GEORGE NORRIS' PROGRESSIVE LEGACY
Neuberger, Richard L.
George Norris' Progressive Legacy The Autobiography Of A Fighting Liberal FIGHTING LIBERAL, the autobiography of George W. Norris. The Macmillan Co. $3.50. Reviewed by Richard L. Neuberger FOR...
...The mother, Mary Mook Norris, a remarkable and courageous woman, spun her son's clothes...
...It was a shadow that never lifted completely from us," the Senator writes...
...The Clinch foams white as it topples across the crest of Norris Dam...
...He calls attention to the fact that the treaty gave Japan the Shantung Peninsula of China, and that China was a friendly power...
...The Populist called him a reactionary...
...Both of them are gone now—F...
...But these are not major criticisms...
...The Work Lives On Sen...
...I may never see this tree in bearing, Willie," she said, "but somebody will...
...After his early experiences as a regular Republican, he invariably supported the liberal candidate for President...
...This required great political bravery, for Nebraska was dry and Protestant, while Smith was a Catholic who advocated repeal...
...They put through TVA...
...The Shantung Provision . . . was compounding and perpetuating a crime against the Chinese people...
...No article or review could detail so rich a career...
...It is the story of one of the most remarkable careers in American history, a career which embodies the tale of the long fight in behalf of the average man...
...Today, with rich rewards to be won by men who seem infallible, it is unique to read a book which confesses to mistakes...
...This is his chapter on the defeat of the League of Nations...
...The sequence is poor...
...Good will among nations was as much a part of Norris' creed as good will among men...
...In 1917 there was no immediate threat of war reaching American soil...
...Fortunately for Congress and for the nation, others have followed Norris' example...
...I have thought conscience was the guide...
...Norris says he believes he deserved defeat in that election...
...Defeat at the polls marred Norris' final years, although he writes, "I have no bitterness in my heart...
...With righteous indignation, Norris tells how he based his opposition to the League on the way that the great powers sold China into the clutches of Japan...
...All a member has to do, if he does follow that which he believes to be the will of his constituency at all times, is to attempt to take such action as will bring him the most votes in the next election...
...The Tennessee hums a dull roar where he surges through Wheeler and Pickwick and Hales Bar and Chickamauga...
...And Roosevelt, standing at Ak-sar-ben coliseum in 1936, paid tribute to Norris as the outstanding leader of American liberalism...
...The book has just been published...
...Here were 30,000,000 people of Chinese blood to be placed under brutal Japanese rule," the old Senator writes...
...As a boy Norris saw his mother planting an apple tree...
...His Guide: Conscience Norris tells why he voted for American participation in the present war, but fought with all his strength to block the war resolution in 1917...
...In Nebraska he became a prairie lawyer...
...He was denounced all over the nation, as were the other 5 senators who voted with him, including his good friends, Bob La Follette and Harry Lane...
...Backer of President Roosevelt's foreign policy that he was, Norris could not bring himself to put in his autobiography that he regretted his attacks on the League, for he felt that the treaty establishing the League was the beginning of Japan's brutal march of conquest...
...No longer could one man, the Speaker, superimpose his own will on colleagues elected from all over the United States...
...Some of the characters are ignored...
...I attacked that transfer of Shantung to China...
...I was outraged by this injustice to China...
...Then his wife died...
...His mother, whom he worshipped, dwelt in poverty...
...George W. Norris lived in the little Nebraska town of McCook, from where he first had gone to Congress 4 decades before...
...Hoover later vetoed TVA in the most outspoken terms...
...He and his widowed mother supported his 8 sisters...
...Roosevelt sleeps forever...
...He ran for office on the Republican ticket and was beaten for district attorney of Furnas County by a Populist...
...In his autobiography he says that his stand was justified when "Mr...
...And he reminds his readers that in October of 1919 he stood on the floor of the Senate and warned: "If you will look at a map of the Pacific Ocean, you will find that the giving of the German island possessions north of the equator to Japan means that Japan is brought thousands of miles nearer our Coast...
...This was sufficient time to enable him to complete his autobiography and to leave for liberals all over America a rich legacy of the progressive movement...
...Although a strong supporter of President Roosevelt's foreign policy, Norris defends vigorously his opposition to the Treaty of Versailles...
...Out of this agony and sorrow came the melancholy courage which inspired so many Americans...
...Reviewed by Richard L. Neuberger FOR a year and a half after his defeat for reelection in 1942, Sen...
...And, sadly, sorrowfully, the old Senator recalls the American blood shed to get back those fortified islands, and the Chinese blood shed because Japan was put astride the Shantung Peninsula...
...It stretches in retrospect through many valiant battles—against the purchase of Senate seats, against imperialism in South America, against monopolies, for public ownership of power, for minimum wages and maximum hours, for the conservation of the country's natural resources...
...On that wild frontier he taught school...
...His second wife, who still lives and is the Senator's widow, came into the home to become "a tenderhearted, loving mother" to Norris' 3 daughters...
...her son asked...
...after majority sentiment in Nebraska had returned to the Republican Party...
...Across the uplands the transmission towers stretch, carrying power to farms and homes and factories...
...Dams were built on other rivers, on the Sacramento, on the Columbia, on the Missouri, on the Colorado...
...The lesson which uneducated Mary Mook Norris taught her son, George William, was well learned...
...Power became to him a symbol of the struggle between entrenched greed and the hopes of the masses of the people...
...Otherwise, a member of Congress giving weight to expressed public sentiment becomes only an automatic machine...
...It might well be the creed for all members of Congress...
...In 1941 an act of war was committed by Japan against the United States at Pearl Harbor under the most treacherous and despicable circumstances, and the following day Germany and Italy issued declarations of war against the American people...
...Japan was a part of the League of Nations but her heart was impure...
...The circumstances were most dissimilar," he claims...
...President," said Norris with tears in his eyes, "my dreams are coming true...
...His first wife lost a child when their buggy overturned...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt once referred to Norris as "the very perfect gentle knight of American progressive ideals...
...Norris was a regular Republican, a GOP stalwart...
...In this fashion does Uncle George's work live after him...
...None of them could see into the future, when reactionaries from Puget Sound to Cape Cod would be denouncing as a wild-eyed radical the man who began his political career so conservatively on the Nebraska plains...
...When George Norris went to Washington in 1902, this was not the case...
...Not all the logs in the structure are dovetailed...
...NORRIS' job was looking after the interests of the average man...
...Men of such diverse views as Wheeler of Montana, Coffee of Washington, Tom Eliot of Massachusetts, Lister Hill of Alabama, and Morse of Oregon have defied sentiment in their constituencies to vote their convictions...
...Norris never knew what it was to play...
...As a young man George Norris went to Nebraska, but first he migrated all the way across the continent to Washington, then a Territory and not yet a State...
...Norris details the persecution and vilification which he endured for his opposition to war in 1917...
...It still continues today...
...He backed T. R. and Fighting Bob La Follette and Smith while Nebraska was voting for their conservative opponents...
...Yet water breaks over the great parapet of Grand Coulee and flows through the penstocks at Bonneville...
...The old man from the prairie tells of the majestic Sierras, pouring their tribute of melting ice and snow down through granite canyons to the Pacific...
...He clung to F.D.R...
...In his chapter on Hetch Hetchy, the old Senator gives a picture of what the persistent battle for public power has meant to him...
...In this connection, the war resolution, perhaps, more than any other issue," writes Norris, "raised the question of what should be the attitude of a member of Congress...
...His second wife gave birth to twin boys, who died in infancy...
...The story of Norris is the story of the struggle to change the American Congress from a refuge for privilege to a bulwark for the common man...
...Much of the chinking is left out...
...Looking back...
...He spent his time on the iob...
...Norris sufferecTintensely in his early life...
...The book is jerky...
...But he broke the iron rule of Cannon...
...Should he always follow what he believed to -be the majority sentiment of his district, or should he obey his own conscience even when, in doing so, it appeared he was voting against the wishes of a majority of his constituents...
...SORROW is a crucible in which greatness is often smeltered...
...The struggle has been successful...
...In a highly interest-ing passage he tells how he came to know about Russia and Russia's people from Colonel Hugh L. Cooper, the brilliant American engineer who constructed the huge Dnieperstroy Dam...
...Today, legislation to aid the people can get a hearing in Congress...
...This is one of the ways that F.D.R...
...This is one of the warm qualities of his autobiography...
...When he left the House to enter the Senate in 1912, the lower chamber had been democratized...
...Unconsciously, without pomp, Norris lived this role...
...If a great river—a river belonging to the nation—could be developed for private profit, then where would the people's interests be protected...
...In the end, the only worth-while pay in Congressional service is that which comes from a satisfied conscience in the knowledge that you have done your duty as God gives you light, regardless of the effect it may have upon political fortunes...
...Into the White House in 1933 came a President who was not afraid to act, who was not afraid to use the sovereignty of his great position to help the average man...
...will be remembered...
...Why do you work so hard, mother...
...His old friend, James E. Lawrence, says in the introduction, "Sen...
...He reviews the long and untiring effort to have the people of San Francisco, rather than a private monopoly, generate and sell the water power from the Hetch Hetchy project...
...Yet he came from a boyhood of poverty, in Sandusky County, Ohio...
...Norris' book contains one chapter which might be read with great profit by the men now making the peace...
...In fact, Norris himself was inclined to back Prohibition but he felt that economic issues outweighed the liquor question...
...He was for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, for Bob La Follette in 1924, for Al Smith in 1928, and for Franklin D. Roosevelt all 4 times that he ran, although death cut short the old Senator's final opportunity to vote for F.D.R...
...Here is the testament of a great man, a man whose monument is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a mightier edifice than any pharaoh ever reared...
...If that is the line of duty of a member, then Congress requires no patriotism, no education, and no courage...
...Four years after his indorsement of the elder La Follette, Norris stumped the nation for Al Smith...
...Norris is dead and gone...
...Here appear names familiar to liberals throughout the land—Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, Borah, the La Follettes, Oswald Garrison Villard, Harold L. Ickes, Harry Lane, Paul Y. Anderson, Dave Lilienthal and, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...He himself wandered about Washington Territory seeking in vain for opportunity for them...
...Norris commenced in politics as an orthodox Republican...
...The aged Senator never rode the bandwagon...
...This is no ordinary publishing event...
...He describes what this vast energy, harnessed and tapped, can mean to the homes of the nation...
...When Japan gets those islands fortified she will not be so distant from us as she has been heretofore...
...He was never frivolous, never gay...
...I have no ill will toward any man...
...Lane, who came from Oregon, died a few weeks later...
...Norris was so impressed by what Cooper had to say about Russia that he sent the colonel to see President Roosevelt, who also learned much from the American who was harnessing the Soviet Union's great rivers...
...D. R. and Uncle George...
...In the Senate he often worked 16 hours a day...
...The relationship between George Norris, the boy from 80 acres of stumps, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the squire of Hyde Park, became one of the stirring stories of America...
...Uncle Joe Cannon ruled the House omnipotently, squashing bills which displeased him...
...Usually it is adopted...
...This was Norris' creed...
...The Sacramento spreads out in a broad lake, as it is slowly penned up behind Shasta...
...In the present struggle, the Axis plan of aggression and conquest in my eyes constituted a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States...
...He might stand around a piano with a few associates and sing Clementine or Tenting Tonight, but such interludes were rare...
...Fight For Public Power The Hetch Hetchy power fight in California began in 1912, the year Norris entered the Senate...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 20
