ABSTRACT
The early life and career of George William Norris and that of William Edgar Borah followed a pattern similar to Tom Walsh’s. Norris was born in 1861 in Sandusky, Ohio. In 1864—after the deaths of his father, Chauncey, of pneumonia and his only brother, John Henry, of battle wounds fighting with General William T. Sherman in Georgia—George, or “Willie,” at the age of three, was the only surviving male in his family of six sisters and mother, the former Mary Magdalene Mook, a Pennsylvania Dutch girl. After growing up on the family farm, Norris attended Baldwin University for a year and then attained a bachelor’s degree and an LL.B. from the Northern Indiana Normal School at Valparaiso. At first clerking and teaching school for two years, he then moved to Nebraska to practice law. That his integrity and independence inspired loyalty was evident in the way he never lost touch with his nine friends and supporters in a bitter contest for the presidency of the Crescent Literary Society at Northern Indiana. Though he lost the contest, they organized the LUN, the Loyal United Nine—or as their opponents called them “Lunatics under Norris”—who held an annual August reunion for fifty-nine years until 1941.
