(See front cover)
This week when the 75th Congress of the U. S. assembled, those who looked down from the galleries could find few gaps in the ranks of Senate oldtimers. Of eleven Senators who at the close of the last session could claim the distinction of having occupied their seats before the U. S. entered the World War, most were again to be in their accustomed places. One, however, was certain to be conspicuous in absence. Neither Death nor defeat at the polls had accounted for him. Senator George William Norris of Nebraska was ''unavoidably detained."
Senator Norris had something to do which he considered more important than attending the opening of Congress. All last week, while other Senators were assembling in Washington, in the little town of McCook on the Republican River in Redwillow County, Nebraska, George Norris took his usual walk from his house down to Floyd Hagenberger's barber shop to get his morning shave. From the barber shop he strolled as usual to the real-estate office of Carl Marsh, almost the only one of his cronies of bygone days with whom he still is intimate, for the rest have become critical of his philosophy as they have grown well-to-do while he has only grown famous. There in the real-estate office he sat as usual, passing the time of day with whoever dropped in.
But at the week's end came the annual change which has punctuated his life these 34 years past. At his home fronting on the park—a two-story stucco house with a lawn which the Senator diligently mows, with shrubs which he diligently clips— Mrs. Norris began wrapping the comfortable old-fashioned furniture in sheets, a handy man began nailing up the shutters. Only one thing was unusual. When the Norrises went to the railroad station and boarded a train on the Burlington, their tickets read not to Washington, D. C. but to Lincoln, Neb. George Norris was going this time to present to the people of Nebraska, "who have done so much for me," something "that will benefit them after I am dead, that will benefit their children after them": a unicameral Legislature.
Legacy. Nobody denies George Norris his full credit for winning a unicameral Legislature to his State, but he did not invent the idea. Three of the original 13 States—Pennsylvania, Vermont, Georgia —in their first constitutions adopted during the Revolution, created one-house Legislatures. Each was coupled with a council or board of censors which acted more or less as a separate house and generally complicated politics. Georgia kept the arrangement for 12 years, Pennsylvania for 14, Vermont until 1836. But the example of the British Parliament and later the U. S. Constitution, with two houses, one more or less representative of the population by numbers, the other representing the upper classes and the interests of States, soon set the fashion for all State Legislatures.
Not until just before the World War did the unicameral idea get under way. Between 1913 and 1917 the Governors of Arizona, California, Kansas, Minnesota, Washington and South Dakota all recommended it. Constitutional conventions in Ohio and New York toyed with it. The people voted it down in Oregon, Oklahoma, Arizona. In Nebraska a joint legislative committee recommended it in 1915, nothing was done.