June, 2020
Washington – Now would be a good time to replace the portrait of John C. Calhoun in the U.S. Senate Reception Room with a portrait of George W. Norris of Nebraska.
The Senate's own web page provides background. In 1957, a Senate committee asked historians to list the greatest U.S. Senators of all time, in order to honor five of them with portraits in the Reception Room. George Norris of Nebraska topped the list, which included Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Robert Taft, and John C. Calhoun.
Recognition of Norris never happened, however, because Nebraska Senator Carl T. Curtis opposed it. The two had been rivals within the Nebraska Republican Party. So the honor went instead to Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. In 2000, two other senators were recognized with portraits, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert F. Wagner.
If ever there was a time to right this historic wrong against Senator Norris, it is now, when the nation with good reason is removing statues and portraits of those who advocated and defended slavery. John C. Calhoun was the leading pro-slavery Senator. He died before the Civil War but was the architect of Southern secession.
George Norris left the Senate in 1943 with these words: "I have done my best to repudiate wrong and evil in government affairs."
Which is all the more reason, in these times of great wrongs and evils in government, to take down the portrait of Calhoun and replace it with a portrait of perhaps the greatest of all U.S. Senators, Nebraska's George W. Norris.
