National Association of Manufacturers

National Association of Manufacturers. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded in 1895 to facilitate manufacturers' influence in promoting U.S. foreign trade and setting protective tariffs.Its leaders soon turned their attention to fighting trade unions. In the aftermath of World War I, the NAM's Industrial Relations Department assumed leadership of the “open shop” drive against organized labor. Anti‐union southern firms and protectionist northern firms, especially in the metal trades, the textile industry, and shipbuilding, dominated the NAM throughout the 1920s. Its anti‐union policies hardened in the New Deal Era, as leading steel, automobile, chemical, domestic oil, food, and tobacco firms focused the NAM's attention on the threat that big government and big labor allegedly posed to employers' “right to manage.”

While many enterprises gradually accommodated the New Deal system of contractual labor relations, a limited welfare state, and increased federal spending, the NAM served as the voice of anti‐union and anti‐statist business interests. It proved especially active in postwar struggles over full employment, business taxation, and labor law reform, and played a central role in the passage of the Taft‐Hartley Act in 1947 that weakened trade unions. Like other national multi‐industry business groups, the NAM operated primarily as a public‐relations service. Its activities in the 1930s and beyond anticipated the institutionalized interest‐group lobbying of modern politics.

Especially after 1945, the NAM prepared congressional testimony, supplied radio stations and newspapers with probusiness stories, and launched a series of educational campaigns on behalf of “free enterprise.” While NAM was less prominent and influential than such moderate business organizations as the Business Roundtable or the Chamber of Commerce, its “cold war” against labor and liberalism after 1945 undermined the political legitimacy of the labor movement and paved the way for the more widespread managerial and political attacks on organized labor that began in the 1970s.
See also Business; Capitalism; Industrialization; Labor Movements; National Industrial Conference Board.

Bibliography

Albert Steigerwalt , The National Association of Manufacturers, 1895–1914: A Study in Business Leadership, 1964.
Elizabeth Fones‐Wolf , Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960, 1994.

Colin Gordon