35 Facts About Gerald Nye

Gerald Prentice Nye was an American politician who represented North Dakota in the United States Senate from 1925 to 1945.

Gerald Nye was born in Hortonville, Wisconsin, the son of Phoebe Ella and Irwin Raymond Nye.

Nye's father was a staunch supporter of Progressive Robert M La Follette, and Nye personally remembered his father's taking him to hear Senator La Follette speak and then meet the Senator afterwards.

Gerald Nye made trips to the South for recuperation, but on October 19,1906, she died.

Gerald Nye was thirteen; his brothers, ten and eight; and his baby sister, six.

Gerald Nye was comforted by the presence of his four grandparents at the funeral.

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

Gerald Nye took the editing end and Clair operated the presses.

In 1911, after graduation, Gerald Nye became editor of The Hortonville Review.

In 1924, Gerald Nye unsuccessfully sought election as a Democrat to the US House.

Gerald Nye's isolationism drew the attention of Dr Seuss who featured him in a political cartoon with Gerald L K Smith and Democratic Senator Robert Rice Reynolds.

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

Gerald Nye served on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Appropriations Committee, the Defense Committee and the Public Lands Committee.

Gerald Nye was instrumental in passing legislation to protect public access to the sea coasts.

Gerald Nye 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.

Gerald Nye supported the political positions of Robert M La Follette, and legislation for agricultural price supports.

Between 1934 and 1936, Gerald Nye headed an investigation of the munitions industry.

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

Gerald Nye suggested that Wilson had withheld essential information from Congress as it considered a declaration of war.

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

Gerald Nye was instrumental in the development and adoption of the Neutrality Acts that were passed between 1935 and 1937.

In common with many conservative isolationists, Gerald 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, Gerald Nye stated that those "responsible for the propaganda pictures are born abroad".

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

Gerald Nye criticized Marcelino Garcia Rubiera and Manuel Diaz Riestra for illegally shipping supplies to the Nationalists.

The day of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7,1941, Gerald Nye attended an America First meeting in Pittsburgh.

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

Gerald Nye only announced the attack at the end of his one-hour speech, stating that he had received "the worst news that I have encountered in the last 20 years".

However, the next day Gerald Nye joined the rest of the Senate in voting for a unanimous declaration of war.

In November 1944, Gerald Nye was defeated in his re-election attempt by Governor John Moses, a Democrat.

Gerald Nye became a consultant to churches and private groups desiring government funds for the building of retirement housing.

Gerald Nye was a Freemason and attended Grace Lutheran Church in Washington, DC.

In 1919, they moved to Cooperstown, North Dakota, where Gerald Nye was the editor and publisher of the Sentinel Courier.

Every summer, Gerald Nye would take the children to Yellowstone National Park where Marjorie and a young Gerald Nye Ford were teenage friends.

In March 1940, Nye divorced his first wife, and on December 14,1940, he remarried, to an Iowa schoolteacher, A Marguerite Johnson.