Good morning, it's Friday, May 6, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Today's observations on American culture come from a well-bred white Southern film and stage actress describing the incandescent talents of a fellow native Alabaman. She was Tallulah Bankhead. The man she admired was a black ballplayer who electrified baseball fans in New York and San Francisco -- and everywhere in between -- for two decades in the mid-20th century. His name was Willie Mays.
I've written about Mays, my boyhood idol, several times before in this space, and about Tallulah Bankhead once or twice. It seemed appropriate to do so again this morning: The "Say Hey Kid" turns 91 today. In 1962, when the great Giants centerfielder was at the peak of his powers, Miss Bankhead quipped, "There have only been two geniuses in the world: Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare."
In 1954, when Mays was only 23 -- and both Tallulah and Willie were working in New York -- the actress predicted (accurately) that the Giants would dominate the National League that season. "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 mentioned several reasons for her adoration of the young star: She and Mays came from the same state; she already 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 often reward celebrity more than accomplishment, but in the Bankheads of Alabama there was a good deal of both. It is a family in which the enduring theme seems to be rebellion. The patriarch of the flamboyant 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, who hailed from the Alabama cotton town of Wetumpka, which today bills itself the "City of Natural Beauty," a description that aptly fit young Mrs. Bankhead. Her husband went into Democratic politics, serving in both houses of the Alabama legislature, running the state penitentiary, and 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, although 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 that 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 attended that year's Democratic National Convention in Baltimore where 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 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 similarly perceptive about his own mortality, but in this instance he was correct. Speaker Bankhead died in mid-September 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 best remembered today 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. 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.
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.