I’m grew up in Alabama, went to the same private school as Jared, attended UA in the early 2000s (and then again for grad school in the early 2010s), and am married a guy who was actually president of one of those “Old Row” fraternities. Which is all to say, I know the world this series has described, inside and out. Anne Helen, you have done a masterful job of illuminating this deeply weird system of power and influence for outsiders. You got everything right. All of it.
Alabama has a pretty terrible public education system, on purpose. When you attend one of the handful of private schools in the state, or one of the handful of small public school districts founded post-Brown v Board to cater to white suburbs, you’re part of an extremely closed social system. I genuinely didn’t know anyone who went to public school when I was growing up (much to my shame and dismay now). There was a while there when I thought that the increase in out-of-state students at the University of Alabama would begin to crack this closed social system. I figured that more students from California and Wisconsin and Michigan (as has been the case since the 2010s and the Saban era) would begin to break the hold these people have on everything in Alabama. But I underestimated just how powerful the image of Greek life at Alabama is outside of the state. It’s part of the reason that I think RushTok is so insidious, because it’s turning what is in fact, a deeply cynical system of power and oppression into what appears to be a silly, frothy, ridiculous performance of white, elite femininity.
I now believe that RushTok exists as a solution to the problem of outsiders threatening to infiltrate what has always been an Old Boys club. It allows people from outside to think they belong without actually threatening the real base of power. Out-of-state girls who post RushTok videos aren’t going to get into any “Old Row” sororities, and if you’re in the real power circles in Alabama, you know that’s what matters.
It’s difficult to understand why The Machine exists—the ideology is hazy, there isn’t an agenda, etc.—if you don’t understand that power and self-perpetuation is the entire point. Maybe the frat boys affiliated with The Machine couldn’t articulate it in so many words, but they know that their continued dominance in state politics, business, and everything else (FWIW, the threat about preventing Alex from passing the bar feels legit to me), depends on their ability to prevent outsiders from infiltrating their closed society. The point is to reinforce that no one who isn’t “one of us” will get anything they want unless it is at our discretion, even if that something feels innocuous, like pay for campus tour guides or football tickets. The point is to make sure that power goes unchallenged, always.
This is the best explanation I've heard for how Rushtok is functioning in real time. It's difficult to describe to people in DMs on Instagram, because I think there's this understanding (borne out in many other spheres of life) that the out-of-state women who are "good" at TikTok will be eagerly invited into the upper echelons, but Rushtok is just another means of identifying who to exclude. And the point that it functions as a recruiting mechanism that simultaneously allows those in power to maintain it and refine it, WHEW, that is *spot on.*
My apologies if this is obvious because there is so much I don’t understand about the concept of rush itself, but do the PNMs have to make these videos, or is it voluntary?
Making the tiktoks? It's voluntary, and the idea they are talking about is that "old row" sororities wouldn't accept those heavily on social media. To the outsider it might seem like the ones followed on tiktok are highly desirable or are playing the game correctly (which they probably are in some ways, just not for the "old row").
This is what I don’t get - do the girls not realize that they’re hurting their chances by making the TikToks?? Or do the OOTD videos help you get into Zeta even while crossing you off the list at Chi O, so deemed to be worth it? Or is the sorority not the real goal because TikTok followers are the only thing that matter in the end?
Thank you for this whole series. Love the penultimate paragraph stating the weirdness of it out loud.
As a white man, let me say that having no real ideas, style or mode of self expression yet organizing to hold power in case you need it for some hand wavey future reason is some of the whitest shit I’ve seen in a minute. And this is the JD Vance timeline!
ha, yes. Holding onto power because you might need it later, and because you don't want anyone else to have it in the meantime.
It strikes me too that this is another side of the power funnel that Anne Helen is talking about. As people enter the funnel, they do have some goal, whether it's just to enjoy college or have a social life, or for the career networking advantages they hope to experience later. For student government they have some goals, even if it's in a small arena. But as they move up in the hierarchy, people start to enjoy the power itself--- just wielding that influence on what other people wear, what other people can do, what they have to do to satisfy you as fraternity pledges,becomes fun or satisfying. The rewards are no longer outside the power. They are the power itself. The "power to" becomes "power over." This also means that the sides of the funnel are becoming steeper, more slippery. They can't get out except by continuing, unless they are washed out, disillusioned and exhausted.
AHP, I would LOVE a "Show Your Work" dive on the behind the scenes of this series. Did you go in with the framing of these five parts or did the framing come after? How much time did you spend "on the ground" vs calling/DMing/emailing? etc. It was one of my fave things you've done here and that's saying something as I've been a CS die-harder since Day 1.
As that smart guy put it a lifetime ago, university administration is much concerned with 'parking for the faculty, sex for the students, football for the alumni.'
This has been an interesting series, not least because of the ultimate emptiness of the political agendas. We're all familiar with the type -- people who run for office not because they want to *do* something but because they want to *be* something. There's a guy who's run for president of the US three times in a row now who falls very clearly in the latter category. But he's not an anomaly, in this anyway. Campus politics, with such low stakes, is the perfect place for people like that: anyone with an actual agenda is going to be frustrated at best (and resented as a try-hard by people just looking for a resume entry).
I suppose their actual agenda could be procedural, but this is also a road to frustration. Whatever their rhetoric, most people absolutely hate talking/thinking about the f*ing rules.
Anne, thank you so much for this series. The investigative research and the writing were incredible. It's amazing to me that this level of journalism can be happening on an individual's newsletter, without all the resources of a big periodical.
There's always something really valuable about exploring power and people's relationship to it. The Machine is such a good example of the truth that power exists to perpetuate itself--the emptiness at the center is irrelevant.
Reading this, it makes me wonder how much The Machine's commitment to the status quo contributes to the economic (and maybe cultural?) stagnation in Alabama. My husband is from the Birmingham area, and his family all still lives there, and it's always struck me how stagnant Birmingham is compared to it's neighbors Atlanta and Nashville. My husband thinks it's because growth means new people coming in with new ideas, which is way too scary for Alabamians. But I wonder how much of that is because the people in power at the state level are there because of their commitment to the status quo?
And the culture among Proper Southern White People™ in Alabama is such a trip. (For context, I'm from the upper Midwest.) It's like a time machine that goes back 100 years. The gender roles are deeply fucked up and apply to all sorts of random things. (E.g. If food is served buffet style, all women must get food before the men get food. Which is super awkward if you're at an event and the only person you know is your boyfriend.) The culture is *so* weird that sometimes it's fun - like Birmingham is the only place I've ever been where my tattoos are transgressive, and it's kinda fun to feel like a badass.
Hahahahah, I'm a Midwesterner and I live in rural South Carolina and my workplace caters lunch for trainings and meetings really frequently and the absolute logjam as the Southern Gentleman try to wrestle all the women present into the food line before they get their plates is endlessly entertaining. We've got quite a few international members of our team and amongst our customers and it's always mass confusion as the women obliviously prevent anyone from eating by not jumping into line.
Yes! This is the exact phenomenon! The first time it happened to me I was at a big gathering at my in-laws, and they were like, "Ann you're new, so you're the guest of honor, you go first." So I made my plate and was ushered out to the deck to sit down and eat. I expected my husband (then boyfriend) to be right behind me, and I was so annoyed when more people kept coming out and sitting down and he was not one of them. Probably 10 people came out before I noticed it was only women who were sitting down to eat. Random women I didn't know were sitting down next to me and not leaving a place next to me for my boyfriend. I had no idea what to do and I was *so* mad at him for ditching me.
After that, I never got a plate before him again, logjams be damned.
I have to admit I’m surprised that there is such an insistence on women eating first! I honestly expected to hear that women were expected to prepare their plate AND their husband’s, or something to that effect.
Your in depth investigation on the University of Alabama is soo, soo needed. I attended the University of Florida, which is surprisingly similar to UA, in the early 2010s. As a child growing up in South Florida, all I had ever heard about UF was that it was the best school in the state. I was so excited to attend and expand my academic horizons. But my experience when I was there was deeply disturbing in so many ways, and most people don’t fully understand. There was something about the way white men in fraternities paraded along campus and frat row that felt…scary. They emitted an energy of power and domination that was intimidating. And they were downright smug.
It’s especially hard to see that attitude against a back drop of giant, old trees. The kind of trees where people were literally hung in the south, not that long ago.
My friend recently reminded me of her experience taking the guided campus tour during high school, in which a band of frat boys yelled out their windows, “PARENTS, SEND US YOUR VIRGINS”. The frat house across the street from my dorm on campus was known for painting its lion statue the color of the underwear of the virgin it had deflowered the night before. I passed by that statue almost daily and was disgusted to see how often it changed colors. While they claimed the lion was painted to support campus events, those colors were often completely disconnected from any current campus events.
I was disappointed that the university was branded to me as a bastion of academic excellence when, in reality, it was a playground for rising Ron DeSantis types. True power on campus didn’t come from knowledge, or morals, or positive leadership traits. It came from white men preserving power and harming others in the process. So many people, even in other parts of the state of Florida, don’t fully understand the horrifying undertones.
This series was delicious to read and I hope it reaches lots of people.
This whole series has been riveting! I am fascinated by the hidden networks of life. When I lived in New Orleans, I learned that the bonds weren’t necessarily among college alumni, or people in Greek life; they were among high school alumni. Newman, St. Aug, Dominican, De La Salle, Brother Martin, Ursuline, Sacred Heart, etc. I’m going to bet that if any New Orleanians go to Bama (versus LSU), they network through their high school relationships.
This is true in Alabama, too, at least for Mobilians. Mobile is off by itself because of its physical distance from Montgomery (2.5 hours) and Birmingham (4 hours), so it's quite insular, not unlike New Orleans. It's the only place I've ever been where people put stickers on their car advertising that they're alumni of the HS they attended. When I posted to social media that we were moving there many many years ago a friend of mine from HS who'd gone to Auburn sent me a message about how in her experience Mobile people only hung out with Mobile people. And all those connections definitely influence their college decisions and which houses they pledge.
Not super relevant to the main point haha, but the high school you went to is a big deal in Memphis too! Much more so than almost anything else. Was definitely one of the bigger culture shocks for this East Coaster when I moved there.
This was an absolutely brilliant series, and I loved every minute of it. It was fascinating to think about how power is coded and exerted in a deeply traditional southern context.
I would love to see a similar analysis about how power is coded in California, or the Pacific Northwest, or the New York area - the obviously blue parts of the country, with tons of immigrants and outsiders.
Yup I grew up in Louisville and live in the SF Bay Area CA now — whenever I meet someone here from Louisville we like to jokingly (?) ask each other what high school we went to in order to start the conversation!
I lived in Baltimore for a decade and it was the same there. Maybe it's a Southern thing? I felt like I never fit in, since I had grown up in Michigan. (My ex-husband was a lifelong Baltimorean, so for the most part, that was the crowd I spent time around.)
It just occurred to me (so, brand new theory, may need some workshopping) that networking via which high school you went to is a very good way to make sure you’re only sharing power with folks who grew up there—not outsiders. In college and Greek life, there’s some risk that someone from California or the Midwest or wherever could show up and infiltrate. Not so if you had to have been a teenager in that town to join the club.
Thanks so much for this series, so fascinating. I feel like this is such fertile ground for the reasons you layout about power, connections and the differences between the male coded version and the female coded version of the same institution.
I would love to hear about things like experiences of former staff of the houses, and about the particular separation of 'typical traits' of men and women go on to define people's lives. I think hearing about marriages between greek members from multiple perspectives would be really interesting.
This right here -- esp about their marriages and how much it ends up gender-coded where dad gets to "hang out and chill" and mom is over there doing all the things to keep it running and beautiful (I think I already know the answer lol).
Thank you for this fantastic series. I really appreciate that you took this culture and its impacts seriously instead of writing it off the way we usually do as 'those harmless college kids'. I was in a sorority in a northeastern private school 20 years ago and I still cringe to this day saying that. This has given me so much to reflect on about that experience. Why did I do it? What was the Greek system's role in the culture of the university? How was it hoarding and reproducing power?
Wow, great facts about Lister Hill. The library for the School of Public Health at UAB (a top SOPH!) is named after him, so that's fun...I don't even remember seeing any efforts to change the name, either (hopefully I just missed those).
I think one of the things that makes it really hard to conclusively pinpoint The Machine's influence is the way it's all inextricably intertwined with patronage. Katie Britt was Shelby's COS for years. She was his handpicked successor. The current president of the University of South Alabama is UA's former Chancellor who was handpicked for that position by his sister, who was president of UA at the time. He was a MOC and stepped down to take it. He became a MOC because he was COS to the guy who held the seat before him. But these are all stories that don't sound too different from ones you hear in other states, too (like how did Ben Sasse, without any connections to UF, become president there if not because he was who Ron DeSantis supported for the role?)!
I also know, as we discussed earlier this week, that the Democratic Party in Alabama is a total mess. Like literally couldn't "pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel." So while I *do* find all the talk about The Machine interesting and especially love to speculate who I may know who is personally a part of it, I can't help but wonder if Jared isn't right? I really have no idea.
Anne must have been laughing at me all week saying "just you wait" when I kept trying to connect dots to actual power- this piece did it. Appreciate the way this ties things together and also see this dynamic replicated across society and at other schools even when they have a weaker greek life but secret societies and eating clubs and the like. Something interesting about the 18-23 year old demographic that seems to thrive on these sorts of power trips and be indoctrinated into them for life.
I’ve always thought this kind of patronage and “it’s who you know” was more organized in the Northeastern US, especially Ivy League schools. Legacy admissions, etc. And although there’s a certain universality to “it’s who you know,” I had no inkling that power structures were so formal in other places, and reached so high. Amazing and illuminating reporting!
"Casey Nelson, who went on to become the communications director for Tom Emmer, the Republican Majority Whip in the US House of Representatives"
Emmer, "my" representative here in MN, holds the seat formerly held by Michele Bachmann. He's chairing the Trump campaign effort in Minnesota. Despite a long-time opposition to same-sex marriage, he was one of very few Republicans (and the only Minnesota Republican) to vote in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, repealing DOMA. When I told him at the Anoka County Fair how much his vote had surprised me, he just shrugged and said, "You have to let people be who they are."
Something of an enigma, Tom, but clearly hitching his wagon to MAGA now.
Great series, thank you. I was a committed non-joiner, someone whose family had never been part of a greek system so it was foreign to me when I started college in 1985. But in the '80's Greek life at my University was low key, low pressure, and I'm glad I took part in it. I would NOT fit in there now, not even at my school. So I straddle lines on this topic, in ways I never thought that I would. It netted me some of my very best friends that I still treasure and would not have met were it not for my membership in my particular sorority. Was expensive? yes. Could I afford it? barely. Am I sorry I did it? No. But did any of my kids pledge when they went to school? Also no (note: my husband was in a fraternity and that is how we met). To each their own. But any group that makes you Conform or Die is something to be mightily suspect of, regardless of what letters or names they go by.
Thanks so much for this week’s emails. Really enjoyed the series as a complete outsider. Writing from Ireland - where sororities and fraternities don’t exist - when I read the first paragraph I thought an examination of ‘Greek life’ was going to be an exploration of the experiences of Greek immigrants to the US! Very insightful and interesting (and horrifying) to reflect how this behaviour, learned at college age, permeates politics at a higher level.
I’m grew up in Alabama, went to the same private school as Jared, attended UA in the early 2000s (and then again for grad school in the early 2010s), and am married a guy who was actually president of one of those “Old Row” fraternities. Which is all to say, I know the world this series has described, inside and out. Anne Helen, you have done a masterful job of illuminating this deeply weird system of power and influence for outsiders. You got everything right. All of it.
Alabama has a pretty terrible public education system, on purpose. When you attend one of the handful of private schools in the state, or one of the handful of small public school districts founded post-Brown v Board to cater to white suburbs, you’re part of an extremely closed social system. I genuinely didn’t know anyone who went to public school when I was growing up (much to my shame and dismay now). There was a while there when I thought that the increase in out-of-state students at the University of Alabama would begin to crack this closed social system. I figured that more students from California and Wisconsin and Michigan (as has been the case since the 2010s and the Saban era) would begin to break the hold these people have on everything in Alabama. But I underestimated just how powerful the image of Greek life at Alabama is outside of the state. It’s part of the reason that I think RushTok is so insidious, because it’s turning what is in fact, a deeply cynical system of power and oppression into what appears to be a silly, frothy, ridiculous performance of white, elite femininity.
I now believe that RushTok exists as a solution to the problem of outsiders threatening to infiltrate what has always been an Old Boys club. It allows people from outside to think they belong without actually threatening the real base of power. Out-of-state girls who post RushTok videos aren’t going to get into any “Old Row” sororities, and if you’re in the real power circles in Alabama, you know that’s what matters.
It’s difficult to understand why The Machine exists—the ideology is hazy, there isn’t an agenda, etc.—if you don’t understand that power and self-perpetuation is the entire point. Maybe the frat boys affiliated with The Machine couldn’t articulate it in so many words, but they know that their continued dominance in state politics, business, and everything else (FWIW, the threat about preventing Alex from passing the bar feels legit to me), depends on their ability to prevent outsiders from infiltrating their closed society. The point is to reinforce that no one who isn’t “one of us” will get anything they want unless it is at our discretion, even if that something feels innocuous, like pay for campus tour guides or football tickets. The point is to make sure that power goes unchallenged, always.
This is the best explanation I've heard for how Rushtok is functioning in real time. It's difficult to describe to people in DMs on Instagram, because I think there's this understanding (borne out in many other spheres of life) that the out-of-state women who are "good" at TikTok will be eagerly invited into the upper echelons, but Rushtok is just another means of identifying who to exclude. And the point that it functions as a recruiting mechanism that simultaneously allows those in power to maintain it and refine it, WHEW, that is *spot on.*
My apologies if this is obvious because there is so much I don’t understand about the concept of rush itself, but do the PNMs have to make these videos, or is it voluntary?
Making the tiktoks? It's voluntary, and the idea they are talking about is that "old row" sororities wouldn't accept those heavily on social media. To the outsider it might seem like the ones followed on tiktok are highly desirable or are playing the game correctly (which they probably are in some ways, just not for the "old row").
This is what I don’t get - do the girls not realize that they’re hurting their chances by making the TikToks?? Or do the OOTD videos help you get into Zeta even while crossing you off the list at Chi O, so deemed to be worth it? Or is the sorority not the real goal because TikTok followers are the only thing that matter in the end?
Ah ok, I see! Thank you!
Thank you for this whole series. Love the penultimate paragraph stating the weirdness of it out loud.
As a white man, let me say that having no real ideas, style or mode of self expression yet organizing to hold power in case you need it for some hand wavey future reason is some of the whitest shit I’ve seen in a minute. And this is the JD Vance timeline!
ha, yes. Holding onto power because you might need it later, and because you don't want anyone else to have it in the meantime.
It strikes me too that this is another side of the power funnel that Anne Helen is talking about. As people enter the funnel, they do have some goal, whether it's just to enjoy college or have a social life, or for the career networking advantages they hope to experience later. For student government they have some goals, even if it's in a small arena. But as they move up in the hierarchy, people start to enjoy the power itself--- just wielding that influence on what other people wear, what other people can do, what they have to do to satisfy you as fraternity pledges,becomes fun or satisfying. The rewards are no longer outside the power. They are the power itself. The "power to" becomes "power over." This also means that the sides of the funnel are becoming steeper, more slippery. They can't get out except by continuing, unless they are washed out, disillusioned and exhausted.
Yikes!
AHP, I would LOVE a "Show Your Work" dive on the behind the scenes of this series. Did you go in with the framing of these five parts or did the framing come after? How much time did you spend "on the ground" vs calling/DMing/emailing? etc. It was one of my fave things you've done here and that's saying something as I've been a CS die-harder since Day 1.
As that smart guy put it a lifetime ago, university administration is much concerned with 'parking for the faculty, sex for the students, football for the alumni.'
This has been an interesting series, not least because of the ultimate emptiness of the political agendas. We're all familiar with the type -- people who run for office not because they want to *do* something but because they want to *be* something. There's a guy who's run for president of the US three times in a row now who falls very clearly in the latter category. But he's not an anomaly, in this anyway. Campus politics, with such low stakes, is the perfect place for people like that: anyone with an actual agenda is going to be frustrated at best (and resented as a try-hard by people just looking for a resume entry).
I suppose their actual agenda could be procedural, but this is also a road to frustration. Whatever their rhetoric, most people absolutely hate talking/thinking about the f*ing rules.
Anne, thank you so much for this series. The investigative research and the writing were incredible. It's amazing to me that this level of journalism can be happening on an individual's newsletter, without all the resources of a big periodical.
There's always something really valuable about exploring power and people's relationship to it. The Machine is such a good example of the truth that power exists to perpetuate itself--the emptiness at the center is irrelevant.
Reading this, it makes me wonder how much The Machine's commitment to the status quo contributes to the economic (and maybe cultural?) stagnation in Alabama. My husband is from the Birmingham area, and his family all still lives there, and it's always struck me how stagnant Birmingham is compared to it's neighbors Atlanta and Nashville. My husband thinks it's because growth means new people coming in with new ideas, which is way too scary for Alabamians. But I wonder how much of that is because the people in power at the state level are there because of their commitment to the status quo?
And the culture among Proper Southern White People™ in Alabama is such a trip. (For context, I'm from the upper Midwest.) It's like a time machine that goes back 100 years. The gender roles are deeply fucked up and apply to all sorts of random things. (E.g. If food is served buffet style, all women must get food before the men get food. Which is super awkward if you're at an event and the only person you know is your boyfriend.) The culture is *so* weird that sometimes it's fun - like Birmingham is the only place I've ever been where my tattoos are transgressive, and it's kinda fun to feel like a badass.
Hahahahah, I'm a Midwesterner and I live in rural South Carolina and my workplace caters lunch for trainings and meetings really frequently and the absolute logjam as the Southern Gentleman try to wrestle all the women present into the food line before they get their plates is endlessly entertaining. We've got quite a few international members of our team and amongst our customers and it's always mass confusion as the women obliviously prevent anyone from eating by not jumping into line.
Yes! This is the exact phenomenon! The first time it happened to me I was at a big gathering at my in-laws, and they were like, "Ann you're new, so you're the guest of honor, you go first." So I made my plate and was ushered out to the deck to sit down and eat. I expected my husband (then boyfriend) to be right behind me, and I was so annoyed when more people kept coming out and sitting down and he was not one of them. Probably 10 people came out before I noticed it was only women who were sitting down to eat. Random women I didn't know were sitting down next to me and not leaving a place next to me for my boyfriend. I had no idea what to do and I was *so* mad at him for ditching me.
After that, I never got a plate before him again, logjams be damned.
I have to admit I’m surprised that there is such an insistence on women eating first! I honestly expected to hear that women were expected to prepare their plate AND their husband’s, or something to that effect.
As a woman in the south, it’s because they let us have “little treats” sometimes so that we don’t totally overthrow the patriarchy :).
This is fascinating on so many levels
Your in depth investigation on the University of Alabama is soo, soo needed. I attended the University of Florida, which is surprisingly similar to UA, in the early 2010s. As a child growing up in South Florida, all I had ever heard about UF was that it was the best school in the state. I was so excited to attend and expand my academic horizons. But my experience when I was there was deeply disturbing in so many ways, and most people don’t fully understand. There was something about the way white men in fraternities paraded along campus and frat row that felt…scary. They emitted an energy of power and domination that was intimidating. And they were downright smug.
It’s especially hard to see that attitude against a back drop of giant, old trees. The kind of trees where people were literally hung in the south, not that long ago.
My friend recently reminded me of her experience taking the guided campus tour during high school, in which a band of frat boys yelled out their windows, “PARENTS, SEND US YOUR VIRGINS”. The frat house across the street from my dorm on campus was known for painting its lion statue the color of the underwear of the virgin it had deflowered the night before. I passed by that statue almost daily and was disgusted to see how often it changed colors. While they claimed the lion was painted to support campus events, those colors were often completely disconnected from any current campus events.
I was disappointed that the university was branded to me as a bastion of academic excellence when, in reality, it was a playground for rising Ron DeSantis types. True power on campus didn’t come from knowledge, or morals, or positive leadership traits. It came from white men preserving power and harming others in the process. So many people, even in other parts of the state of Florida, don’t fully understand the horrifying undertones.
This series was delicious to read and I hope it reaches lots of people.
I loved this series, and I am going to be really sad tomorrow when there's not another installment to chew over. Thanks AHP and team!
Agreed! I could read 50 more haha
This whole series has been riveting! I am fascinated by the hidden networks of life. When I lived in New Orleans, I learned that the bonds weren’t necessarily among college alumni, or people in Greek life; they were among high school alumni. Newman, St. Aug, Dominican, De La Salle, Brother Martin, Ursuline, Sacred Heart, etc. I’m going to bet that if any New Orleanians go to Bama (versus LSU), they network through their high school relationships.
This is true in Alabama, too, at least for Mobilians. Mobile is off by itself because of its physical distance from Montgomery (2.5 hours) and Birmingham (4 hours), so it's quite insular, not unlike New Orleans. It's the only place I've ever been where people put stickers on their car advertising that they're alumni of the HS they attended. When I posted to social media that we were moving there many many years ago a friend of mine from HS who'd gone to Auburn sent me a message about how in her experience Mobile people only hung out with Mobile people. And all those connections definitely influence their college decisions and which houses they pledge.
Not super relevant to the main point haha, but the high school you went to is a big deal in Memphis too! Much more so than almost anything else. Was definitely one of the bigger culture shocks for this East Coaster when I moved there.
This was an absolutely brilliant series, and I loved every minute of it. It was fascinating to think about how power is coded and exerted in a deeply traditional southern context.
I would love to see a similar analysis about how power is coded in California, or the Pacific Northwest, or the New York area - the obviously blue parts of the country, with tons of immigrants and outsiders.
I have family in and lots of friends from St. Louis and it also the same there!
It's 100% this way in Louisville, KY too!
Yup I grew up in Louisville and live in the SF Bay Area CA now — whenever I meet someone here from Louisville we like to jokingly (?) ask each other what high school we went to in order to start the conversation!
I lived in Baltimore for a decade and it was the same there. Maybe it's a Southern thing? I felt like I never fit in, since I had grown up in Michigan. (My ex-husband was a lifelong Baltimorean, so for the most part, that was the crowd I spent time around.)
It just occurred to me (so, brand new theory, may need some workshopping) that networking via which high school you went to is a very good way to make sure you’re only sharing power with folks who grew up there—not outsiders. In college and Greek life, there’s some risk that someone from California or the Midwest or wherever could show up and infiltrate. Not so if you had to have been a teenager in that town to join the club.
Thanks so much for this series, so fascinating. I feel like this is such fertile ground for the reasons you layout about power, connections and the differences between the male coded version and the female coded version of the same institution.
I would love to hear about things like experiences of former staff of the houses, and about the particular separation of 'typical traits' of men and women go on to define people's lives. I think hearing about marriages between greek members from multiple perspectives would be really interesting.
This right here -- esp about their marriages and how much it ends up gender-coded where dad gets to "hang out and chill" and mom is over there doing all the things to keep it running and beautiful (I think I already know the answer lol).
Thank you for this fantastic series. I really appreciate that you took this culture and its impacts seriously instead of writing it off the way we usually do as 'those harmless college kids'. I was in a sorority in a northeastern private school 20 years ago and I still cringe to this day saying that. This has given me so much to reflect on about that experience. Why did I do it? What was the Greek system's role in the culture of the university? How was it hoarding and reproducing power?
Wow, great facts about Lister Hill. The library for the School of Public Health at UAB (a top SOPH!) is named after him, so that's fun...I don't even remember seeing any efforts to change the name, either (hopefully I just missed those).
I think one of the things that makes it really hard to conclusively pinpoint The Machine's influence is the way it's all inextricably intertwined with patronage. Katie Britt was Shelby's COS for years. She was his handpicked successor. The current president of the University of South Alabama is UA's former Chancellor who was handpicked for that position by his sister, who was president of UA at the time. He was a MOC and stepped down to take it. He became a MOC because he was COS to the guy who held the seat before him. But these are all stories that don't sound too different from ones you hear in other states, too (like how did Ben Sasse, without any connections to UF, become president there if not because he was who Ron DeSantis supported for the role?)!
I also know, as we discussed earlier this week, that the Democratic Party in Alabama is a total mess. Like literally couldn't "pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel." So while I *do* find all the talk about The Machine interesting and especially love to speculate who I may know who is personally a part of it, I can't help but wonder if Jared isn't right? I really have no idea.
Anne must have been laughing at me all week saying "just you wait" when I kept trying to connect dots to actual power- this piece did it. Appreciate the way this ties things together and also see this dynamic replicated across society and at other schools even when they have a weaker greek life but secret societies and eating clubs and the like. Something interesting about the 18-23 year old demographic that seems to thrive on these sorts of power trips and be indoctrinated into them for life.
I’ve always thought this kind of patronage and “it’s who you know” was more organized in the Northeastern US, especially Ivy League schools. Legacy admissions, etc. And although there’s a certain universality to “it’s who you know,” I had no inkling that power structures were so formal in other places, and reached so high. Amazing and illuminating reporting!
"Casey Nelson, who went on to become the communications director for Tom Emmer, the Republican Majority Whip in the US House of Representatives"
Emmer, "my" representative here in MN, holds the seat formerly held by Michele Bachmann. He's chairing the Trump campaign effort in Minnesota. Despite a long-time opposition to same-sex marriage, he was one of very few Republicans (and the only Minnesota Republican) to vote in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, repealing DOMA. When I told him at the Anoka County Fair how much his vote had surprised me, he just shrugged and said, "You have to let people be who they are."
Something of an enigma, Tom, but clearly hitching his wagon to MAGA now.
Great series, thank you. I was a committed non-joiner, someone whose family had never been part of a greek system so it was foreign to me when I started college in 1985. But in the '80's Greek life at my University was low key, low pressure, and I'm glad I took part in it. I would NOT fit in there now, not even at my school. So I straddle lines on this topic, in ways I never thought that I would. It netted me some of my very best friends that I still treasure and would not have met were it not for my membership in my particular sorority. Was expensive? yes. Could I afford it? barely. Am I sorry I did it? No. But did any of my kids pledge when they went to school? Also no (note: my husband was in a fraternity and that is how we met). To each their own. But any group that makes you Conform or Die is something to be mightily suspect of, regardless of what letters or names they go by.
Thanks so much for this week’s emails. Really enjoyed the series as a complete outsider. Writing from Ireland - where sororities and fraternities don’t exist - when I read the first paragraph I thought an examination of ‘Greek life’ was going to be an exploration of the experiences of Greek immigrants to the US! Very insightful and interesting (and horrifying) to reflect how this behaviour, learned at college age, permeates politics at a higher level.