Abstract

The Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, or Nye Committee, which convened between 1934 and 1936, has been remembered for its critique of US business interests and their influence on US entry into World War I. However, the committee, led by Senator Gerald P. Nye (R-ND), did not simply look backward. It focused principally on lodging cogent criticisms of the munitions industry’s role in fueling wars in South America and rearming Germany in the 1930s—in opposition to US neutrality laws and the Treaty of Versailles. By investigating and exposing the “international armaments ring,” the Nye Committee channeled the momentum of the international peace and disarmament movements, as well as domestic antimonopoly. Its findings called out the supranational interests of munitions makers that engaged in war profiteering while simultaneously benefitting from US government largesse. This paper draws on the records of the Nye Committee, the Gerald Nye papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the private papers of Gerald P. Nye, and other sources, to reconsider the role the munitions industry played in jeopardizing US neutrality in the interwar period. It then explores the trajectory of Senator Nye’s progressive critique of business-government associationalism in foreign policy through the onset of World War II, which prompted a transformation in Nye’s “isolationist” political tradition away from a critique of business influence over foreign policy and toward a more conservative suspicion of big government. Examining this transformation provides an opportunity to understand both the coherence and disappearance of a broad-based progressive antimonopoly critique of business-government relations abroad in the mid-twentieth-century United States.