George Norris
George Norris sat in Congress for forty years for a state that had nothing he wanted for it, and left behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, the one-chamber legislature of Nebraska and the end of the lame-duck session. He was born in 1861 on a farm in Ohio, taught school, read law, and moved to the Republican River valley of Nebraska in 1885, where he was a county attorney and a district judge before the House of Representatives took him in 1903. In 1910 he organised the revolt of the insurgent Republicans that stripped Speaker Joseph Cannon of his power over committees, and went to the Senate in 1913 on the strength of it. He was one of the six senators who voted against war with Germany in April 1917, and said on the floor that the country was going to war on the command of gold; Nebraska nearly recalled him. His long fight was over the dam and nitrate plant the government had built at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee for the war. Henry Ford wanted to buy it; Norris wanted the government to run it and sell the power, and he got the bill through Congress twice, to be vetoed by Coolidge and by Hoover, before Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority in May 1933 and named the first dam after him. In the same years he wrote the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 that stopped the federal courts issuing injunctions against strikes, the Twentieth Amendment that moved the start of Congress to January so that defeated members could no longer legislate for four months, and the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. At home he campaigned in 1934 for a referendum to replace Nebraska's two chambers with one, nonpartisan, of forty-three members, on the argument that a conference committee was where lobbyists did their work, and it passed; the Nebraska page names him for it. He left the Republicans in 1936 and sat as an independent, was beaten in 1942 at eighty-one, and died two years later. Kennedy put him in Profiles in Courage for the 1917 vote.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1944 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: senator, politician
