Norwood Mackie was a Texan Army officer, Jesuit chaplain, and statesman who served as the 31st President of the Republic of Texas from July 1954 until his assassination in 1969. In Texas, he is commonly referred to as Father Mackie, or by his initials, ANM.
Mackie was born in Benthuysen, Hunt County in 1916. He was the fourth son of Andrew Mackie, a clothier, and Marian Short Mackie, a midwife. Both his parents were devout Roman Catholics. His grandfather Thomas had migrated from Ulster to Texas in 1873 to work on the railroads. At age 17, Mackie graduated from Our Lady of the Assumption Seminary School in Bishop and joined the Society of Jesus. In 1935, he graduated Saint Paul Commissary College and was designated a chaplain in the Army of the Republic of Texas. From 1936 to 1938, he served military congregations in Nacogdoches and Bird’s Fort. Upon the outbreak of the Second Continental War, Mackie was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and sent to the Trans-Mississippi front to fight against the Anglo-Americans. He received 17 medals, decorations, and awards, including the Texas Valor Cross, and ended the war with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He was promoted to full Colonel in 1946.
As Colonel, Mackie was the Deputy Director of Army Intelligence before transferring to the Quartermaster Department. In February 1948, Mackie was appointed Deputy Commissioner for Veterans Pensions by President Lazard. He was removed from his post May of that same year after being accused of Communist sympathies, and was recommended for ten-months instruction at l’École de guerre in Paris.
Mackie returned to Texas to find a greatly changed political environment. The reactionary Lazard had been ousted in favor of the much more amenable General Alphonse E. Ames, who promised an end to Old Guard paranoia in favor of “Honor, Progress, and Bread”. He restructured the steel and shipbuilding industries, raised wages for agrarian laborers, and formed a provisional committee for revisions to the Official Texas Bible. Selected by Ames as a potential protégé to cultivate, Mackie received the prestigious appointment of Provost of St. Paul Commissary College. Following the downfall of Ames ally James P. Thomas, Mackie ascended to the office of Secretary of State in 1953. He came to represent the conservative tendency in the military, and clashed frequently with the President.
In the end, Ames proved to be a bitter disappointment to both the political Catholic elite, who found him atrociously liberal and insufficiently pious, and the peasant-labor left, who resented his patrician roots and felt that he did not go far enough with his reforms, particularly land reform. Foreign perceptions were no more flattering; on a state visit to Houston-on-the-Brazos in May 1951, French Prime Minister Jeanneret derisively referred to Ames as a “sycophantic little gargoyle”. The officer corps quickly grew tired of their former hero’s chameleon antics, and talk of a coup was in the air as early as 1952. With no single faction detesting him enough to overthrow him, Ames clung to power for another two years before the pot boiled over.
The Texan coup d’état of 1954 was relatively bloodless, and Ames was placed under house arrest. Four hours later, Andrew Norwood Mackie was unanimously elected President by the State Council for Constitutional Reconstruction in the dining hall of the Presidential Palace.