Abstract

"Voices of Business: Business-Class Consciousness, Trade Politics, and the NAM-Chamber of Commerce Merger That Never Was"

Zev Miklethun, Princeton University (zm7332@princeton.edu)

In early 1976 two of the largest American business associations—The United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—announced their plan to merge into a single broad-based employers organization. The top leadership of both groups, dominated by executives from some of America’s largest corporations, hoped that a merger would help them rally their membership behind a neoliberal business agenda and gain greater influence in national politics. The NAM board of directors voted, however, ultimately voted down the merger proposal, citing their desire to protect their particular interests as manufacturers. Examining the planning of and internal debates over the proposed merger, this paper shows how business leaders sought to co-create a new political order in the midst of the global economic transformations of the 1970s. If historians have represented the late 1960s and early 1970s as a period in which the business class increasingly mobilized in pursuit of their political interests, the failure of the NAM-Chamber merger reminds us that defining a collective business agenda remained contentious in the years following the publication of the Powell memo. In their responses to the proposed merger, members of NAM and the Chamber highlighted significant political divisions among businesses based on size and sector, as well as ideology. As NAM and Chamber leadership attempted to overcome these divisions, they contributed to the development of a strain of business politics that combined internationalist free-trade aspirations with an aggressive conservative antigovernment agenda. This paper thus sheds light on how a particular form of business politics came to guide the work of NAM and the Chamber at a moment when both organizations were attempting to radically reshape the contours of the American political economy.