 |
 |
 |
| William Andrew Edmondson and wife Linda | Edmond Augustus Edmondston | James Howard Edmondson |
William Andrew "Drew" Edmondson
The Edmondson Family of Muskogee County,
Oklahoma
William Andrew Edmondson and wife Linda
Edmond Augustus Edmondston
James Howard Edmondson
William Andrew "Drew"
Edmondson
EDMONDSON, EDMOND AUGUSTUS (1919-1990)
Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on April 7, 1919, and son of Edmond Augustus and Esther
Pullen Edmondson, Edmond A. "Ed" Edmondson graduated from Muskogee Junior
College in 1938 and the University of Oklahoma in 1940. His father was a
Muskogee County commissioner. His brother, J. Howard Edmondson, was Oklahoma
governor and U.S. senator. While attending college, Ed Edmondson worked for a
Muskogee newspaper and United Press International. From 1940 to 1943 Edmondson was a special
agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. During World
War II he became a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy while serving in the Pacific. He
was also in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1946 to 1970. He married June Maureen
Pilley on March 5, 1944. Their children were June Ellen, James Edmond (who
became a district judge), William Andrew (who became Oklahoma attorney general),
John, and Brian. Edmondson was the Washington, D.C., correspondent for several
Oklahoma newspapers from 1946 to 1947. He received a law degree from Georgetown
University, Washington, D.C., in 1947 and returned to Muskogee where he was
Muskogee County attorney from 1949 to 1952.
In 1952 Oklahoma's
Second District voters first elected Ed Edmondson as a Democrat to the U.S.
House of Representatives; he served from 1953 to 1973. By the end of his
congressional career he had attained considerable seniority on the Interior and
Insular Affairs Committee and Public Works Committee. He was chair of the Mines
and Mining Subcommittee and the second-ranking Democrat on the Indian Affairs
Subcommittee. Other subcommittees on which he sat were Environment; Irrigation
and Reclamation; Public Lands; Flood Control and Internal Development;
Investigation and Oversight; Roads; Conservation and Watershed Development; and
Economic Development Programs. He played a crucial role in passage of
legislation creating the Arkansas
River Navigation System and Copan
Dam. When he first went to Congress, he was a grass-roots liberal, and
throughout his tenure he was prolabor. He supported Pres. John F. Kennedy's New
Frontier legislation, but during Lyndon Johnson's administration he became more
conservative. In 1972 and 1974 Edmondson ran for the U.S. Senate. His campaigns
focused on his conservatism, his dislike of Democratic presidential candidate
George McGovern, and his support for economic measures to help the "little man."
Nonetheless, Republicans Dewey
Bartlett and Henry Bellmon defeated him. In 1978 he tried again but lost his party's nomination to
David Boren. In later years Edmondson was an attorney
in Muskogee. He was involved with the Oklahoma Scenic Rivers
Commission and the preservation of the Illinois River. He died
in Muskogee on December 8, 1990. EDMONDSON, JAMES HOWARD (1925-1971)
Oklahoma's sixteenth governor was
born on September 27, 1925, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to Edmond
Augustus and Esther Pullen Edmondson. The elder Edmondson instilled a love of
politics in both J. Howard and his older brother, Ed, a long-term congressman.
J. Howard graduated from Muskogee High School, briefly attended the University
of Oklahoma, and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942. Edmondson completed
flight training but did not serve overseas. After the war he graduated from the
university with a law degree in August 1948. He had married his childhood
sweetheart, Jeannette Bartleson, in May 1946, and the couple had a son, James,
Jr., and two daughters, Jeanne and Patricia.
After graduating,
Edmondson returned to Muskogee and served as law clerk for Federal Judge Eugene
Rice before joining Harold Shoemake in the practice of law. Unsuccessful in a
race for a seat in the legislature in 1950, he moved to Tulsa
in 1953, accepting an appointment by Tulsa County Attorney Robert Wheeler.
Edmondson's reputation as a successful prosecutor grew rapidly after he obtained
convictions of several corrupt county and state officials. In 1954 when Wheeler
did not seek reelection, Edmondson was elected Tulsa County attorney. He was
reelected in 1956. Edmondson announced his candidacy for governor on December 7,
1957. Reform became the hallmark of his campaign and administration. A political
unknown, Edmondson won the Democratic primary, then crushed his opponent in the
general election, winning by the largest margin in the state's history. At
thirty-three, Edmondson became the youngest governor in the state's history and
in the nation at the time. Edmondson interpreted his victory as a public mandate for reform. Many
"old guard" members of the legislature disagreed. Edmondson had promised to send
a proposal to repeal prohibition to a vote of the
people while strictly enforcing the law. True to his pledge, as the legislature
worked on the referendum, he vigorously enforced prohibition. Oklahoma came
closer to being truly "dry" than ever before. Repeal passed overwhelmingly.
By the end of the
longest legislative session in the state's history, Edmondson had gained many
reforms. In addition to repeal of prohibition and a liquor control measure, he
had persuaded the legislature to adopt a merit system, central
purchasing, a withholding tax plan, and several "housekeeping" measures that
eased the strain on state finance. He had also obtained a financing plan for two
state turnpikes and creation of the Oklahoma Capitol Improvement Authority.
Many of his other
proposals were rejected, including a constitutional highway commission, a
legislative apportionment proposal, and the removal of gasoline tax revenues
from control of county commissioners. Undeterred, Edmondson quickly began to
push these three proposals through initiative petitions. All three petitions
failed. In pushing their adoption Edmondson permanently alienated important
elements of the Democratic
Party, and by the fall of 1960, only
half way through his term, his mandate was gone. The balance of his term saw little in the way of
additional reform. He successfully defeated attempts to repeal the gains from
the 1959 legislative session but achieved little more. Then two weeks before his
term ended, when it seemed Edmondson's political career was at an end,
Oklahoma's U.S. Senator Robert S.
Kerr died. This allowed Edmondson to
arrange his own appointment to the Senate seat and gave him sixteen months to
rebuild his political support. In 1964 Edmondson bid for a full Senate term but was defeated.
His fight for reform had earned him too many enemies. He had neglected to mend
political fences, and he angered the Kerr family and friends by not appointing
Robert Kerr, Jr., to his father's vacant seat. In 1964 the Kerr organization and
money helped retire Edmondson permanently to private life. From the end of his brief Senate term in
1965 until his death of an apparent heart attack in 1971, Edmondson was a
private citizen engaged in the practice of law. At his death Oklahomans were
beginning to realize their state was better because he had served them as
governor. Before he was forty years old, J. Howard Edmondson had achieved more
significant reform than any governor before him and had produced one of the most
colorful eras in Oklahoma's political history.