Edwin Edward passes away at 93

GONZALES - Former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, who embodied Louisiana’s populist era in the late 20th century — championing the poor and ushering Black people and women into state government — died just before 7 a.m. Monday at his home in Gonzales.
The cause of death: respiratory problems that had plagued him in recent years, said Leo Honeycutt, his biographer. Friends and family surrounded his bedside.
A Democrat, Edwards dominated the state’s politics for 25 years and even enjoyed a brief and spectacular turn in the national spotlight during the 1991 governor’s race when he faced off against former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, a Republican.
Edwards won 1,057,031 votes, the most ever in a Louisiana gubernatorial election.
With his bayou charm, razor-sharp mind and quick wit, Edwards personified the state’s “Let the Good Times Roll” motto, proudly proclaimed himself as the first Cajun governor in the 20th century and, by defeating Duke, became the only person elected to lead Louisiana four times and serve 16 years.
“He was extremely intelligent, and he was able to analyze problems and find solutions where other people couldn’t find them,” said former U.S. Sen. John Breaux, who was his assistant when Edwards was in Congress and succeeded him as Louisiana’s 7th House District representative.
“I think he had a very big heart and a good feel for people who were less advantaged than he was.”
His authorized biography became a bestseller in Louisiana.
In 2017, his 90th birthday bash at the Renaissance Hotel in Baton Rouge filled a ballroom with some 500 guests paying $250 per person. Gov. John Bel Edwards, who is not related, and former Gov. Kathleen Blanco were among the attendees.
“I’m 90 years old and I woke up Friday and took my son to preschool,” Edwards told the crowd to uproarious laughter.
Edwards is the fourth former governor to die within the past two years. The others were Kathleen Blanco, Mike Foster and Buddy Roemer.
Throughout his career, Edwards won fervent support from poor White people and Black people — and grudging respect from his political rivals.
“He was the most effective, skilled, wily politician I ever knew,” former Gov. Buddy Roemer once said of Edwards.
Raised during his early years in an unpainted farmhouse in central Louisiana that had neither electricity nor running water, Edwin Washington Edwards was the latter-day heir of the populist era led by the Long brothers — first Huey P. and then Earl — in the years before and after World War II.

Low-key beginnings

In 1954, Edwards got his start in politics when he was elected to the Crowley City Council; he won reelection two more times. In 1964, he defeated an incumbent to win a seat in the state Senate. In 1965, he won a special election to Congress and set his sights on achieving his lifelong goal: being elected governor.
One of 17 Democrats who vied to succeed Gov. John McKeithen, Edwards led the party primary, narrowly defeated then-state Sen. J. Bennett Johnston in the Democratic runoff (both elections were in late 1971) and then defeated David Treen, the Republican candidate, in February 1972.
Edwards was elected governor by forging a coalition of working-class White people — especially Cajuns in his home base — and Black people beginning to flex their electoral muscles.
Over the next four years, he oversaw the passage of a number of highly regarded reforms sought by good-government groups. None were greater than the 1974 constitution, which simplified the operation of government, including allowing local governments to make substantive changes without having to win the Legislature’s approval.
Edwards easily won reelection in 1975. Because of term limits, he had to sit out the 1979 campaign won by Treen, who became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
Edwards overwhelmed Treen in 1983 to win a third term but lost his reelection bid in 1987 after the oil bust ruined the state’s economy.
Edwards made a comeback in 1991 to win a fourth and final term, routing Duke in the runoff election. In 1994, Edwards announced he would not seek reelection, just after marrying his second wife, Candy Picou.
In his later years, Edwards would say his greatest political achievements were passage of the 1974 constitution and getting the Legislature to begin taxing oil production based on the market price rather than a flat fee.
When oil prices soared in the 1970s, Edwards had plenty of extra money to spend on new roads, bridges, ports, hospitals and schools.
Like Huey P. Long, Edwards throughout his political career urged the state to take care of the underprivileged.
In 1980, just after stepping down as governor, Edwards served a day as an associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. That led him to comment that he was the only person in the U.S. who had served as governor of his state, as a member of the U.S. Congress and as a member of his state’s highest court.
Treen was no match when Edwards ran against him in 1983.
Voters returned him to the Governor’s Mansion with a 63% to 37% margin. The 1,002,798 votes he received marked the first time a Louisiana governor received more than 1 million votes.
But when Edwards moved back into the Governor’s Mansion in early 1984, oil prices were dropping, and so were state tax revenues. Edwards pushed a $730 million tax increase through the state Legislature, but it did not plug the budget gap, and it antagonized voters.
He faced four strong opponents in 1987. Roemer, then a congressman overtook them all as voters responded to his promise to repudiate the Edwards era and “slay the dragon,” as Roemer put it. He led Edwards in the primary. That night, Edwards conceded the runoff election. It was his first election defeat.
In 1991, Edwards sought to avenge the defeat and ran for governor again. By then, Duke was cleverly tapping into Whites’ racism and anger with the state’s high unemployment rate.
Edwards ran first in the primary, followed by Duke, a Republican state legislator from Metairie who delivered a race-based message against political elites. The runoff election became front-page news across the country because of Duke’s Klan past.
In a debate two weeks before election day, Edwards delivered a powerful closing statement that marked their sharp differences.
“While David Duke was burning crosses and scaring people, I was building hospitals to heal them,” he told a statewide televised audience. “When he was parading around in a Nazi uniform to intimidate our citizens, I was in a National Guard uniform bringing relief to flood and hurricane victims. When he was selling Nazi hate literature as late as 1989 in his legislative office, I was providing free textbooks for the children of this state.”
Edwards trounced Duke with 61% of the vote.
Edwards had won over skeptics — including two former foes, Roemer and Treen.
During the campaign, Edwards pinned revitalizing the state’s economy on the creation of a single land-based casino in New Orleans. It would create 25,000 jobs and generate millions of dollars in tax revenue, he promised.
In 1992, the Legislature legalized the New Orleans casino following a controversial vote in the state House overseen by Speaker John Alario.
In June 1994, Edwards made the surprise announcement that he would not seek a fifth term the following year.
Edwards ran for Congress in 2014. He received 38% of the vote and lost to Garret Graves in a district designed to elect a Republican.
On election night, Edwards climbed onto a raised stage in a hotel meeting room, Eli in his arms, Trina by his side. As he waited for supporters to crowd in, Edwards lightly sang, “The party’s over. It’s time to turn out the lights.”

Edwards was born on Aug. 7, 1927, in Johnson, a community outside of Marksville in Avoyelles Parish. His father, Clarence, a Presbyterian, had only a third-grade education. His mother, Agnes, a Catholic, had left school after seventh grade.
Clarence Edwards eked out a living as a sharecropper, raising chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, cows and sheep. Agnes Brouillette Edwards was a midwife who taught her five children to speak Cajun French. Edwin was the middle child. Although reporters described him as Cajun, who descended from Canada, his mother’s forebears actually were from France.
Young Edwin began his schooling in a one-room schoolhouse where one teacher taught grades one through four. As a teenager, he planned to be a preacher, practically memorized the Bible and preached in Marksville’s Church of the Nazarene.
During the five years of interviews Honeycutt conducted for the biography, he said the former governor described the effect of growing up with so little money: “Poverty will make you bitter or better. You get mad at the world because you’re poor, but you realize that it will take work and education to get what you want. You can’t focus on what you don’t have; you focus on what you want.
“In that sense,” Edwards continued, according to Honeycutt, “poverty is a blessing because life is a problem from the get-go. You learn to problem-solve from the beginning.”
Edwards trained to be a Navy pilot late in World War II, obtained a law degree from LSU and then, in 1949, married his high school sweetheart, Elaine Schwartzenburg.
Edwards and Elaine moved to Crowley, where his sister Audrey lived. He and Elaine had four children: Anna, Stephen, Victoria and David. They all survive him.
Edwards had 12 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren with Elaine Edwards.
Elaine died in 2018. His three brothers and his sister also died before him.
Edwards outlived four of his successors: Treen, Roemer, Blanco and Mike Foster.
Edwards explained his philosophy in a 1983 interview.
“In life, politics and hunting,” he said, “I play by the rules, but I take all the advantages the rules allow.”