Nye Committee
There were seven members: Nye, the committee chair; and Senators Homer T. Bone (D-WA), James P. Pope (D-ID), Bennett Champ Clark (D-MO), Walter F. George (D-GA), W. Warren Barbour (R-NJ), and Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-MI).
[11] Burns and Rauschenbusch, who met on the committee, married soon after and co-authored a book that recounts salient testimony gathered by the investigation, War Madness (Washington, D.C., National Home Library Association, 1937).
[13][14][15] About their testimony, Dorothy Detzer (Appointment On The Hill, p. 169) reports: "The four solemn Du Pont brothers," averred that "the corporation's profits of 400% during the First World War seemed only the good fruit of sound business."
Democratic leaders, including Appropriations Committee Chairman Carter Glass of Virginia, unleashed a furious response against Nye for 'dirtdaubing the sepulcher of Woodrow Wilson.'
[16]In her memoir, Appointment On The Hill (p. 169), Dorothy Detzer, an intimate eye-witness to the Committee's processes, summarizes: "The long exhaustive investigation ... produced a sordid report of intrigues and bribery; of collusion and excessive profits; of war scares artificially fostered and [disarmament] conferences deliberately wrecked."
Many Americans felt betrayed and questioned that the war had been an epic battle between the forces of good (democracy) and evil (autocracy), as it had been depicted in pro-war propaganda.
[6] The committee's findings did not achieve the aim of nationalization of the arms industry, but gave momentum to the non-interventionist movement, sparked the passage of the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s in 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939,[16][17] and encouraged Charles Lindbergh and other anti-Semites, who believed that the lenders were mostly Jewish and that Jews were one of the principal groups advocating for U.S. intervention in Europe.
In its final report, the Nye Committee also identified the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay as a key example of complicity between debt financiers, arms makers, and militaries.
Killing the back-country Indians of South America with airplanes, bombs, and machine guns, boiled down to an order to get busy because "these opera bouffe revolutions are usually short-lived, and we must make the most of the opportunity.
