Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,011

This is the grave of Edwin Norris.

Born in 1865 in Cumberland County, Kentucky, Norris seems to have come from relatively well off circumstances. He got to go to college anyway, at Southern Normal School, which is now Western Kentucky University. He graduated, but instead of going into teaching like many normal school students, he chose the law instead. He passed the bar in 1888 and then moved to Montana, where an ambitious young man could enter a place just becoming a state and rise much faster than anyone could back home.

He moved to the town of Dillon and became a successful lawyer there. Being a white Kentuckian of this time, of course he was a Democrat. And Republicans generally dominated early Montana–it even being admitted as a state in 1889 was part of the Republican fix to create a whole bunch of new states so that they would over a dozen more electoral college votes after somehow losing the 1884 elections; this is why there are two Dakotas instead of one, even though neither side had enough population by traditional standards to allow statehood. Republicans cheat, I know, it’s shocking to us all.

Anyway, there were pockets of Democratic Party strength in these states and Norris was able to take advantage of this. He won election to the state senate from Dillon in 1896 and served two terms. Then he became lieutenant governor in 1905. When Joseph Toole resigned from the job of governor in 1908, Norris rose and became governor. He then won his own term the next year and stayed in that job until 1913. As a Democrat, he was generally more favorable to the working class than Republicans, which has more or less been true for the entire history of the two parties. So he pushed for and signed legislation that would create mine operator liability if their workers became disabled on the job, which happened all the time in this brutal industry. He also sought to reform the life insurance industry and pushed for nonpartisan judicial elections, which are annoying. I’m sure we’d all like to think that judges were nonpartisan, but we know damn well that the whole idea is a farce and they have uncovered agendas this way. But it’s the kind of thing that Good Government Liberals love, or at least they used to. Progressive Era reformers were really into this kind of thing.

One thing Norris did not support was the growing power of the federal government to regulate the environment. In short, he hated things such as the U.S. Forest Service, which was founded in 1905. He resented the idea that the feds should have control over state environments (never mind that said control was on federal land, western states have long resented the sheer existence of federal land). He made claims that there was no need for national forests in Montana since there was no reason to control erosion by keeping trees standing. He claimed Montana soil didn’t wash away! Uh, OK….He also lambasted federal efforts to engage in farm improvement activities by saying that Montana farms were already so productive that it was a waste of time. He then ripped Theodore Roosevelt and his administration for keeping grazing fees on federal land in Montana. In short, Norris was pushing an early version of the Sagebrush Rebellion, the far-right astroturf movement of the 1980s that freaked out over federal control of western land when it dared push environmental standards.

This all led Secretary of Interior James Garfield, Jr., to push back hard on Norris, telling him to his face that he was a pro-business hack making dishonest arguments that he knew were lies. He put Norris’ comments in the context of the last several decades of western politicians ruining American nature by doing the bidding of corporate America. No lies told there, no matter how much Norris hated it all.

Another fun fact about Norris is that when Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a tick-borne illness, was discovered in 1912, he had the information suppressed because he felt it would get in the way of the white settlement of the Bitterroot Valley, which was far more important than some dead people. In fact, it wasn’t until some people died in 1921 that the facts came out.

Norris was also a big prison labor guy. He thought prisoners should be put to work by the state building infrastructure, which has always been a fantastic way to not pay free workers. He was also a big modern road guy and with the rise of the car, creating passable roads in remote Montana meant a lot of work. So he put the state prisoners to work on it. After he left the governor position in 1913, he ran the State Board of Prison Commissioners and over the next eight years, prisoners built over 200 miles of good road in the state. Norris might have had some support for labor, but not over this issue.

The Montana Federation of Labor (the state chapter of the American Federation Labor) was furious over Norris pushing to use prison labor. This was stealing union jobs from union men, which was the point of course. When people talk about how great it is to get prisoners outside of the prison to work (and it’s not as if they don’t have a point in their favor on why this is a good idea) they always have to elide (or just ignore entirely) the fact that this is usually in conditions of near-slavery that undermine actual paid labor and especially union labor. But then I always find liberals very soft on union issues anyway who prefer to let social work do-gooding prevail because it makes them feel good about themselves.

Norris died in 1924, at the age of 58.

Edwin Norris is buried in Highland Cemetery, Great Falls, Montana. Now, there is one source online that claims he is actually back in Kentucky, but honestly, who knows who is where? Not like I’m digging up bodies and running DNA tests here. But the grave sites list him in Great Falls. These questions might be the most interesting thing about the man.

If you would like this series to visit other exciting governors of the period, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Aram Pothier is in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and Claude Swanson is in Richmond, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.