Edward Edwards

The race for Governor of New Jersey in 1919 centered around the national debate on prohibition, with Democrats running as the wet party and Republicans taking the dry position.  One week before the election, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, overriding Woodrow Wilson's veto.  

The winner was Democrat Edward Edwards, a 56-year-old former banker who had been elected to represent Hudson County in the State Senate two years earlier.  He defeated Republican State Chairman Newton Bugbee by a 49%-46% margin.  Edwards called himself "as wet as the Atlantic Ocean," while Bugbee said he was personally wet but politically dry.  (He even drank a beer at a public event in Clifton to demonstrate his point.

One of the first two women to serve in the New Jersey General Assembly was Margaret Laird, a 49-year-old Republican ex-Suffragette from Newark who won her seat in the 1920 GOP landslide that saw the Republicans win 59 of sixty seats in the lower house. One of the major issues facing a Legislature divided between the "wet Republicans" and "dry Republicans" in 1921 was a plan to deny jury trials to people accused of breaking Prohibition laws. The Democratic Governor, Edward Edwards, vetoed the bill, and the Legislature overrode his veto. Laird was part of a group of dry Republicans who disagreed with the idea that offenders should lose their right to a jury trial -- something that became quite an issue in her bid for re-election to as second term in 1921. Laird defended her record to The New York Times: "I intend to stand or fall on my belief that persons charged with offenses under the Prohibition Enforcement Act should have the benefit of a trial by jury. I had the same views when I voted for the act last winter, but I was inexperienced and I allowed others to tell me what to do. This will not occur again."

New Jersey will have seven living former Governors when Jon Corzine takes office at today -- the most since Edward Edwards became Governor in 1920.

Update: Four of the seven attended Corzine' s inauguration -- Brendan Byrne, James Florio, Donald DiFrancesco and Richard Codey. Thomas Kean, Christine Todd Whitman and James E. McGreevey did not attend.