Abstract:

The Chamber of Commerce of the United States has matured into the largest lobbying group in Washington. Formed in April of 1912 at the request of President William Howard Taft (1857-1930), the Chamber's commitment to be the voice of business is well documented. The records contain articles of incorporation, bylaws, resolutions and minutes of annual meetings. Presentations to Congress, speeches by members, and conferences hosted by the Chamber. Numerous publications give insight into the concerns facing American businesses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Abstract:

Frederick G. Singer (1897-1971) was a manager for the Tariff Division of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company's Development Department, working out of the foreign office in Paris, France. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. This small collection consists mostly of organizational charts and lists of officers and products of the DuPont Company and the Grasselli Chemical Company, as well as the products of their competitors, between 1936 and 1937.

Scope and Contents: The International Economic Affairs Department was responsible for NAM activities related to international trade, international investment and finance, and later technology. The materials are arranged into four subseries: Staff; Committees, subcommittees, and task forces; Conferences and meetings; and Subject files. This series should be used in conjunction with the Trade and Technology Department, as the department changed names in 1994.The Staff subcommittee contains the papers of several NAM staff members within the department including Kitty Brims (1963-), associate director of International Trade; Stephen Cooney (1946-), director of International Investment and Finance; Jerry Jasinowski (1939-), NAM president; Howard Lewis (1948-), vice president of the department; Marino Marcich (1964-), Cooney’s successor as director of International Investment Finance; and Robert “Judge” Morris (1944-), director of International Trade. Cooney’s files contain numerous records related to the European Commission (EC) and the formation of the European Union, as well as material concerning South African apartheid. The Jasinowski files, it is important to note, are not his personal files but rather materials related to international economic affairs issues produced under Jasinowski’s signature. The files include numerous letters to members of Congress and several to President Bill Clinton, many concerning NAM’s campaign in support of NAFTA in 1993. Morris was responsible for organizing the long-running Trade Forum discussion series and his files contain extensive correspondence related to its organization. In each person’s case, the bulk of the records are made up of correspondence, memoranda, and mailings covering the day-to-day activities of the department.The Committees, subcommittees, and task forces subseries includes mailings, meeting material, member lists, minutes, and agendas from the various committees and subcommittees that fell under the purview of the department. The material is arranged by committee or subcommittee, and then chronologically. One of the committees is the Technology Policy Committee (formerly the Council on High Technology, which is also included). Within these files are those from William Morin (1954-), who organized the Council and led its efforts, as well as meeting records of the two main groups within the committee: the Intellectual Property Task Force and the Technology Policy Task Force.The...

Scope and Contents:

The Ivan F. Baker papers describe his overseas work with Westinghouse and his postwar activities promoting economic development and international trade. There are numerous engineering reports, memoranda, handbooks for trade fairs, conference proceedings, tear sheets, Westinghouse corporate publications, and Baker’s speeches and writings. The materials are arranged chronologically. Some items are in Japanese, Indonesian, and Spanish.

Among the few items on pre-war Japan are booklets and letters describing the Kant (Tokyo) Earthquake of 1923, articles on the Japanese electrical industry, and the text of a 1940 speech by M. Wakabayashi of the Mitsubishi Electric Company to the Tokyo English Speaking Society describing his impressions of the U.S.

The bulk of the papers deal with postwar reconstruction and the economic aspects of the Cold War. Notable items include a diary of A. L. Nadai describing a tour of Moscow and Leningrad when attending the 220th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1945; a Westinghouse plan for Brazil (1945); the proceedings of the first international meeting of the Westinghouse Treasury Dept. (1946); a report on Baker’s trip to India (1948); a history of Westinghouse International’s war activities; a transcript of a written message of Emperor Hirohito with translator’s notes by the journalist Compton Pakenham, a pre-war friend of the Emperor’s, urging a modification of occupation policies (1950); and a Westinghouse International sales manual (1952).

Files and reports on trade fairs and conferences include the India-America Conference (1949); the Colgate University Conferences on American Foreign Policy; the Tokyo International Trade Fair (1955); and the Indonesian International Fair (1955). Other organizations represented are the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Council on Japan, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Other items of note include an illustrated brochure of the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo (Teikoku Hoteru); a large promotional book by Ercole Marelli & C., an electrical manufacturing company of Milan, for which Baker was U.S. representative; an anti-American article by Yoshio Tsujimoto from the Bungei Shunju (1955); and the proceedings of a 1955 arbitration between Saudi Arabia and the Arabian American Oil Company over a rival oil tanker concession granted to Aristotle Onassis.