Brief Romance

Of the 20 new U.S. governors who took office this year, none was more eager to get going than Michigan's John Swainson. But by last week, like many another freshman Governor across the U.S., Democrat Swainson, 35, had discovered that campaign saying was a far cry from in-office doing.

Swainson stepped into the shoes of Democratic Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams, whose six terms of financial feuding with Michigan's Republican legislature had teetered the state to the brink of bankruptcy. After Soapy, anyone would have looked good to the G.O.P. legislators, and Swainson looked especially promising: he was elected on his record as Lieutenant Governor, as a state senator, and as a World War II combat veteran who lost both legs below the knee. The legislators were delighted when Swainson dropped around to pay them a surprise visit on the opening day of their 1961 session.

But the minute Swainson began poking into Michigan's fiscal mess--the problem that popped Soapy's bubble--he also ran into trouble. In short order, the legislature killed the income tax that Swainson had proposed in order to lower the state deficit of $67 million. It cut back Swainson's request for aid to state universities and colleges from $105,700,000 to $98,400,000, upsetting the schools' delicately balanced budgets and forcing them all to restrict enrollments next fall. Especially hard hit by the reduction was poor but proud Wayne State University in midtown Detroit, which relies almost entirely on public funds, has no endowments to match those of the University of Michigan or Michigan State University.

What was more, the Republicans were quick to blame Swainson for some political partisanship when he vetoed a bill calling for stricter voter registration in Detroit, the Democratic stronghold that the G.O.P. suspects of wholesale vote stealing last November.

Just before the legislature adjourned last week, Governor Swainson really enraged the Republicans: he vetoed a bill that would have barred payments of state unemployment benefits to Michigan employees thrown out of work by the effects of an out-of-state strike (as in the case of a Michigan auto company that laid off men after its Ohio supplier plant was struck by the United Auto Workers). The Republicans shouted that Swainson, like Soapy before him, was playing the U.A.W. game. Retorted Swainson: "Strictly a political charge, of course." Thus the brief romance between John Swainson and the Michigan legislature was finally and completely phfft.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.