George W. Norris
George William Norris (July 11, 1861 – September 2, 1944) was an American politician from the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. He served five terms in the United States House of Representatives as a Republican, from 1903 until 1913, and five terms in the United States Senate, from 1913 until 1943. He served four terms as a Republican and his final term as an independent. Norris was defeated for re-election in 1942.
George W. Norris
September 2, 1944 (aged 83)
McCook, Nebraska, U.S.
Republican (until 1936)
Independent
3
Norris was a leader of progressive and liberal causes in Congress. He is best known for his sponsorship of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 during the Great Depression. It became a major development agency in the Upper South that constructed dams for flood control and electricity generation for a wide rural area. In addition, Norris was known for his intense crusades against what he characterized as "wrong and evil",[1] his liberalism, his insurgency against party leaders, his non-interventionist foreign policy, and his support for labor unions.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt called him "the very perfect, gentle knight of American progressive ideals", and this has been the theme of all his biographers.[2] A 1957 advisory panel of 160 scholars recommended that Norris was the top choice for the five best Senators in U.S. history.[3]
Early life[edit]
Norris was born in 1861 in York Township, Sandusky County, Ohio. He was the eleventh child of poor, uneducated farmers of Scots-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch descent. He graduated from Baldwin University and earned his LL.B. degree in 1883 at the law school of Valparaiso University.
He moved west to practice law, settling in Beaver City, Nebraska. In 1889 he married Pluma Lashley; the couple had three daughters (Gertrude, Hazel, and Marian) before her 1901 death. The widower Norris married Ellie Leonard in 1903; they had no children.
Political career[edit]
House insurgent[edit]
In 1900 Norris relocated to the larger town of McCook, where he became active as a Republican in local politics. In 1902, running as a Republican, he was elected to the House of Representatives for Nebraska's 5th congressional district.
In that election, he was supported by the railroads; however, in 1906 he broke with them, supporting Theodore Roosevelt's plans to regulate rates for the benefit of shippers, such as the merchants who lived in his district. A prominent insurgent after 1908, Norris led the revolt in 1910 against House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon. By a vote of 191 to 156, the House legislators created a new system in which seniority would automatically move members ahead, even against the wishes of the leadership. This had the practical effect for several decades of benefiting Southern Democratic congressmen, who became powerful in both the House and the Senate. Because Southern states had effectively disenfranchised most blacks by new constitutions and discriminatory practices at the turn of the century, it was a one-party region, known as the Solid South, representing only white voters.
In January 1911, Norris helped create the National Progressive Republican League and served as its vice president. He originally supported Robert M. La Follette, Sr. for the 1912 presidential nomination but then switched to Roosevelt. However, he refused to bolt the Republican convention and join Roosevelt's Progressive Party. He instead ran for the Senate as a Republican.
Senator[edit]
As a leading Progressive Republican, Norris supported the direct election of senators, ratified by the states in the Seventeenth Amendment. He also promoted the conversion of all state legislatures to the unicameral system. Only the Nebraska Legislature passed this change in 1934. All other states have retained a two-house system.
Norris supported some of President Woodrow Wilson's domestic programs but became a firm isolationist, fearing that bankers were manipulating the country into war. In the face of enormous pressure from the media and the administration, Norris was one of only six senators to vote against the declaration of war on Germany in 1917.