Say Hey to Alabama's Political Royalty

Good morning, it’s May 6, and Willie Mays' birthday. In 1962, when the great Giants centerfielder was at his peak, Tallulah Bankhead remarked, “There have been only two geniuses in the world: Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.”

In 1954, when Mays was only 23 – and both Tallulah and Willie were stationed in New York – the actress wrote a piece for Look magazine predicting (accurately) that the Giants would dominate the league that year. “Do you want to know why the Giants are going to win the pennant?” she began. “Well, darlings, I can tell you in two words: Willie Mays.”

Tallulah revealed several reasons for her adoration of the young baseball star: She and Mays were both Alabama natives, she loved the Giants, she was a racial liberal (at a time Major League Baseball was still integrating), and her father, Alabama congressman William B. Bankhead – Speaker of the House for two terms during Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure - was also called “Willie” by his family.

We live in times that pay more homage to celebrity than accomplishment, but in the Bankheads of Alabama there were enough of both. It is a family in which the enduring theme seems to be rebellion.

The patriarch of this colorful clan was John Hollis Bankhead, a southern farm boy with limited formal education who enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 19, fighting in many famous Civil War battles, including Chickamauga, where he was seriously wounded. He remained in uniform to the end, however, and by the time of Lee’s surrender had risen to the rank of captain.

After the war, John Bankhead married Tallulah Brockman, a beauty from Wetumpka, Ala., and went into Democratic politics, serving in both houses of the Alabama legislature, running the state penitentiary, ascending to Congress in 1887. Twenty years later, he was elected to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat.

He died in office, in 1920, the last Confederate veteran to serve in Congress, but by then his children were assuming the mantle. His daughter Marie served as Alabama state archivist for some 35 years and two of his sons followed him into politics.

In the early 1930s, his oldest son, John H. Bankhead II, also assumed a seat in the Senate, where he demonstrated that although he was his father’s namesake, he was not his clone. The senior Bankhead voted against women’s suffrage on the grounds it was a state matter. Seeking to help Alabama’s farmers weather the Great Depression, Sen. Bankhead II forged common ground on New Deal economic policies that greatly expanded federal power.

John Hollis Bankhead’s younger son had arrived in Washington earlier. William Bankhead was a congressman in 1912 and attending that year’s Democratic National Convention in Baltimore when he made the Alabama delegation’s motion putting his father’s name in for the presidential nomination that eventually went to Woodrow Wilson.

As Speaker of the House from 1936 to 1940, “Willie” Bankhead carried a lot of water for Franklin Roosevelt. He was an early supporter of FDR’s for the presidency, and he sided with the administration on everything from New Deal economic policies to FDR’s ill-fated attempts to pack the Supreme Court.

Assuming in the run-up to the 1940 election that Roosevelt would not break precedent and run for a third term, Bankhead began assessing his own chances for national office. When it became clear that FDR was indeed running, Bankhead made quiet overtures to the White House about the vice presidency. At 66, he was too old for such a position, FDR believed, and was not considered.

Franklin Roosevelt would not prove to be very perceptive about his own mortality, but in this instance he was correct. Speaker Bankhead died in mid-September of 1940 while campaigning for the Democratic ticket. His legacy would live on, however, in the person of his daughter Tallulah, a stage and movie actress, television personality, writer, talk show host, baseball fanatic, and sexual libertine.

She is remembered today, probably, best for witticisms that seem a cross between Mae West and Dorothy Parker. “I ‘m pure as the driven slush,” Tallulah once said. “Never practice two vices at once,” she also quipped – advice, by the way, she did not follow.

(“I keep a radio going in my dressing room whenever possible so I can hear the Giant games,” she wrote for Look magazine. “I have always been a rabid Giant fan. The name Giants is right for my team. Who could stand in awe of a team named the Cubs? Cubs are cute. Or the Dodgers? I never dodged anything in my life. Cincinnati? Too many Republicans...”)

When it came to race relations, Bankhead was also ahead of her time, and she was able to communicate her views to a wide audience that loved her and loved baseball.

She was proud that New York’s National League teams had been the first to sign and promote African American ballplayers. MLB, she opined in 1954, had finally done something positive for blacks in this country. “If nothing else,” she wrote that year, “it's unbigoted some bigots.”

Willie Mays, she believed, was the kind of transcendental performer whose gifts could overwhelm prejudice. In describing Willie’s play, Tallulah herself casually used the word “color” in a non-racial context.

“Everything he does on a ball field has a theatrical quality,” she wrote. “In the terms of my trade, … he rescues the heroine from the railroad tracks just as she's about to be sliced up by the midnight express. He routs the villain when all seems lost. Willie has that indefinable thing called color. Color blended with talent brings the highest prices in the amusement market. Those blessed with both have what it takes at the box office.”

As she described Mays’ gifts, this granddaughter of an unreconstructed Confederate officer invoked a vision of baseball – and America – as it should be.

“Daddy's name was William Brockman Bankhead,” she noted. “But to family and friends (and voters, God bless them) he was Willie. My Grandmother Tallulah used to say when Daddy did something that pleased her, 'Willie gets under my ribs.' My grandmother wouldn’t have known a baseball from a beaten biscuit, but Willie Mays would have gotten under her ribs too.”