Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER FIVE: The One-trick Pony and the Man on the Horse

145 chapter five The One-trick Pony and the Man on the Horse My mom and dad gave me Alabama values, and that’s all I need to be your governor. Alabama values run through my blood and have helped shape my life. Each and every one of you knows exactly what I mean by Alabama values . . . a heritage, a culture, a quality of life, tempered by self-reliance, rebellion and chivalry—it’s all part of being an Alabamian. And I will build Alabama’s future on Alabama values, the values we learned from our parents . . . the values we pass on to our children. —don siegelman, Inaugural Speech, 1999 Even an intelligent governor would be a refreshing change. —bob ingram, “Bronner Won’t Seek Office” The University of Alabama’s fraternity and sorority mansions are planted along Old Row and Magnolia Drive in Tuscaloosa, on a campus that “looks like a museum of plantation houses,” wrote faculty member Diane Roberts following the election of Don Siegelman in 1998. “Most of the buildings boast white columns, tall windows and satiny lawns.” They boast white residents as well. Delta Kappa Epsilon is the oldest of these Greek letter organizations, established by a couple of visiting Yalies in 1847.1 With great expectations, the golden-haired Don Siegelman landed on the Dekes’ baronial doorstep in 1964. “Son of a piano salesman and beautician” was a favorite way for Siegelman to describe his origins, twining his roots around those of everyday Alabamians. A resolution adopted by the state legislature at his father’s death in 2000 celebrated Leslie Bouchet Siegelman not 146 • chapter five only as a “successful piano salesman” but also as “general manager for the Jesse French Company, a Mobile music company.”2 As the old-line white fraternities and sororities of the University of Alabama have maintained racial segregation into the twenty-first century, the political organization of the Greeks, known as the Machine, has continued to hold sway over student government. Don Siegelman, a political science major, won the Machine’s nomination and became president of the Student Government Association in 1968. Previous sga presidents went on to become U.S. senators and representatives, state political officeholders, and major players in the state’s most powerful law firms and businesses. “I don’t think there has ever been a president of the student body who didn’t walk off the campus thinking he or she would be governor,” former Alabama Democratic Party chairman (and onetime sga president) Bill Blount told the Birmingham News. But the Dekes’ Siegelman became the first to actually do so.3 Frat brother became father to the Fratman. At age fifty-two, Don Siegelman, who had been secretary of state, attorney general, and lieutenant governor, won the office he’d coveted “from his days in diapers.”4 The first Democrat to be elected governor since Wallace’s last hurrah in 1982, Siegelman had run with one main proposal: an education lottery to be modeled along the lines of the Hope Scholarship program championed by Georgia governor Zell Miller. Miller himself was present at the inaugural , holding a Siegelman family Bible as well as the state’s official Good Book (the Jeff Davis Bible) for swearing-in. “The next four years will be a defining moment for our children, our families, and for this state’s future,” Siegelman pledged to the capitol steps crowd along Dexter Avenue in his “New Day for Alabama” speech. Although he had made himself an ultimate insider during his series of moves from the Deke mansion on the hill in Tuscaloosa to the Neoclassical Revival governor’s residence in Montgomery, Siegelman insisted, “I am part of Alabama, and you are part of me. I walk in your shoes.”5 When he finished, Parrothead-in-Chief Jimmy Buffett sang “Stars Fell on Alabama.”6 Don Siegelman’s 1999 inaugural speech is worth lingering over for the new governor’s forced attempt to balance old incommensurables: It was here . . . that the Confederate States of America was born. On these steps President Jefferson Davis looked down the same street and saw civil war and sacrifice. The One-trick Pony • 147 In that time he turned to General Robert E. Lee and said: “Lead us.” And we honor General Lee today for his courage, his sense of duty and his sacrifice. Ninety years later . . . a single, solitary African-American woman refused to give...