1983 George William Norris

COMMENTS BY SENATOR EDWARD ZORINSKY

It is a pleasure, indeed, to be with you this evening. I understand that you have already had a full quota of speeches. I come from the most deliberate body in the world, the United States Senate, but I am not going to give those type of speeches I used to give when I was Mayor. People would come up to me afterwards and tell me I was a warm speaker. I thought that was a compliment until I looked the word “warm” up in the dictionary and found out it means “not too hot,” so I don’t want to give that kind of a talk.

Willard asked me before I was allowed to speak at this austere occasion if I believed in the Constitution of the United States of America. I said I did, and he said, “Do you believe in the Bill of Rights?” I said I did, and he said, “Do you believe in free speech in this country of ours?” I said “Yes” and he said, “Would you make a free speech?” I just want to say a few words. I did have something written and I’m condensing is so that you needn’t get the full effect, but I think you will get the flavor if it.

I would like to begin by saying that I am honored to have been asked to help induct into the Agricultural Hall of Achievement one of the finest individuals to have ever called the State of Nebraska his home. Let me first compliment all those connected with the Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement, as well as the George Norris Commemorative Committee for the wisdom of selecting Senator Norris as your inductee this year. Few have done as much for our State, for Agriculture and for the Nation as the former Congressman and Senator from McCook, Nebraska. And there could be no more appropriate time to honor this great Nebraska than this, the 50th Anniversary of the Tennessee Valley Authorize and Nebraska Public Power.

You’ll notice that I praised Norris as a great Nebraskan and a great public official. Nowhere did I stress that he was well known or famous. That wasn’t an oversight on my part, because earlier this year, I found out the hard way how little known this great man is today, once you have crossed the Missouri River. I had written none other than the President of the United States, inviting him to a June 12th tribute to Senator Norris in McCook. For any of you who didn’t catch it in the newspapers, let me quote from the reply I received from one of the President’s top assistants. He said, “President Reagan will not be able to attend this function, as his schedule is fully committed at that time. However, your interest is appreciated, and the President asks that you extend his warm regards to Senator Norris.” Perhaps we should send the White House a transcript of tonight’s proceedings to bring them up to date back there.

But, seriously, Senator George William Norris was a man of truly mythical stature in our State and I’m flattered to have been asked to participate in this induction. Since I am following several very distinguished speakers, I will try to conclude my remarks in a relatively brief period of time. Besides, I learned a long time ago, that to make a speech immortal, you need not make it everlasting.

My task tonight is to sum up George Norris’ career as a Senator and a statesman with specific attention to his activities in the area of agriculture. Of course, we have already heard in detail about his fights for the Unicameral Legislature, Rural Electrification, TVA and the Tri County Project. But my assignment is still a tall order considering that Norris served in the Senate for 30 years, a period that stretched from the beginning of the Wilson Administration to the Second World War. Tumultuous years they were. Norris arrived in the Senate in 1913, a progressive in the hey day of progressivism and flush from victory in his battle to overthrow the authoritarian Republican Speaker of the House, Joseph Cannon.

At age 51, Norris had already been a teacher, lawyer, prosecutor, judge and five-term congressman. What he had already accomplished would have amounted to a very rewarding career for most men and one wonders if even Norris realized that his most productive years and his greatest accomplishments were still to come. A staunch conservative and loyal Republican in earlier days, Norris had, by this time, modified his views considerably. In the process, he established the principle that would guide his actions and would dictate his opinions for the rest of his life. Among these principles were an undying empathy for the working man, the farmer and the disadvantaged, blunt distrust for business and corporate power, a staunch belief in the public development of public resources and, in particular, of hydro-electric power, a sincere pacifism and hatred of war, a deep respect in civil liberties, and a clear dislike of partisan politics regardless of what party was involved. In addition, there was the legendary Norris integrity and independence. Together, over the three decades of his Senate service, these two-character traits would make the phrase “Norris of Nebraska” synonymous with the ideals of honesty and decency in government and the American political system.

One he arrived in the Senate, Norris quickly found a whole range of causes to exspouse in the interest of rank-and-file Americans. In short order, in his first few years in the upper chamber, he attacked the Democrats’ caucus system and President Wilson’s patronage systems as a continuation of Cannonism under Democratic auspices. He took on the electric power lobby in supporting a dam to provide water to San Francisco, filibustered Wilson’s bill authorizing the arming of American merchant ships and was one of only six senators to vote against the declaration of war on Germany. His opposition to U.S. entry in World War I prompted those who favored the war to scorn and vilify Norris. That, in turn, triggered Norris’ famous offer to resign his seat if the people of Nebraska didn’t want him as their representative. As it turned out, of course, they did want him and wasted no time in telling him so. Still, the attacks he suffered for his anti-war stand caused Norris to consider not running for re-election at the close of his term. His friends convinced him otherwise, and he ended up winning re-election in 1918 by a comfortable margin.

Through the era of the 1920’s, Norris found himself involved in one fight after another, each in pursuit of his ideal of the public welfare. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, he helped organize the so-called Farm Block and he fought vigorously to aid farmer suffering from the post-war market collapse. Norris’ support for farmers was founded on the assumption that the prosperity of agriculture was necessary for the prosperity of a nation. I think most of us still feel that way today. He fought to win tariff protection for farmers to reduce price-depressing surpluses and to limit the profits of the middlemen between farmer and consumer. Norris felt that the bulk of farmers’ problems were not the result of their own actions but of an economic system that was inherently unfair to them. “The farmer ought not be compelled to sell his product in a free trade market,” Norris argued, “while everything he consumed and used was purchased in a protected market.” Also in the 20’s, Norris played a role that was crucial in passage of legislation creating Boulder Dam and, after 1925, intensified his fight for Nebraska’s Tri County Project.

With the death of his friend and ally, Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette, midway thru the decade, Norris had become the most prominent progressive in the Senate. Such was his fame and reputation that, in 1928, he turned down an offer to be Herbert Hoover’s running mate. And, when he ended up backing Democrat Al Smith for President, his decision unleashed a firestone of criticism in Nebraska. Not surprisingly, the Catholic, Anti-Prohibition, New York Governor had virtually no support in Nebraska. At one point, even Norris’ wife was quoted in the newspaper as saying she wouldn’t vote for Smith.

Two years later, Norris was approaching the end of his third Senate term and once again was considering retirement. Nebraska’s Republican leaders by now were totally disenchanted with Norris’ independence and disdain for mere party politics and they were afraid to challenge him or to chance his voluntary departure. They found an obscure grocery clerk whose name happened to be George W. Norris and conspired to put him on the ballot against the incumbent in the Republican primary. Outraged at such goings on, “Norris of Nebraska” decided against retirement and won the Republican primary when “grocer Norris’” candidacy was invalidated. Then he went on to win a hard-fought, nasty general election in which the organizations of both of Nebraska’s political parties supported his adversary and opponent.

By 1934, George Norris had won many of his longest-running Washington battles. TVA and the 20th Amendment had both passed and the Nebraskan was free to turn his attention in earnest to his idea for a unicameral legislature in Lincoln. Once again, he was the object of severe criticism from political leaders and others in his home state. Nevertheless, when the votes were counted, the unicameral amendment passed overwhelmingly.

In 1942, Norris’ initial decision, once again, was to retire from the Senate, having served by this time five full terms. With the luxury of hindsight, we can say he probably should have stuck to that notion. Instead, after the campaign was well under way, he reversed himself and sought re-election as an Independent. War-time duties kept him in Washington until the weekend before the election and despite the endorsement of Roosevelt and numerous of his Senate colleagues, he lost to Republican Kenneth S. Wherrey. Today, his unseating, along with that of several of his progressive colleagues the same year, can be seen clearly as part of a nationwide turning to the right in the early 1940’s.

How do you sum up a Senate career such as Norris’? Since the Nebraskan’s death in 1944, many observers have tried. In his 1961 book, “Leaders and Liberals in the 20th Century,” Charles A. Madison called Norris a “homespun idealist with implicit faith,” who exemplified “the fine flowering of American Democracy.” Norris, he wrote, “denied party conformity, defied political bosses and suffered rebuff fighting for his beliefs with a firmness and fervor that finally gained him the respect of his opponents and the plaudits of the Nation.”

John F. Kennedy made Norris a subject of his book “Profiles in Courage,” calling him “an idealist, and independent, a fighter—a man of deep conviction, fearless courage and sincere honesty. The future president said Norris had faults that included a tendency to be too emotional and to sometimes engage in bitter personal attacks. “But nothing,” he added, “could sway him from what he thought was right, from his determination to help all the people, from his hope to save them from the twin tragedies of poverty and war.”

In his fine series of articles on Norris in the Rural Electric Association Magazine, Art Grimm said that Norris’ career “is unique in the annals of American heroes. There were more flamboyant types,” Grimm says, “but none so quietly and effectively efficient in his pursuit of getting a fair shake for the public.” And, of course, there is Franklin Roosevelt’s famous and oft-quoted description of Norris delivered in McCook, during the 1934 presidential campaign. “There are few statesmen in America today who so definitely and clearly measure up as does the senior Senator from Nebraska, George W. Norris. In his rare case, history has already written a verdict. He stands forth as the very perfect gentle knight of American progressive ideals.”

For my own part, I think Norris’ most outstanding qualities were his independence, his sincerity and his tenaciousness. It has been said that a man who fights for his ideas is truly alive. By that standard, Norris was truly alive from the day he entered the Senate til the day he left that Senate. He fought 11 years against virtually unsurmountable odds for Muscle Shoals and almost as long for the end of the lame-duck congress. The unicameral state legislature was likewise a decade-long interest. Public power was, for Norris, a lifelong preoccupation. The key point was always, “Is it right?” Never, “Is it popular or is it what my party wants?”

Art Grimm gives us this interesting contemporary assessment of Norris from the Lincoln Journal in 1924. “Norris goes contrary to most of the established rules for holding political popularity. He has made no effort to secure and hold party support. Politically, he is probably the most independent member of the American Senate. He does what he thinks ought to be done and says what he thinks ought to be said and then we can take him or leave him as we please. This independence and sincerity the voting public obviously likes.”

Independence, sincerity, tenaciousness. I am reminded of the words of another fighting Midwesterner who I have had the honor of serving with in the United States Senate. His name was Hubert H. Humphrey and he often advised those who sought his counsel, “Never give up and never give in.” George Norris never gave up and wouldn’t even think of giving I when it came to the major political battles of his career. He made his life’s work a fight for the things he believed in and all of us, Nebraskans and Americans alike are better off that he did.
 


Remarks by . . .
EUGENE R. CLIFFORD
Manager, Cooperative Education
National Rural Electric Cooperative Association


The life of George W. Norris stretched from a far-off yesterday to the earliest glimpses of a tomorrow we’re still guessing about. It spanned the most incredible years of change and progress the world has seen.

His beginnings were rotted in the day of the walking plow, the horse and buggy, the tallow candle and the Civil War. And as he neared the twilight, he could look back on America’s busy trail from the woodlands to a new world – to the faster, louder time of the automobile and the radio, the magic sulfa drug and the ocean-hopping airplane. He saw the world around him bloom from backwoods countryside to a cultivated, productive land, criss-crossed by smooth roadways and dotted by energetic communities. Near the end, he watched in sadness as the world actually turned on itself in the calamitous catastrophe we remember as World War II. Like some others, he worried about tomorrow – about all of our tomorrows – when that first ominous mushroom cloud signaled that the atom bomb had arrived, and that global suicide was more than simply a bad dream.

George Norris saw the huge mass of this country’s darkened rural acres brighten and pulse at long last with new productive energy, and he was greatly pleased because he had a lot to do with that.

It was Norris who mailed down the bod beginning made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 in his Executive Order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration. Norris authored a bill in the U.S. Senate to make this new agency nationwide in scope and permanent.
Certainly, he understood that an electrified rural America would mean powerful new benefits for all of this country – that a major result would be the unlocking of a vast new market for the goods and services produced by the workers in our cities. He knew it would generate an unprecedented transfusion of new wealth, flowing from country to town and back again, over and over, multiplying its dollar effect everywhere.

George Norris understood that. But he also saw a brighter and more promising vision, an entirely new world for the families scattered along this country’s back roads, who finally would join the rest of the United States in the shining new time of the 20th century.
He knew precisely what that meant. He set it down on paper in later years, like this: “From boyhood, I had seen first-hand the grim drudgery and grind which had
been the common lot for eight generations of American farm women . . . . I had seen the fallow candle in my own home, followed by the coal-oil lamp. I knew what it was to take care of farm choses by the flickering, undependable light of the lantern in the mud and cold rains of fall and the snow and icy winds of winter. I had seen the cities gradually acquire a night as light as day.”

His first concern, his overriding concern, was not a new abundance of quality food and fiber – though this is an important part of what followed – and it was not new jobs and more jobs for city laborers who would be able to earn their living by producing appliances and pumps and lights and motors and many other things for this broad new market – though this, too, became a mighty new force in our land. He knew about these things, he understood them, but his real concern was simply people.

He believed it was wrong not to share the modern blessing of electricity with the country folks who needed it as badly as any others. He could and did argue the economics of rural electrification, but his deep-felt pain over the plight of disadvantaged people rings sharply in these words, which he wrote some years later: “I could close my eyes and recall the innumerable scenes of the harvest, and the unending punishing tasks performed by hundreds of thousands of women, uncomplainingly and even gaily and happily, growing old prematurely, dying before their time.”

Believing and feeling were nothing to George Norris if they did not lead to action, to determination to cure ills and right wrongs. So, he felt it was eminently right to strive and strain in every possible way to guarantee that the powerful electrical hired hand was brought to the farms and homes and businesses of rural America.

He acted. He framed his bill, he fought for it with the fierce fire of a crusader, he drove it almost single-handedly through a resistant Senate-House conference committee. And he stood proudly at the side of the President as the bill was signed into law.

That pride was even more evident just nine years later, when he was able to report that “the REA has developed into a wonderful success . . . . its benefits to the rural population have been of mammoth proportions. More than 1,200,000 American farm homes have electricity as a result.”
Surely, he could not have dreamed then that by 1983 1,000 rural electric cooperatives and other user-owed systems in 46 states would be delivering electricity to more than 25-million Americans.

That would have been truly the end of the rainbow in Norris’s view – the knowledge that this remarkable rural development program – perhaps the most effective the world has seen – shows as its best result that it makes possible happier and more satisfying lives for people – for many, many people.
Very likely, it would not have surprised him at all to know that through nearly a half-century of borrowing more than $15-billion from the federal lending agency he helped to create, not a single one of these operating, user-owned rural electric systems has defaulted on a penny…They have kept faith with their government, and with their fellow taxpayers, as he knew they would, repaying in full, on time and plus interest.

In the eyes of George Norris, that’s the way people are – if you give them half a chance.

George Norris does not need a monument of marble and steel. During 40 years in the House and Senate, he constructed living monuments in such concepts as the Rural Electrification Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the unique unicameral legislature and many others. He envisioned, then put together, piece by piece, the kind of working monuments that endure, on and on and on, in the service of people.

That is exactly what a statesman ought to be doing with his public life.

And that’s what George Norris did. That’s why we’re here 40 years later – remembering.

Those things that compelled his attention and devotion throughout his life were the things that could serve the public interest. He saw the relationship between people and their government in a way too seldom apparent today. He spelled out this clear-eyed perception one time in a letter to a friend in which he said:
“A government in its truest sense is only a method to bring to humanity the greatest amount of happiness, and is founded, after all, upon the love of man for man.”

From his earliest years on an Ohio farm, he had learned first-hand how sorely people need each other and must depend on each other. He never forgot the repeated occasions when he saw impressive results come about simply because people decided to join hands and do together the things they could not do alone. And at such time, he must have observed that people do not need to be cast in the same mold in order to work together, that individuality need not die in common cause. This would have firmed his belief that neither nations nor states nor organizations prosper because of uninspired robot supporters, marking in lockstep, but, rather, explode with creativity when it is refined from the collective thought of unrestricted individuals. He believed that’s the way the United States works best, and on one occasion he said so, like this: “There must be room in a successful democracy for differences of opinion. It is
the true leavening process which produces the best flower of thought. ”His insistence that people, themselves, are the precious resource, the true raw material, from which the democracy of the United States has been fashioned inevitably led George Norris to a parallel insistence that the people and their welfare must be the final beneficiaries of all that this country is and does. That explains his unrelenting drive to guarantee that the electric servant would live in the country, too.

And that’s why Senator Norris, on his retirement from public life, was asked to interrupt his final train trip from the nation’s capital to his home in McCook, Nebraska, and to stop in St. Louis for the first annual meeting of the organization I represent, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
The pioneers of rural electrification knew very well what the Gentle Knight from Nebraska had done for them, and they wanted to tell him so. They agreed with the late Senator George Aiken of Vermont, who described the Rural Electrification Administration as “a living memorial to the great Nebraska statesman, George Norris.” They made their own testimony public and permanent by giving him their first Distinguished Service Award, a silver plaque engraved with their tribute for his “outstanding contribution to rural electrification and public power.”

And that also is why this national association’s fine library in its headquarters building in Washington, D.C., is proudly identified as the George W. Norris Memorial Library. George Norris helped mightily to turn the lights on for rural America, and to insure that this great portion of our nation no longer ends its days at sundown. Because of this – and for many other reasons that are almost equally compelling – his own light will be tended with care and affection, so that it will shine on in American history, our national memory, for many long years to come.

 
COMMENTS BY GOVERNOR ROBERT KERREY

Thank you, Willard. First of all, if George Norris was here tonight, I’m sure that he would be upset that the State Capitol is not wired into the local Public Power Operation, LES, for air conditioning in this space. We normally open the doors and get a little bit of breeze, but the weather didn’t cooperate.

I hope you are all enjoying, nonetheless, this fine meal served to us by the University of Nebraska. It’s a unique experience for me to be asked to stand up here and pay tribute to George Norris. I’m sure all of you in your lives, as I have in mine, realize that everything that we have around us didn’t always exist. We didn’t always have public power. We didn’t always have the roads that we have today. We didn’t always have the fine representation that we have in this state. We didn’t always have the system of education that we currently possess.

At some point in your life you recognize that in the past people have made some hard decisions about water – made investments in our water resources and worked hard to develop and take care of them. At some point you recognize the things that we have here today, in 1983, came as a result of people working very hard for us.

I recognize that most of those people didn’t even know that I exist and certainly an awfully lot of those people, up until 22 months ago, didn’t even know who I was, and some of them still don’t. But, nonetheless, there have been an awful lot of people prior to Bob Kerrey coming on the scene who worked hard just because I was part of the future. They didn’t have to know who I was. They didn’t have to know, in fact, that I was going to be coming along. They simply said that we are going to work hard for the future of the state. We are going to commit ourselves to it and sacrifice for it. Certainly, George Norris was such an individual. He worked very hard, was very courageous, and did at times run against the current of popular thought. He has certainly contributed a substantial amount to this state, not only public power, but also to the development of agriculture itself. Those of us who recognize how important agriculture is to us and how important the prosperity of agriculture is to the prosperity of the entire state, recognize the importance of George Norris. It’s easy for me to accept the invitation to come here and to at least make an attempt to pay tribute to this human being. Senator Norris didn’t just limit his efforts and his contributions to the development of agriculture. He was also a student of good government and he was constantly searching for methods to improve our political system. In fact, you can witness one of his accomplishments each year in this very building if you have courage enough to come down here and watch the Unicameral in action. Nebraska has the only one-house, nonpartisan state legislature in the nation, thanks to George Norris. It is George Norris’s accomplishments in these two areas – Nebraska agriculture and Nebraska’s unicameral legislature – which I’d like to touch on briefly this evening.

Don’t be alarmed; we’re going to turn out the lights and have a little slide show for you.

As a veteran newspaperman once said of George Norris, “The life of Norris is the story of America at its best.” Indeed, George Norris epitomized the American belief that if you work hard for what you desire, it shall be yours. This attitude was probably most prevalent in Senator Norris’s fight to establish a unicameral legislature in Nebraska.

By all accounts, an amendment to the State Constitution creating the one-house, nonpartisan legislature would not have passed without the efforts of George Norris. Although the concept had been discussed for several years in various parts of the country, it was Senator Norris who brought the idea out of the shadows of backroom discussions and into the public light. After years of biding his time, Norris decided in 1934 that Nebraskans were ready for a unicameral legislature devoid of party politics. With a few close supporters, Norris drew up a proposal that would change Nebraska state government for decades to come.

To announce the petition drive that would put the amendment on the ballot, Norris scheduled an endorsement speech for the proposal on February 22, 1934, -- George Washington’s birthday. Called “The Model Legislature,” Norris’s speech ranks as one of the most famous in Nebraska history. Norris delivered this speech to a standing-room-only audience in the Cornhusker Hotel auditorium. Reports indicate that more Nebraskans listened to that speech that to any other address ever delivered, except, perhaps, by the President of the United States. In the speech, which was broadcast throughout most of the state, Norris made an eloquent defense of the unicameral system saying he wanted to take the legislature out of politics and “put the politicians out of business.”

Senator Norris was convinced that a two-house state legislature enabled people to shift responsibility, while a one-house legislature made that impossible. His biggest complaint was that the two-house conference committee could operate secretly and change the entire meaning of any piece of legislation. Norris’s logic was simple, but direct. He said, “There is no more reason for a state to have a two-house legislature than there is for a bank to have two boards of directors . . .” We can see that, obviously, George Norris took a business-like approach to government.

This approach prompted what was the most controversial portion of the amendment – the nonpartisan feature. Freed of party ties, Norris reasoned that senators could function much more effectively . . . voting their consciences instead of the party line. As he aptly noted, the legislature was supposed to be “a business institution of the state instead of a political machine.” Reflecting on the past fifty years, I think we can safely say that our legislature has functioned much as George Norris envisioned it would.

Even though Norris was convinced of the soundness of his proposal, it wasn’t easy to persuade other Nebraska to adopt the same philosophy. Most newspapers in the state and both political parties were opposed to the amendment, . . . passing their views on to uninformed citizens. I think the character of George Norris can best be illustrated by the fact that he never gave in to opposing pressure. For example, when Arthur Mullen, then the acknowledged leader of the Nebraska Democratic Party, told Norris that the Democratic organization would support the amendment of the nonpartisan feature was removed, Norris steadfastly refused. He could have easily accepted the offer to ensure passage of the proposal, but instead he fought for what he believed was right.

Still, George Norris and his supporters had a battle on their hands. Sixty thousand signatures were needed to put the issue on the ballot and even more support was needed to pass the amendment. When the petition drive started to slow far short of the target, Norris was persuaded to tour the state to drum up support for his amendment.

And tour the state he did. From October 8th to November 6th, Norris covered some 5000 miles – giving 39 speeches in cities across the state. As the most popular proponent of the nonpartisan unicameral, Norris convinced many Nebraskans that the proposal would improve state government. As one Nebraskan said, “I was for it because Norris was for it and because the politicians were against it.” That statement itself says something about George Norris that all public servants should keep in mind. The most effective government official isn’t a politician. He or she is a friend of their constituents who understands their problems. Apparently, Nebraskans also held this view of George Norris because when the votes were counted on November 6th, 1934, George Norris’s nonpartisan, one-house legislature amendment was added to the State Constitution by a majority of nearly 93,000 votes. Today, we Nebraskans harvest the fruits of Norris’s labor. We are blessed with state senators who represent their constituents, not special interest. Our political process is simple and easy to follow, which gives all Nebraskans a better understanding of state government. It also leads to better accountability. A small, one-house legislature means bills are given greater consideration; they are not passed on to another house in order to shift responsibility. And faced with below average economic times today, we can be thankful that our Unicameral is less expensive to operate than a two-house legislature.

George Norris was a man who always tried to help those he represented, whether it be by fighting for an efficient government or seeking federal help for the state’s farmers when they were down on their luck.

Biographer Norman Zucker probably sums up the Norris philosophy on agriculture best. “A child of the expanding frontier and a son of the Midwest, he was nurtured on an agrarian ideology which regarded agriculture as logically prior to all other economic activity.” Because of this attitude, Norris believed that agriculture was entitled to government protection, not as charity, but as a matter of justice and what is inherently right.

As a U.S. representative, Norris proposed increasing homestead rights from the original 160 acres to 640 acres. This proposal, eventually included in the Kinkaid Act of 1904, illustrates Norris’s commitment to improving the lot of Nebraska’s farmers.

But I think it is also important to remember that Norris wasn’t pro-farmer at the expense of other segments of our society. He sincerely believed that helping the farmer would also help the state and the nation, a belief with which I concur. Norris felt that the problems facing agriculture could be reduced to three elements: 1) there was no protective tariff for farmers, 2) the problem of surplus crops, and 3) the cost of distribution. It’s amazing how some things never seem to change.

Attacking those three problem areas proved to be an unenviable task in the 1920s for Norris. He just couldn’t seem to convince people that agriculture was an important segment of the economy and required federal aid. But those failures in the 1920s set the stage for future legislation during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Finally, Washington began to see that farmers needed help. And George Norris was there to make sure that help was delivered.

A fervent support of parity, Norris also adopted the Jeffersonian ideal that farms should be owned and operated by the people who live on them. But in 1930, 47 percent of Nebraska farmers were cultivating land owned by someone else. A great believer in the family farm, Norris gave qualified support to a measure that would help reduce the number of tenant farmers in the state.

But during the Great Depression, all farmers needed help. In the 1930s, Nebraska was one of the leading farm states in the nation, but farm bankruptcy was increasing dramatically. An estimated 20,000 farmers were leaving the state annually. The 1934 drought made the situation even worse. One observer said there was “scarcely a living thing” in some parts of this state. But, as I’m sure you know, farmers still need money to pay expenses, feed the livestock, and provide for their families. Private and local efforts failed to produce the needed assistance, so Senator Norris went to work at the federal level. He pressured officials to expedite loans for seed and feed. He encouraged the implementation of conservation measures, such as shelterbelts, and prodded New Deal agencies to make increased funding available to Nebraska farmers. In each of these areas Norris achieved some success. In many instances, the state received more than its quota of assistance, thanks to the dedicated efforts of the Nebraska Senator.

In one case, Norris sought extra federal funding to fight an innocuous-looking plant called bindweed, which was literally taking over productive farmland. It took two years to exterminate the weed and cost about $30.00 an acre to do so, more than land itself was then worth. On top of that, the farmer couldn’t use the land until the week was eliminated. Banks refused to loan money to infested farms so farmers were put in a no-win situation. Norris introduced an amendment that would have had the federal government assist states in finding an economical way of killing the weed. Unfortunately, the House rejected the amendment.

Even with these notable efforts, Nebraska’s farmers needed yet more help in their battle with the elements. Between 1929 and 1934, Nebraska crop failure skyrocketed from 360,000 acres to 3.2 million acres. As a result, 58,000 farms were mortgaged in 1935 alone.

Again, George Norris was there to help. He spent endless hours attempting to find some sort of relief for farmers who were having their mortgages foreclosed. He stayed up nights studying the question of rural credit and proposed the creation of a Bureau of Farm Loans in the Department of Agriculture to lend money directly to farmers in order to help them meet mortgage payments, improve their buildings, and purchase more stock and implements.

Senator Norris also examined the possibility of states postponing mortgage-due dates and urged Congress to consider practical mortgage relief for farmers. Throughout the 1930s, Norris fought for better mortgage legislation. In 1939, he called for a moratorium on mortgages held by the federal government and for a reduction in interest rates for those mortgages.

Norris was acutely aware of the problems facing Nebraska farmers. Of particular concern to the Senator was the fact that businessmen were receiving lower interest loans than farmers because farmland, the farmer’s security, wasn’t liquid. Forced to sell crops when the market price was low, the farmer had to sell his harvest to speculators who held it until prices went up. In an attempt to alleviate this problem, Norris examined the operation of cooperatives in Europe to see if such a system could work in this country. Although his initial efforts proved unsuccessful, Norris did succeed in paving a road that would eventually lead to the establishment of co-ops in the United States.

Not all of Senator Norris’s work resulted in direct help for Nebraska farmers, but he did create an awareness of the problems facing agriculture. Even today, some people fail to recognize the importance of a strong farm economy. It is through the work of Senator Norris that we have made progress in bridging this awareness gap. He pointed out that many segments of the economy are tied directly or indirectly to agriculture.

For example, during the Second World War, he tried to secure federal funding for the construction of plants where surplus crops could be turned into alcohol for use in the production of synthetic rubber. Further, the Senator was one of the earliest proponents of gasohol in the nation. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for the establishment of one of this state’s finest energy programs, a program that remains as one of my own top priorities. The production of gasohol not only lends itself to eliminating surplus crops, but it’s also one of the very important parts of our program to decrease our energy dependence.
Senator Norris made great strides for Nebraska agriculture during his lifetime. That progress has made our task today much easier. The public needs to become even more aware of the importance of agriculture to our overall economic well-being, but Norris began the journey. It is up to us to continue it today. The healthier our farms are, the healthier our nation is. And the key to that economic well-being is public support. Ultimately, it is the people of Nebraska and the nation as well who will make a difference. George Norris believed he could make a difference, and he did.

I would like to close with a statement made by O.S. Marden which I believe best describes that all-important characteristic possessed by George Norris. “There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow . . . the hopeful man sees success where others see failure, sunshine where others see shadows and storm.” I thank you all very much for helping us to see the sunlight and for helping all of us see the bright future we have in this state. Thank you.
 
REMARKS BY W. F. WILLIS, GENERAL MANAGER
TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY

I’m very proud to be here this evening. It’s a genuine honor for me to be able to pay homage to a man who probably gave more to my part of the country than any other American Senator past or present.

The fact that George Norris didn’t represent my part of the country in Congress only reflects his refusal to be constrained by parochial thinking, and his sincere commitment to the good for all the United States. The Tennessee Valley Authority was, to a large extent, the creation of Senator Norris. It was the child of his deepest convictions, and it bears his moral stamp to this day. Through 12 long years, Norris kept his faith in the ideal of integrated river basin development. Through legislative defeats and 2 Presidential vetoes, he nurtured his dream of a government agency that would put the land, the water, and the forests to work, not for the privileged few, but for the benefit of all mankind.

Senator Norris was born to that kind of expansive vision. He was raised in the spirit of the great central plains of this country—a spirit that recognizes the mutual rights and responsibilities of all men and women. In his autobiography, Norris recounts a story from his childhood that identifies the source of his faith in the community of citizens, and in the obligation of each individual to protect the future of that community.

One day at his home in Sandusky County, Ohio, the young George Norris was helping his mother plant a fruit tree. She had dug a hole and she wanted him to hold the seedling upright while she shoveled the dirt in around its roots.

As Norris watched his mother, he noticed that she was straining and perspiring. She was not a young woman, and he couldn’t understand why she wanted to exert herself that way. Finally, he asked her, and I’m quoting here: “Why do you work so hard, mother? We now have more fruit than we can
possibly use. You will be dead long before this tree comes into bearing.” Norris recalls that his mother’s answer came slowly, as if she were carefully measuring each word.
“I may never see this tree in bearing, Willie,” she told him. “But somebody will.”

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That story clearly reflects the tradition Norris inherited—a tradition of hard work, not aimed toward personal gain, but rather toward an ultimate good. As Norris matured, he would refer over and over again to the interests of “generations yet unborn.” The words of Norris’ mother had struck a responsive chord, and Norris never really forgot them. “So many times in the battles in Congress,” he wrote, “particularly in the fights relating to the conservation of natural resources, my mother’s words that late spring afternoon came to my ears.”

Certainly those words must have come back to him when he first encountered the philosophy of Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot had been named Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester in 1905, and his thinking harmonized perfectly with the early training and the instincts of the young George Norris who was then serving his first term in the House of Representatives. Pinchot’s basic concern can be summed up in a single phrase: “the one great central problem of the use of the earth for the good of man.”

The philosophy that grew out of that problem is the source of the TVA idea’s great strength. It’s the basis of Norris’ firm belief in the public ownership of natural resources. It’s the foundation of TVA’s approach to unified river basin development. And it’s the beginning point of some of the most profound achievements in agricultural productivity that the world has ever seen. When the Tennessee Valley became a model for regional development and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, became a laboratory for national fertilizer research, American agriculture experienced a forceful push into the era of modern farm technology.
You all know what TVA agricultural people, working with the Extension Service and the region’s land grant colleges, were able to accomplish in the Tennessee Valley.

Largely through the work of the TVA, thousands of seedlings were planted, row crops were converted to cover crop and pasture, erosive soil was stabilized and Valley farms had a chance to become profitable enterprises. With the introduction of new farm techniques and equipment, Tennessee Valley agriculture became a productive sector of our regional economy. At the same time, research at the National Fertilizer Development Center in Muscle Shoals was beginning to affect virtually every farm in the United States—including the farms of Nebraska. In fact, the TVA influence extends beyond the Nebraska farm. You’re all familiar with the Tri-County Irrigation District—the “Little TVA.” Like its large brother in the Tennessee Valley, this project is producing water for farms and other uses, electricity from hydro-power and gas-fired plants, and a substantial recreational asset for this State.
The Tri-Counties project proves that Norris’ vision still has application to this country’s water resources.

And the 50-year history of TVA’s National Fertilizer Development Center demonstrates that Norris’ efforts to keep the Muscle Shoals development in the hands of the American people has produced positive results for the people of the entire world.
Today, about three-quarters of the fertilizers used on American farms are based on Muscle Shoals developments. With the help of high-grade fertilizers, farmers feed an American population that’s 75 percent larger than it was in the 1930s, and they’re doing it on far fewer cultivated acres.
The American farmer of the 1980s is a miracle of productivity. A single American farm worker feeds about 80 people. And in recent years America has exported about $40 billion worth of agricultural products annually to people all over the globe.

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All of those benefits are, in part, the result of George Norris’ stubborn fight to convert two munitions facilities at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, into a great experiment in public ownership and management of this country’s natural resources.

The results of Norris’ fight and the quality of his legacy have been recounted many times. But I’d like to conclude with one particular description by one of Norris’ partners in the struggle to make TVA a reality.

In 1961, on the 100th anniversary of George Norris’ birth, many distinguished people from government gathered to honor Norris’ memory. Among them was Senator Lister Hill of Alabama. Hill knew what TVA had meant to the poverty-stricken people of the Tennessee Valley. And he knew what Norris had meant to TVA. He said this: “I like to think TVA will forever bear the mark of Norris’ rare and selfless spirit. I believe, in some mysterious fashion, it makes a difference that the enterprise was not born of parochial concern, or in response to local political pressure, and that no man’s ambition was advanced by its creation. Its lineage is pure. TVA was established because each day George Norris asked himself the timeless questions, lately cheered but rarely answered, “What can I do for my country?”

Those words have deep meaning for TVA. They explain why many of us have devoted our lives to a single agency that’s devoted itself, in turn, to the use of the earth for the good of man.
I think Lister Hill’s words suggest, better than anything could, what it means to work for the people of the Tennessee Valley, what it means to demonstrate resource development for the people of the world, and what it means to carry on, in some small way, the great tradition of public service established by Senator George Norris.

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