Politics & Power Quote by George William Norris

A polite way of saying the country had been bought, right down to the seating chart.

George William Norris wasn’t just lobbing a partisan jab at Warren G. Harding; he was naming a postwar reality that many Americans sensed but couldn’t quite prove in a headline. “Great wealth took possession of the government” turns money into an occupying force. Not influence, not pressure, but possession: a word that suggests capture, control, even a kind of institutional haunting. It’s moral language disguised as diagnosis.

Then Norris sharpens the blade with administrative specificity. He doesn’t accuse Harding of a single crooked deal; he points to the cabinet - the supposedly sober machinery of governance - as the mirror where capture becomes visible. Cabinets are meant to represent competence and balance. Norris implies they instead represented the donor class, corporate law, and extractive industry: government not as referee but as in-house counsel.

The timing matters. Harding’s early 1920s “return to normalcy” sold comfort after World War I and the Progressive Era’s agitation. Norris, a progressive Republican turned insurgent, heard something else in that slogan: a return to the old arrangement where concentrated capital writes the rules and calls it stability. Soon enough, scandals like Teapot Dome would supply the lurid proof. Norris’s line works because it doesn’t need the details. It frames corruption as structural, not episodic - a staffing choice that reveals who the government believes it serves.