The Press: Strong Constitution

Georgia’s famed Atlanta Constitution last week jumped the gun by nearly a year to publish a fat, 144-page 75th-anniversary edition. This haste is typical of the new bounce animating the Constitution in the traditions of its great Editor Henry Woodfin Grady. Responsible was the South’s fastest-rising new editor: 43-year-old, 230-lb. Ralph Emerson McGill, who went to the Constitution as assistant sports editor in 1929. In him, the Constitution found the new blood it needed.

The Constitution became potent, under three generations of the Howell family, without covering all the news, often without fairness or objectivity. But it did speak, by guess and by God, with ringing feeling for the South. Editor McGill fits the pattern. Like Grady, he loves political slugging matches, especially with Governor Eugene Talmadge. Like Grady’s, his signed editorial column is probably the widest read in the Southeast.

In his archaic fifth-floor office a Negro named Josh fits smoothly into Editor McGill’s inefficient routine: he totes Coca-Cola and coffee, informs telephone callers: “Mr. McGill ain’t here.”

Though the Constitution has one of the South’s best photographers, it has no picture editor. Editor McGill hammers hard on the big stories, but still has not hired a police reporter. The Constitution has not had a complete staff in the memory of Atlanta’s oldest living newsmen. It loses good reporters who “cannot live on hope forever.” Nobody seems to care that the rival Journal (bought by James W. Cox in 1939) beats it in circulation and news coverage. But the Constitution has upped circulation 40%, to its alltime high of 136,000 daily, 150,000 Sundays.

Born on a Tennessee farm of Scotch-Welsh parents, McGill worked his way through Vanderbilt University (where he played star tackle and belonged to the famed literary group of “Fugitives”), took time out to fight with the Marines in World War I. At political odds with the chancellor, he left shortly before the end of his senior year, went to the Nashville Banner as sports editor under his fellow classman (now publisher) James Geddes Stahlman. He originated a popular, Will Rogerish column called I’m the Gink, branched into political writing with prodigious energy. Shortly after going to the Constitution he married a redheaded Nashville girl named Mary Elizabeth Leonard, who first saw him whaling a bully who had pushed a little fellow around in a Nashville hot-dog stand.