The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is an industrial trade association and advocacy group. NAM was organized in January of 1895 when approximately 600 manufacturers met during the 1890s depression in Cincinnati, Ohio, to formulate a program for economic recovery. The aim was to develop a strategy to protect American goods from foreign competition and promote trade expansion. During its early years, NAM was largely controlled by representatives of small and medium-sized firms in the Mid-West and South. In its first decade, NAM focused on lobbying for a high protective tariff, government support for a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and a federal Department of Commerce.

During the 1910s and 1920s, NAM was at the center of the open-shop movement that was being organized in order to counter the successes of organized labor. NAM played a leading role in lobbying state legislatures for uniform workmen's compensation laws that would limit employer liability for industrial accidents. In the 1930s, NAM became the focal point for the business community's opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and it organized sophisticated public relations campaigns to build support for the free enterprise system and defend an American business system that considered itself as under attack. The National Industrial Information Council (NIIC) was organized in 1934 for this purpose. During the late 1930s and 1940s, NAM worked for the repeal of the Wagner Act that had guaranteed labor the right to organize. This effort culminated in the 1948 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.

The Marshall Plan provided NAM with the opportunity to play an important role in European postwar reconstruction. Working through the Anglo-American Council on Productivity, NAM helped to train thousands of British, French and Italian managers in American business practices. In the 1950s, NAM adapted its public relations efforts to the new medium of television when it launched its "Industry on Parade" series in 1953. During the next two decades, NAM continued its efforts to roll back the New Deal Order and later, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, NAM saw many of the positions it had long advocated become enacted into law.