NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MANUFACTURERS (NAM)

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded in 1895 as a collection of small- and medium-sized firms with common interests in two areas of public policy: achieving protectionist trade measures and strengthening the power of management vis-à-vis organized labor. After World War I and during the 1920s, the NAM conducted a high-profile campaign in favor of the open shop, striking back at organized labor's efforts to increase union membership. Hit hard by the Great Depression, member firms resigned from the NAM at a high rate; by 1933 membership had declined to fewer than 1,500 firms, down from five thousand in 1920.

During the Great Depression, the NAM was led by Robert Lund, president of Lambert Pharmaceutical. Due to the decline in its traditional membership base of smaller firms in textiles, shipbuilding, and the metal trades, the NAM increasingly fell under the influence of larger firms from the tobacco, automobile, steel, chemical, and food processing industries. By 1936, these latter firms provided about 40 percent of the NAM's annual revenues, which grew by 1937 to $1.5 million a year, up from $250,000 in 1933. Lund, who assumed leadership of the NAM in 1931, mobilized it against the New Deal. The NAM opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt every time he ran for president, and objected to aspects of major New Deal policies, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), National Labor Relations Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). By 1937, 55 percent of the NAM's budget went to spending on public relations, carrying the NAM's vision of business-government relations to the broader public. The NAM also focused its energies on lobbying the government, attempting to directly influence events on Capitol Hill. Unlike such business figures as Edward Filene and Gerard Swope, the NAM entertained little sympathy for the rights of organized labor. The NAM portrayed government as parasitic and organized labor as proponents of social agitation and disorder, contrasting them with an image of business leaders as paragons of expertise, social harmony, and reasoned decision making. Although the NAM made little headway against the New Deal, its organizing efforts, publicity campaigns, and improved financial health placed it in a position to advance its goals during and after World War II.

See Also: BUSINESSMEN; ORGANIZED LABOR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960. 1994.

Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics inAmerica, 1920–1935. 1994.

Tedlow, Richard S. "The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations during the New Deal." Business History Review 50 (1976): 25–45.

Jason Scott Smith