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Who Tells Your Story: Contested History at the NAM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

JENNIFER DELTON
JENNIFER DELTON*
Affiliation:
Jennifer Delton is professor of History at Skidmore College in upstate New York and author of The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020). This article was funded in part by the Judith Johnson Carrico ’65 Fund for Faculty Support. Contact information: Department of History, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY12866. E-mail: jdelton@skidmore.edu.
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Abstract

From 1948 to 1960, an executive secretary at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) attempted to persuade NAM leaders to commission an “objective” history of the organization. The project never came to fruition, but the story reveals a fundamental split within the NAM between its professional staff and its conservative leadership over the organization’s mission. It thus offers a unique perspective on the NAM not as a powerful lobby, but as a contested workplace with its own fraught dynamics, which, in turn, reveals a more progressive image of the 1950s-era NAM than historians have typically recognized.

Type
Article
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 110 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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References

Bibliography of Works Cited

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Tedlow, Richard S. “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal.” Business History Review, 50 (Spring 1976): 25–45.10.2307/3113573CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whyte, William Foote. “Human Relations Theory—A Progress Report.” Harvard Business Review 34 (September/October 1956): 125–132.Google Scholar
Workman, Andrew. “Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1941–45.” Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998): 279–317.10.2307/3116279CrossRefGoogle Scholar
U.S. Congress. Maintenance of a Lobby to Influence Legislation: Hearings Before a Subcommittee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913.Google Scholar
National Association of Manufacturers Records. Accession 1411. Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE. (NAM Records)Google Scholar
Bauer, Raymond, de Sola Pool, Ithiel, and Anthony Dexter, Louis. American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade. New York: Atherton, 1963.Google Scholar
Berk, Gerald. Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.10.1017/CBO9780511581205CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Vintage, 1996.Google Scholar
Chase, Stuart. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Inquiry into the Science of Human Relations. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1948, rev. ed., 1956.Google Scholar
Delton, Jennifer. Racial Integration and Corporate America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Drucker, Peter. New Society: The Anatomy of industrial Order. 2nd ed. New York: Transaction Publishers, 1993. Originally published in 1950.Google Scholar
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Galambos, Louis. Cooperation and Competition: The Emergence of a National Trade Organization. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Harris, John Howell. The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Himmelberg, Robert F. The Origins of the National Recovery Administration: Business, Government, and the Trade Association Issue. New York: Fordham University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Godfrey. America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon—What Happened and Why. New York: Vintage, 1978.Google Scholar
Jacoby, Sanford. Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–44. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Jacoby, Sanford. Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic, 1977.Google Scholar
Khurana, Rakesh. From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Martin, Cathie Jo, and Swank, Duane. The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth, and Equality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.10.1017/CBO9781139088299CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McQuaid, Kim. Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, New York: Norton, 2009.Google Scholar
Schattschneider, E. E. Politics, Pressure and the Tariff. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1935.Google Scholar
Schriftgiesser, Karl. The Lobbyists: The Art and Business of Influencing Lawmakers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.Google Scholar
Sklar, Martin. The Corporate Reconstruction of Capitalism, 1890–1916. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.10.1017/CBO9780511528781CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steigerwalt, Albert K. The National Association of Manufacturers: A Study in Business Leadership. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1964.Google Scholar
Strom, Susan Hartman. Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern Office Work, 1900–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Waterhouse, Benjamin. Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Whyte, William H. Jr., and the editors of Fortune. Is Anybody Listening? How and Why US Business Fumbles when It Talks with Human Beings. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.Google Scholar
Wiebe, Robert. Businessmen and Reform. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989. Originally published in 1962.Google Scholar
Bell, Daniel. “Adjusting Men to Machines.” Commentary, 3 (January 1947): 79–88.Google Scholar
Burch, Philip H. Jr., “The NAM as an Interest Group.” Politics and Society, 4 (1973): 97–130.10.1177/003232927300400105CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cleveland, Alfred. “NAM: Spokesman for Industry?” Harvard Business Review 26 (May 1948): 353–371.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Thomas. “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America.” In The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, edited by Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, 3–31. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Gable, Richard. “NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?” Journal of Politics (May 1953): 254–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galambos, Louis. Review of The National Association of Manufacturers, 1895–1914: A Study in Business Leadership, by Albert K. Steigerwalt. Business History Review, 38, no. 4 (1964): 525–526.10.2307/3112557CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffith, Robert. “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth.” American Historical Review, 87, no. 1 (1982): 87–122.10.2307/1863309CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Renovation in the NAM.” Fortune, July 1948, 72–75, 165–169Google Scholar
Soffer, Jonathan. “The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism.” Business History Review, 75 (Winter 2001): 775–805.10.2307/3116511CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steigerwalt, A. K. “The NAM and the Congressional Investigations of 1913.” Business History Review, 34 (Autumn 1960): 335–344.10.2307/3111878CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tedlow, Richard S. “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal.” Business History Review, 50 (Spring 1976): 25–45.10.2307/3113573CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whyte, William Foote. “Human Relations Theory—A Progress Report.” Harvard Business Review 34 (September/October 1956): 125–132.Google Scholar
Workman, Andrew. “Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1941–45.” Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998): 279–317.10.2307/3116279CrossRefGoogle Scholar
U.S. Congress. Maintenance of a Lobby to Influence Legislation: Hearings Before a Subcommittee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913.Google Scholar
National Association of Manufacturers Records. Accession 1411. Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE. (NAM Records)Google Scholar