Gerald Nye

Gerald Prentice Nye (December 19, 1892 – July 17, 1971) was an American politician who represented North Dakota in the United States Senate from 1925 to 1945.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was a prominent opponent of United States involvement in World War II.

Nye graduated from Wittenberg High School in 1911, at age 18, and moved back to his grandparents' town of Hortonville, Wisconsin.

[citation needed] Gerald and his brother Clair had grown up helping around their father's newspaper business and learned the trade.

Senator Edwin F. Ladd died on June 22, 1925,[4] he and others gathered in the office of North Dakota Governor Arthur G.

[5] Additional, Seuss cartoons showed Nye riding a dying creature labeled as isolationism, entitled The End of the Trail.

As Chairman of Public Lands, he dealt with the Teapot Dome investigations and the formation of Grand Teton National Park.

He initially supported Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, but their relationship soured before the decade closed: for instance, Nye was one of four Senators who voted against the Supreme Court nomination of William O. Douglas.

The Senate cut off committee funding after Chairman Nye blundered into an attack on the late Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.

Democratic leaders, including Appropriations Committee Chairman Carter Glass of Virginia, unleashed a furious response against Nye for 'dirtdaubing the sepulcher of Woodrow Wilson.'

Standing before cheering colleagues in a packed Senate Chamber, Glass slammed his fist onto his desk until blood dripped from his knuckles.

According to Nye, American involvement in the "war for democracy" could be explained in terms of a conspiracy of arms manufacturers, politicians and international bankers.

In common with many conservative isolationists, Nye subscribed to an antisemitic belief in a Jewish conspiracy pushing the US into war.

At a 1941 Senate subcommittee hearing investigating "war-mongering" Hollywood films, Nye stated that those "responsible for the propaganda pictures are born abroad".

[10] He accused Hollywood of attempting to "drug the reason of the American people", and "rouse war fever"; he was particularly hostile to Warner Brothers.

It would be well at the same time if the people would politely suggest that the same Government at Washington cease its almost daily issuance of engraved invitations to all the rest of the world for trouble and war ... Those millions who have conquered the defeatist complex have brought about magnificent changes, changes in spite of newspapers, fireside chats, cabinet speeches, and a virtual blitzkrieg of propaganda to drive us to war ... in spite of what we see and hear each day, the chance of staying out has been multiplied to a degree that causes many of us to feel that it is better than a 50-50 chance.Despite Nye's antiwar positions, he supported the Republican faction in Spain and sought to repeal the embargo against selling arms to either side of the Spanish Civil War.

[13][14] Nye criticized Marcelino Garcia Rubiera and Manuel Diaz Riestra for illegally shipping supplies to the Nationalists.

[16][better source needed] The day of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nye attended an America First meeting in Pittsburgh.

The reporter passed him a note during the speech stating that Japan had declared war; Nye read it but continued speaking.

He and his wife had purchased 3 acres (12,000 m2) of pasture land in Chevy Chase, part of a farm on a hill above Rock Creek Park.

"[22] While a large number of Jewish people were involved with Hollywood, Nye ignored the fact that the Hollywood film industry was not self-financed and had to rely on loans from American banks not run by Jews, such as "Chase National Bank, Atlas Corp., and the Rockefellers.”[22] Nye was a Freemason and attended Grace Lutheran Church in Washington, D.C. On August 16, 1916, he married Anna Margaret Johnson in Iowa where she lived with her maternal grandparents and had taken their name, Munch.

Gerald Nye Becomes Sen. Nye
Nye (left) and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts confer with each other in their call for President Roosevelt to invoke the Neutrality Act to keep the U.S. out of the Sino-Japanese conflict (1937).