The Little Governor

Most Georgians were pleasantly surprised at the moderate pronouncements of Lester Garfield Maddox after he took over the statehouse last January. His critics in the cities had feared the worst from the onetime purveyor of fried chicken and racist pamphlets who earned national notoriety by chasing Negroes away from his Pickrick restaurant in Atlanta at gunpoint. But Governor Maddox seemed to grow in his new job. Racial peace was preserved, his administration was untainted by corruption, and he plunged into work with gusto, opening his office door to "the little man," black or white, whom he had pledged to represent.

Maddox, 51, hired Negroes for state jobs, ordered a sweeping inquiry into Georgia's fetid convict camps, and bustled around greeting one and all with a breezy "Everything Pickrick?" Some of his constituents even took comfort from the Governor's proclivity for picayune problems. "I'd rather have him clipping my toenails," averred one critic, "than operating on my heart."

Dashed Hopes. But eight months after his inauguration, business and civic leaders no longer view their Governor's performance with such equanimity. The prison probe generated no tangible reforms, and most Maddox innovations have proved to be short-lived palliatives at best. Hopes for better education were dashed when the Governor moved to bar consolidation of schools and began toying with illicit schemes to subsidize all-white private schools with state funds. A plan to alleviate the desperate financial squeeze on Georgia's cities by allowing them to tack 1% onto the state's 3% sales tax was also rejected by Maddox, who has yet to put forward a comprehensive legislative program. "I reckon I'll get around to that soon," he muses.

Industry, which the state had wooed successfully under the progressive, racially moderate administration of Governor Carl Sanders, was less than impressed by Maddox's populist style and outspokenly unhappy over his retrogressive plans for the schools. Nor were prospective clients encouraged when Maddox fired the head of the state's department of industry and trade. As a result, Republican Legislator Rodney Cook, a backer of the industry-seeking Forward Atlanta organization, charges that capital outlay for new factories and expansion of existing plants in the state slumped by $86 million during the first six months of 1967.

Bingo & Booze. But Maddox has time for other matters. A teetotaling, nonsmoking, hard-shell Baptist, he fervently believes that gambling--even church bingo--breeds "drinking, assault and drug addiction." Accordingly, he declared war on all games of chance, although his own furniture store in Atlanta was then raffling off a $299 sleeper set. He wasted no time combatting Sabbath drinking. Despite a 1964 state law permitting local authorities to set hours for closing bars, state agents obeyed the Governor's orders one Sunday by raiding an Atlanta nightclub at 2 a.m. and hauling away $5,000 worth of liquor. The owner is suing the Governor, who had invoked an obscure 1938 blue law prohibiting the sale of drink on the Lord's Day.

Hominy & Homilies. Last week, at the Southern Governors' annual conference at Asheville, N.C., Maddox launched into archaic harangues against federal guidelines to desegregate schools, denounced the war on poverty ("It's breeding a generation of bums"), sneered at his fellow Governors for bowing to the "King" in Washington. He also voted down an ambitious long-term program for complete integration of the South's Negro colleges. Maddox's peers either snubbed him or ignored him, and an Atlanta Constitution cartoon showed the Governor returning from the meeting with a black eye.

Maddox's antics have endeared him more than ever to his supporters in the red clay counties he calls "Maddox country." But the diet of hominy and homilies from the Governor's office is gritting city dwellers' teeth. "I'm afraid," sighs an Atlanta official, "we are in for four years of triviality."

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