country may be best promoted by concerted action.” The invitation insisted that “the convention
shall be non-political, nonpartisan and nonsectional.”
At the time NAM vehemently denied that McKinley had any role in its inception, but
later the organization admitted that McKinley was partly responsible for its origins.
There was
much overlap between the NAM organizers and the McKinley Republican campaign, with key
personnel important to both efforts. Among the core group of Ohioan organizers of NAM was
Thomas McDougall, who was chair of the Committee on Resolutions at the initial convention to
and a key speaker at NAM’s second annual convention.
A few years before the 1896 election
McKinley was almost lost in financial scandal, when it was revealed that Robert Walker, whose
enterprises McKinley had helped to subsidized, was going to declare bankruptcy. When
McKinley drew together a handful of his closest associates to figure out how to prevent this
ruinous event, McDougall was one of them.
McDougall visited McKinley for a week in
December 1894, about a month before the NAM organizing convention. While we have no
record of discussions during this visit, the newspapers during this period were convinced that
McKinley was behind many of McDougall’s activities and suggested that McKinley had “an
‘authorized organ’ in Cincinnati.” In private correspondence McKinley complained to
McDougall about the newspapers being “full of every manner of suggestion of conspiracy and
strategem”; indeed, McKinley defended a prior conversation with a Tribune reporter, explaining
that he had “repeatedly said you [McDougall] were acting on your own responsibility and sense
of duty.”
The first president of NAM, Thomas Dolan of Pennsylvania, was a curious choice: he
was elected to office at the organizing convention without even being present. The popular press
reported that “delegates were entirely in the dark as to who would be recommended [by the
nominating committee], and when the name of Mr. Thomas Dolan of Philadelphia was
Convention