IN THE SPOT LIGHT
Sen. Dave Landis, as co-op
champion Sen. George Norris
avid Landis, a state senator
from Nebraska since
1978, has been getting
rave reviews at co-op
annual meetings for an
inspirational, one-man performance in
which he portrays co-op pioneer and
champion George W. Norris. Born at
the outset of the Civil War in 1861,
Norris was elected from Nebraska to
the House of Representatives in 1902,
spending 10 years in the House before
moving on to the Senate, where he
served another 30 years. During the
1930s, he authored legislation that created
the Rural Electrification
Administration (REA) and the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
These organizations gave millions
of Americans access to many of the
simple conveniences city people had
enjoyed for decades. Rural electricity
revolutionized farm life in America.
Throughout his career, Norris’ conscience
was his only guide, and he
fought for the farmers and the common
men and women of this country.
Q. How did you first become familiar with
Sen. George Norris, and what about his
life and work inspired to you to create your
one-man show based on his life?
A. When I was first elected to the
Nebraska unicameral, non-partisan
legislature, I discovered that both of
those innovations, unicameralism
[a legislature composed of a single
body] and nonpartisanship, were the
ideas of George Norris. The idea for
a one-man show, or for doing Norris,
was prompted by a request from the
Nebraska Humanities Council to
impersonate Norris at our 125th statehood
anniversary celebration. The
Humanities Council felt Norris’ legacy
was slipping in the mind’s eye of
Nebraskans, and that he was no longer
a vital part of our communal memory.
Q. What major messages or lessons do you
think Sen. Norris would want the leaders
and members of today’s cooperatives to
remember, based on his experiences?
A. Norris would remind us that the
cooperative is a mechanism for selfhelp.
It is people determining their
own fate, getting together and charting
their own course. He was a great
believer in that kind of responsibility,
and that’s one of the reasons he loved
the cooperative movement. Second,
I think he would remind them that
cooperatives sprang up because the
marketplace had failed them. The
desire for profits that motivates the
investor-owned utility was not sufficient
justification to run electricity to
low-profit or no-profit customers. Coops
are a product of the failure of the
investor-owned utilities to care enough
to extend service to people that needed
that service.
Q. Are the challenges confronting today’s
cooperatives much different than the ones
faced in Norris’ day?
A. I’m sure there are new complexities
and difficulties facing co-ops today
that were not present in Norris’ time;
however, those days were also difficult
and complex. Co-ops sprang up, for
the most part, in the days of the
Depression and WW II. They grew
up with the envy of the investor-owned
operators who wanted to stymie co-ops
at every turn, including the use of lawsuits
to stop the creation of co-ops.
I guess you could say that the co-ops
have never had an easy row to hoe.
They’ve always had critics and challenges
and they’ve always risen above
and succeeded in the face of those
challenges.
Q. Is there one particular anecdote about
Norris that you think reveals the type of
man he was?
A. There is a particular anecdote
that’s helpful to understand Norris,
although it’s one that he would say
reveals not himself, but his mother.
When he was ten and had spent a
hard day working on the family
farm, his mother called him over to
plant a tree. Both of them were
glistening with sweat, it was hot
and a hard day of work that they’d
just finished. Norris said, “Mother,
why do you work so hard? You
won’t even see this tree in fruition.”
And she looked him in the eye and
said, “Willie, I may not see this tree
bear fruit, but someday someone
will.”
Norris used that anecdote over
and over in his life to say that we
need to think in terms of what is
good today and what is good in the
future, that our legacy runs across
generations and the shadow of our
life falls upon generations yet
unborn. He thought in terms of a
legacy that would last decades as it
affected people’s lives and he found
that obligation or responsibility in
that anecdote of his mother and his
childhood.
Q. The sheer tenacity of Norris — continuing
to push for laws supporting coops
even though he was defeated time
and again — is a striking feature of
your presentation. Even the fact that he
was left as a widower with three children
prior to making his first run for Congress
might have defeated a lesser man. What
do you think kept him fighting against
such formidable odds?
A. Norris grew up on a farm, fatherless,
with a mother and six older sisters
trying to eke out a living on relatively
poor soil in Ohio. He didn’t go to
kindergarten so he could help on the
farm. At the age of 11, he paid the
taxes on that farm by working on the
county road gang. Norris knew nothing
but tenacious effort. It would not
have made a difference what line of
work he ultimately went into. The
kind of energy and fight that he had
was obvious by the age of 16. Norris
never calculated the odds, so that they
could intimidate him or dissuade him.
He calculated the public good and was
motivated by that alone.
Q. Who are the primary audiences for
your performances? How many shows do
you perform per year? How can interested
parties contact you?
A. Co-op annual meetings are a major
audience, although I also speak at
meetings of credit unions, which are
also organized as cooperatives. Norris
was a supporter of them as well. He
believed in the idea of the cooperative
one-person, one-vote form of selfdetermination.
The Nebraska legislature
is on-line; you can find me there
for e-mail or home telephone number.
Q. Are you able to “tailor the content of
the presentation if the audience is one or
the other type of co-op?”
A. I try to tailor the content of the
presentation to the audience. Norris’
general approach did not distinguish
between utilities and [farm or other
types of] co-ops. His basic distinction
was between private and public power.
He found the virtues of public power
to straddle both the utility and the
cooperative.
Q. What would the nation lose if our
utility and farmer co-ops pass out of existence?
A. I regard that future as unthinkable.
In a more light-hearted response,
I would just quote Mark Twain who
said, “There is nothing so irritating as
a good example.” If there is tension
between the investor-owned utility
community and public power, it’s
because public power and cooperatives
have been such a shining example
of service, fair prices, community,
outreach and fair dealing. Those are
things we can’t afford to lose in our
communities.
