Norman Moses Clapp was born in Ellsworth, Wisconsin, on October 28, 1914. Of his three brothers, Gordon, Newell, and Carvell, only his older brother Gordon, moved with their widowed mother and thirteen-year-old Norman to Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1927. After receiving his high school diploma, Norman attended Lawrence College, where he majored in political science, edited the weekly Lawrentian, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa before graduating in 1937.
Clapp was on the staff of United States Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr., from 1935 to 1937 and from 1939 to 1944. During those years he assisted the senator in developing the La Follette-Moroney Congressional Reorganization Bill and served as minority expert for the Senate Finance Committee (1942-1944). Between his two stints with La Follette he served as an investigator and mediator on the staff of the Wisconsin Labor Relations Board.
From 1944 to 1958 Clapp edited and published the Lancaster, Wisconsin weekly Grant County Independent, which under his direction won many state and national awards. From 1953 to 1958, Clapp owned a partnership in the Muscoda Publishing Company which, among its other operations, published the Muscoda Progressive, another award-winning Wisconsin weekly.
When most Progressives became Republicans in 1946, Clapp became “Independent,” like his newspaper; and he remained so well into the 1950s. In 1956, however, he declared himself a Democrat, won a three-way primary battle, ran for Congress in Wisconsin's heavily Republican Third District, and was defeated by incumbent Gardner R. Withrow. Clapp ran twice more for the same seat, and although able to attract more votes than any other Democrat in Third District history, he lost both times--to Withrow in 1958 and to former Governor Vernon Thomson in 1960.
During the 1950s Clapp served as a delegate to the White House Conference on Education (1955) and as a member of the National Planning Association, a national organization of top farm, labor, business, and professional leaders interested in the study and planning of national policies. Clapp's involvement in Democratic politics led to his being elected a Kefauver delegate to the 1956 Democratic National Convention. In 1959 he was named to the executive directorship of the Democratic Party for western Wisconsin by State Chairman Patrick J. Lucey. In February 1961, Clapp was named administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration of the United States Department of Agriculture by President John F. Kennedy, a position he occupied until January, 1969.
In 1971, while working as a private consultant in the Washington, D.C., area, Clapp was named secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. In January 1975, he was appointed by Governor Patrick Lucey to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. Having completed the unexpired term to which he had been appointed in 1977, Clapp declined reappointment and moved to Arlington, Virginia, to become vice-president for energy for the Development and Resources Corporation.
Clapp married the former Analoyce Elkington of Madison, Wisconsin in 1936. They became the parents of three sons: David Allen, William Reynold, and Douglas Edwin. Clapp died on October 7, 1998.
