Kentucky. Governor (1919-1923 : Morrow)

Edwin P. Morrow, a Republican, served as governor of Kentucky from 1919-1923. His administration achieved a number of progressive reforms and was characterized by a strong commitment to law enforcement, the equal treatment of blacks, women's suffrage, and by improvements in education and transportation.

Born in Somerset, Kentucky in 1877, Morrow was educated in the public schools of Pulaski County. He later attended St. Mary's and Cumberland Colleges. In 1898, he enlisted as an army private in the Spanish-American War, but did not see active service before being mustered out as a second lieutenant the following year. He received his law degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1902, married, and established a law practice in Lexington. Starting in 1904, he served a four-year term as the City Attorney for Somerset, and in 1910, was appointed by President Taft to be the United States District Attorney for Eastern Kentucky. He ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate in 1913, and in the same year was removed from his district attorneyship when Woodrow Wilson succeeded Taft in the White House. In 1915, Morrow ran as the Republican candidate for governor against Democrat, Augustus Stanley, and lost by a margin of 471 votes out of more than 440,000 cast. It was the closest gubernatorial election in state history. In the election of 1919, Morrow defeated James D. Black, Stanley's lieutenant governor, who succeeded to the office when Stanley became a United States Senator.

Morrow's early term was favored with the support of a Republican majority in the House, and a Senate that lacked a republican majority by only two votes. Consequently, the governor was able to deliver on most of his campaign promises. He abolished many unnecessary offices and, wherever possible, consolidated the state's boards and commissions. He initiated a myriad of laws for improving education, revising property tax laws, establishing the Kentucky Department of Labor, and creating a non-partisan judiciary, as well as transferring the state's charitable and penal institutions from the control of politicians to administrative agencies. Among his most noteworthy achievements were the creation of the State Board of Charities and Corrections; the centralization of the administration of highway construction and maintenance; and the improvement of the state's text book selection process, which had been a major source of complaint against previous administrations.

Governor Morrow believed strongly in his executive responsibility for upholding the law. He enforced the state's eight-year-old law against concealed weapons in an effort to reduce homicides, and tightened the rules for dispensing pardons. Defending the principle of equality before the law, Morrow was an outspoken critic of the Ku Klux Klan, and gained a national reputation for his opposition to lynching. He called out the National Guard in 1920 to protect a black prisoner accused of murder. A year later, he dismissed the Woodford County Jailer for failing to prevent the lynching of another black man awaiting trial, and offered a reward for the apprehension of the lynchers.

In his State of the Commonwealth address of 1922, the governor asked for further reforms in education, and for increased funding for all state institutions. He also requested the repeal of section 10 of the syndicalism and sedition law, a bill he had himself signed in 1920. He refused to enforce section 10, on the grounds that it violated the right of free speech. By then, the legislature was fully under Democratic control, and rejected almost all of his suggestions, while Morrow, in turn, vetoed a number of bills passed by the General Assembly.

Morrow left the governorship in 1923, and served on the United States Railroad Labor Board from 1924 to 1926, and on the United States Board of Mediation from 1926 to 1934, the year in which he sought the Republican nomination for the Ninth District's congressional seat. Unsuccessful in his bid for congress, he planned to resume his legal practice in Lexington. While temporarily living with a cousin in Frankfort, however, Morrow died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1935, and was buried in the Frankfort Cemetery.