THE GENTLE KNIGHT OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM
Zucker, Norman L.
rriHis month marks the centennial of -¦- the birth of a folkhero of American political history, George William Norris of Nebraska. For nearly four decades the phrase "Norris of Nebraska" symbolized...
...he joined Bull Mooser Theodore Roosevelt in his 1912 battle at Armageddon...
...To these attitudes he added some of the thinking of Roosevelt and Wilson: a realization of the problems of the city and an awareness of the needs which inspired the social-justice movement...
...As a child he sensed the wounds and doubts of the Civil War and as an adolescent and young man he witnessed the closing of the frontier and the emergence of unrestrained exploitation...
...In 1909, he was instrumental in defeating Speaker Cannon in his attempt to control the House committee which was to investigate the Ballinger-Pinchot public land fraud controversy...
...It too proposed a "Covenant with the People" and postulated the great issue before the American people as "the control of government and industry by private monopoly...
...George W. Norris made a lasting contribution to American life, not only in deed, but also in spirit...
...He was always willing to champion unpopular causes and battle the omnipresent venal interests...
...he constantly opposed the business philosophy of the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover...
...not only did it represent a throwback to preceding dissident movements but it also embodied a program for the present and a plan for the future...
...The attack by Norris and other Progressives was not against the essentials of capitalism but rather against its operation...
...To this end the New Individualism accepted public ownership and management in the area of natural monopolies and in fields where monopolies might exist to the public detriment...
...The drift of Midwestern Progressive thought as embodied in the Norris-LaFollette New Individualism, although it exalted the traditional Jef-fersonian-Jacksonian beliefs in the virtues of frontier equality, individualism, and the common man, nonetheless departed from the Jeffer-sonian concept of limited government...
...He was instrumental in the crusading work of the People's Legislative Service, the Progressive Conferences of 1922 and 1931, and the 1932 National Progressive League for Roosevelt...
...They wanted state ownership and operation of the nation's hydroelectric and transportation systems...
...He never thought in terms of fundamental socialistic dogma such as the nationalization of all the means of production...
...It was an attempt to destroy the economic and political power of monopoly, which had come between the people and their government...
...La-Follette's 1924 candidacy under the auspices of the Conference for Progressive Political Action was an attempt to organize a third party in the interests of the common man...
...Effective regulation, however, was impossible as long as big business controlled both major political parties...
...Government was to act as the conscience of insensate industrialism...
...This liberal tendency within Republican ranks received formal recognition with the creation of the National Progressive Republican League in 1911...
...and he certainly opposed collectivization of land, dictatorship of the proletariat, and the achievement of a classless society...
...He recognized the interdependence of the farm and the factory...
...He was able to work successfully with each of the different reform waves because he had a deep, emotional attachment to programs designed to protect the common man...
...Norris could not then, and never did, embrace socialism...
...The LaFollette Platform of 1924 was reminiscent of the 1912 Bull Moose crusade...
...Lawrence Seaway...
...The remedy was not socialism but a return of the organs of capitalistic government to the people...
...This recognition of the complementary natures of the farm and the city enabled Norris to work with both the urban and rural aspects of the Progressive surge...
...The enactment of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution eliminating Lame Duck sessions and the establishment of Nebraska's unicameral legislature, both primarily the result of Norris' influence, were intended to make government more effective and more responsive to the desires of the electorate...
...But the Nebraskan was also important for less tangible reasons...
...By 1924 both Norris and LaFollette had become nationally known for their advocacy of certain types of government ownership...
...The New Nationalism accepted inequality and bigness as natural [consequences of an expanding industrialism, but wanted to subject the trusts and leviathan corporations to public control for democratic ends...
...George W. Norris, like so many other Americans, rose to prominence from humble beginnings...
...While Roosevelt and Wilson became celebrated respectively for their New Nationalism and New Freedom, both programs of an urban, Eastern character, Norris, and to some extent, Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., followed an agrarian Midwestern philosophy which the Wisconsin Progressive Charles McCarthy called the New Individualism...
...Confronted with the problem of reconciling the old Eighteenth Century ideal of untram-meled individualism with Twentieth Century needs of an urban industrial society, the New Individualists retained some of the intellectual shibboleths of Jefferson and Jackson and grafted upon them the concept of a positive state responsive to the needs of a broadly based electorate...
...Therefore, to achieve corrective legislation the government must be returned to the people...
...LaFollette's appeal, although regional, recognized the need for a balanced development of both agriculture and labor...
...The labor legislation for which he is famous, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, indicates an understanding of organized labor's critical position in an urban, industrial America...
...Despite the fact that Norris came from a rural area, many of his attitudes were far from provincial...
...For nearly four decades the phrase "Norris of Nebraska" symbolized political independence, integrity, and liberalism...
...Not only did he serve as a nexus between agriculture and labor, but he also was a link between the periods of reform as epitomized by the Progressive movement and the New Deal...
...The League actively opposed Republican President Taft and ultimately supported Theodore Roosevelt and the newly formed Bull Moose Party...
...Norris, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, was "the very perfect, gentle knight" of American liberalism...
...When the reform spirit waned and was eclipsed after World War I, the Senator nurtured it...
...By 1912 Progessivism, now the dominant political force, was being expressed in the philosophies of Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Wilson's New Freedom...
...He disdained petty partisan politics and placed the commonweal above personal consideration...
...Norris, in short, retained much of the thinking epitomized by another Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan...
...Like the Great Commoner, Norris, too, had faith in the common man, a belief that political questions were essentially moral questions, an agrarian outlook, a lingering suspicion of the cities, and a vehement hatred of monopoly, Wall Street, and Big Business...
...A healthy agriculture in itself was insufficient...
...Norris was able to accept some of the rationale of both Roosevelt and Wilson in that a great deal of Progressive political effort was directed toward enacting proposals the Populists had outlined earlier...
...Norris was a vice-president of this group, which was predominantly agrarian in membership but included many important urban Progressives...
...Although Norris was forced to shift from pure individualism toward social control, this use of government control did not imply socialism...
...George W. Norris began his legislative career in 1903 as a Republican in the House of Representatives and concluded it in 1942 when he was defeated for re-election to the Senate as an Independent...
...But government ownership was to be employed only in selected quasi-public areas...
...But the agencies of government were controlled by the plutocrats and their lackeys, the political bosses...
...It was the abuses of tariffs and railroad rates which oppressed the farmer, and the injunctions, court decisions, and tax policy which oppressed the laborer that the Norris-LaFollette Progressives wanted to eliminate...
...Norris was the only Congressman to serve continuously from the Republican Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal to the Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal...
...Government ownership, they believed, was the ultimate alternative to be used only if regulation failed...
...Although both the New Nationalism and the New Freedom were devoted to the cause of social justice, their methods and philosophies differed...
...Through two score years on the national political scene he embodied the Progressive recognition of the ethical functions of the state...
...The major goals of muckraking—rhonesty in government, the democratization of Congress, the restriction of big business, and the conservation of natural resources—appealed strongly to the Nebraskan...
...When Norris first arrived in Washington in 1903 to take his seat in the Fifty-eighth Congress, the intellectual climate was astir with the disclosures of an increasingly militant muckraking...
...and he ultiThe Gentle Knight of American Liberalism by Norman L. Zucker mately emerged during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as the Grand Old Man of Progessivism...
...Democracy could flourish only when both agriculture and labor were content and prosperous...
...And a year later he spearheaded the Insurgent-Democratic coalition which destroyed the Speaker's arbitrary power to appoint the members of the important Rules Committee...
...This 1924 conception of Pro-gressivism was significant in a number of respects...
...He was born shortly after the start of the Civil War on July 11, 1861, and grew to maturity in the midst of a rapidly changing and increasingly complex society...
...Although nominally a Republican, he defied Republican Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon on the issue of party regularity...
...It was a middle path between the two extremes: accepting some government ownership in order to gain its ends, which were the preservation of the essentials of private ownership and private enterprise...
...It was, in this respect, a decided advance over raw agrarian class-conscious Populism, and a significant forerunner of the New Deal...
...In following his principles he courted political suicide and national opprobrium...
...The ends remained much the same, but the methods changed as the frontier faded...
...It called for public development of a national water power system, conservation of natural resources, a progressive tax policy, a non-partisan judiciary, legislative aid to the farmer and the laborer, ratification of the Child Labor Amendment, and the creation of a St...
...The worker, like the farmer, was entitled to government protection against the harsh conditions of an unrestrained market society...
...The negative use of government machinery implied anti-trust laws to control corporate concentration, the supervision of transportation facilities, a tax policy which emphasized high inheritance and corporation taxes, banking and insurance laws, public service and utility commissions, and other regulatory measures...
...However, while Norris, during his early years in Congress, did accept some of the sour aspects of Populism such as imperialism, xenophobism, and isolationism, he did not go along with the Populists on monetary theories, narrow class divisions, nativism, and racism...
...and unlike the socialists, the LaFollette-Norris definition of a quasi-public activity was narrow...
...In this month in which we observe the centennial of his birth it is not amiss to suggest that the selflessness of a Norris is always needed in positions of political responsibility, especially so today when America is challenged by a New Frontier...
...The ethical imperative that the farmer was entitled to a fair recompense for his toil applied equally to the laborer...
...he supported President Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom reforms...
...The Nebraskan, however, is important for his legislative legacy rather than for his political aberrations— a legacy which must be considered within the context of the Twentieth Century progressive reform impulse of American politics...
...Norris substantially changed the rules of the House of Representatives, sponsored measures of lasting importance for agriculture and labor, fathered legislation which created the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, and was primarily responsible for the establishment in Nebraska of the only unicameral legislature in the United States...
...When Norris joined LaFollette in pleading against Wilson's policy of "armed peace" and when he voted against entrance into World War I, he demonstrated Parnassian integrity...
...it also advocated regulation by commission and rigid taxing policies...
...The positive use of government machinery implied the enactment of social-justice legislation such as workmen's compensation and employers' liability laws, industrial safety standards, wage and hour laws, old age pensions, and other legislation intended to ameliorate the onerous working conditons of men, women, and children...
...order to destroy the oppressors of the people it was necessary, in his judgment, to turn to the government to bring about a redress of grievances...
...Norris' intellectual commitment to the New Nationalism was no greater than his commitment to the New Freedom...
...Col-lectivistic restriction on laissez-faire, as proposed by Senator Norris, was a device to preserve capitalism itself...
...it was too extreme a departure from his traditional values which exalted individualism and self-reliance...
...The New Individualism was an attempt to evolve a democratic capitalistic society free from the evils of ruthless individualism and free from the regimentation of socialism and communism...
...Because they feared concentration and control, and its concomitant, unregulated industrial bigness, Norris and others like him abandoned limited government for positive government...
...he accepted, in its essentials, the ideology of the agrarian radicals of the 1890's, the Populists...
...and railroads possessed a unique obligation to the health, safety, and comfort of the community...
...The New Freedom, in contrast, wanted to destroy monopoly and industrial gigantism so as to restore an economic order based on individual competition...
...Water power, a natural resource, belonged to all the people...
...They did not want to abolish capitalism, only control its abuses...
...he engaged in an Insurgent controversy with President William Howard Taft...
...The power of the state was to be used both negatively and positively...
...In NORMAN L. ZUCKER, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, is currently completing a book on George W. Norris and American Progressivism...
...The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act, the Norris-Doxey Farm Forestry Act, the Norris-Rayburn Rural Electrification Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority Act were in keeping with the finest expressions of a combined agrarian-urban Progressive spirit...
...The only intellectual position with which he had no sympathy during the 1912 campaign was Eugene V. Debs' espousal of the Socialist platform's fundamental premise that "the capitalist system has outgrown its historic function, and has become utterly incapable of meeting the problems . . . confronting society...
...During this period, for five terms as a Representative and for an equal number of terms as Senator, Norris violated every rule of partisan politics...
...Norris, no longer an obscure Congressman, was now identified with the rising Insurgent spirit within the Republican Party...
...Like the Populists, Norris accepted the principles of an agrarian, equal-itarian democracy and assumed that the enemies of this society were the giant trusts, the railroads, the middlemen, and the Wall Street financiers...
...Basically it meant that the rule of the majority should be expressed by a stronger government committed to a democratic vision of a broad social and economic program...
...By the time of the panic of 1907, Norris, with his Midwestern agricultural sentiments, had developed a strong distaste for the conservative Eastern wing of the Republican Party...
...These major legislative achievements are tangible witness to Senator Norris' importance...
Vol. 25 • July 1961 • No. 7
