National Reports

...Of a novel of his scheduled for fall publication...

...A bill to outlaw interracial social and athletic events aroused a storm of opposition from the south Georgia delegation, bceause it would destroy minor league baseball in the state...

...These two proposals, full of righteous indignation hut without any binding effect, serve to certify the diligence with which Georgia's legislators are fighting the good light, but involve them in no potentially embarrassing commitments...

...all I care about: is Georgia's 250,000 textile workers...

...In 1946, he was elected state Attorney General on a Republican "Reform" ticket headed by Kim Sigler...

...The criticism he showered on his fellow Republicans during all the months he held office as Attorney General almost certainly created the political atmosphere which made possible Williams's first victory in the 1948 elections...

...Attempts to inquire into what some legislators feel is a noisome mess have been beaten back bv the Administration: the Governor's brother and salaried administrative aide, "Cheney" Griffin, has been seen on the floor of the House informing legislators of the Governor's wishes...

...The Legislature also passed, with only a few dissenting votes, what the newspapers solemnly called "Governor Griffin's segregation program...

...It has produced what veteran observers have come to consider its normal quota of measures that are either ridiculous or sinister, but always sensational...

...All Atlanta can do is endure the vagaries of the Legislature and try to extract some of the amusement that Georgia's Government is providing for the rest of the nation...

...After long debate, a bill discriminating against imported Japanese textiles, which was passed by the House, was defeated in the Senate...

...Atlanta and its environs form a wealthy but politically emasculated area...

...It aroused opposition from many groups ordinarily politically inert, and narrowly failed passage...

...He is the first resident of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to serve on the State Supreme Court in many decades...

...Atlanta A Northerner moving into Georgia isn't here very long before he hears the wry comment that "Georgia exists fo r the amusement of the rest of the nation...

...As a national leader of the Student League for Industrial Democracy in the hectic mid-1930s, he had already earned a reputation as a firebrand...

...2) Another memorial will urge the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren and five associate justices (no explanation was offered for the omitted three...

...Two of the laws that are part of the program, however, are of major importance and rank with last year's authorization for the abolition of public schools as an alternative lo desegregation...

...if the judgment of Michigan's liberal lawyers may be trusted, also the most brilliant...

...I cannot believe that it was the legislative intent to protect only the strong, letting the weak lie where they fall...

...in his opinion, this is needed to preserve segregation...

...Even so, he rolled up the largest plurality ever polled by a candidate for statewide office in Michigan history...

...Whatever Atlanta wants the rest of the state usually opposes...

...At the last moment, however, the bill was pigeonholed...

...Since then it has been involved in bitter—if mysterious and largely covert—controversy...

...This moved through with little opposition and no important public discussion...

...For many reasons, they form an unusual group...

...This enables him to strangle any county whose representatives oppose him...

...Southern politicians have a preference for Constitutional controversy, fmd the Legislature's two most publicized efforts have come in this field: (1) A memorial to the U.S...

...Justice George Edwards is perhaps the best known of the four...

...Voelker is now standing for election after prior appointment by Williams...

...The General Assembly, under the watchful eye and close supervision of Governor Marvin Griffin, has moved steadily through its program...

...In what must have been his first appearance before a Michigan court, ho was a defendant charged with unlawful conduct in the Yale-Towne sitdown strike...

...Several years ago, he was an unsuccessful candidate for Mayor of Detroit...

...The county-unit system for making Democratic nominations for statewide offices, and the apportionment of representation in the Legislature (Fulton County is the most under-represented county in the nation), put the cities at the mercy of the wool-hats...

...Thereafter, Edwards became one of the UAW's most effective full-time organizers...

...Old-fashioned enough to be an admirer of Eugene Victor Debs, Voelker describes himself as a kind of "backwoods egghead...

...Baffled by the ease with which Negro leaders were able to get a bus segregation case into court without giving the state a chance to use its police power to quell a "disturbance," the Administration demanded, and received, the right to act much more freely...

...Early in 1955, he was nominated for the State Supreme Court at the State Democratic Convention and won the spring election handily...

...Actually, if indirectly, il was another weapon in Ihc segregationists' fight to prove that Negroes arc unfit for association with whites...

...Throughout the next two years, Black aimed a running fire of bitter criticism at Governor Sigler...

...Black finally switched political allegiance and joined the Democratic party...

...Elected to a short term just last fall, after having served for a period a? a Williams appointee, Smith is now campaigning for re-election to a full term on the Court...

...A liberal Republican in the Wayne Morse-LaGuardia-George Norris tradition, he could not abide the Republicans with whom he had run...

...Prior to his defeat in that campaign, in which he was dubbed "the CIO candidate" by local newspapers, he had been President of the City's Common Council...

...The argument ran that since most illegitimate children are Negro, their mothers would not risk criminal prosecution in order to receive aid...

...His 849,000-vote margin exceeded that given Williams by 558,000 and Eisenhower's plurality by 495,000...

...Arriving in town, he look a job at the Kelsey Hayes Wheel plant, where he helped Walter and Victor Reuther establish the first sizable unit in the United Auto Workers' giant West Side Local Union 174...

...If these four Democrats remain for any time 011 the Michigan Supreme Court, they will make it the most unorthodox and interesting in the nation—and...

...the rest of the state (exccpt for the clustcr of middle-sized cities) fears, distrusts and resents the cilv slickers...

...Some years ago the island was purchased by the state as a playground for the public...

...The session has been dominated by the single obsession that has gripped all Georgia political life since May 17, 1954: race...

...Last fall, when Edwards ran as candidate for election to the Michigan Supreme Court, the Chicago Tribune, which circulates heavily in the state's western counties, dredged up the story of his jail term...

...All any Governor needs to do to win immediate support on an issue is provoke Atlanta into opposing him...

...NATIONAL REPORTS Four Unusual Michigan Justices By Brendan Sexton Detroit In the forthcoming spring election, Talbot Smith and John Voel-ker, both of whom were appointed as justices of Michigan's Supreme Court by Governor G. Mennen Williams, will be seeking election...

...In private conversation, his language is larded with "nautical terminology," picked up during 14 years in the Navy...

...One concerns the compulsory school attendance law...

...Segregation has also appeared in several other guises...

...The original proposal by the Georgia Education Commission (which, despite its name, merely consists of top politicians and segregationists...

...It seems that the "Empire State of the South" has a knack for provoking headlines, even if usually derogatory ones...

...He possessed an enormous power for invective...

...it was just a coincidence that they voted the way the Governor wanted them to...

...Smith has been particularly sharp in dissenting from the Court Republican majority's decisions on workers' appeals from unfavorable lower-court workmen's-compensation findings...

...He isn't here much longer before he comes to believe it...

...One of Black's chief targets was Wilbur Brucker, now Secretary of the Army, then a powerful figure in the Michigan Republican organization...

...What is over-exertion for one is under-exertion for another...

...Important groups with close connections with the ruling clique are alleged to have control of the island...

...Georgia's Constitutional Dictatorship By Charles O. Lerche Jr...

...Apparently, Georgia is convinced that racial segregation is more important than public education, but confronted with a choice between segregation and something like baseball (or Georgia Tech football), the issue isn't so clear...

...a vote against the Administration usually means that the county receives no state funds for highways, relief, or public works...

...And there is little anyone can do about it...

...The best answers agree that the ordinary problems of the region are complicated by one or two local factors so that "constitutional dictatorship" results...

...The sponsors of the measure asserted that "of course the bill isn't intended to apply to the daughter of a nice family that gets into trouble," but only to undesirable elements...

...called for the simple repeal of the law on the ground that Negroes would drop out of school "in droves" if attendance were not required...

...For a long time, Black was forced to evade physically the jurisdiction of the Wayne County courts because of a criminal libel action instituted against him there by Brucker...

...Questions of taxation, budgetary procedure, electoral reform, and an equitable basis of representation for the large counties have been swept into limbo...

...What the Governor himself wants is still unclear, though he has said he wants the island "taken out of politics...

...The other law is purposefully vague...

...Voelker's father, so the son claims, learned to "swear in Chippewa" before learning to speak any English...

...Whether he will be successful is still uncertain...

...His German grandfather came to Michigan to escape compulsory service in the German Army, and also to establish a brewery to serve workers employed at the newly opened iron and copper mines...

...The Court is now evenly divided, with four Republicans and four Democrats (under Michigan law, Supreme Court candidates, uniquely, are nominated at political party conventions, but thereafter run on a non-partisan ballot), and not in recent memory has Michigan had as many as four Democratic Supreme Court justices...

...In spite of his appearance, he is the Court's "angry man...

...Talbot Smith is known as the Court's "dissenter...

...Exhibit A in this charge is the current session of the Georgia Legislature...

...Voelker says "it deals with crime and punishment, and has just enough love interest to make it go down...

...So constant has the leadership been in its manipulation of the segregation issue that a sizable number of important issues have been allowed to drift into the background, to the misfortune of the urban citizenry and the gratification of the ruling clique...

...Certainly his campaign speeches are the saltiest and wittiest heard on an American political platform in many a day...

...The last of the four, John Voelker, is in some ways the most interesting...

...Pressed about this open pressure on the Legislature, Governor Griffin said that his brother was only telling the members that the Administration didn't care which way they voted...

...He is a grandson of one of the Upper Peninsula's earliest settlers...

...Thousands of reprints of the Tribune story, in which Edwards was described as a "jailbird," were distributed by the Republicans...

...Voelker says that he is no longer "interested" in its operation, "but only in its product...

...This was presented as an economy measure to reduce the number of illegitimate children on relief rolls...

...The law takes the worker as it finds him," he wrote in one dissent...

...While mild-looking and generally soft-spoken, he is nevertheless a powerful platform orator...

...Congress discovered that the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were null and void because they were irregularly adopted (some zealots also wanted to include the 13th...

...Previously, Voelker served 14 years as prosecuting attorney in rough, tough Marquette County, where Michigan's lumber camps, iron and copper mines, and Maximum Security Prison are all located...

...In addition, Georgia is ridden by a particularly vicious form of the pervasive rural-urban conflict...

...In the course of the debate, one Georgia Senator said: "I don't care about Japan or about American foreign policy...

...lie was found guilty and sentenced to 30 days in prison...

...Public attention, meanwhile, has been riveted on detailed analyses of how the latest segregation bills will preserve Georgia's traditions against the insidious encroachments of "Yankee-Communist" ideology...

...The Reverend W. T. Bodenhamcr, of Ty Ty —member of the Georgia House, Baptist clergyman, and pillar of the Georgia Stales RighLs Council— urged the passage of the bill: "If we're going to have segregation, we might as well have it all the way...

...The books, Trouble Shooter, Danny and the Boys and Small Town DA, are full of wonderfully well-told anecdotes and dialect stories...

...Edwards came to this city in the early days of the CIO...

...Under a pen name, Robert Traver, he has published three books based on his experiences as a County Prosecutor...

...Eugene Black, the Michigan Court's senior Democratic member, began his political career as a Republican...

...Shortly after election, Black and Sigler fell out...

...Another long squabble started over a bill subjecting unwed mothers to criminal prosecution...

...The most complex issue in Georgia politics, Jekyll Island, while primarily of local interest, illustrates how the political process works here...

...he often described them as "phonies...

...This, it was argued, would solve the integration problem at one blow...

...The family brewery is still in business...

...Tn its final form, the law confers authority on the Governor to suspend the compulsory feature if...

...Many people have speculated about why Georgia politics is extreme, even for the deep South...

...and few Georgians outside Government circles today could say exactly what it contains...

...But pressure from the education lobby and assorted public-interest groups in the large cities resulted in some modification...

...Peculiar to Georgia is the Governor's control of appropriations...

...Even the ordinarily optimistic League of Women Voters is discouraged about the possibility of breaking the oligarchy's control...

...Under the new law, the Governor is empowered to decide if and when any person, group or organization is acting in such a manner as to endanger the public peace, and to take such action as is necessary to deal with the threat...

...The story is that they are planning to make a major financial coup out of the sale of lots and the leasing and operation of the concessions...

...The furor has not been confined to racial issues...