The Gentleman From Nebraska
The senatorial record of Mr. Norris, with all its ramifications, has been endorsed in as convincing a manner as anyone could wish. Many reasons have been advanced as to why such an endorsement should not be extended to him. The opposition to Mr. Norris has been conducted as ably and as thoroughly as any group of capable politicians could do the job. The candidacy of as fine a statesman as Nebraska ever produced has been presented to the state as an alternative to that of Mr. Norris, and has been rejected.
Acceptance of the situation is therefore a matter without choice. To continue the argument is to waste words. The opposition to Senator Norris has been so completely subdued and so thoroughly discredited that further jousting with the windmill is more quixotic than Quixote himself.
There is not even good reason for being disgruntled over the result. For the purpose of the Nebraska political situation, 70,000 people can't be wrong. The will of the state is seldom expressed in so tremendous a majority, and it must be taken not only as an endorsement of Mr. Norris but also as at least a temporary quietus upon his critics and opponents.
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The state of Nebraska has elected Norris to the United States senate this year, as it has many times in the past, mainly because he is not wanted there. If his return to Washington causes discomfiture in official circles, the people of Nebraska will regard their votes as not having been cast in vain. They do not want farm relief or any other legislative benefits a senator might bring them; all they want is a chance to sit back and gloat.
Nebraska nurses an ingrowing grouch against America in general and eastern America in particular. The state expects nothing from the national government, which it regards as largely under eastern control, and asks nothing. It has lost interest in constructive participation in federal affairs, and its people are in a vindictive frame of mind.
This grouch is cultural as much as political. Nebraska and its people have been the butt of eastern jokesters so long they are embittered. Every major federal project of the last half-century has been disadvantageous to them. The building of the Panama canal imposed a discriminatory rate burden upon them. Various reclamation projects have increased agricultural competition. Federal tariff policies increase the cost of living in Nebraska, without material benefit to Nebraska producers.
Nebraska voters have long since ceased to look to Washington for relief, and they no longer select their congressional representatives with relief in view. Neither George Norris nor any of his Nebraska colleagues in Congress have been able to combat this hopeless situation. If Norris were forced to rely upon what he has done in congress for Nebraska, he would approach an election day with fear in his heart.
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But Senator Norris has found another way to serve Nebraska. By making himself objectionable to federal administrations without regard to political complexion and to eastern interests of every kind, he has afforded Nebraskans a chance to vent their wrath. He is, perhaps unwittingly, an instrument of revenge.
The people of Nebraska would not listen to George Norris long enough to let him tell them how to elect a dog catcher in the smallest village in the state, but they have been sending him to the senate so long it is a habit. If he lives long enough and does not get tired of the job, he will spend more years in the upper house of congress than any man before him. Death, ill health, or personal disinclination—one of these may some day drive him out of the senate, but the people of Nebraska never will!
The state asks little of him in return. It gives him perfect freedom of movement and of opinion. It holds him to no party or platform. It requires no promises of him, no pledges. He need have no concern for his constituency, is under no obligation to people or to politicians. He can devote as much of his time as he likes to the Muscle Shoals power site, and none at all to western Nebraska irrigation projects. He can vote for the low tariff demanded by cane sugar producers of Cuba, while the beet sugar growers of Nebraska are starving to death. He can interest himself in political scandals in Pennsylvania, and be wholly unconcerned over the economic plight of the Nebraska farmer.
He can do all these things and be as assured of election as the seashore is of the tide. He could spend a campaign year in Europe, and beat a George Washington in a Republican primary and an Abraham Lincoln in a general election.
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And yet George Norris is not a political power in Nebraska. The people of other states believe he is revered as an idol in his own state. As a matter of fact, he is probably held in lower esteem in Nebraska than in any other state in the Union.
His endorsement of another candidate is of no real value. He could not throw a hatful of votes over any political fence in the state. He gave his tacit support to LaFollette as a third party presidential candidate in 1924, and the Wisconsin senator could have carried all his Nebraska votes in his hip pocket without a bulge. He came into Nebraska in 1928 with a fanfare of Democratic trumpets and of radio hook-ups, stumped the state for Governor Smith—and Nebraska gave Herbert Hoover the largest majority, on a basis of percentage, of all the states in the Union.
As far as the people of Nebraska are concerned, George Norris is as deep as the Atlantic ocean in Washington, and as shallow as the Platte river in his own state.
The explanation of this fascinating political paradox is to be found not in an analysis of Norris, but of Nebraska. As a senator, Norris has given Nebraska something the state never had before. He has put the "Gentleman from Nebraska" on every front page in America and has kept him there. A resident of Nebraska can pick up the latest edition of a New York daily or of an Arizona weekly and find "Norris of Nebraska" in at least three type faces.
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But the publicity Norris gets for Nebraska is not the whole story. His real strength in Nebraska is measured by the antagonisms he stirs up beyond the borders of the state. His people take delight in setting him on the heels of the ruling powers, whether of government, of finance or of industry. The more he makes himself obnoxious to a political party, to a national administration or to Wall Street, the better they like him.
Nebraska is not interested in the smallest degree in what progress he makes, or what he accomplishes. It has been said of Norris that he has cast more negative votes against winning causes and more affirmative votes for lost causes than any other man in the senate. But every time he succeeds in pestering his prey until it turns around and snarls back at him, the chuckles can be heard all the way from Council Bluffs to Scottsbluff.
The summary of it all is that Nebraska derives a great deal of pleasure out of shoving George Norris down the great American throat. He has been an effective emetic in republican and democratic administrations alike, has worried every president from Taft to Hoover. His retirement from the senate, whether voluntary or forced, would be welcomed in more quarters than that of any of his colleagues.
The people of Nebraska know this and enjoy it. Every time Norris baits the power trust or lambasts the social lobby, Nebraska gets the same amusement out of his antics that a small boy gets out of sicing a dog on an alley cat. When he shies a brickbat at a president, Nebraska has as much fun as a kid pushing over an outhouse.
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You have to know the isolation of the hinterland to understand why this is so. Nebraska has sent many men to the senate who were more capable than Norris, as his predecessors and as his contemporaries. It has had other senators who have done more for the state and for the nation than he has.
But it has never had another senator who let the whole world know there was a "Gentleman from Nebraska" in the manner he has succeeded in doing. Nebraska could send a succession of great men and good men to the senate, and the east and west and south would never know there was a state of Nebraska or that such a state was represented in the senate. But Norris lets them know there is a Nebraska, and Nebraska does not care how he does it.
There is an instinctive resentment in the hearts of these people of the states between the Mississippi and the mountains against the failure of the far east to understand and appreciate the middle west. It crops out in politics, in religion, even in sports.
Nebraska is one of the richest of all the agricultural states, and yet the wealth of its industries exceeds that of its farms. It has given such names as Gutzon Borglum, Willa Cather, John J. Pershing, William G. Dawes, William Jennings Bryan and a hundred others of prominence to the nation. It has unsurpassed schools, progressive cities and towns, people of intelligence and culture.
And yet the rest of the nation persists in regarding Nebraska as provincial, its people as backward. If the east thinks of Nebraska at all, it is as a state still in a frontier period. The national conception of a Nebraskan is that of a big hayshaker, with a pitchfork in his hands, a straw in his mouth, a musical comedy goatee on his chin, a patch on the seat of his overalls and the muck of the barnyard on his boots.
Nebraska has resented these indignities, but has given up hope of avoiding them. Its only hope is to pay back in kind. In the days of the real frontier, it vented its wrath on the occasional luckless tenderfoot from the east. Now it sends George Norris to the senate.
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Norris does not represent Nebraska politics. He is the personification of a Nebraska protest against the intellectual aloofness of the east. A vote for Norris is cast into the ballot box with all the venom of a snowball thrown at a silk hat. The spirit that puts him over is vindictive, retaliatory. Another senator might get federal projects, administrative favor, post offices and pork barrel plunder for Nebraska, but the state is contemptuous of these. For nearly two decades Norris has kept Nebraska beyond the pale of federal favor, but his people consider him worth the price.
George Norris is the burr Nebraska delights in putting under the eastern saddle. He is the reprisal for all the jokes of vaudevillists, the caricatures of cartoonists, and the jibes of humorists that have come out of the east in the last quarter of a century.
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