George William Norris

• George William Norris
• Born: July 11, 1861
• Died: September 2, 1944

Progressive Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, was born in York Township, Sandusky County, Ohio, the second son and fourth child (in a family of eleven children) of Chauncey Norris and Mary (Mook) Norris. His father was an uneducated farmer of Scotch-Irish descent who migrated in 1846 to Ohio from Batavia, New York, and who died when George Norris was three years old. His mother, of Pennsylvania Dutch background and also uneducated, managed to teach her children the values of hard work, frugality, and compassion. Growing up on a small farm, Norris acquired a lifelong interest in the problems and aspirations of independent farmers.

He spent his summers as a youth working for neighboring farmers and his winters attending the Mount Carmel, Indiana, public schools. He worked his way through Northern Indiana Normal School (now Valparaiso University), earning a bachelor’s degree and then an LL.B. He was graduated in 1882 at age twenty-two and was admitted to the bar that year. After teaching briefly in Ohio and in Washington Territory, he moved to Nebraska in 1885 to practice law. He began in Beatrice, moved to Beaver City six months later, and then in 1900 to McCook, which became his home until his death.

Norris built a successful practice and served as counsel in civil and criminal cases. In the years 1892-96, he completed two unexpired terms as prosecuting attorney of Furnas County and won election for a third term, owing to his growing reputation for honesty, integrity, and fairness. In 1895 he was elected judge of Nebraska’s Fourteenth Judicial District, and he won reelection in 1899, serving from 1896 to 1902. In the depression-bound 1890s, with populism on the upsurge in agrarian states, he dispensed classical justice as modified by the needs of an expanding frontier society.

A Republican himself, Norris in 1902 defeated Ashton C. Shallenberger, who was backed by Democrats and Populists, for the incumbent’s seat in the Fifteenth Congressional District by 181 votes—a victory aided by the return of prosperity. He won successive reelections and served in the House of Representatives until 1913, when he was elected to the Senate.

Norris first arrived in the capital as the ferment of progressivism was under way during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09). Norris generally followed the Republican line in legislative matters until 1908, when he challenged (unsuccessfully) Speaker Joseph Cannon over his arbitrary committee appointment authority. That break with the party’s machinery led Norris to join and soon lead insurgent House forces during the 1909 Ballinger-Pinchot controversy over forest conservation. By 1910 the battle, in which Norris sided with the Pinchot proconservation forces, resulted in Cannon’s loss of considerable power, including that of committee selection. The insurgent victory gave impetus to the growing progressive movement in Congress. Involved in other controversies, Norris, his reputation now established, was chosen in 1911 as a vice president of the newly formed Progressive Republican League, organized and led by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin.

On January 22,1913, the Nebraska legislature chose Norris for the Senate, launching his long career of political independence. During President Woodrow Wilson’s administrations (1913–21), Norris opposed the Underwood Tariff Act reductions; advocated a graduated income tax; fought for the 1913 Hetch Hetchy Act, which provided for conservation measures and municipal development of hydroelectric power; and called for several investigations, relating particularly to dishonesty in certain senators’ campaign expenses.

He won national notoriety by opposing Wilson’s foreign policy, notably the armed-merchant-ship bill in 1917—which was filibustered to death partly as a result of his leadership. Morally opposed to war in those years, Norris became one of only six senators voting against the president’s war resolution on April 4, 1917, arguing that selfish forces of great wealth were manipulating America into a useless conflict. But after Congress declared war, he backed the administration’s policies. He overcame public condemnation of his pacifist stand; won the 1918 primary; and won reelection over Democrat John H. Morehead in November. Norris perceived different circumstances surrounding World War II. By 1939 he opposed the rising Nazi oppression and aggression; in 1941, outraged by the attack on Pearl Harbor, he voted on December 8 to declare war on Japan, and on December 11 he voted to declare war on Germany and Italy.

Before World War I, Norris had suffered personal tragedies. He married the daughter of a miller and banker, Pluma Lashley of Beaver City, on June 1, 1890. She gave birth to four children: a stillborn son and three daughters, Hazel, Marian, and Gertrude. But the last birth caused her death in 1901, a loss that agonized Norris. On July 8, 1903, he married Ellie Leonard of San Jose, California; their twin sons died within hours of birth in February 1906, a crisis that almost caused her death. Norris and his wife finally reconciled themselves to a childless marriage, a fact that probably increased their deep devotion for each other.

Serving in the Senate until 1943, Norris gradually became the nation’s foremost progressive. As a Republican by label (until 1936, when he declared himself an Independent), he had a gadfly career that spanned the Wilson years and the League of Nations fight; the mixed prosperity under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge (1921-29); and the Great Depression that assaulted President Herbert Hoover’s administration (1929-33). After backing Democrat Alfred E. Smith for president in 1928, the maverick Norris supported Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, 1936, and 1940.

The advent of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs enabled Norris to witness some of his lifelong progressive goals enacted into legislation. Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, he championed federal agricultural aid, including the McNary-Haugen measures (vetoed by Coolidge in 1927 and 1928) and the Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933, 1936, and 1938. He battled for clarification of labor’s rights and succeeded in passing the landmark Norris-La-Guardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932. This law restricted the use of court injunctions in labor disputes; outlawed the yellow dog contract, under which a worker agreed, as a condition of employment, not to join a union; and authorized the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively. Almost alone he won enactment in 1932 of the Twentieth (Lame Duck) Amendment, which abolished the short session of Congress following biennial elections. At home, his leadership induced the Nebraska legislature to amend the state constitution in 1934 and create a unicameral assembly, he argued persuasively that it would promote economy and efficiency in government—always two of his major concerns.

During the 1920s, Norris diligently fought private interests (including Henry Ford) that sought to purchase federal electric and nitrate facilities at Wilson Dam near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on the Tennessee River. Nationally known for those efforts, he became the Senate sponsor in 1933 of President Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Act. The TVA law provided for a government corporation whose objects were to implement power generation and distribution, to produce nitrates, to outline national planning to prevent soil erosion, to pursue reforestation, improve marginal land use, and involve the region’s people in various educational and economic activities. Consequently, the first large TVA dam built was named Norris Dam in his honor, and a nearby town was named after him.

Norris was also instrumental in achieving passage of the Rural Electrification Act and the Norris-Doxey Forestry Act of 1937. However, he failed to win enactment that year of the Roosevelt-backed bill for seven regional “little TVAs.” In a related losing cause, he proposed, also in 1937, a nine-year term for the entire federal judiciary.

The “perfect, gentle knight of American progressive ideals”—as Franklin Roosevelt called Norris in 1932—was involved in the most acrimonious campaign of his life in 1930. Conservatives induced a grocer named George W. Norris, of Broken Bow, Nebraska, to run in the Republican primary, thus confusing voters. The Republican National Committee flooded the state with scurrilous propaganda, charging that the senator was alcoholic, immoral, and (in Ku Klux Klan areas) married to a Catholic. But the incumbent, who had no religious preference, prevailed over the grocer and then won reelection in November over Democrat Gilbert M. Hitchcock.

In 1936 the maverick Norris broke his nominal Republican ties and ran as an Independent. But he won with a majority of only 35,000 out of over half a million votes cast, despite having Roosevelt’s full support. At last, in 1942, the increasingly controversial Norris—by then in his eighties—lost by a large majority to Republican Kenneth S. Wherry. Although he had remained in Washington until days before the election to work for anti-poll-tax legislation, Norris was shocked and embittered. But he refused all offers of federal posts; left his Washington apartment and moved back with his wife to McCook; and, later, completed dictating his memoirs, Fighting Liberal: The Autobiography of George W. Norris (1944), six weeks before his death, at eighty-three, following a cerebral hemorrhage.

Norris’s independent career reflects the virtues and defects of agrarian-urban progressivism. He always championed more democracy, politically and usually economically, but rarely socially. Many constituents found his obsessions with simplicity, hard work, and frugality admirable, but he sometimes carried personal values to extremes in his public life: he could, for example, criticize with equal fervor expenditures for the army’s breeding of saddle horses and Woodrow Wilson’s traveling to Europe in 1918-19. He was morally opposed to the consumption of alcoholic beverages, seeing it as destructive of families. His righteous indignation also extended to those who took their work, and their life, less seriously than he did.

Norris expanded his independence of feeling and action to the area of civil liberties, calling for free speech and a free press even during the Red Scare of 1919-20. But he also showed a nativistic prejudice in supporting the 1921 Immigration Act and the 1924 National Origins Act. Moreover, his legislative accomplishments, like those of most progressives of his era, included nothing to equalize opportunities for blacks or women. On the other hand, he believed humanely in the value of democracy applied in its broadest terms, as well as in the capacity for goodness in all people. According to Norman L. Zucker, his most lasting achievement was in “propagating the idea of the responsibility of the government to all its citizens.” The epitome of Norris’s belief in the ethical capacities of government was the Tennessee Valley Authority. Questioning laissez-faire, he believed that government intervention in the economy—even some government ownership!—could help Americans who were weak or oppressed.

Despite his personal idiosyncrasies, George Norris’s public career and his personification of honesty, courage, progressivism, and, above all, integrity, rightly allow him to be judged one of the best reformers ever to sit in Congress.

The over 1,000 boxes of George W. Norris papers at the Library of Congress contain a massive amount of source materials amply documenting the senator’s life and career, particularly after 1925. The Congressional Record, as well as various Senate documents, contains much useful material, as do the papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. Norris’s memoir, Fighting Liberal: The Autobiography of George W. Norris (1944), is not complete. It was written from memory after his 1942 defeat, and Norris slighted or ignored persons who opposed him or his programs. The best short biography is N. L. Zucker, George W. Norris: Gentle Knight of American Democracy (1966), but it analyzes mainly his public career. An excellent, definitive three-volume work is R. Lowitt, George W. Norris: The Making of a Progressive, 1861-1913 (1963), The Persistence of a Progressive, 1913-1933 (1971). and The Triumph of a Progressive, 1933-1944 (1978). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973).