“Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats rejected this legacy of engagement. It was a Democratic Congress that passed two Neutrality Acts in 1935 and 1936, prohibiting American companies from selling any war equipment to any belligerent in an armed conflict, and a Democratic president—Franklin Roosevelt—who signed them both.5 Roosevelt had also encouraged Senator Gerald Nye (a Republican) and his young legal counsel Alger Hiss in their sensational investigations into the conduct of American armaments manufacturers in the First World War. The Nye Committee blasted companies like DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Colt Arms, Electric Boat (makers of submarines), Curtiss, Boeing, and Sperry Gyroscope as “merchants of death.†It even blamed their “lies, deceit, hypocrisy, greed, and graft†for getting the United States into the war in the first place.6 Nye’s proposed solution was nationalizing the armaments industry. That didn’t happen, but companies like DuPont got the message. The Wilmington, Delaware, firm had supplied America’s armed forces with gunpowder since the American Revolution. Now it slashed its munitions-making division to less than 2 percent of operations.7 Other companies drew the same lesson: Supplying America with arms was business you did not want.* That didn’t matter much, because the defense budget was moribund. Cuts President Hoover had imposed on the War and Navy departments with the onset of the Depression became self-sustaining. “Niggardly appropriations for the operation and maintenance of the Navy put naval operations in a veritable straitjacket,†one historian would write of those bleak years.8 Ships were scrapped or mothballed; fleet exercises were curtailed by a lack of fuel and support vessels. Building and fortifying facilities ceased, especially in the western Pacific. The naval base at Pearl Harbor, which was supposed to anchor a chain of fortified Pacific naval stations stretching from Midway to Guam and the Philippines, became a lonely outpost in a vast and empty sea. From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland. Herman, Arthur (2012-05-07T22:58:59). Freedom's Forge (Kindle Locations 169-175). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Herman, Arthur (2012-05-07T22:58:59). Freedom's Forge (Kindle Locations 160-169). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Herman, Arthur (2012-05-07T22:58:59). Freedom's Forge (Kindle Locations 155-160). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
