Gerald Prentice Nye

Background

Gerald Prentice Nye was born on December 19, 1892 in Hortonville, Wisconsin, United States. He was the son of Phoebe Ella Prentice and Irwin Raymond Nye, a crusading country editor and supporter of Progressive Robert M. La Follette.

Education

Nye graduated from Wittenberg High School in 1909.

Career

Nye managed the Hortonville Review, one of his father's weekly newspapers. He then went to Iowa, where he edited the Creston Daily Plaindealer and worked briefly for the Des Moines Register before moving to Fryburg, N. Dak. , in 1915. There he purchased and ran The Pioneer, the first privately owned newspaper in the state to support the newly formed Non-Partisan League, an agrarian reform movement.

In 1919, Nye and his wife moved to Cooperstown, N. Dak. He purchased the Griggs County Sentinel-Courier, which backed the efforts of the Non-Partisan League to build its own grain elevators and flour mills and to defeat the "interests" who controlled the state.

In 1925 he was appointed by the governor of North Dakota to fill a vacant seat in the U. S. Senate. Nye, wearing bulbous yellow shoes and having "an Old Oaken Bucket haircut, " arrived in Washington, D. C. , in December 1925. Opposition to his appointment forced him to wait a month while the Senate debated whether a governor had the power to fill a senatorial vacancy. In 1926, by a two-vote majority, Nye was seated by the Senate, and in November the progressive Republican was elected to a full six-year term.

Assigned to the Public Lands Committee, Nye presided over the investigation of the Teapot Dome scandal and uncovered the fact that President Warren G. Harding's interior secretary, Albert B. Fall, had, without competitive bidding, leased a $100 million oil field to Harry F. Sinclair of the Mammoth Oil Company in return for large contributions to the Republican National Committee. Nye's revelations, which he said demonstrated the "frightful influence of money upon our political and economic life as a nation, " forced the revision of the government lease and the recovery of more than $7 million in taxes and penalties. It also won "Gerald the Giant-Killer" a reputation as an independent, stubborn battler. Nye enhanced that reputation by battling with President Calvin Coolidge over taxation policies and settlement of the war debts, as well as over North Dakota patronage, and by campaigning against monopolies, branch banking, and chain stores. Appointed chairman of a committee to investigate Senate campaign expenditures in 1930, Nye exposed the link between the Ku Klux Klan and a Republican senatorial candidate in Kentucky, and the huge slush fund that had been employed, in vain, to defeat Senator Norris of Nebraska.

Nye played a leading role in the drafting and adoption of the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress between 1935 and 1937. These measures, seeking to prevent a repetition of the circumstances that had led the United States into war in 1917, outlawed arms sales or loans to nations at war, forbade Americans to travel on the ships of belligerent nations, and permitted the sale of nonmilitary goods to nations at war only if the warring countries paid cash and transported the goods on non-American ships.

Nye was supported in his 1938 reelection bid by a national committee headed by the historian Charles A. Beard and by Bruce Bliven, editor of the New Republic.

He lost his Senate seat in the election of 1944. After the war Nye served as president of Record Engineering. In 1959, he became the special assistant for housing for the elderly in the Federal Housing Administration. Resigning that post in 1963, Nye then joined the staff of the Senate Committee on Aging. He retired in 1966 and died in Washington, D. C.

Achievements

• Gradually becoming more concerned about keeping the United States out of another European war at all costs, Nye in 1934 headed a Senate investigation of the munitions industry. Once again, his revelations created a national sensation. Emphasizing the close and sometimes unsavory connections during World War I between the military and the arms industry and its banking associates, and the huge wartime profits of munitions manufacturers and bankers, especially the du Pont and J. P. Morgan interests, the Nye committee documented the role of these "merchants of death" in influencing the United States to intervene. Many Americans agreed with Nye's conclusion that the United States had been tricked into entering World War I by munitions makers and that the latter constituted "a definite menace to world peace. " In the words of the pacifist-minded journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, Nye, "a great leader in the fight for peace, " received the Cardinal Newman Award in 1935. He helped to establish the America First Committee, and won its cheers for his unceasing vituperation against Roosevelt's unprecedented third term; the first peacetime draft in American history; the Lend-Lease Act, which gave the president sweeping powers to sell, transfer, exchange, lend, or lease military equipment to any nation whose defense he deemed essential to American security; and aid to the Soviet Union (populated by "thieves, human butchers and murderers of religion").

Politics

Nye supported La Follette, the Progressive party candidate for president, in 1924.

In the Senate, Nye associated himself with the farm bloc, especially with William E. Borah of Idaho and George W. Norris of Nebraska. He pressed for passage of the McNary-Haugen bill, which called for government price supports for basic crops, and voted against a resolution that favored United States membership in the Court of International Justice.

In 1932, Nye was returned to the Senate by a three-to-one majority. Still an agrarian reformer, he opposed many elements of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In particular, along with Borah, he vehemently opposed the National Recovery Administration for fostering monopoly and price-fixing, and derided its symbol, the Blue Eagle, as "a bird of prey on the masses. "

He was a frequent speaker against the Reserve Officers Training Corps and other examples of militarism in American life, addressing groups as varied as the right-wing Social Justice followers of Father Charles Coughlin and the left-wing American League Against War and Fascism, thus helping to create a widespread determination among Americans to keep the United States out of future wars.

He opposed any changes in the Neutrality Acts and fought to maintain the existing quotas on immigrants, which allowed only a trickle of German Jews to find refuge from Nazi persecution in the United States. Appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1940, Nye opposed aid to Great Britain ("the greatest aggressor in modern times") and bitterly criticized Roosevelt's "destroyers for bases" executive agreement with Winston Churchill.

In mid-1941 Nye lashed out at Jewish film producers in Hollywood. Claiming that they were poisoning American minds with anti-Hitler propaganda, Nye said, "My objection to them is that they are foreign born and are in a position of power to control what 81, 000, 000 people a week see in our theaters. " He also accused Jews of leading the United States toward war. Although Nye reluctantly voted for America's entry into war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, his grim isolationism, association with the German-American Bund, and anti-Semitism left him discredited.

Connections

Nye married Anna Margaret Munch in 1916. In March 1940, Nye was divorced from Anna Nye, with whom he had three children. That December he married Marguerite Johnson, a schoolteacher he had met when he stopped his car to help her change a flat tire.

Father:

Irwin Raymond Nye

editor

Mother:

Phoebe Ella Prentice

Spouse:

Anna Margaret Munch

Spouse:

Marguerite Johnson

schoolteacher

References

• Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-2005
• Senator Gerald P. Nye and American foreign relations