By Ray Hill
Charles Edison was the son of one of America’s foremost innovators and entrepreneurs, Thomas Alva Edison. Thomas A. Edison is perhaps the best remembered inventor in American history. Yet when Charles Edison died, the Paterson Morning Call editorialized that the son “was no smudged carbon copy of a famous father.” Edison’s father is still remembered today and the son’s memory has faded, but he had a notable career of his own, serving as Secretary of the Navy under President Franklin Roosevelt and as governor of New Jersey. Although Edison only served a single three-year term as governor, one New Jersey newspaper insisted his time in the chief executive’s office should not be dismissed as “they were highly significant years.” When Edison died, Governor Richard J. Hughes hailed his predecessor. “Governor Edison was a man of many talents,” Hughes said. “He applied himself successfully as a scientist, businessman, government executive, governor and poet.”
“Gov. Charles Edison brought to the state house the naivete of a farmer in the dell and the burning zeal of a true missionary,” the Jersey Journal recalled.
Indeed, Charles Edison was no pale impression of his famous father. The younger Edison had a mind of his own and was in turn, a businessman, executive, elected official and philanthropist. Edison chaired the company founded by his father and the company it merged with, McGraw-Edison, until his voluntary retirement in 1961. The Thomas A. Edison Company comprised more than a dozen affiliated enterprises. The company had been appraised at $12 million (about $252 million today) by the time Thomas Edison died in 1931.
Although raised in wealth, Charles Edison liked people and enjoyed hard work. Edison’s first business was as a theatrical impresario, where his company staged plays, although he had earned a degree in electrical engineering. Thomas Edison then insisted his son learn the family business “from the bottom up” and paid Charles $35 a week in the beginning. The younger Edison ran Edison Records for a period of time before heading the Thomas A. Edison Company in 1927 at age thirty-five. Charles Edison continued to head the Edison Company until its merger with the McGraw Electric Company in 1957. Following the merger, Edison chaired the McGraw-Edison Company until he retired in 1961. Edison had married Carolyn Hawkins, who was from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1918, and they remained together until her death in 1963. The couple had no children.
Edison’s entry into politics came as something of an accident. Edison had been named Secretary of the Navy after the death of the incumbent, Claude A. Swanson, who had held every elective office of importance in Virginia. New Jersey Democrats were desperately searching for a candidate to run for governor who could not be tarred as a stooge of the notorious Hudson County political machine run by Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City. They settled on Charles Edison, who resigned his post as Secretary of the Navy to return to the Garden State to run. As Edison ran and pledged to be no tool of the machine, many of his fellow Democrats looked at one another and winked. They soon regretted their choice of Edison as their nominee after he won the election. Democrats in New Jersey had worried about promoting a new face instead of a machine regular, especially as the Republicans had nominated Wendell Willkie as their presidential nominee in 1940. Edison was most certainly a new face and once elected, it became readily apparent that he meant precisely what he said. Hague was utterly outraged when Governor Edison chose Frederic R. Colie to sit on the New Jersey State Supreme Court. Not only was Colie a Republican, but he was also quite likely the most politically and personally obnoxious candidate Edison could have named, at least in the eyes of Frank Hague. It had been Frederic Colie who had tried to keep the boss’s son, Frank Hague Jr., from sitting on the state Court of Errors and Appeals. That amounted to a declaration of war on the Hudson County political machine, and their adherents in the state legislature fought a bitter battle with Governor Edison. One New Jersey newspaper noted that Edison lost many of the battles he fought with the machine, but wondered if the governor had not ultimately won the war as Frank Hague was never quite the same after their tussle. Edison demonstrated that even a Democratic governor need not bend to Boss Hague’s will. A series of Republican governors followed Edison into office and helped to diminish, if not altogether dismantle, the Hague machine. Edison quipped his running feud with Hague had been “a job of slum clearance.”
Like his father, Edison had originally been a Republican, but like many others of the time, he became a New Deal Democrat. Edison helped to formulate the Federal Housing Administration under FDR after having served on the New Jersey State Recovery Board and the Regional Labor Board. Named as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1936, Edison carried a much heavier workload than usual, as Claude Swanson was old and infirm and unable to carry out many of the responsibilities of his office. President Roosevelt balked at the idea of moving Swanson out, as he said the Virginian was dependent upon his salary. While working in the Navy Department, Edison objected to the policy of discarding old ships as junk, insisting they be reconditioned. That enabled the United States government to provide Great Britain with ships when the British Empire was being quite hard pressed by Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe and intense bombing and shipping was highly endangered by Nazi submarine “wolfpacks.”
One of those who helped to nudge Edison into the governor’s race was Franklin Roosevelt, which impaired Frank Hague’s ability to object, although he had become accustomed to personally picking the Democratic nominee for statewide offices. Swanson had died a couple of months before FDR appointed Edison officially to serve as Secretary of the Navy, but the shrewd occupant of the White House had decided to appoint two Republicans to his Cabinet as the wars in the Far East and Europe raged.
Charles Edison resigned as Secretary of the Navy in 1940 to kick off his campaign to become governor of New Jersey and received a public letter from President Roosevelt who praised him for having “greatly contributed to the present efficiency” of the Navy Department as well as Edison’s “splendid record” as secretary. Possessing one of the most famous names in the United States of America, personally wealthy and with Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement, Charles Edison would have been hard to derail and was a very formidable first-time candidate for elective office.
Even Frank Hague had to think twice about bucking Roosevelt, the most popular Democrat of them all. Only reluctantly did Frank Hague support Edison in the general election and certainly regretted it quickly. In office for a week, Edison managed to ruin Frank Hague’s vacation. Hague was basking in the Florida sunshine when word reached him that Governor Edison had named Frederic Colie to the state Supreme Court. Hague began bombarding the governor with long-distance telephone calls, pleading with him not to appoint Colie. When Hague saw Edison would not change his mind, the Boss screamed into the phone, “Charlie, you’ve turned out to be just the kind of governor I thought you’d be, you… Benedict Arnold! Do you know what I am going to do to you for this? I am going to break you, Charlie, if it’s the last thing I do.”
Unimpressed by the threat, Governor Edison stated that when he appointed Colie, it was “a public proclamation that Hague is no longer free to carry on his attempts to exert control over the higher courts of New Jersey.”
Hague was left to sputter that he was not trying to control New Jersey’s judicial system, and the fight between Governor Edison and the Hague machine was joined. Democrats in New Jersey were flustered by having to choose between the Hudson County and the governor, who wielded power over state jobs and patronage. Personal and political loyalties conflicted during Edison’s three-year term as governor.
Governor Edison and Hague fought a pitched battle over the issue of taxation involving railroads. Hague’s Hudson County and Jersey City were heavily reliant upon railroad taxation, and the governor proposed to forgive certain debts owed by the railroads in order to get them to pay $34 million (almost $740 million today) to the state. The fight between the chief executive and the political boss was heated and a GOP-controlled legislature passed the measure after an all-night session. Governor Edison publicly said, “The sooner Hague loses his power to act with such viciousness the better it will be for New Jersey.”
Charles Edison proved to be what Frank Hague hated the most: a reformer. Throughout his administration, Governor Edison insisted upon making appointments he believed to be qualified without regard to political party. The governor prodded the people of New Jersey to revise and update their state’s constitution, which had been written in 1844. It took some years, but eventually the people of the Garden State voted to approve a new constitution in 1947.
Some believed the governor’s feud with Frank Hague had been unproductive as Hague was “a political boss whose time was running out any way.” That was likely the minority opinion. The Passaic Herald-News remembered Edison as “a good governor.” “To say that New Jersey is a better-governed state today because Charles Edison served as its governor during the trying days of World War II is no exaggeration.” The editorial acknowledged Edison’s administration had been “inspired by his innate honesty, decency and fierce independence” and it “ushered in a new era in New Jersey politics.” “Subservience to a political boss was not in his makeup,” the editorial stated, noting Governor Edison “paved the way for the eventual demise of the Hague machine. . .” The Herald-News believed Edison had “restored public confidence in the high office of governor of New Jersey,” quite a feat for any individual to accomplish. The editorial stated Charles Edison “rates a high place in the history of our state and the gratitude of its citizens” for his integrity and for restoring the confidence of the Garden State in its chief executive.
Barred by law from seeking a second consecutive term, Charles Edison was content to resume the presidency of the Edison Company. In 1950, Edison became chairman of the board.
Although he owned a home at the site of the Thomas Edison company, the former governor lived largely with his wife in an apartment at the Waldorf Towers whose residents included General Douglas MacArthur and family, as well as former president Herbert Hoover. Hoover and Edison became friends in their later years, and the former governor became increasingly conservative. Governor Edison’s conservatism was reflected in those candidates he chose to support, and having ignored party labels while in office, he was even less partisan as a private citizen. Edison was one of the founders of the Conservative Party in New York State, which elected a United States senator in 1970. The former governor was also one of the founders and a trustee of Americans for Constitutional Action, an organization that supported conservative candidates and promoted conservative causes.
By any measure, Charles Edison lived a productive life, and the Bridgewater Courier-News published an editorial upon the former governor’s passing in 1969 at age 78, assessing Edison’s life and works. “Much of his accomplishment in business and government stands today among the monuments that all of us take so much for granted in a world literally made brighter by the works of Thomas Edison and his son Charles Edison, former governor and native son.” While it is oftentimes difficult for a child to shine when obscured by the light of a famous parent, Charles Edison managed to continue his father’s innovations and business, but also to make a mark of his own.
© 2026 Ray Hill
