Integrity Pitch

Next only to the match that General Sherman lit on their premises, many Georgians regard the 1955-59 administration of Governor Marvin Griffin as the worst disaster ever to hit the state. In the words of a grand jury, the state government under Griffin was characterized by the "perfidious conduct of state officials heretofore inconceivable to the minds of citizens." Nearly two dozen people were charged with almost everything except stealing the roof off the Statehouse; among the convicted were a former member of the state board of corrections, a former state park director, and a former assistant state purchasing agent. Though one educated estimate placed the cost of corruption at $30 million. Griffin's comment was simply: "Nuts. Just plain nuts."

In the ordinary course of events, it would have seemed that Griffin was through in politics. No such thing. Last week Democrat Griffin was running again for Governor -- and was given a good chance of winning.

Peashooter. Griffin's opposition in the September 12 Democratic primary (the only kind that counts in Georgia) is not much. Of his four rivals, one is a woman who claims, "I don't know why Georgia couldn't have a woman Governor. Europe has had its queens." Another is a Bible-quoting farmer-brickmason whose plat form is prayer, but who doesn't have one in this contest. Only Carl Sanders. 37. a good-looking state senator, seems to have a chance against Griffin. Sanders has the backing of a host of anti-Griffinites, including Georgia's key newspapers (the "Atlanta integrationist press," as Griffin calls it). Sanders also figures to benefit by the fact that Georgia's county-unit voting system has at last been overthrown by the courts. In years past, state elections in Georgia were decided not on popular votes but on a complex system where by each county was permitted so many unit votes in the ballot box. Invariably, this gave the rural counties a hugely dis proportionate balance of power against the populous areas; Griffin himself, for example, was elected in 1954 on only 36% of the popular vote.

Countering this. Griffin is capitalizing on Georgia's rising racial tensions. He has threatened to put the Rev. Martin Luther King so far back in jail that "they'll have to shoot peas to feed him." To cheers of approval, Griffin castigates "superliberals and one-worlders" who threaten to "trample" Georgia. He praises "our sister states in the South" for their refusal to throw m "the towel of surrender" by integrating their schools, paints a lurid picture of integration in Washington, where "it was necessary to station policemen in the halls and corridors of their public schools, and even this action did not prevent rape, beatings and muggings." Although Sanders himself is a segregationist, Griffin calls him "a puppet and an amanuensis and a handmaiden of Martin Luther King."

Admiration in Limbo. All this has gone over so well that Griffin has gone on to declare for general piety in state government. Says he: "We are going to put honesty, integrity and morality in the government of Georgia. You can depend upon it that I shall appoint to public office men of unquestioned honesty and integrity ... I made some mistakes in my appointments before, but I will not make the same mistakes the second time. Truman had his Harry Vaughan, Eisenhower had his Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine, Kennedy has his Billie Sol Estes, and I had some myself . . ."

Surveying this new integrity pitch, the Macon News concluded in an editorial: "The miracle is that everyone who remembers the Griffin administration's shenanigans didn't fall right down laughing ... In some far-off limbo where old politicians go when they die, Jim Curley, the ex-mayor of Boston who was once elected while serving a jail sentence, must have nodded his head in admiration at the colossal gall of Marvin Griffin."

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