The Athenian Touch

In the wooden-domed building where General George Washington tendered his resignation to become G. Washington, Esq., and where the Continental Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris, Maryland's legislators of late have been busily writing some modern history. Last week, after decades of stand-pat government, the state's general assembly concluded its most productive, innovative session in memory. As a result, Annapolis--which once was proudly dubbed the Athens of America, but is better known today as Crabtown, after the Chesapeake crustaceans for which it is famed--fairly steamed with bipartisan mutual admiration.

Spiro ("Ted") Agnew, the fifth Republican Governor Maryland has had, said of the opposition's legislative leader: "One of the most skillful I've ever seen, completely reliable and willing to meet a problem." For his part, House Speaker Marvin Mandel allowed: "We've worked together well. The Governor has made every effort to cooperate."

Trivia. A major consequence of the new amity in Annapolis will be a constitutional convention to rewrite the state's 100-year-old charter, a farrago of archaisms and amendments so cluttered with trivia that it even spells out regulations for off-street parking in Baltimore. The legislature also adopted the state's first billion-dollar budget and passed a long-needed tax-reform measure, replacing the flat 3% state income tax with a graduated levy of from 2% to 5%, which will give Maryland a much-needed revenue boost of $120 million a year.

More significant yet in a border state with an uneven record in race relations was enactment of 1) a limited open-housing statute, 2) a measure broadening the existing public-accommodations law to conform with federal legislation, and 3) repeal of the state's 306-year-old ban on racial intermarriage.

Bucolic Reactionary. For Ted Agnew, who beat George Mahoney, a Democratic, demagogic segregationist last November, the raft of new laws meant fulfillment of his most important campaign promises during his first three months in office--with Democratic majorities of better than 4 to 1 in both houses. Luckily for Agnew and Maryland, most of the Democrats were not Mahoney men; for the first time, as a result of the state's court-ordered reapportionment, they represented population patterns rather than geography. Thus the political center of gravity had shifted from Maryland's conservative rural minority to its metropolitan preponderance (76%).

With half the legislature consisting of freshmen, the 188-year-old red-brick statehouse had no shortage of reformers in either branch of government. Even so, they treated the newly disinherited with due deference. Said Democratic House Leader Thomas Lowe: "I'm what you might call a bucolic reactionary from the Eastern Shore. These urbanites did not run over us rural people. They understood our problems, as we understood theirs."

Agnew sweetened the honeymoon still further by adopting a bipartisan approach to patronage and consulting closely with Democratic legislators. An able former Baltimore County executive, he knows the arts of compromise and deferment. A number of important measures remain to be enacted, including reorganization of the state's administrative machinery and a comprehensive traffic-safety program. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Agnew--who, appropriately, is the first Governor of Greek descent in U.S. history--have shown that a Socratic luster is still to be found in Crabtown.

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