Mad as a Maddox

Sticks and stones, not to mention ax handles, may break your bones, but words can get you a lot madder. Especially if you are Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, and you are running for reelection, sort of, as Lieutenant Governor.* And more especially if the words are those of the Atlanta Constitution and the Journal, which have been arguing against a special session of the legislature this summer.

Maddox called the session to amend state government financing procedures. In the long run, the proposed change should save the state money, but the Constitution and the Journal questioned the urgency and warned that the special session itself could be costly. The papers even suggested that Candidate Maddox might just be grandstanding.

Maddox? Grandstanding? As if to prove that nothing could be farther from his mind, the Governor labeled the papers' editorial writers "lying devils and dirty dogs" and then personally helped remove 29 Constitution-Journal vending boxes from state government grounds. He called for an advertising boycott against the "leftist management of the fishwrappers," urged readers to stop buying the papers until they "apologize to the people of Georgia," and announced that he would picket the papers' offices. Maddox acknowledged that his boycott and picketing gambits were inspired by the civil rights movement. "If it works for them," he said, "I think it will work much better for me because I'm right."

The Constitution and Journal reacted indulgently. A front-page editorial in the papers' combined Sunday issue recently noted that they were old hands at being picketed: "The Ku Klux Klan has been here any number of times; and a scrofulous bunch of youthful toughs the FBI later picked up in the

Jewish temple bombing. Then there was Snick and CORE and, more recently, the S.D.S. Not to mention the anti-fluoridationists, the women's liberationists and the Committee to Stomp Out the Fire Ant." Newspapers, the editorial continued, can be measured by the enemies they make. "We are proud of ours. So, welcome, Governor."

* Georgia law bars a Governor from succeeding himself.

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