According to an interview in the Literary Digest, he pronounced his last name "van-NIECE".[1]
He was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 1932, soundly defeating longtime incumbent and Majority Leader James Eli Watson. He was an opponent of the Eighteenth Amendment and called for changes to the Volstead Act.[2] In 1937, he joined with Senator Robert F. Wagner in introducing an anti-lynching bill in the Senate. The House of Representatives passed a similar numbered bill (HR 1507)by a wide 277-120 margin. The bill failed to achieve even a simple majority on either cloture vote in the Senate in 1938 because of the way the Senate Judiciary committee rewrote the bill.
Although he was a Democrat who was elected as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sweeping victory, Van Nuys was not always a reliable supporter of New Deal policies and opposed the president’s plan to enlarge the United States Supreme Court.[3] He also stayed outside of the Indiana Democratic Party political machine opposing the party in patronage matters.[3] His positions led some forces in the Democratic Party, including the AFL–CIO to oppose his renomination in 1938. Loyalists to Governors Paul McNutt and M. Clifford Townsend sought to "eliminate" him from the Senate, which was welcomed by the Roosevelt administration.[4]
After initially threatening to run as an independent, he secured support for the Democratic nomination and faced Republican newspaper publisher Raymond E. Willis in the general election. Van Nuys won the election by a mere 5,100 votes, which led Willis to appeal to the Senate for a recount, alleging election irregularities. The Senate denied the recount on the grounds that the affected votes would not have changed the results.[5]
his voting record is a very mixed one; in 1939 he was one of the members of the committee which voted to postpone consideration of the Neutrality Act in June of that year; in October he voted for a revision but not for repeal. Like George and Gillette, he is one of the Senators whom the 1938 purge failed to eliminate, and his feeling towards the President is, therefore, somewhat cool. He voted for Lend-Lease in common with most Democrats, against reciprocal trade agreements, and occasionally votes with the Farm Bloc. A man of very uncertain views tinged with isolationism and liable, on the whole, to vote with the Conservatives.[6]
