This Day in Senate History (Nye Investigates WWI “Merchants of Death”)

September 4, 1934—One of the most comprehensive congressional investigations of the 20th century began, as Gerald Nye of North Dakota convened the “Senate Munitions Committee,” empaneled to determine whether American arms makers unduly influenced the U.S. entry into World War I.

The resulting 18 months of hearings bolstered the isolationist movement and hampered Franklin D. Roosevelt as he attempted to “quarantine” the world’s rising dictatorships.

Though Congress has investigated malfeasance in the executive branch and other parts of American society since 1792, Senate investigative hearings took on new levels of showmanship in the broadcast era, notably hearings involving Watergate, Vietnam, labor racketeering, organized crime, and the Army vs. Joseph McCarthy. They could make stars of members of the world’s “greatest deliberative body” (Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, Estes Kefauver) or undo them (Joe McCarthy).

The model for these hearings took rote in the 1920s, when liberals used the hearings to make the case for landmark legislation (Senate Robert Wagner investigating crackdowns on unions) or to ferret out corruption (Teapot Dome). For the benefit of the media, committee members would announce what would happen at each succeeding stage of the investigation, then release bits of information meant to highlight interest in what they intended to prove.

Nye, a member of what today is a dying breed--a Republican progressive from west of the Mississippi—was an emblematic example of this. At the start of the Munitions Committee Hearings, he laid out his promise of what the testimony would show: “When the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.”

Nye’s statement found a ready audience because the fact was that a number of American arms manufacturers had sold to multiple customers—sometimes on both sides. Bankers had been involved with some of the most vexing problems of the interwar period, including reparations from World War I. In the spring of 1934, the Book-of-the-Month Club had made one expose of the influence of these groups, Merchants of Death, not only a bestseller but a catchphrase that would take its place alongside the later “military-industrial complex.”

Democrats, now in control of Congress, may have felt that someone with the progressive leanings of Nye would accord with their own views, so, after he introduced a resolution calling for this investigation, they named him to lead the seven-member committee. They would later regret that choice.

The vast sweep of material collected by the Nye Committee in its 93 hearings—including transcripts from the testimony of more than 200 witnesses, including representatives of the iron and steel, shipbuilding, and aircraft industries, as well as munitions manufacturers such as the Colt Firearm Company and the DuPont Company—make it a goldmine for historians. Historian Stuart Brandes, in Warhogs, credits it, along with the Vinson-Trammell Act of the same year, with spurring excess-profits taxation and renegotiated contracts during World War II.

Brandes, however, also takes the committee to task for using methods “eerily close to the methods of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy." In particular, the committee pushed too far its conclusions that the munitions makers had conspired together.

Eventually, Democrats turned on Nye for suggesting that Woodrow Wilson had withheld essential information from Congress when he requested a declaration of war against Germany. Carter Glass, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, became so enraged during his denunciation of his Senate colleague that blood burst from his knuckles when he slammed his fist onto a desk for emphasis.

Before that point, however, Nye had created ammunition of his own—talking points for three Neutrality Acts, as well as the broader isolationist movement. FDR was alarmed by the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, but he had to rein in his crypto-interventionist instincts so he would not lose support for key elements of his domestic agenda. And no wonder: the popularity of isolationism, particularly before Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, was so broad that it exceeded 90% in approval.

It’s impossible to imagine in a country that has become split 50-50 over elementary policy questions as well as national elections, but isolationism enjoyed such broad support because it tapped into the concerns of so many different groups:

* Historical caution, dating back to George Washington, about becoming involved with “entangling alliances”;

* Agrarian antagonism to big-money interests, dating back to Thomas Jefferson and fanned into flame by William Jennings Bryan and other Populists, that saw the hand of Wall Street in everything;

* Pacifism, rising in influence just before World War I and gaining steadily afterward—including the Oxford Pledge, named for the students at the British university who pledged never to join any army;

* Unilateralism, the concept that America should conduct its foreign policy with minimal consultation with other nations lest it restrain our freedom of action. It found expression in a kind of “power progressivism” practiced by Republican Senators William Borah and Hiram Johnson, who often supported domestic New Deal legislation and were incensed by Japanese imperialism, but wanted no part of European quarrels;

* Marxist opposition to capitalist wars, exemplified by Socialist Presidential candidate Norman Thomas and (except for the period after the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact, Communists);

* Fanatical anti-Communism, which saw Hitler as a counterweight to Stalin;

* Opposition by the party out of power—in this decade, Republicans—to the foreign policy of the President;

* Understandable domestic preoccupation with the Great Depression; and

* Guilt over the punitive anti-German measures in the Treaty of Versailles.

FDR signed each of the three Neutrality Acts, but he increasingly sought to neutralize its effects and circumvent its intent to restrict his foreign policy. It took not only Pearl Harbor but Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. to end the argument over isolationism—at least, in terms of World War II.

Nye’s isolationism, once a political selling point, became a liability after war was declared. He lost his reelection bid and was not around on Capitol Hill the next year when the conflict concluded. He died in 1971, a once-powerful and influential influence on foreign policy, now confined to the margins of history texts.