The economic collapse of 1893 shook American industry to its knees and convinced many financiers and industrialists of the need for more stable markets, less competition, more efficient production, and greater influence on federal and state governments. In 1895, a group of 583 industrial manufacturers from all over the country met in Cincinnati, Ohio, and formed the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Under the leadership of Thomas Eagan, the NAM stated that its objectives included the expansion of foreign trade, support for the construction of a Panama Canal, the improvement of domestic transportation, and support for creating a Department of Commerce.
Although the NAM was ostensibly created to promote domestic development and foreign trade, by 1903 it had become vociferously antiunion. Industrial organizing drives by the United Mine Workers oe America, the Industrial Workers oe the World (IWW) and, to a lesser extent, the American Federation oe Labor (AFL) had resulted in increased union membership in the nation’s factories and mines. In response, the NAM began warning about the deleterious impact of organized labor and encouraging employers to resist organizing initiatives. In particular, the NAM encouraged employers to resist union efforts to establish closed union shops, in which employees were required to join the union as a condition of employment. Arguing that the closed shop was unconstitutional and un-American, the NAM supported an open shop policy, in which workers, they argued, could chose whether or not they wanted to join a union and pay union dues (see open shop movement). Under such a system, however, there were no guarantees of workers’ right to organize. The NAM also supported the use of yellow-dog contracts, which prohibited employees from ever joining a union.
Between 1900 and 1910, Samuel Gompers and the AFL proved willing to try to work with employers to avoid strikes and keep more radical unions like the IWW at bay. These cooperative efforts, however, proved short-lived as employers and the NAM launched a counteroffensive against organized labor that was halted, only briefly, by the outbreak of World War I. With the end of the war, the NAM helped launch an all-out offensive against radicals, socialists, and organized labor. It led the charge in the drive for the open shop, effectively eviscerating labor’s wartime gains. Union membership, which had grown from 2 million in 1904 to 5 million in 1921, plummeted over the course of the 1920s. It declined to 3.5 million in 1929, despite the fact that there were millions more industrial workers than in 1904. By 1930, the NAM, which had its roots in coordinating industrial production and the expansion of foreign trade, had become one of the most conservative, antiunion, and influential trade associations in the country.
Further reading: Melvin Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
—Robert Gordon
World History
