William Norris

(b. Ohio, 11 Jul. 1861; d. 2 Sept. 1944) US; Senator George Norris was the eleventh of twelve children. He studied and graduated in law while earning money as a schoolteacher. He moved to Nebraska in 1885 and practised law. He served time as an elected judge until 1902, when he was elected to Congress as a Republican, serving until 1913. From the start he showed his independence. He was a key member of the insurgency group who curtailed the power of Speaker Cannon, in 1910. He proposed that the membership of the powerful Rules Committee, which determined much of the business of the House, be increased and elected on a geographical basis, with the Speaker ineligible for membership. The proposal was carried and weakened the Speaker's power. He was elected in 1908 by a margin of only 22 votes and had received little help from the Republican Party. He considered himself a self-made candidate and that he might as well go it alone. He had also been denied committee assignments by Cannon. Norris was elected to Senate in 1912, displacing the incumbent Senator Brown, who had the support of the party establishment.

Norris is one of the great American legislators in the twentieth century. Remarkably many of his accomplishments came after he was over 70. He played a major role in the Rural Electrification Act (1936) which provided electricity to farming homes, and the Farm Forestry Act (1937). He was behind the amendment to the Nebraska constitution which made it the only state to have a unicameral system. He was behind one of the first New Deal measures, Tennessee Valley Authority Act, and author of the twentieth amendment to the American constitution, which abolished the short session of Congress and defined the terms of office of President, Vice-President, Senators, and representatives. He was an individualist, not a clubable or a party man. He supported Democratic candidates for the presidency in 1928, 1932, and 1936, but not the Democratic Party. In 1936 he defeated both Republican and Democratic opponents and was endorsed by the President. He was usually to be found supporting the rights of workers to form trade unions, conservation measures, constitutional reforms (including the abolition of the electoral college) and the public ownership of hydro-electric power. He stood as an independent in 1942 and lost.

George William Norris (1861-1944), U.S. congressman and senator, authored the 20th Amendment to the Constitution and sponsored numerous pieces of Progressive legislation.

George W. Norris was born on July 11, 1861, in Sandusky County, Ohio. He attended Northern Indiana Normal School (now Valparaiso University), where he received his bachelor of arts and law degrees. Returning to the family farm in 1883, he clerked in a local law office and taught school. He settled in Nebraska and in 1899 opened a law office in McCook, which remained his home until his death.

In 1892 Norris was elected Furnas County prosecutor and 3 years later, district judge. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1902, where he aligned himself with the Progressive wing of the Republican party. His most noteworthy achievement was his leadership of the 1910 rules fight which clipped the autocratic powers of the reactionary Speaker, Joseph G. Cannon.

In 1913 Norris was elected to the Senate. He voted against most of the Woodrow Wilson administration's domestic legislative program on the grounds that it was not sufficiently Progressive, and he bitterly opposed Wilson's foreign policy, even voting against the declaration of war against Germany. He was against American membership in the League of Nations and later opposed United States adherence to the World Court.

In the 1920s Norris was a leading supporter of farm relief legislation. He successfully blocked the sale to private interests of the hydroelectric facilities at Muscle Shoals, Ala., and in 1928 and 1931 he pushed through Congress legislation providing for government operation of the facilities. Although presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover vetoed the bills, Norris saw his dream realized with the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority under the New Deal.

Norris was the cosponsor of the Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932), which outlawed labor contracts that made union membership a condition of employment and drastically limited the use of injunctions in labor disputes; and the Norris-Rayburn Act (1936), which made the Rural Electrification Administration permanent. He was the father of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution (which eliminated the "lame-duck" Congress and changed the date for the president's inauguration) and was instrumental in Nebraska's adoption (1934) of a unique non-partisan, unicameral legislature.

Unlike most Progressives, Norris was a loyal supporter of the New Deal. Alarmed by the Nazi threat, he favored limited American intervention in Europe and backed Franklin Roosevelt's third-term bid in 1940. In 1936 he had formally renounced the Republican label and won reelection, with Roosevelt's endorsement, as an independent. In 1942 Norris again ran as an independent but was defeated. He died in McCook on Sept. 2, 1944.

Further Reading

Norris's autobiography is Fighting Liberal (1945). Richard Lowitt's George W. Norris: The Making of a Progressive, 1861-1912 (1963) and George W. Norris: The Persistence of a Progressive, 1913-1933 (1971) are two volumes of a projected three-volume biography. Norman L. Zucker, George W. Norris: Gentle Knight of American Democracy (1966), analyzes Norris's political thought.

Additional Sources

Lief, Alfred, Democracy's Norris: the biography of a lonely crusade, New York: Octagon Books, 1977, 1939.

Lowitt, Richard, George W. Norris: the triumph of a progressive, 1933-1944, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Norris, George W. (George William), Fighting liberal: the autobiography of George W. Norris, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

For other persons named William Norris, see William Norris (disambiguation).

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)

William Charles Norris (July 14, 1911 near Red Cloud, Nebraska – August 21, 2006) was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities.

Norris entered the computer business just after World War II, when his team of US Navy cryptographers formed Engineering Research Associates to build scientific computers. ERA was fairly successful in these early days, but in the early 1950s a lengthy series of government probes into "Navy funding" drained the company and they sold out to Remington Rand. They operated within Remington Rand as a separate division for a time, but during the later merger with Sperry Corporation that formed Sperry Rand, their division was merged with UNIVAC. This resulted in most of ERA's work being dropped, and a number of employees decamped and set up Control Data, unanimously selecting Norris as president.

Control Data started by selling magnetic drum memory systems to other computer manufacturers, but introduced their own mainframe, the CDC 1604, in 1958. Designed primarily by Seymour Cray, the company soon followed it with a series of increasingly powerful machines. In 1965 they introduced the CDC 6600, the first supercomputer, and CDC was suddenly in the leadership position with a machine ten times as fast as anything else on the market.

This was a significant threat to IBM's business, and they quickly started a project of their own to grab the performance crown back from CDC. In the meantime they announced an advanced System 360 machine that was to be faster than the 6600. However the machine didn't yet exist, and after carefully documenting sales lost to the IBM project, Norris launched a massive lawsuit against them in 1968. IBM was unable to finish its "6600 killer," and CDC eventually won the suit, and was awarded $600 million in damages.

In 1967 Norris attended a seminar for CEOs where Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, spoke about the social and economic injustices in the lives of young black Americans. This speech, along with a summer of violence in Norris's hometown of Minneapolis, greatly disturbed him. He became a champion of moving factories into the inner-cities, providing stable incomes and "high-tech" training to thousands of people who would otherwise have little chance at either.

Another CDC project that Norris championed was the PLATO system, an online teaching and instruction system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics terminals of their own design. In 1974 they reached an agreement with CDC to allow CDC to sell PLATO in exchange for free machines on which to run it. PLATO was released in 1975, but saw almost no use due to its high costs and complex maintenance. In the end PLATO did see some use as an employee training tool in large companies, but was never a success in the original education market.

Norris continually purchased new companies to fold into CDC, and eventually returned to the peripheral market in the 1970s. This later move proved particularly wise. It was also during the 1970s that Cray left to form his own company, and quickly drove CDC out of its leadership position in the supercomputer market. This left CDC in second place in a market for a small number of machines. Soon large Japanese companies were gobbling up what Cray didn't. CDC tried to regain its footing in the supercomputer market by spinning off ETA Systems, in order to allow the developers to escape an increasingly ossified management structure inside CDC. However this effort failed and CDC gave up on the market entirely.

In the 1980s CDC was left primarily as a hard disk manufacturer, and their series of SCSI drives were particularly successful. But at this point the rest of the company crashed, and the board started pressing for Norris to step down. They were particularly harsh in blaming his social programs for their problems, although any connection is difficult, if not impossible, to find. He eventually realized there was little he could do to stop this course of action, and started an effort to place the company under the leadership of two hand-picked replacements. The stockholders didn't go along with this, and Norris subsequently retired in January 1986.

William Norris died on August 21, 2006 in a nursing home in Bloomington, Minnesota after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

See also

• Charles Babbage Institute

References

External links

• William Norris: Computer Pioneer, Maverick Social Activist
• A Brief Biography of William C. Norris
• CNET obituary accessed August 23, 2006
• Oral history interview with William C. Norris. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
• William C. Norris Papers, 1946-1988. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
• Control Data Corporation Records, William C. Norris Executive Papers, 1946-1995. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

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