lacked legitimacy and seemed devoid of purpose after McKinley won the election of 1896.
NAM’s questionable legitimacy after the campaign was compounded by the failure of Congress
to legislate the promised Commerce Department, a governmental agency with which NAM had
hoped to have corporatist-style arrangements. Without this longed-for role in the new
administration, NAM started to wither away at the end of the century, and only gained new life
when it reconstituted itself as an organization devoted to fighting organized labor in 1903.
What does this arguably esoteric story tell us about business politics, public policy or the
course of American political development? I hope to make several contributions with this
research. First, I seek to further research on America from a comparative perspective. Much of
the story of American exceptionalism has been chalked up to the ideological rejection of state
intervention. Yet the manufacturers of late Nineteenth-Century America sought government
protections similar to those requested by their counterparts across the pond. The big difference is
that elsewhere these policy demands were pushed by business parties and considered by coalition
governments, where quid-pro-quo exchanges often satisfied employers. In the United States,
however, employers had no such platform from which to press their claims. Lacking a forum to
press for positive governmental regulations and confronted with the animosities of sectional
economic diversity, employers later came to resist government as an intrusive foe rather than a
developmental friend. The NAM story offers us a snapshot of this critical juncture.
Second the paper seeks to contribute to the scarce literature on the connection between
party systems and business organization. Although scholars have investigated the impact of
societal cleavages and organizations on political party development, less attention has been paid
to the reciprocal influence of parties on the historical evolution of social class and especially on
business organization.
Understanding the origins of business association may be relevant to our
understanding of the changes in parties and electioneering in America during the course of the
Convention