George W. Norris: where are you when we need you so badly!
By Charles Peek
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. -Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (14 Mar 1879-1955). Taken from Anu Garg’s A Word A Day.
Our latest (last?) blizzard of a bitter winter has sent us all to thinking of better times, first of course of spring, but also, now inextricably bound with all our days, of our political landscape. Nostalgia is usually a liar, but I can’t help think that the culture of our political life was once not only different but better.
Much like I read in a recent Facebook post of my classmate Pam Axelson, I grew up in McCook, Nebraska, and over the years have become grateful for the start it gave me in life and for the examples set for me by many people. I didn’t, of course, feel that way when I first escaped after graduating high school there, but later opportunities brought back a lot I’d missed when I knew so much!
One example that springs immediately to my mind comes from the life of Oliver Schneider. He was the father of a still close friend and his sister and three brothers. As I recall, I was probably about 14 when I first met him. I’d met his oldest son the year before and we couldn’t stand each other. By the next year, we were best friends.
McCook was celebrating its Diamond Jubilee, and along with lots of other costumed men Oliver sported an old-fashioned black suit or a Buffalo Bill leather jacket, and he wore a cropped white beard. I don’t know if he actually ever carried a whip as a prop, but the sight of him scared the hell out of me.
There are some stories about Oliver in one of the wonderful little books that Walt Sehnert (see my recent blog on bakeries) and Ray Search (see a future blog on theaters) edited to chronicle McCook stories, but the story I’ve always found most meaningful is a simple one. Oliver’s parents didn’t believe in education; Oliver hadn’t gotten to go to enough school to learn even the basics. So, when it became possible as he neared adulthood, he took a job as a custodian at St. Patrick’s parochial school where he could, by loitering in the doorway at the back of classrooms between tasks, overhear the lessons that would teach him how to read and write.
McCook’s Oliver Schneider at his desk
When I think of our heritage in the midst of our country’s current political mayhem, that’s the kind of heritage I think of, and I think it is the kind most of the country actually prizes.
I’ve been thinking about heritage a lot these past few years, and was focused on it intensely when I was asked sometime back to again help kick off McCook’s Heritage Days, always the occasion for a breakfast sponsored by the George Norris Foundation. That particular year McCook was also gearing up for its 125th anniversary. I don’t suppose it is often these days that anyone is present for their town’s 75th and its 125th.
On that occasion, I told the audience that I’d come to commemorate the life of a reprehensible man, who was a traitor to his country, a moral pervert, and a political tramp! I was speaking, of course, of George W. Norris—and those are all labels used in newspapers across America in their denunciations of Norris in 1917.
Norris would become one of the most esteemed figures in American history. Along with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert Taft, Thomas Hart Benton, and Robert M. Lafollette, Sr., he would come to be considered one of the greatest senators to ever serve in the United States Senate. His bust would occupy one of the prized niches in the capitol if two partisan Nebraska Senators had not urged their colleagues to pass over him, even when he was first on many of their lists.
That he could be the recipient of such epithets and execrations, should at least teach us that the goals we had in junior high, to be popular and well-liked, are not sufficient moral guides if we want to grow up to serve well our communities and country.
Norris didn’t become the visionary national statesman that Franklin Roosevelt would call “the very perfect gentle knight of American progressive ideals” by trying to be popular and well-liked, even though that is what we often demand of our politicians. But because Norris did become a great statesman, his life teaches a lot about what our attitude toward our heritage should be.
Heritage. There are several attitudes we can adopt toward those who came before us and their accomplishments. We could let the glitz and glamour of today fool us into simply ignoring the past, having nothing to do with, taking no interest in it. Or we could let the difficult problems we face scare us into becoming slavish worshipers of the past, sticking only to how we’ve always done things, making a rosy picture of the way things were. Or we could look at our heritage honestly and try to draw from it lessons that would be useful to us in living today and preparing for tomorrow.
Those choices remind me a little of the story about a visitor to a mental asylum who asked the director how the asylum decided whether or not a patient should be institutionalized. “Well,” the director told him, “we fill up a bathtub and then offer a teaspoon, a teacup, and a bucket to him or her, and ask the person to empty the bathtub. “Oh, I understand,” said the visitor. “A normal person would use the bucket because it’s bigger.” “No,” said the director, “A normal person would pull the plug in the bathtub. Do you want a bed near a window?”
Suspecting that none of us want that bed near that window, I’m here suggesting some individual and community friendly ideas about our heritage, ideas that I think are in keeping with that heritage, ideas that come from the example of George Norris’s life.
First, an oxymoron. (An oxymoron implies two things that make sense by themselves but seem contradictory when put together, for example: “Family Vacation.”) Here’s the oxymoron of heritage: We find ourselves looking back at a heritage of people who were looking ahead!
Our heritage, and George Norris as an example of it, turn us forward to the future, to what’s to come, to our obligations to those who come after us. Some readers may know the story that historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recounted of Norris’s widowed mother planting a seedling. She’d worked terribly hard digging the hole and had enlisted little Georgie’s help in holding the tree upright as she shoveled the dirt around its roots. Seeing her worn and tired and sweating, Norris protested the whole project. “We have more fruit already than we can possibly eat,” he reminded her, adding, “You will be dead long before this tree comes into bearing.” And Norris never forgot her reply. “I may never see this tree bearing but somebody will.”
I don’t think I’m much interested in seeing our heritage as being embodied by people who were looking backward. We have a lot of people caught up in a “Know Nothing” spirit of retreat and fear. The heritage I look back on is a heritage of looking ahead.
Secondly, we have a heritage of looking outward. Whether you live in a borough of New York or in a market hub in southwest Nebraska, it is awfully easy to start to think that, if you aren’t the whole story, you are at least the only part of the story that matters. But, the outcry against NEW YORK CITY in the old Pace Picante Sauce ads notwithstanding, good things can come from other people and other places.
When farmers in Nebraska’s hills were plowing up and down and the soil was washing way, Chinese farmers had been practicing terraced farming for centuries. In Norris’s own life, the idea for rural electrification came from a remark his future father-in-law made about something that had taken place in Schenectady, New York. Norris had gone to squire Pluma Lashley, who wasn’t ready yet for their outing, and, to stall for time, her father, David Lashley, began telling young George about a successful attempt in Schenectady to send electricity across a wire.
That was one of those “what if” moments in life. In Lashley’s mind, it was “What if the benefits of that could be shared by the small towns and farms in rural America?” In Norris’s mind, as we know, rural electrification became a lifetime crusade, a crusade to use our resources for the benefit of all.
A good idea is a good idea wherever it comes from, and Norris refused to confine himself to party lines or state lines. He got into considerable trouble from time to time for not paying attention just to Nebraska, but Norris’s dream was of free individuals with equality of opportunity, and it was that larger dream that lead to the adoption of conservation measures, the capacity for irrigation, and the creation of public power that generations of Nebraskans could take for granted, as could rural Americans all across this country.
Honoring our heritage means, to me, that we don’t just look back and we don’t just look to ourselves because we have a heritage of looking forward and a heritage of looking outward.
Then, too, George Norris’s example shows us that we have a heritage of looking to what is right rather than what is expedient. Too much today, both among our leaders and among ourselves, there is too little devotion to our public responsibilities and too much pursuit of our private benefit.
Norris was not a conventionally religious man, but he was a man of high ideals and ingrained principles. He believed there was a higher calling than just getting ahead personally. He once said, “I would rather go down to my political grave with a clear conscience than ride in the chariot of victory as the slave . . . of any man.”
Reading about him, you find that it is moral terms like “courage” and “integrity” that dominate the accounts of his life. To me, his finest moment came in the wake of his terribly unpopular resistance to the Armed Ship Bill that President Wilson had called for in 1917, the resistance that called down on him all the labels I referred to when I began.
Although the fears of those days and the politics such fears led to are relevant to today, it is not my purpose here to explore the pretty obvious political parallels; nor was the rightness or wrongness of his cause what made Norris’s resistance his greatest moment. It was what followed. In the wake of the calumny heaped upon him, Norris did an amazing thing. He offered to the people of Nebraska that he would waive his constitutional right to remain in office, would in fact step down from his Senate seat, and allow a special election to replace him. He asked only one thing first: that he have the opportunity to explain his position to the people.
When he came home to do so, he didn’t come to stay in political power, to plead for himself. Instead, he announced in the opening line of his speech, “I have come home to tell you the truth.” And when he had done so, there was no special election and Norris went on to be elected by Nebraskans to serve another 25 years. After that episode, he came to be regarded as “the only honest man in political life in America.”
Perhaps it was because he had known poverty and experienced how the poor can be pushed aside, perhaps it was because he had been vilified for following his conscience and knew how people can be bullied into following the popular line. Whatever it was, he was a champion of the right to dissent, and he could work together with men and women he disagreed with. He believed in ignoring differences to work together with others for what is most important. We elect many people who say they will do that; few of them do. Even more sadly, we seem to elect many who bluntly say they won’t.
If our rich heritage hasn’t inspired us to look to what is right rather than what is popular or expedient or profitable, then we have turned our back on the richest of the riches of our heritage. If we can’t draw integrity from its lessons, then most of its other lessons will be wasted on us.
As a Senator, Norris was not always or immediately successful. He had to introduce what became the 20th Amendment to the Constitution six times over a decade before it passed. He had many convictions, took many positions, fought many battles, and could sometimes be unfair to his opponents. But he had a keen sense for which of those convictions, which of those positions, were of the utmost importance to the well-being of the country.
Today, when we seem to be foundering in a swamp of each group’s special interests, we badly need a resurgence of Norris’s sense of balance and fair play, his sense of decency and integrity, his willingness to work together with any who were working for the common good.
I never knew George Norris. His last year in the Senate was the year I was born, and he had died before we moved to McCook. My family and I did know his second wife, Ellie. We cherished our times in her home on Norris Avenue as my wife and I do the silver thimble she gave us on the occasion of our wedding. But mostly I cherish the way in which Norris represents the kind of heritage I was given as a young boy growing up in a small town in the southwest corner of Nebraska.
I’ve done some sounding out of my friends lately on what it is we really want in our government. Forget all the issues that clamor for our allegiance and support. What is it we want our government to be? I’ve spoken with very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats and every stripe between. And three things always emerge as what, I think, the ordinary citizen wants. Instead of graft and bribes and secret deals, we want a clean government that operates honestly and openly. Instead of pouring money down the rat hole, we want an effective government that can actually get things done. And we want a government that, rather than catering to special interests, works to serve the greatest good of the greatest number over the longest time.
No single issues are quite as important as those ideals, because those go to the heart of the matter; those affect us all. And, isn’t it interesting: most polls show that citizens are not so divided as we are sometimes touted to be. We agree on lots of common goals even across partisan lines…we just can’t get many elected officials to take their cue from our common sentiments.
We would be closer to those goals if there were more elected officials like Senator George Norris and more voters who voted for such officials instead of the clearly partisan obstructionists we often send to our State Capitals or to Washington. For me, then, celebrating our heritage is not so much a stroll down memory lane as it is a revival of the spirit that promises a better tomorrow.
Someday, people will gather to celebrate more anniversaries of more towns and schools and churches and enterprises. I’m not likely to be around for many more, which makes me all the more appreciative for those celebrations I’ve been a part of. But I hope that those who do participate will also not just engage in an orgy of nostalgia. I hope they, too, will find in looking back the inspiration to look forward and look outward and look to what is right.
Next blog: April
Deep Winter, 2019
Kearney, Nebraska
capeek 