MISSISSIPPI: The Six-Foot Wedge

For Mississippi, the Civil War marked not only the end of glory, but also the beginning of a dismal record as the hindmost state of the reconstructed union in wealth, education and social progress. For

Mississippians who have waited long to be led to glory, the rising hero of the day is James Plemon Coleman, their amiable, husky (6 ft. 2 in., 230 lb.), 43-year-old governor. J. P. Coleman reveres the tactics and tragedy that he learned as a child at the feet of ancient Confederate veterans in his native Choctaw County, 100 miles northeast of Jackson. He has built a 400-volume war library, reads himself to sleep with war stories and Reconstruction history. But J. P.. Coleman, in tune with the past, is also much in tune with Mississippi's present and its hopes for the future. Last week, sighting on a brighter future, he tackled a problem no governor has cared to grapple with in 25 years. He called for a state constitutional convention to replace 1890's "oxcart" constitution with a 1957 "jet plane" model.

Coleman wants to revamp the state's judicial system, clarify obscure provisions enacted in horse-and-buggy days, and make adjustments favorable to industry. He expects plenty of opposition from Mississippians who believe that "the brains which designed the previous constitution can never be duplicated, much less improved on." But, says Governor Coleman, "weaklings do not write history, and the timid do not ordinarily point towards progress."

Cowing the Satraps. J. P. Coleman is neither a weakling nor timid, as some 2,000,000 Mississippians have discovered ever since the day that he tramped down from the red clay hills of the northeast a year ago to best the entrenched politicos of the rich Delta country, and become the hill country's first governor in 36 years.

Since inauguration (TIME, Jan. 30, 1956), Coleman has worked tirelessly to bring Mississippi's government into the 1950s, to knit the state together with the kind of unified administration and purpose that most states take for granted. By threatening state action, he corrected a statewide disgrace by cowing some 500 locally elected justices of the peace, most of them inept and many of them corrupt, who have traditionally acted like local satraps.

He frightened those local princelings, the county sheriffs, by pushing through a law authorizing their removal through local recall. He built up the state highway patrol as a strong statewide law-enforcement agency. He did not hesitate to use National Guardsmen to smash stocks of bootleggers in counties where prohibitionists were not getting help from local law enforcement officers. He closed down Gulf Coast gambling so that tourists who bring $300 million a year into the state would spend it on legal pleasures, benefiting more Mississippians. He streamlined the executive departments to produce a $20 million budget surplus with no new taxes. He stopped brutality at the state penitentiary farm at Parchman.