Gerald Prentice Nye

• Gerald Prentice Nye
• Born: December 19, 1892
• Died: July 17, 1971

American progressive politician and isolationist, was born at Hortonville, Wisconsin, the first of four children of Irwin Raymond Nye, a newspaper publisher of English ancestry who was a native of Wisconsin, and Ella (Prentice) Nye, also a Wisconsin native.

Nye’s youth was spent in rural Wisconsin. He was graduated from Wittenberg High School in 1911; though an indifferent student, he was active in sports and other extracurricular activities. He learned the journalist’s trade from his father and in 1911 became editor of the Hortonville Weekly Republican, a paper he later purchased. In 1914 Nye’s enterprise failed. He thereafter edited the Creston, Iowa, Daily Plain Dealer (1915-16) and was briefly a business representative for The Des Moines Register and Leader.

In May 1916 Nye purchased The Fryburg Pioneer and moved to western North Dakota’s Billings County. His activism and energetic progressivism resulted by 1918 in a growing identification with the insurgent Nonpartisan League (NPL), then a dominant force in state politics. Nye moved to Cooperstown, North Dakota, in 1919 to become editor of the Griggs County Sentinel-Courier, a cooperatively-owned newspaper; he rapidly thereafter developed into a leading journalistic spokesperson for the NPL.

In 1924 Nye ran unsuccessfully for Congress, but on November 14, 1925, he was appointed by Governor Arthur G. Sorlie to complete the unexpired term of the late U.S. Senator Edwin F. Ladd. Because of a controversy over the power of a North Dakota governor to make interim appointments, Nye was not seated until January 1926; but he easily won the special election that was held in June of that year and was reelected without difficulty in 1932 and 1938. He failed to obtain renomination in the June 1944 primary and lost in the 1944 general election. He was resoundingly defeated in his final reelection try in 1946, an event that closed his political career in North Dakota.

Nye remained in the Washington, D.C, area after 1946. Until 1959, he operated a records management and microfilming company that he had incorporated in 1937. He became a special assistant for elderly housing with the Federal Housing Administration in 1960 and served until 1963. Upon retirement, Nye actively supported conservation organizations and the Lutheran church.

Nye married twice. His first wife, Anna Margaret Munch, was a native of Missouri whom he married in 1916; they had three children, two sons and a daughter. The union ended in divorce in 1940. That same year Nye married Marguerite Johnson, a native of Iowa. Two sons and a daughter were also born of the second marriage.

A strong and combative public speaker with a flair for the spectacular, Nye achieved national prominence as an advocate of isolationist foreign policies. His most visible effort came between 1934 and 1937, when he acted as chairman of the Special Senate Committee on Investigations of the Munitions Industry, a body set up to determine whether arms manufacturers had influenced the American decision to enter World War I. Witnesses at the well-publicized hearings on “the merchants of death” included such prominent industrialists and financiers as the Du Pont brothers and J. P. Morgan Jr. The Nye committee’s final report, issued in 1937, called for nationalization of the munitions industry and strict neutrality legislation. The report led to acts defining the conduct of foreign relations during times of belligerency.

Nye also gained the limelight for his advocacy of progressive legislation and an independent attitude that superseded party lines. In particular, he spearheaded investigations of corrupt political campaign practices in 1930, opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act in 1933, labored strongly for federal irrigation projects in the arid West, and backed rural relief programs during the depression. Always a strong nationalist, he outspokenly struggled to forestall American involvement in foreign wars and alliances. He helped form and became a leader in the America First Committee in 1940, quickly attracting large audiences with his impassioned appeals against what he considered the pro-British sympathies of the Roosevelt administration. Throughout his public career, he supported a proposal for a constitutional amendment requiring a national referendum to ratify declarations of war.

Nye’s consistent isolationism, a major element in his political success, became a liability after 1941. However, his 1944 defeats in North Dakota can more likely be attributed to his comparative inattention to farm issues, conflicts with leaders of the Nonpartisan League, and his divorce in 1940. Nye remained literate, active, and personally appealing during his post-Senate years. He never recanted his isolationist principals, and during the 1950s found reason to applaud the anti-internationalist activities of men such as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. He viewed with regret the American presence in Vietnam after 1963 and interpreted the national divisions and other negative results of the undeclared war as vindications of his isolationist arguments.

Nye died at seventy-eight in Washington after a long illness.

Nye’s papers are held by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. The standard biography is W. S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (1962). An informative article is D. F. Rylance, “A Controversial Career: Gerald P. Nye, 1925-1946,” North Dakota Quarterly, Winter 1968. See also Current Biography, November 1941. Obituaries appeared in The Fargo Forum, July 19, 1971 and in The New York Times, July 19, 1971.