Gerald
Nye was born in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, on 19th December, 1892.
After leaving school he began work for the Weekly
Review in Hortonville, Wisconsin. In 1912 Nye was appointed
editor of the Plain Dealer in
Iowa. A strong supporter of the temperance movement Nye constantly
advocated prohibition in his newspaper
In May 1916 Nye purchased the Fryburg Pioneer
in Billings County. Two months later he married Anna M. Munch. Over
the next few years the couple had three children (Marjorie, Robert
and James).
Nye
joined
the Republican Party and became a
close associate of Iowa's progressive senator, Albert
B. Cummins. In 1916 Nye used his newspaper to argue that Cummins
should become the party's presidential candidate to take on Woodrow
Wilson. The campaign failed and the party selected Charles
E. Hughes instead.
In
1919 Nye was appointed editor
of the Griggs County Sentinel-Courier.
In his first editorial Nye promised he would be a "constant fighter"
for the interests of Griggs County farmers. In the newspaper he repeatedly
emphasized the need for farmers and local businessmen to join together
in order the combat the growing power of "big business".
Nye was elected to Congress in 1926 and served on the Committee on
Public Lands and Surveys. A member of the progressive wing of the
party, he worked closely with William
Borah,
Henrik Shipstead, Hiram
Johnson, Bronson Cutting, Lynn
Frazier, Robert La Follette, Arthur
R. Robinson, John Elmer Thomas,
Burton
K. Wheeler,
George Norris in the Senate.
Nye
strongly opposed the financial policies of Andrew
Mellon, the secretary
of the treasury
under President Calvin
Coolidge.
He argued in May 1926 that Mellon's measures "provides great
reductions in taxes to those who can best afford to pay taxes and
causes the masses of the people to pay a greater proportion of the
whole tax to be collected than was the case under the old bill."
Instead Nye argued for higher tax rates for the rich and a inheritance
tax.
Nye was a member of the Special Committee on Public Lands and Surveys
that investigated the Teapot Dome Scandal.
Although he endorsed the work of Thomas J.
Walsh, the chairman of the committee, he also provided his own
report that was highly critical of the role that the oil industry
played in the scandal.
In
1929 Nye began to criticize the economic policies of President Herbert
Hoover. In
one speech he claimed that the greatest trouble "with Congress,
with the Government, is that we fear new thoughts; we dread to depart
from the beaten path; we withhold our support of things which are
new and a departure from old ways. It is my hope that the next six
months will have the effect of impressing upon Congress and the President
the importance of accepting drastic means and new ways
of righting wrongs of long standing."
After the victory of Franklin
D. Roosevelt,
Nye criticized the New Deal for "not
going far enough in grappling with the economic emergency". He
also denounced Roosevelt's for favouring big business while neglecting
farmers, small businessmen and workers. However, he did support some
of Roosevelt's measures such as the National
Labor Relations Act
and the Social
Security Act.
Nye was a close political
associate of William
Langer,
a fellow member of the Nonpartisan League, who became Governor of
North Dakota in January 1933. The following year Nye was told by Harold
Ickes, the secretary
of the interior, that Langer had been putting pressure on workers
on federal relief to contribute to the Nonpartisan League newspaper,
The Leader. Nye used this information
to make a speech in Congress where he criticized Langer's actions.
Nye was accused of betraying the Nonpartisan League and it marked
the beginning of a long political feud with Langer.
Dorothy Detzer, executive
secretary of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom,
approached Nye, George
Norris and Robert
La Follette and
asked them to instigate a Senate investigation into the international
munitions industry.
On 8th February, 1934,
Nye submitted a Senate Resolution calling for an investigation of
the munitions industry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under
Key Pittman of Nevada. Pittman disliked
the idea and the resolution was referred to the Military Affairs Committee.
It was eventually combined with one introduced earlier by Arthur
H. Vandenberg of Michigan, who sought to take the profits out
of war.
The Military Affairs Committee
accepted the proposal and as well as Nye and Vandenberg, the Munitions
Investigating Committee included James
P. Pope of Idaho, Homer T. Bone of
Washington, Joel B. Clark of Missouri,
Walter F. George of Georgia and W.
Warren Barbour of New Jersey. John T.
Flynn, a writer with the New
Republic magazine, was appointed as an advisor and
Alger
Hiss as the committee's
legal assistant.
Public hearings before
the Munitions Investigating Committee began on 4th September, 1934.
In the reports published by the committee it was claimed that there
was
a strong link between the American government's decision to enter
the First World War and the lobbying of the
munitions industry. The
committee was also highly critical of the nation's bankers. In a speech
in 1936 Nye argued that "the record of facts makes it altogether
fair to say that these bankers were in the heart and
center of a system that made our going to war inevitable".
Nye was strongly opposed
to the United States government exporting arms to both sides in the
Spanish Civil War. However, by
May, 1938, he accepted this policy had not worked and introduced a
Senate resolution that proposed the lifting of the embargo on shipment
of arms to the Spanish government. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt made
it clear he was opposed to this resolution and it was defeated in
the Foreign Relations Committee by seventeen votes to one.
Although he was not a pacifist,
Nye shared some of their attitudes and his views on the munitions
industry gained him the support of organizations such as the Fellowship
of Reconciliation and
the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom.
Nye's long-term enemy,
William
Langer,
was his opponent for his seat in Congress in November 1938. Nye was
re-elected for a third term by a margin of nearly 20,000 votes over
Langer out of more than 263,000 votes cast in the Senate race.
Nye remained a staunch
isolationist during the emergence of Adolf
Hitler and Benito
Mussolini
in Europe. In August
1940, Nye attacked President
Franklin
D. Roosevelt for
giving the leaders of England and France "reason to believe that
if they would declare war on Germany, help would be forthcoming."
He went on to argue that the United States had "sold
out, by deliberate falsification, the two European nations with which
we had the closest ties. We sent France to her death and have brought
England perilously close to it."
On 15th April, 1940, Nye
told a meeting in Pennsylvania that the European war was not "worthy
of the sacrifice of one American mule, much less one American son."
He also argued that "Russia, Stalin and communist ideology"
would eventually win from the Second World War.
In 1941 Nye was the most
active member of the America
First Committee in
the Senate. This involved the attempt to defeat the administration
Lend Lease proposal. Although Nye persuaded
Burton
K. Wheeler,
Hugh
Johnson, Robert
LaFollette Jr., Henrik
Shipstead, Homer
T. Bone, James B. Clark, William
Langer,
and Arthur
Capper, to vote
against the measure, it was passed by 60 votes to 31.
In a speech in August 1941,
Nye claimed that the motion picture industry had "become the
most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse the war
fever in America and plunge this Nation to her destruction".
He added that the movies were "not revealing the sons of mothers
writhing in agony in trench, in mud, on barbed wire, amid scenes of
battle or sons of mothers living legless, or lungless, or brainless,
or sightless in hospitals." His commented that this approach
was partly due to the large number of refugees and British actors
working in the industry.
In a speech in Des Moines,
Iowa, Charles
A. Lindbergh claimed
that the "three
most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war
are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration".
Soon afterwards Nye gave his support to Lindbergh and
argued "that the Jewish
people are a large factor in our movement toward war." These
speeches resulted in some people claiming that Nye was anti-Semitic.
The
Japanese Air Force attacked
Pearl Harbor on 7th December, 1941. The
following day Nye voted in the Senate for war. He admitted: "The
one thing an American can want to do - win the war and win it with
the greatest possible dispatch and decisiveness. It is not time to
quibble over what might have been done or how we got where we are.
We know only that the enemy chose to make war against us. To give
our Commander in Chief unqualified and unprejudicial backing in his
prosecution of the war is an obligation which I shall gladly fulfill.
Differences over matters of foreign policy up to this hour are abandoned
and unity should be accorded in every particular."
Nye's
known isolationist views became very unpopular after America entered
the war and he lost his seat in Congress in November 1944. He became
a lawyer in Washington and was special
assistant for elderly housing, in the Federal Housing Administration
(1960-64). Gerald Nye died in Maryland on 17th July, 1971.
Forum Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-1990
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1)
Gerald Nye, speech in Congress (May, 1926)
The Mellon tax revision legislation provides great reductions in taxes
to those who can best afford to pay taxes and causes the masses of
the people to pay a greater proportion of the whole tax to be collected
than was the case under the old bill... Favors have been granted by
Congress to the railroads, the bankers, and great industries time
and again. Congress considers what it has done for them 'good business';
but when the same measure of aid is asked for the farmer, it immediately
becomes paternalism and class legislation.
(2)
During a speech at the Conference on Causes and Cures of War in Washington
Gerald Nye explained his basic view on foreign policy (January, 1930)
That government must respond to the wishes and interests of the masses
of its people. That
there is need for world leadership and example. That back of any successful
war-outlawry program there must be the motive looking to the well
being of the people of every country instead of the motive to perpetuate
the status quo.
That in nearly every war
it is the people who bear the burdens and that it is not the people
who cause wars bringing them no advantage, but that they are caused
by fear and jealousy coupled with the purpose of men and interests
who expect to profit by them.
And finally, that more
than we need any set-up of world machinery to judge and determine
controversies, we need an abandonment of those causes which seek world
control of money, of credit, and of trade, not in the name of a great
people but in the name of selfish individuals and
interests.
(3)
Gerald
Nye, speech in Congress (1932)
The greatest trouble with us, with Congress, with the Government,
is that we fear new thoughts; we dread to depart from the beaten path;
we withhold our support of things which are new and a departure from
old ways. It is my hope that the next six months will have the effect of impressing upon Congress and
the President the importance of accepting drastic means and new ways
of righting wrongs of long
standing.
(4)
In her autobiography, Appointment on the Hill, Dorothy
Detzer reported a conversation
she had with George
Norris in 1933 about Gerald Nye leading
the investigation into the international munitions industry.
Nye's young, he has inexhaustible
energy, and he has courage. Those are all important assets. He may
be rash in his judgments at times, but it's the rashness of enthusiasm. I think he
would do a first-class job with an investigation. Besides, Nye doesn't
come up for election again for another four years; by that time the
investigation would be over. If it reveals what I am certain it will,
such an investigation would help him politically, not harm him. And
that would not be the case with many senators. For you see, there
isn't a major industry in North Dakota closely allied to the munitions
business.
(5)
Gerald
Nye, speech in Congress (May,
1933)
Investigations serve a most healthy purpose in that they prevent many
practices and serve as a caution against practices which might be
considered proper and customary but for the development of a conscience
by the existence of an investigating committee.
With economic
and political influence coming into such concentrated control it is
of greatest importance that legislative bodies be on closest guard
against encroachment which further threatens a free government. Honest
investigations, prosecuted by legislators determined to reach and
develop the facts, and by legislators who in their work can and will
abandon partisanship, are of greatest value to the government and
its people. They afford necessary knowledge basic to helpful legislation.
They educate people to practices unfriendly to their best interests.
They throw fear into men an interests who would by any means at their
command move governments to selfish purposes.
(6)
Gerald
Nye, speech reported in the
New
York Times (10th February, 1936)
It would not be fair to say that the House of Morgan took us to war
to save their investment in the Allies, but the record of facts makes
it altogether fair to say that these bankers were in the heart and
center of a system that made our going to war inevitable. We started
in 1914 with a neutrality policy which permitted the sale of arms
and munitions to belligerents, but which forbad loans to belligerents.
Then, in the name
of our own business welfare. President Wilson permitted the
policy to be stretched to the extent of permitting the house of Morgan
to supply the credit needs of the Allies. After this error of neutrality,
the road to war was paved and greased for us.
(7)
Report on Activities and Sales of Munition Companies (April,
1936)
Almost without exception, the American munitions companies investigated
have at times resorted to such unusual approaches, questionable favors
and commissions, and methods of 'doing the needful' as to constitute,
in effect,
a form of bribery of foreign governmental officials or of their close
friends in order to secure business. These business methods carried
within themselves the seeds of disturbance to the peace and stability
of those nations in which they take place.
While the
evidence before this committee does not show that wars have been started
solely because of the activities of munitions makers and their agents,
it is also true that wars rarely have one single cause, and the committee
finds it to be against the peace of the world for selfishly interested
organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military
activity.
(8)
Joel
B. Clark, introduction to the Munitions
Industry: Report on Existing Legislation (5th June, 1936)
The Committee wishes to point out most definitely that its study of
events resulting from the then existing neutrality legislation, or
the lack of it, is
in no way a criticism, direct or implied, of the sincere devotion
of the then President, Woodrow Wilson, to the high causes of peace
and democracy. Like other leaders in government, business and finance,
he had watched the growth of militarism in the pre-war years. Militarism
meant the alliance of the military with powerful economic groups to
secure appropriations on the one hand for a constantly increasing
military and naval establishment, and on the other hand, the constant
threat of the use of that swollen military establishment in behalf
of the economic interests at home and abroad of the industrialists
supporting it. President Wilson was personally impelled by the highest
motives and the most profound convictions as to the justice of the
cause of our country and was devoted to peace. He was caught up in
a situation created largely by the profit-making interests in the
United States, and such interests spread to nearly everybody in the
country. It seemed necessary to the prosperity of our people that
their markets in Europe remain unimpaired. President Wilson, himself,
stated that he realized that the economic rivalries of European nations
had played their part in bringing on the war in 1914.
(9)
Gerald
Nye, speech in Congress (6th
June, 1936)
Loans extended to the Allies in 1915 and 1916, led to a very considerable
war boom and inflation. This boom extended beyond munitions to auxiliary
supplies and equipment as well as to agricultural products. The nature
of such a war-boom inflation is that, like all inflations, an administration
is almost powerless to check it, once the movement is well started.
Our foreign policy then is seriously affected by it, even to the extent
of making impossible the alteration of our foreign policy in such
a way as to protect our neutral rights.
(10)
Gerald
Nye, speech in Congress (July,
1939)
No member of the Munitions Committee to my knowledge has ever contended
that it was munitions makers who took us to war. But that committee
and its members have said again and again, that it was war trade and
the war boom, shared in by many more than munitions makers, that played
the primary part in moving the United States into a war.
(11)
Gerald
Nye, speech reported in the
New
York Times on
28th August 1940.
England and France reason to believe that if they would declare war
on Germany, help would be forthcoming. Some day history will show,
as one of the blackest
marks of our time, that we sold out, by deliberate falsification,
the two European nations with which we had the closest ties. We sent
France to her death and have brought England perilously close to it.
Had they stalled Hitler for a while, while they prepared to meet him,
the story might have been different.
(12)
Gerald Nye, speech (9th December, 1941)
The one thing an American can want to do - win the war and win it
with the greatest possible dispatch and decisiveness. It is not time
to quibble over what might have been done or how we got where we are.
We know only that the enemy chose to make war against us. To give
our Commander in Chief unqualified and unprejudicial backing in his
prosecution of the war is an obligation which I shall gladly fulfill.
Differences over matters of foreign policy up to this
hour are abandoned and unity should be accorded in every particular.
(13)
R. Douglas Stuart of the America
First Committee, letter to
Gerald Nye (7th January, 1942)
If the Government had followed the policy we advocated, war could
have been avoided and America and the world would have benefited.
Your contribution was immense. Without your tireless energy and your
wonderful courage, such a great fight could not have been made. I
often marvelled at your stamina and the way in which you carried on
night after night, meeting after meeting. Your rallies were political
phenomena. It will be a long time before this country sees such crowds
or such genuine enthusiasm.
(14)
Gerald Nye, speech in Fargo, North Dakota
(August, 1942)
The task before us is tremendous. We do not properly meet the challenge
by raking through words of what might have been. I opposed the Roosevelt
administration of foreign policy step by step because I believed it
was leading us to war. I believed then, and I still believe, that
the alternative policy which I and many others advocated was sounder
and that it would have kept us out of this war. That alternate policy was in
no sense or degree a policy of non-defense, however much some sources
may try to confuse the question of non-intervention with the question
of defense. But all of that need not now concern us. At war as we
are, so far as I am concerned, there will be support of every measure
and every purpose advanced which has as its purpose the successful
prosecution of our great cause in the winning of the war.
(15)
Gerald Nye, speech in the Senate (4th November, 1942)
If we can not isolate ourselves from these experiences of war, then
at least we might try, with the hope of preventing them, cooperative
undertakings with the rest of the world, but undertakings, mind you,
that do not create some super-govemment that shall dictate our own
destiny, undertakings that will not jeopardize our own sovereignty
as a nation, undertakings of a purely cooperative nature that will
not challenge our identity or our sovereignty any more than does cooperation
with our allies in winning the war.
To me a
just and honorable peace is one that will go further than merely to
punish the leaders who have been responsible for the catastrophe that
is upon the world. To me, a just and honorable peace means one that
will -
Undertake seriously the
elimination of the factors making for war;
Afford liberation and
sovereignty to all the peoples of the world wanting it;
Deny to the victors the
acquisition of any territory without the consent of the people of
the proposed newly acquired territory;
Give every nation equal
access to commercial lanes and ports;
Withhold aid and encouragement
from imperialistic and world domination ambitions;
Deny undertakings to preserve
unpopular monarchies or their reign over others;
Restore and maintain the
identity and sovereignty of lands like Finland, Poland, Norway, and
Sweden, unless the peoples of those lands find an association or a
partitioning to their own liking;
Refrain from undertaking
to force a race of people to live forever under foreign masters.
Deny extraterritorial
rights for any power in other lands unwilling voluntarily to grant
such rights.
Refrain from subjecting
any people or their resources to the profit or advantage of any other
power."
(16)
In
his last speech in Congress Gerald Nye
he explained what the Munitions Investigating Committee had discovered
(February, 1944)
First, it showed that economic interests do lie at the bottom of modem
war. Second, our inquiry also discovered that economic interests which
stand to make money out of war cannot be trusted not to work for war.
I do not say, mark you, that they always do, but I do say that they
cannot be trusted not to. The third fact follows, namely, that the
private armament industry stands at the top of the list of those which,
because they stand to make money out of the arming of nations for
war, cannot be trusted to work against the coming of war. The fourth
fact brought out by our inquiry is that any portion of the banking
industry which is engaged in financing the armament industry is just
about as dangerous to peace, as the armament industry itself.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
