It’s been called the most powerful—and most secretive—fraternity in America. For decades, a shadowy group known as The Machine has controlled student government at the University of Alabama through intimidation and backroom deals. And it matters—because its influence stretches far beyond campus and into national politics. For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is The Machine and its significance?
In 1992, Esquire magazine ran a cover story with the headline, The Most Powerful Fraternity in America. It was about a secret organization at the University of Alabama known as The Machine. It's so secretive that its own members deny it exists. And yet, its presence is everywhere. The article's subtitle reads, 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 reeks of corruption, but nobody can smell it. It is, simply, the machine.
It seems so silly for a college group that the stakes really are high. When you talk about the things they've been willing to do in the past to win, targeting people who went against them, when you talk about that racism is nurtured there, and when you talk about the power they continue to hold in the state and also in the country, then it isn't really as silly as you might think it is.
I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, we're pulling back the curtain on the most powerful and most secretive fraternity in America. Getting into college was a major milestone for Alicia. She'd be the first in her family to attend. Both of her parents were particularly excited about the University of Alabama, her dad for the football team and her mom for the Greek life.
I think that my mom was drawn to the Greek life and was interested in that for me because she saw it as a possibility to help me meet somebody to marry or to get a better job. And for her daughter to be a sorority girl in Alabama, to her, I think that was something special. So once I decided to go there, I knew that I would go through Rush.
Back in 1983, when Alicia was at Alabama, sorority rush was just as cutthroat as it is today. But she got into her top choice, FIMU. She still remembers the moment, known on campus as Squeal Day, like it was yesterday.
Everybody's literally squealing and running from the student center to the houses to meet the sisters on the lawn of the houses. And they give you a shirt with your Greek letters. And there's a party that night and it's all just right away. You're sucked into it. And at that time, they're so welcoming and they really made it feel special.
At first, Alicia loved everything about the sorority. The parties, the sisterhood, the camaraderie.
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Chapter 2: How does Greek life influence student government at Alabama?
And it was good to have built-in friends, people that were interested in the same things I was interested in and that seemed supportive.
But early on, Alicia saw a darker side beneath the frills and pink accessories. The first glimpse came during her freshman year, when a high school friend, also attending Alabama, ran for student government.
I innocently thought that I could bring her to dinner at the Phi Mu House and introduce her to everybody. It wasn't like we were, you know, handing out anything. I brought her to dinner. I clinked my glass and I introduced her and said that she'd been my friend and she's great and she's running for Senate and please consider voting for her. That was the extent of the whole thing.
And that was the first time that I really got in trouble.
an older girl in the sorority pulled Alicia aside and scolded her. She was told not to support or vote for anyone outside of Greek life. Then, on the eve of the election, she was handed a cheat sheet, a list of exactly who to vote for, from student government president to homecoming queen.
You would come to the house for dinner or whatever other event there was, and they would have printouts. I'm sure they do it on the phone now, but back then we had printouts that told us who to vote for in every category that we could vote in. And we were supposed to take that to the polls with us and put it down next to our ballot and just make those selections.
I knew what voting was supposed to be. And I had just voted in my first presidential election right around that time. Even then, I knew no one could tell me how to vote.
But being told how to vote is a common practice at Alabama. And that's thanks to the machine. For over a century, the machine has run Alabama's campus. It's a chapter of the National Secret Society, Theta Nu Epsilon. But unlike similar groups at other schools, like Yale's Skull and Bones, the machine became a political powerhouse. Here's how it worked.
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Chapter 3: What dark side does Alicia discover in her sorority?
Each fraternity in the machine had a representative. They met in secret to handpick student government candidates, then made sure their houses voted exactly as told. And it worked. Since the student government came into existence in 1914, machine-backed candidates have almost never lost. As the university began admitting women and non-white students, the machine's mission only intensified.
It was about holding onto power, and that meant keeping it in the hands of white men. Until 1976, sororities were excluded from the machine, but that changed after they helped elect a black student as SGA president, a direct challenge to the machine's control. In response, the machine brought them in,
The only reason they were brought in was to double their voting power. And if not for that, they probably still wouldn't be in there.
Phi Mu, Alicia's sorority, was one of many brought into the machine. When she rushed, she knew it was a machine sorority. But it didn't mean much to her until the start of her junior year when she joined the student paper, the Crimson White.
I was majoring in journalism, and I decided to write for the Crimson White because I knew that when I graduated, I would be asked for a portfolio of clips, and those don't make themselves.
At the time, the editor of the paper was a former sorority sister of Alicia's, though she'd since dropped out. She was excited for Alicia to join, but did warn her that getting involved with the paper might cause some tension with the sorority.
But, you know, not enough to scare me off. I can say honestly, I did not anticipate the level of disgruntledness I would get from my friends and from other Greek members.
Her sorority sisters couldn't understand why she'd want to write for the student paper. After all, the paper had a history of publishing critical pieces about Greek life, from its segregation to its control over student government.
So from the very start, they were discouraging me, coming to me and saying, they're going to try to get you to do things that'll make us look bad. You don't need to do this. Sometimes they would ask me what kind of stories I was going to be writing. And there was a lot of, why are you doing this? What is your goal?
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Chapter 4: How does The Machine control voting at the University of Alabama?
You don't want your friends to get hurt because of what you're doing. And she was never my friend again.
To Alicia, it was clear. The machine was sending her a message. Stop writing for the paper, or there will be more consequences. At the University of Alabama, the relationship between Greek life and the student paper is anything but cordial. For decades, the Crimson White has been calling out the problems within the Greek system, elitism, segregation, and the influence of the machine.
I think that the people from the Crimson White covered the machine from the first whisper of it in the early 1900s or whatever. They were always antagonistic to each other.
So you can see why Crimson White reporters were surprised when Alicia, a sorority girl, joined the newsroom.
None of us trusted her when she came in. We did not trust her at all. We thought she was some kind of spy or something.
This is John Archibald. He was a year older than Alicia and already an established reporter at the Crimson White.
We were an automatically distrustful, I mean, this was the 80s and we were very 80s dark newsroom kind of people. And she was, you know, pink bow in the hair, you know, Greek letters around her neck kind of thing. So, I mean, I think there was a natural sort of distrust because that was the nature of the environment. You know, this is a segregated Greek non-Greek campus.
It all sounds weird and it is weird.
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Chapter 5: What tactics does The Machine use to maintain power?
I know I was wearing a pink bow in my hair, like a big one, because I wore them all the time. I didn't think about them not liking Greeks. So I wore my usual, you know, I'm pretty sure I had on some shorts with the FAMI logo on. I mean, I was completely geared in the way that I usually would be. There were people who were very suspicious of me and didn't really trust what I was doing.
Alicia was determined to prove herself in the newsroom and especially eager to impress John.
He made a very big impact on me when I met him. I really liked him from the very start.
It didn't take long for John's suspicion to fade. He and Alicia started dating not long after. And Alicia won over the rest of the team too, proving herself to be a hard-hitting journalist. Her main beat was the Student Government Association, the SGA.
As we started getting into the elections, it became more obvious that the machine was controlling what was going on. And you couldn't cover the SGA without talking about who was making decisions behind the scenes.
The machine had an extraordinary grip on student government. From the SJA's founding in 1914 through the early 1980s, when Alicia was on campus, it had handpicked all but seven student body presidents.
That was always a big question to me personally. How could the machine stay in power when there were so many more people who were not in Greek life? Only 20% of campus was Greek.
For one, the machine was skilled at mobilizing those Greeks to the polls, whether by offering free beer in exchange for votes or fining members who didn't vote. But they didn't rely on chance alone.
I realized how sinister they were, willing to do anything to accomplish their goals.
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Chapter 6: What are the consequences of challenging The Machine?
A black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was moving into an empty sorority house. And it was directly behind the five-year house. The road curves around and they backed up to each other. And John and I were coming home from a date. He was dropping me off. And there were all these police cars.
Just so much going on. they drove over to see what the commotion was about. To their shock, there was a cross burning next to the sorority house.
It was so disturbing and upsetting. And the message was, we do not want Black sororities on white sorority row. And it's not like the sorority issued a press release saying it was wrong or anything like that. That is not the stance that was taken. I don't remember anybody telling me they were disturbed by it, honestly.
The administration didn't investigate the crime, and they certainly didn't acknowledge the open secret that the machine was behind it. That silence gave the machine room to thrive. After all, if it didn't officially exist, it couldn't be held accountable. Not surprisingly, when Alicia tried asking about the machine's involvement in the cross-burning, she got nowhere.
There's just this extreme silence when you try to interview somebody. They really persisted in not admitting that the machine even existed. They would go so far as to say, what machine were you talking about?
Alicia found that hard to believe. Everyone in Greek life knew about the machine. And yet, even sorority and fraternity members didn't know who their own representative was. That's how secretive the organization was. But Alicia wasn't the type to settle for ignorance. She'd been quietly keeping a list of people she suspected were involved. Then a tip came in from someone inside the organization.
It's 1986. Alicia, John, and another editor from the Crimson White are sitting at Wings and Things, a restaurant on University Boulevard. But they're not there to eat. They chose the spot for one reason. It's right across the street from the SAE fraternity house. Alicia got a tip that members of the machine were meeting there that night.
If that's true, and if she can spot who goes in and out, she might finally be able to identify them and land the biggest story of the year.
We sat there basically getting more and more nervous and excited as we watched the house waiting for the meeting to be over for people to come out.
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Chapter 7: How does the administration respond to The Machine's actions?
Alicia still lived with those friends in her sorority house. One day, she noticed something on the bulletin board. Her face had been scratched out with a pencil.
It had become scary all the time. Boys calling the house and telling me that I needed to stop writing for the paper and I would be sorry if I didn't. And the last girl who did it had her lights in her car bashed out with a baseball bat. And, you know, I wouldn't want that, right?
Then, in the spring of her junior year, Alicia added kindling to the fire. She published an opinion piece in the Crimson White.
It was about my desire to integrate the sororities and feeling that 1986 was too late for us to be doing that, that we should have done it before and how we would benefit from the diversity. And I honestly believe that that is what was the final straw for my alumni advisor.
Shortly after the piece was published, the Phi Mu alumni advisor summoned Alicia to her office. And I would just like to reiterate that I was 21 years old.
I feel like I was still a child. And she was a very successful realtor in Tuscaloosa with children in college who had a lot of life under her belt. So I was very intimidated when she started talking. She told me that I shouldn't be writing for the paper. She's like, you are hurting the name of FAMU.
The advisor told Alicia that Phi Mu's national headquarters was involved, meaning she was in serious trouble.
I was so shocked, and I started crying, and I was like, there were always girls in the house with drugs. Why are you focusing on me? That doesn't make sense.
The alumni advisor suggested that Alicia's boyfriend, John, was likely to blame for her poor decision-making.
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