The focus of labor history is often—unsurprisingly—workers’ organizations and what has made them thrive or languish. But employers organized, too. Examining their efforts to do so illuminates the problems of collective action for both workers and employers.
One of the best-known employer organizations is the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The NAM, which still exists, was founded in 1895 mainly to promote foreign trade, but in 1902–1903 it pivoted to opposing the rising labor movement. This line quickly brought results—while labor unions’ growth and lobbying successes stalled for a decade, the NAM gained members rapidly.
The NAM was national in scope. As the map below shows, it had active members in most industrial cities in the eastern half of the United States. Its goals, too, were national: among other things, it aimed to undercut the American Federation of Labor (AFL) nationwide and to ensure that no pro-labor legislation could be passed in the U.S. Congress.
Figure 1: Heatmap of active NAM members, 1902–1912. Data compiled from NAM correspondence and geocoded with GPS Visualizer, https://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/. Map made with MapBox Studio, https://www.mapbox.com/. For more technical details on this and other figures, and for the data used to construct them, see Vilja Hulden,“Documentation of Digital Work in the Bosses’ Union,” Github, https://github.com/vhulden/bossesunion/.
Despite its national orientation, the NAM’s power largely stemmed from the local level. Quite deliberately, the NAM mapped out which political notables its members knew personally, and then used those personal connections to strengthen its lobbying efforts. This strategy was particularly useful since the NAM’s main goal was not to pass legislation but to prevent its passage, which did not require mustering majorities. Instead, the NAM could block legislation by exerting pressure on key players in Congress. This might mean convincing a committee member or two to change their minds about whether a bill should be reported out of committee, for example, or persuading the Senate’s Steering Committee to keep a bill off the calendar for debate and voting.
Using its members’ personal connections with Congressmen was central to one of the NAM’s first antilabor campaigns in 1902–1903, which aimed to block an AFL-promoted bill that would limit the workday for government contract work to eight hours. The bill was quite popular in Congress, having passed the House multiple times. Fearing that the bill might soon pass in the Senate, the NAM looked to leverage personal influence to stall the legislative process.