Peter Kuznick
speaker
151 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Peter Kuznick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes. The big five, the military contractors are doing great.
Yes.
1934. Gerald Nye. Yeah, it was a great committee. The Nye Committee hearings in the Senate were an extraordinary moment, and it was a reaction to World War I. Because what Wilson said, we want a million volunteers. Well, they got 73,000 because Americans had been watching the World War I in Europe go on for three years. They saw the trench warfare. They saw the poison gas. It was a horrible war.
And so very few Americans wanted to volunteer. So we had a draft instead. But afterwards, in the 1920s, going back to Hollywood, they had a lot of fabulous movies about World War I that were passionately anti-war. Movies like The Big Parade, Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front. And the novels, almost all the American writers were opposed to the war.
And so the American attitude was very negative about World War I. So in 1934, Gerald Nye proposes these hearings and a new legislation to eliminate all profit from war. Now these bastards are making enormous amounts of profit.
Well, then they started to go after Wilson because it was a bipartisan effort on the committee. It had front page headlines. Who was Gerald Nye? Gerald Nye was a senator from... Midwest. Yeah, Midwest. Midwest Republican. Yeah. Progressive. There were a lot of progressive anti-war Republicans during World War I and then afterwards in the 20s and 30s. They've been libeled ever since.
Robert La Follette is one of the greats, but there were a lot of them then. And they weren't strictly isolationist. William Borough was one of the leaders from Idaho.
Right. Henry Wallace from Iowa. And so, but when they started to go after Truman, the Democrats got very defensive. And after Wilson, the Democrats got very defensive and they blew up the hearings. Even Roosevelt was supportive of what they were calling for in 1934. So what were they calling for? Well, there are various variants on this. One was to either tax everything above $10,000.
Once war began, anything that people earned over $10,000 would be taxed at either 98% or 100%. because the DuPonts and the Morgans and Mellons made huge profits out of World War I, astronomical profits.
And part of the reason why we got involved in the war at all, even though American people did not want to, was because we had lent, Morgan banks had lent $2.5 billion to the allies and 100 million to the other side. And so it was clear which side we were going to get involved in.
What Wilson said when he was criticized, because he ran in 1916 as a peace candidate, the slogan was, we kept America out of the war. And then in 1917, they changed the slogan to, it's the war to end all wars or the war to make the world safe for democracy. But Wilson entered it in large part because he knew that if we didn't, then the US would have no hand in the post-war settlement.
And he said, we have to be in it so that we can shape the post-war world. And he came up with the League of Nations, which could have been a good idea under certain circumstances. But his 14 points were very progressive, but the British and French colonialists were not going to accept it. And as Oliver said before, when the Soviet...
revolution occurred, one of the first thing they did is they broke in and found all the diplomatic papers which showed the secret treaties between Russia, France, and Britain to divide up the Middle East. You know, the problems we're talking about now trace back to then, to the colonialists who controlled the Middle East. But this was going on all over the world. They had this plan.
The Germans wanted to get involved in the war in part because they were latecomers to the empire in Africa. They felt they'd been frozen out of the empires that the British and French and Dutch and Portuguese all were controlling.
Another play that Oliver knows that also is critical of war profiteering was Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets. You know, he's also got various episodes about condemning the war profiteering.
They came close, and it was overwhelmingly popular at the time. And then the Democrats reacted to those allegations against Wilson getting us into the war.
You know, the kids don't even know about World War I. Right. That's really ancient history. They hardly know about Vietnam. Yeah. You know, Oliver fought in Vietnam. Oliver volunteered for combat in Vietnam. Probably the only person to drop out of Yale and volunteer for combat in Vietnam in history. No. No? I think there are others. Oh, maybe, I doubt it.
And I was an anti-war activist during that period. But I was in Hanoi in January. And it's interesting to me because I had Robert McNamara come into my class some years ago. And McNamara said to my students that he accepts that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war. And I've always used that figure because it's mind boggling.
But when I was in Hanoi, the Vietnamese leaders told me that now the figure that they use is 5 million Vietnamese. Vietnamese. So the one place that all my students have been is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., which you've been there. And it's got two walls with 492 feet long with the names of 58,280 Americans who died.
And the message is the tragedy of Vietnam is that 58,280 Americans died, which is part of it. But if you included the 5 million Vietnamese, the million Cambodians and Laotians, the Americans, the Brits, the Aussies, the Thais, everybody who died, that wall would be more than 10 miles long. And that would be a fitting tribute to the Vietnam, but it would send a whole different message.
Showing 101–120 of 151 · page 6 of 8
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