It became a major development agency in the Upper South that constructed dams for flood control and electricity generation for a wide rural area.

In addition, Norris was known for his liberalism, his insurgency against party leaders, his non-interventionist foreign policy, his support for labor unions, and his intense crusades against what he characterized as "wrong and evil".

[1] President Franklin D. Roosevelt called him "the very perfect, gentle knight of American progressive ideals", and this has been the theme of all his biographers.

By a vote of 191 to 156, the House legislators created a new system in which seniority would automatically move members ahead, even against the wishes of the leadership.

Because Southern states had effectively disenfranchised most blacks by new constitutions and discriminatory practices at the turn of the century, it was a one-party region, known as the Solid South, representing only white voters.

As a leading Progressive Republican, Norris supported the direct election of senators, ratified by the states in the Seventeenth Amendment.

Norris supported some of President Woodrow Wilson's domestic programs but became a firm isolationist, fearing that bankers were manipulating the country into war.

Norris was a leader of the Farm Bloc, advocated the rights of labor, sponsored the ("Lame Duck") Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[5] and proposed to abolish the Electoral College.

In that period, he blocked industrialist Henry Ford's proposals to modernize the Tennessee Valley by building a private dam at Muscle Shoals, insisting it was a project the federal government should handle.

Norris twice succeeded in getting Congress to pass legislation for a federal electric power system based at Muscle Shoals, but it was vetoed by presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.

[10] He voted in 1935 along primarily with Democrats to adjourn the United States Senate as the chamber was deadlocked over the Costigan-Wagner Act;[11] the anti-lynching bill was ultimately defeated.

[14] "To get good government and to retain it, it is necessary that a liberty-loving, educated, intelligent people should be ever watchful, to carefully guard and protect their rights and liberties," Norris said in a 1934 speech, "The Model Legislature".

Norris opposed Roosevelt's Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937 to pack the Supreme Court, and railed against corrupt patronage.

In late 1937, when Norris saw the famous photograph "Bloody Saturday" (showing a burned Chinese baby crying in a bombed-out train station after the Japanese invasion), he shifted his stance on isolationism and non-interventionism.

"[1] Norris is one of eight senators profiled in John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, included for opposing Speaker Cannon's autocratic power in the House, for speaking out against arming U.S. merchant ships during the United States' neutral period in World War I, and for supporting the presidential campaign of Democrat Al Smith.

In February 1984, the west legislative chamber of the Nebraska State Capitol, home of the legislature since 1937, was named in Norris's honor.

"Gentle knight of progressive ideals" a quote on his character from FDR, is inscribed at the bottom left, while George W. Norris appears below his portrait.