Edwin Washington Edwards (August 7, 1927 – July 12, 2021) was an American politician who served as the 50th governor of Louisiana for four terms (1972–1980, 1984–1988, and 1992–1996). A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a U.S. representative for Louisiana's 7th congressional district from 1965 to 1972. He served twice as many elected terms as any other Louisiana chief executive. He served a total of almost 16 years in gubernatorial office, which at 5,784 days is the sixth-longest such tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history.
An influential figure in Louisiana politics, Edwards, who was dubbed the "very last of the line of New Deal Southern Democrats", was long dogged by charges of corruption. In 2001, he was found guilty of racketeering charges and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Edwards began serving his sentence in October 2002 in Fort Worth, Texas, and was later transferred to the federal facility in Oakdale, Louisiana. He was released from federal prison in January 2011, having served eight years. He was also considered to be the last remnant of the political machine founded and led by Huey Long and Earl Long to serve as governor.
In 2014, Edwards again sought election to the U.S. House of Representatives, running to represent Louisiana's 6th congressional district. He placed first in the jungle primary, but was defeated by Republican Garret Graves by nearly 25 percentage points in the runoff election, assumed to be a sign of Edwards' precipitous decline in popularity due to his felony conviction, as well as the Republican Party of Louisiana's growing dominance over state politics.
Edwin Washington Edwards was born in rural Avoyelles Parish near Marksville on August 7, 1927. His father, Clarence Edwards, was a half-French Creole Presbyterian sharecropper, while his mother, the former Agnès Brouillette, was a French-speaking Catholic. Edwards' ancestors were among early Louisiana colonists from France who eventually settled in Avoyelles Parish, referred to as the original French Creoles. Like many 20th century politicians from Avoyelles, Edwards assumed that he had Cajun ancestry, when in fact he may have had none. His father was descended from a family in Kentucky that came to Louisiana during the American Civil War. His great-great-grandfather, William Edwards, was killed in Marksville at the beginning of the Civil War because of his pro-Union sentiment.
The young Edwards had planned on a career as a preacher. As a young man, he did some preaching for the Marksville Church of the Nazarene. He served briefly in the U.S. Navy Air Corps near the end of World War II. After his return from the military, he graduated at the age of twenty-one from Louisiana State University Law Center and began practicing law in Crowley, the seat of Acadia Parish. He relocated there in 1949 after his sister, Audrey E. Isbell, who had moved there with her husband, told him there were few French-speaking attorneys in the southwestern Louisiana community.
Edwards entered politics through election to the Crowley City Council in 1954. He was a member of the Democratic Party which, in that era, had a monopoly on public offices in Louisiana, but which fell out of favor in the late 20th century. Edwards remained on the Crowley council until his election to the Louisiana State Senate in 1964; in that race he defeated, in a major political upset in the Democratic primary, the incumbent Bill Cleveland, a Crowley businessman who had served for twenty years in both houses of the Louisiana legislature. Years later as governor, Edwards appointed Cleveland's daughter, Willie Mae Fulkerson (1924–2009), a former member of the Crowley City Council, to the Louisiana Board of Prisons.
1971–1972 campaign for governor
In the election of 1971–1972, Edwards won the governorship after finishing first in a field of seventeen candidates in the Democratic primary, including the final race of former governor Jimmie Davis and Gillis Long, a relative of Huey Long. His greatest support came from southern Louisiana, particularly among its large numbers of Cajun, Creole, and African-American voters.
Both Edwards and Johnston ran on reform-oriented platforms during the primary, but Edwards was more adept at making political deals and building alliances for the runoff round of voting. Edwards said that the major philosophical difference that he held with Johnston was in regard to their "awareness of problems of the poor". Johnston won the endorsement of Edwards' legislative colleague, Joe D. Waggonner of Bossier Parish, but the Shreveport state senator declined to accept Edwards' offer of a televised debate between the two.
Bill Dodd, who was defeated for state superintendent of education in the same election cycle that Edwards was winning the governorship in for the first time, attributed the Edwards victory in part to political kingmaker Louis J. Roussel Jr., of New Orleans. According to Dodd, Roussel "can do more than any other individual in Louisiana to elect any candidate he supports for any office in this state. ... He is such a good administrator and motivator that he can put together an organization that will win in business and in politics."
First two terms as governor, 1972–1980
Both in his political rhetoric and in his public persona, Edwards cast himself as a Louisiana populist in the tradition of Huey P. Long and Earl K. Long. He was inaugurated as governor on May 9, 1972. One of his first acts was to call for a constitutional convention to overhaul Louisiana's bulky charter.
On taking office, Edwards hired J. Kelly Nix as his executive assistant and in 1974 elevated him to first executive assistant. In the second term, however, Nix left the administration to take office as the Louisiana state school superintendent. Dale Thorn, who had been Edwards' press secretary while he was in Congress, continued in that position for the first and most of the second Edwards terms. He was later associate commissioner of higher education for the Louisiana Board of Regents, and a journalism professor at Louisiana State University.
Under Edwards, Michael H. O'Keefe of New Orleans in 1976 was named president of the state Senate, an office that was held by the lieutenant governor prior to the implementation of the state Constitution of 1974. In 1983, as Edwards prepared to return to office, O'Keefe was engulfed in scandal and forced to resign as senate president. He was as replaced by Edwards loyalist Samuel B. Nunez Jr., of Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish. On the same day Edwards won election to a third term, O'Keefe lost his bid for a seventh term by a wide margin to state Rep. Ben Bagert. In 2013, O'Keefe was still serving time in prison for a 1999 conviction.
During his first two terms in office, Edwards developed a reputation for being a flamboyant politician. Charismatic, well dressed, and quick with clever one-liners and retorts, he maintained wide popularity.
After enduring three grueling rounds of voting in the 1971–1972 campaign, Edwards pushed a bill through the legislature that limited state elections to two rounds by having Democratic, Republican, and independent candidates run together on the same ballot in a nonpartisan blanket primary. Though the jungle primary system was intended to benefit Edwards' own political career, many observers cite it as being a major factor in the eventual rise of the state's Republican Party and the creation of a genuinely competitive two-party system. For this, Edwards was facetiously christened "father of Louisiana's Republican Party".
William Denis Brown III, a lawyer and a state senator from Monroe, was Edwards's floor leader in the upper legislative chamber in the first term as governor. A native of Vicksburg, Mississippi reared on a plantation north of Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish, Brown was instrumental in drafting the Louisiana Mineral Code. Thereafter from 1980 to 1988, Brown was the chairman of the Louisiana Board of Ethics.
Early in the first gubernatorial term, Edwards initiated the creation of the first new Louisiana state constitution in more than a half century. He intended to replace the Constitution of 1921, an unwieldy and outmoded document burdened with hundreds of amendments. A constitutional convention was held in 1973; the resulting document was put into effect in 1975. As of 2021, the 1973 Constitution remains in effect. Edwards also undertook a major reorganization of the state government, abolishing over 80 state agencies and modeling the remaining structure after that of the federal government.