the tradition of the Southern gentleman, if they could stand for the same values, he didn't have to ponder the question.
"Certainly," he said.
Even some old-line Greeks on Alabama's board of trustees are said to have agreed it's time. The injustices of the Greek system as it stands today are too obvious and painful. I met several middle-class black kids at the university who measure themselves by mainstream benchmarks — white benchmarks, if you will. Kids for whom the Montgomery bus boycott is fuzzy history, who have a lot of white friends, who want to be included in the social elite represented by the line of red-brick mansions.
I could imagine the damage to their self-esteem when they spoke about being turned away from Greek parties by pledges guarding the door, or about school friendships with whites, especially girls, ending freshman year because their friends' "big sisters" said it would be uncomfortable for everyone if the black girl came to lunch at the sorority. It's not the same as Bull Connor, but it's a real inequity. It might even have been a factor in the recent federal case against Alabama's university system, which charged that the unequal funding of historically white and historically black schools violates blacks' civil rights.
The Machine has always, if grudgingly, accommodated large social forces. It made way for urbanized, New South whites (and in doing so lost control of The Crimson White). Someday it will make way for blacks. As this article was going to press, the defiant fraternities and the administration seemed to have hammered out a compromise on accreditation. Maybe someday black kids or black fraternities and sororities will be in the Machine. Stranger things have happened. In 1970, after a humiliating loss to the University of Southern California and its star black tailback Bear Bryant integrated the football team.
As I finish my conversation with Charles McPherson, I ask him about Lamonde Russell, a black student from Oneonta who is an Alabama football star. McPherson's face lights up.
"Number 81!" he says. "He worked for me and my family two summers. I took him down there when he got his scholarship. Me and another guy recruited him away from Auburn. We did everything we could to help him on."
McPherson's dog walks over. She's named Daisy (from the movie Driving Miss Daisy). I feed her a peanut.
"He's a hero here," McPherson goes on. "Not because he played ball but because of the kind of person he is. Intelligent. First class as far as right and wrong, a true Christian. He doesn't just preach it. He lives it. He's shy and quiet." He trails off as he considers the obvious question.
A student politician who's trying to explain Chuck Hess's oddness tells me about the choir incident. The Afro-American Gospel Choir came to the Senate last year to ask for $2,500 to attend a Houston retreat. The Senate cut the grant to $1,000. As the choir leaders started out of the room, a top Machine senator asked amiably if they couldn't bring the whole group back sometime to perform for the Senate.
Chuck Hess exploded.
"Y'all make me sick," he cried. "You sit here and cut the bill and then have the gall to ask them to come back and sing! I feel something moving inside me, and it isn't the spirit of Jesus."
The Machine senator was deeply embarrassed. He hadn't meant to be demeaning.
I'm impressed by Chuck's political awareness, and before I leave Tuscaloosa I stop in on him again. I go to the night desk of the law school, where he works as a security guard. As no one else does, Chuck grasps the dangers and responsibilities of power.
"I had a landlady who told me about a man who swindled her out of money, 'He's not a bad man, he wouldn't jump into hell for a nickel. But he sure would dance around the edges trying so hard to get it he would fall in,'" Chuck says. "[Machine loyals] are not bad people. They don't want to be labeled as elitist or racist or even undemocratic. But it doesn't matter whether they dislike independents or blacks or international students, the actions they're taking have that effect. And I'm tired of seeing them try and walk that line. I want them to take a couple of steps away from the fire, away from the heat. Or jump in. Either way they will create a solution."
Behind him a black-and-white security monitor is flickering with a long shot of a distant hallway, but Chuck is focused on politics. He takes his argument further, to the problems of the state.
Just about everyone with a college degree in Alabama today will tell you that the state faces great difficulties involving poverty and education. The state has by far the lowest property taxes in the country. It is doing such a bad job of educating its young that you often hear leading officials, such as university president Roger Sayers, liken the state to a Third World country. This system of haves and have-nots may have worked for centuries for the well-off, but even Boo Haughton concedes that his children may not be able to live off the fat of the land in rural Alabama the way he has.
Still, fundamental change is unlikely. The legislature is in gridlock. The governor is a Baptist minister and former Amway salesman without a good idea of how to change things, and the Democrats who've run against him are progressives who've been out of touch. Black politicians have been working with conservatives to create party registration voting for primaries, effectively ending any black/white coalition building and stifling the chances of white progressive candidates.
The Machine is the academy for people going into state politics, so it's part of the problem. First off; Greeks leave Tuscaloosa with too many like minded friends to ever be effective reformers. They aren't going to campaign against the network they raise money from.
For another thing, the Machine is entrenched at this university with no real competitors. The people who are brought up in this fashion are good organization men, and very polished to boot; but they aren't necessarily good politicians. They tend to feel entitled and few have a sharpened sense of hunger and ambition. Neither do they have the progressiveness and belief in competition, the ideas which initially gave rise to the Machine through its TNE origins.
Even when Machine candidates disagree with traditional politics or trends they are not able to stir enough of a public outcry. And without an outcry the politicians are going to be like that dog Chuck told me about — doing what they can get away with. fin
(Where are they now- Boo Haughton, who works for a regional building contractor is on the Winston County, Alabama school board, after a 2005 election win and victory over a court challenge on issues of voting irregularities. He is in charge of contracts and he is looking for a 2010 state race. Billy Ray Casteel worked in lumber sales before using his client base of contacts to start his own company, Lumber One. He is running for town council this year. We will leave the rest for another article. Or probably not.)
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