The accomplished historian Jennifer Delton has written an extremely important book on one of the United States’ leading business organizations, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which spans the entire first century of its existence. Delton connects her meticulously researched study of NAM, based on the organization's archival records, with a sweeping history of American capitalism from the Progressive Era to the Clinton presidency. In the vein of the recent “history of capitalism” paradigm, she brings together both the perspectives of business and those of labor to investigate how they shaped such developments as the rise of industrial capitalism, globalization, and the decline of manufacturing.
One of the book's most fascinating theses is that despite the fact that its membership was largely Republican, NAM's economic aims were in line with the liberal internationalism supported by the twentieth century's Democratic administrations, from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton. This was especially true for the question of free trade. The expansion of foreign trade that had been one of the main reasons for the founding of NAM in 1895 continued to be pursued by its leadership throughout the twentieth century. NAM members, however, were divided on this issue, with small and midsized companies praising the merits of protective tariffs, while large multinationals overall favored open-door policies. The Industrialists exposes how NAM navigated these divisions, by carefully balancing its positions in favor of an integrated world economy with refraining from making any official free-trade statements during periods of rising economic nationalism. By analyzing the effects of this antagonism on the association's management, Delton has written the first, century-long, organizational study of NAM. She investigates how NAM leaders accommodated the different interests of small and midsized member companies and those of its large corporation members. Since its creation, and up until today, NAM has acted mostly in the interest of the latter, on which it mainly depended for financial support. However, smaller companies (net worth below $500,000) represented around 80 percent to 85 percent of its membership. NAM leaders looked after their needs by providing useful services, such as offering business opportunities, resources, and sharing information. In turn, this part of its membership allowed NAM to speak in the name of the entire manufacturing sector and was therefore an important asset for its organizational legitimacy.
The facet of NAM's history that is probably best known is its militant anti-unionism. Delton shows that during the first decade of the twentieth century, the organization employed particularly harsh means of sabotaging unions and breaking strikes, which led to congressional hearings on NAM in 1913. NAM leaders then shifted their approach to a campaign on industrial betterment, applying scientific management tools to labor relations. They thereby sought to develop industrial standards of fair hiring, hours of employment, and pay that would keep workers from turning toward the unions or the state. At the same time, however, NAM continued to support the open-shop movement and took extraordinarily conservative positions on the issues of child labor, the universal eight-hour day, and collective bargaining. In 1931 NAM reorganized, after having lost three-fourths of its members during the four preceding years, mainly due to recessions and mergers. For the remaining interwar period, the organization was led by resolute conservatives and became the “first line of resistance to the New Deal state” (p. 107).
While the conservative revival in the NAM of the 1950s has already been compellingly discussed by other historians, notably by Kim Phillips-Fein in Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade against the New Deal (2009), Delton brings an additional perspective to this issue. She emphasizes the divide that existed between two different strands of NAM conservatives: the “Hayekian free-trade libertarians” and the ultraconservative McCarthyite businessmen, who were generally protectionists and who joined such groups as the John Birch Society and the Manion Forum (p. 208). This general divide was obscured by the fact that some of the most prominent NAM leaders in the second group, such as William Grede and Cola Parker, also supported Hayek-type conservatism.
In chapters 10 and 11, Delton deals with the effects of deindustrialization on this organization whose raison d’être is defending the interests of industry leaders. Since the 1960s, NAM faced a declining growth rate of manufacturing, growing competition from Europe and Japan, and strongly decreasing membership numbers. Despite all, its leaders continued to stick with their tried and tested methods: calling for increased exports and foreign investment—even if outsourcing of production was actually hurting many of its member firms—while also fighting union initiatives that aimed to curb the export of jobs (most notably the Burke-Hartke Act of 1971). The Industrialists compares the plights of unions and those of NAM during the Reagan era, with both losing political influence and members as a result of rising investments and exports in the sectors of services, technology, banking, and finance. Smaller and midsized NAM member companies particularly suffered from the decline of manufacturing, while the AFL-CIO had to face both diminishing influence in the Democratic Party and the rise of nonunionized industries.
During the 1980s and 1990s, NAM presidency was in the hands of Democrats, first Alexander Trowbridge and then Jerry Jasinowski. Under Trowbridge's leadership, NAM embraced the idea of an industrial policy that through retraining and aid programs would help transition the economy toward streamlined and automated manufacturing. As Delton points out, these ideas were very much in line with those of the so-called Atari Democrats who were then on the rise. While NAM did not have significant influence on the Reagan presidency in this respect, it was more successful with the Clinton administration, with which it largely agreed on national and global economic policy strategies, while continuing to oppose its labor and environmental legislation.
In the 1990s, the manufacturing sector—through automating, relocating production abroad, and turning away from the vertically integrated Chandlerian production unit—increased its productivity and exports. Manufacturing jobs, however, declined considerably. In this context, NAM leadership embraced a rhetoric of worker empowerment and high–performance workplaces, which accompanied the transition toward the new nonunion high-tech industrial economy. In the international arena, it enthusiastically supported steps taken toward further globalization, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the GATT Uruguay Round, and facilitated trade with China, once more catering to the interests of its large corporate members. While The Industrialists brilliantly concludes with NAM's partial recovery of power and even membership in the 1990s, Delton does not shy away from a brief epilogue on NAM's relation with President Donald Trump, concluding that to a certain extent the “Trump phenomenon is a reprisal of the old protectionist, economic nationalist wing of NAM” (p. 316).
