The Last of the Willful Men

In the elm-shaded town of McCook, Neb. (pop. 6,212), the telegraph office was swamped with wires, and the florists ran out of flowers before noon. The first citizen of McCook, an old radical named George W. Norris, was dead.

George Norris was 83 when he lay down for the last time in the front bedroom of the big, stucco house on Main Avenue. One morning last week he was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage. For a day he was conscious of the August sun on the hackberry trees and lilac bushes which he had planted. Then more fever came, and coma, and his old heart stopped.

All the U.S. mourned him. George Norris had been a great liberal in the days when being a liberal meant something very specific: a man who fought on the side of The People against The Interests. In 40 years in Washington he had been called many names. Perhaps the most accurate was "radical." His radicalism had mainly consisted of his persistent belief that the U.S. could somehow be made into a better place for the plain man to live in.

George Norris ignored all the rules. He courted political suicide. Elected on the Republican ticket, he conscientiously nagged at Republican Presidents Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. His constituents were rural, dry Republicans, but in 1928 he campaigned for New York's wet, Catholic, Democrat Al Smith. The only campaign promise he made was: "I have voted against every measure and every motion I believed wrong. ... If reelected, I promise you that I will carry on with that same policy."

Plain Man. The old man was not a great orator; but the U.S. always stopped and listened when he spoke. He was not an impressive figure of a statesman: his baggy, old-fashioned suit was topped by a limp string of bow tie; his droopy eyelids, under bushy brows, made him look perpetually tired. But people always looked at him. An avowed pacifist, he was one of the "little group of willful men" who blocked Woodrow Wilson's 1917 plan to arm the merchant marine, and he also voted against World War I. But he left isolationism back in the '30s.

Finally defeated in 1942, George Norris retired to the quiet, shady house in McCook. He settled down to smoke his long-stemmed pipe, to listen to the radio, to muse over the Nebraska countryside, and to dictate his autobiography. He began to grumble that he could not "stay quiet and live."

But before he died, this plain man and radical saw the monument that will preserve his name. That monument, not merely Norris Dam but the entire Tennessee Valley Authority, is greater than any Pharaoh or any emperor ever had.

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