Fighting Liberal: The Autobiography of George W. Norris, Second Edition
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Though George Norris was born and grew up in Ohio, he h...)
Though George Norris was born and grew up in Ohio, he headed west after earning his law degree and set up practice in Nebraska, eventually settling in McCook. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1902 and the Senate in 1912, Norris was a Republican for most of his life but headed a wing called the Progressives, who believed the government should be more responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens. Norris believed it his duty to vote according to conscience even if that sometimes conflicted with party affiliation or popular sentiment. Beyond personal integrity, Norris also left a considerable legacy of achievements: he promoted the nonpartisan one-house Unicameral in Nebraska, led the effort to create the Tennessee Valley Authority, and sponsored the Rural Electrification Act. Fighting Liberal is Norris’s account of his amazing and admirable life from the early impoverished years that informed his populist philosophy to his career in government, where he made great contributions to the nation.
George William Norris was an American congressman and senator from Nebraska. He was a progressive and liberal politician. Braving the wrath of utility-company spokesmen, Norris in the 1920's became the leading figure in political life favoring the public production, transmission, and distribution of hydroelectric power.
Background
George William Norris was born on July 11, 1861 on a farm in Sandusky County, Ohio, United States. He was the eleventh child and second son of Chauncey and Mary Magdalene (Mook) Norris. Of the twelve children in the family, ten reached maturity. Norris's father, born in Connecticut of Scotch-Irish descent, and his mother, of Pennsylvania Dutch background, had both settled in upstate New York, where they were married in 1838; both were uneducated and wrote their names with difficulty. In 1846 they set out by wagon for Ohio, where the family prospered and grew. At the time of George's birth his father was fifty-four years old, his mother forty-three, and his two eldest sisters already married. When "Willie" was only three his father died of pneumonia and his only brother, a soldier in General Sherman's army, died of wounds received at Resaca, Georgia. The mother assumed management of the eighty-acre farm. Although unable to provide intellectual or cultural stimulation, she taught her children a concern for the poor and a belief in the absolute goodness and righteousness of the Lord. She was, however, not a church member, and her son never joined a church.
Education
While a pupil at the local district school, Norris spent the summers working on the family farm or for neighboring farmers. He attended Baldwin University (later Baldwin-Wallace College) in Ohio in 1877-78 and, after teaching school for a year to earn money, entered Northern Indiana Normal School and Business Institute (later Valparaiso University), where he studied law, excelled in rhetoric and debate, and received Bachelor of Laws degree in 1883.
Career
Although admitted to the Indiana bar in 1883, Norris spent the next two years teaching school in Ohio and Washington state.
In 1885 he moved to Nebraska and opened a law office, at first in Beatrice and then in Beaver City. Nebraska was prosperous in these years, and Norris quickly established himself as a rising young man.
In conjunction with his law practice he engaged in the milling and mortgage-loan businesses and was local attorney for the Burlington & Missouri Railroad (later the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy).
Nebraska's prosperity gave way in the 1890's to drought and depression, and Norris's business ventures suffered severely.
Although he was a Republican in a heavily Populist area, he decided to seek a livelihood in public office. He secured appointment to two unexpired terms as prosecuting attorney of Furnas County and then was elected in his own right in 1892. Three years later, narrowly defeating the Populist incumbent, he won the first of two four-year terms as judge of Nebraska's fourteenth judicial district. Norris moved in 1900 from Beaver City to McCook, Nebraska, which became his permanent home.
In 1902, seeking a larger stage for his talents, Norris won the party's Congressional nomination in his district. In the November election he defeated the Democratic incumbent by 181 votes.
Norris approved the legislation being enacted in Nebraska to curb the railroads and the brewers and to make government more efficient and more representative. By supporting the federal administration's railroad bills, and by quietly returning his free railroad pass in 1906, Norris broke his ties with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. In May 1908, furthermore, he openly cast his lot with the House insurgents, who introduced an abortive resolution that would have sharply curtailed the power of Speaker Cannon by ending his control of the powerful Committee on Rules.
Norris soon learned the price of insurgency. Although he backed the presidential candidacy of William Howard Taft in 1908, he received little help from either the state or the national Republican organization in his own reelection campaign. He won by a mere twenty-two votes; the experience convinced him that he should not tie his political fortunes too firmly to those of the Republican party. With Taft in the White House, animosity between the Old Guard and the insurgents became more pronounced, heightened by the sympathetic coverage the insurgents received in the press. Taft withdrew patronage from the rebels and sought support for his legislative program from Speaker Cannon, leading to insurgent charges that he had abandoned the principles of Roosevelt. House Democrats, for their part, encouraged the renewed efforts of insurgent Republicans to curb the power of a now thoroughly aroused and angered Speaker. Norris, whose role in the 1908 revolt had cost him desirable committee assignments, precipitated the dramatic revolution on March 17, 1910, with a request for permission to present a matter privileged by the Constitution. When Cannon unsuspectingly acceded, Norris called for an elected Rules Committee on which the Speaker would not be eligible to sit. Cannon initially declared the resolution out of order but eventually had to give way. After an emotional thirty-six-hour fight, Norris's resolution was adopted by a vote of 191 to 156. While pleased by this fundamental procedural reform, possibly the most important in the history of the House of Representatives, Norris recognized that it was only an initial step toward achieving progressive social and economic legislation.
Now a national political figure, George Norris won easy election to a fifth term in 1910 and figured prominently in the rapidly coalescing progressive movement. He was chosen first vice-president of the National Progressive Republican League when it was formed in January 1911. He endorsed Robert M. La Follette for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination, switching his support to Theodore Roosevelt only when convinced that La Follette could not win the nomination. He stayed out of Roosevelt's third-party campaign of that year, not wishing to relinquish Nebraska's Republican organization to the "stand-pat" elements and thus jeopardize his own ambitions to rise to the Senate. His strategy succeeded; he defeated the incumbent Senator Norris Brown, a Taft supporter, in the Republican primary of April 1912, and in a bitter, hard-fought campaign that autumn emerged as the only major Republican victor in a Democratic landslide in Nebraska.
Entering the Senate on March 4, 1913, at the age of fifty-one, Norris was to serve in that body continuously for the next thirty years. In these three decades of political and social upheaval, he steadily gained in stature, preserving his independence yet never becoming a mere obstructionist.
Rejected because of his age when he volunteered for military service, he was easily elected to a second Senate term in 1918 by Nebraskans dissatisfied with wartime agricultural restrictions and the monopolistic practices of meat packers. Although an advocate of international cooperation to ensure a permanent peace, Norris felt the Versailles Treaty contained serious inequities; he especially denounced the secret diplomacy by which Shantung was transferred to Japanese control and the sanctioning of continued British domination of colonial peoples. As a result, he joined the Senate "Irreconcilables" in opposition to the treaty.
During the Republican ascendancy of the 1920's, Norris served as chairman of the Senate's Agriculture and Forestry and Judiciary committees; but his views were out of harmony with those of the dominant groups in his party. He was one of those labeled "sons of the wild jackass" by Senator George Moses of New Hampshire for their unrelenting criticism of the complacency and business domination of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations.
Emerging as the leader of the Congressional liberals after the death of Robert La Follette in 1925, he became an outspoken advocate of farm relief, the rights of labor, more efficient use of the nation's natural resources, and the direct election of presidents.
An early participant in the so-called farm bloc, in 1924 he introduced the Norris-Sinclair Bill, a predecessor of the McNary-Haugen plan for government purchase and sale abroad of farm surpluses.
By 1928 he had won many colleagues to his position, and his bill calling for government ownership and development of Muscle Shoals was enacted by Congress. President Coolidge vetoed the measure, however, as did Herbert Hoover when it was reenacted in 1931. Norris's loose ties to the Republican party continued to weaken during the 1920's. He favored Hiram Johnson for the presidency in 1920, and in 1924 he supported Robert La Follette's third-party bid--though not publicly, since he was himself seeking election to a third Senate term.
In 1928 he denounced his party's platform planks on agriculture and hydroelectric power and opposed the candidacy of Herbert Hoover. He campaigned that year for progressive Senators of both parties, and shortly before the election he publicly endorsed Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic candidate. With the economic collapse after 1929, Norris's disaffection with his party intensified. The Hoover administration's depression policies he regarded as either unrealistic and unworkable or overly helpful to those who least needed help: the banks and large corporations. In 1930 Republican regulars, plotting his defeat in the Nebraska primary, endorsed another George W. Norris, a grocery clerk, but the scheme was frustrated by the courts and the "grocer Norris" later served a prison sentence for his part in the plot. Norris endorsed the presidential candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and was a staunch supporter of most New Deal measures. He was largely responsible for the passage of the Norris-Rayburn Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which made permanent the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Norris-Doxey Farm Forestry Act of 1937. Still deeply committed to the public development of natural resources, he was the chief author of the act in May 1933 which created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to supervise the multipurpose development of the Tennessee River. Though broader in scope, the TVA was clearly rooted in the Norris bills earlier vetoed by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover. In recognition of his sponsorship of the immense project, the first dam built by the TVA was called Norris Dam, and his name was also given to the model community developed nearby. He was responsible, too, for the construction of a "little TVA" in Nebraska which helped make it, like Tennessee, an all-public-power state. His advocacy of the multiple-purpose public development of other river valleys, however, was unsuccessful.
In his home state Norris played a major role in the adoption, in 1934, of a constitutional amendment establishing a unicameral legislature to be chosen in nonpartisan elections. With the advent of the Second World War, Norris reluctantly concluded that totalitarian aggression could be met only by force or the threat of force.
Early in 1942 Norris announced his intention of retiring, but when the campaign was well under way he changed his mind and ran for a sixth Senatorial term. Wartime duties kept him in Washington until the weekend before the election, while his opponents directly appealed to Nebraska voters increasingly disillusioned with the Roosevelt administration. Despite endorsements of Norris by the President and by numerous Senate colleagues of both parties, the Democratic party in Nebraska stood by its own candidate, and Norris, running again as an independent, was defeated by a Republican, Kenneth S. Wherry. Returning to his hometown of McCook, Norris retained his keen interest in the issues of public power and resource utilization and developed a new concern over global matters and the nature of the postwar world. His autobiography, Fighting Liberal (written with the help of James E. Lawrence, a Nebraska newspaper editor and political associate), was completed in August 1944, several weeks before he was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage.
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Though George Norris was born and grew up in Ohio, he h...)
Politics
Despite his agreement with much of the Populist program, Norris remained a loyal Republican.
As a freshman Congressman, Norris displayed neither marked ability nor marked liberal tendencies. He sympathized with Theodore Roosevelt's domestic policies, but he was indebted to the party organization and to railroad officials for help in his campaign. Joseph G. Cannon, the conservative Republican leader in the House with whom he was later to cross swords, even spoke in his district when Norris ran for reelection in 1904. Yet Norris was sensitive to the political mood of his constituents.
During the Woodrow Wilson era Norris supported many of the administration's key measures, including the Federal Reserve and anti-monopoly bills, and in 1916 he was one of three non-Democratic Senators to vote for the Supreme Court nomination of Louis D. Brandeis. But he objected to Democratic efforts to assure total support of Wilson's program through caucus control, contending that it prevented the addition of worthwhile amendments and represented a continuation of "Cannonism" under Democratic auspices. On foreign affairs, Norris was highly critical of Wilson's Mexican policy and particularly of the American occupation of Vera Cruz in 1914. Three years later he was one of the "little group of willful men"--in Wilson's phrase--who opposed a resolution authorizing the arming of merchant ships traversing the Atlantic war zone. Believing that the United States was being led into the European hostilities by the nation's financial and commercial interests, he was also one of six Senators who voted against the American declaration of war in April 1917. Norris nevertheless unstintingly supported the administration in the prosecution of the war, while endorsing such antiprofiteering measures as heavier taxation and, where possible, direct government operation of industries.
Norris's disillusionment with his party stemmed in part from the low caliber of Republicans appointed or elected to public office, many of whom, he believed, were too intimately connected with corporate wealth or corrupt interests. On these grounds he opposed Senate confirmation of the nominations of Charles Evans Hughes and John J. Parker to the Supreme Court, of Charles B. Warren as Attorney General, and of Thomas F. Woodlock to the Interstate Commerce Commission, as well as the seating in the Senate of Truman H. Newberry, Frank L. Smith, and William S. Vare. Of these, only Hughes and Newberry were approved, and the latter soon resigned his Senate seat. Norris's foreign policy views in the 1920's were similarly unorthodox. He early favored recognition of the Soviet Union, opposed the activities of American corporations and United States Marines in Nicaragua, and sympathized with the aspirations of the Mexican revolution. Even in the hostile political environment of the 1920's, however, Norris's role was never merely one of opposition.
Senator Norris was closer to Franklin Roosevelt, politically and personally, than to any other president under whom he served. He openly supported F. D. R. in all four of his presidential races and actively campaigned for him in 1932 and 1940, playing a particularly effective role in Western states, where public power was an important issue. In 1936, when Norris successfully ran as an independent for a fifth Senate term, the President strongly endorsed him, and the Democratic party in Nebraska reluctantly followed suit. Even in the New Deal years, however, Norris remained his own man. A critic of Roosevelt's 1937 court-packing plan, he proposed his own measure to limit all federal judges to one nine-year term and to require a two-thirds vote of the Supreme Court to invalidate acts of Congress. Norris was, furthermore, relentless in his criticism of partisanship and of the patronage policies of James A. Farley, Postmaster General and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He insisted on writing into the TVA and Rural Electrification acts the provision that all appointments and promotions should be entirely on a merit basis.
Though he opposed the establishment of compulsory military service in 1940, he did support a revision of the neutrality law to allow the Allies to buy American arms on a "cash and carry" basis; and in 1941 he endorsed the Lend-Lease Bill. As early as 1938 he called for a consumer boycott of Japanese silk, and after Pearl Harbor he voted for the declaration of war on Japan. Always sensitive to civil liberties issues, he criticized the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for their wartime treatment of aliens and other suspect persons. One of his last legislative concerns was the drive to repeal the poll tax in national elections.
Views
Though firmly rooted in rural America, Norris clearly understood the impact of an increasingly industrialized and integrated national economy upon the lives of farmers and city dwellers alike, and did not hesitate to call for extensions of federal power to curb privilege or promote the general welfare. Norris is usually grouped politically with other progressive Republicans like La Follette and William E. Borah of Idaho, but he differed from them in significant respects. Unlike La Follette, whose views were perhaps closest to his own, he never stressed the necessity of organization and discipline among progressives. He and Borah were both "loners" in politics, but Borah's unpredictability, bombastic style, and love of publicity--as well as his emphasis on states' rights--were all uncharacteristic of Norris. With La Follette, Norris understood that patient attention to legislative detail and committee routine were integral parts of a Senator's job. Norris's career, unlike that of many politicians, ended on a note of fulfillment rather than of decline. After his years in the political wilderness, power and recognition flowed to him in the 1930's. With the lone exception of the 1910 insurgency fight against Speaker Cannon, his major achievements--the Anti-Injunction Law, the "Lame Duck" amendment, TVA, the Rural Electrification Act, the unicameral legislature in Nebraska--all came after he had passed the age of seventy. In his last years he was widely regarded as one of the outstanding legislators in American political history, and perhaps that history's most distinguished independent.
Personality
The remarkable political success of George Norris was rooted in part in his personal style. Norris was a fearless speaker whose integrity could never be doubted. Yet he always spoke in a conversational fashion, devoid of oratorical effects. His manner was amiable and mild, and he willingly conceded that he could be mistaken. Normally slow to anger, he became aroused whenever he detected the involvement of private privilege or partisan politics in public issues. Though not lacking in wit and humor, he could hardly be described as jovial, and he was prone to occasional periods of depression. He was a phenomenally hard worker, and few surpassed him in parliamentary skill. In the popular mind Norris was widely regarded as an idealist who would fight for his beliefs to the bitter end regardless of person or party--an impression heightened by the sternness of his visage and the steadiness of his gaze. In fact he was neither unrealistic nor rigid politically, and the prospect of compromise did not alarm him, provided he could thereby gain at least a part of what he sought.
Quotes from others about the person
"He stands forth as the very perfect, gentle knight of American progressive ideals. " (Franklin Roosevelt)
Connections
On June 1, 1889 Norris married Pluma Lashley, daughter of Beaver City's most prominent businessman and banker. They had three daughters: Hazel, Marian, and Gertrude.
On July 8, 1903, he married a McCook schoolteacher, Ellie Leonard, at the home of her parents in San Jose, California. Their only children died at birth.