Pod Insights Throughline Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback) About this episode Whether it's pesticides in your cereal or the door plug flying off your airplane, consumers today have plenty of reasons to feel like corporations might not have their best interests at heart. At a moment when the number of product recalls is high and trust in the government is low, we're going to revisit a time when a generation of people felt empowered to demand accountability from both companies and elected leaders — and got results. Today on the show, the story of the U. S. consumer movement and its controversial leader: the once famous, now infamous Ralph Nader.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:24 Speaker 01 Hi, nice to meet you. Come on in.
0:27 Speaker 02 The year is 1960.
0:29 Speaker 01 Now, what kind of car are we looking for today?
0:31 Speaker 02 You've got an urge to hit the open road, to touch the black asphalt of the nation's new interstate highways that are being built all around the country.
0:39 Speaker 01 I think you're gonna love this.
0:41 Speaker 02 Now, all you need is the perfect car.
0:44 Speaker 01 They just released this model.
0:46 Speaker 02 Compact, sleek, a thing of beauty.
0:55 Speaker 01 Have a safe drive.
0:57 Speaker 02 You turn on your car radio, and that iconic summer place song starts playing. When you hit the highway, you roll your window down, letting the wind rush through your hair. This is the American dream, riding in an American car on an American road, boundless and free.
1:22 Speaker 02 When you come up across a slight turn, you keep your foot on the gas, cruising along.
1:32 Speaker 02 For a moment, you feel the wheels slip, the car no longer in your control. But then, it comes back again. You think, it's fine. It's a brand-new car, right off the dealership block. You come up on another turn, this time, a wider one. You stay the course, when... All of a sudden, your wheels lose traction with the road.
2:05 Speaker 02 The paramedics will later tell you you're a lucky one. As you crawl out of the driver's window, you think to yourself, what happened? How could driving a brand-new car end up with me lying on the road?
2:22 Speaker 03 This is my point. Either it's sheer callousness or indifference, or they don't bother to find out how their cars behave.
2:29 Rund Abdelfatah? That's a young Ralph Nader talking about car safety.
2:33 Speaker 05 Ralph Nader has announced he will run for president as a third-party candidate again.
2:38 Rund Abdelfatah? Yes, that Ralph Nader. He's made four runs for the presidency as a third-party candidate, most infamously in the year 2000, when some people felt that his run led to Democratic candidate Al Gore losing to Republican candidate George W. Bush.
2:53 Speaker 02 So if you're feeling skeptical, we get it. But bear with us, because before Ralph Nader was infamous, he was famous.
3:01 Speaker 06 I was better known by more people in the United States than Taylor Swift is today.
3:07 Rund Abdelfatah? OK, so that's definitely an exaggeration. But he's right that for a long time, he was one of the most trusted people in America. Some people even called him Saint Ralph. He's the reason any new car that gets sold today has to comply with a set of federal safety standards.
3:23 Speaker 03 And this is a bill for the vast number of millions of unrepresented American consumers who need representation before federal regulatory agencies.
3:35 Rund Abdelfatah? And car safety was only the beginning, because Nader felt that in a country increasingly dominated by corporations controlling our access to basic goods, the people who use those goods, the consumers, had rights. He fought to guarantee them, and in many cases, he won.
3:53 Speaker 02 The right to clean drinking water, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, whistleblower protections, the Freedom of Information Act, and more. Nader was instrumental in all of them. His activism and efforts spurred the modern consumer movement, a movement fueled by the idea that public citizens, consumers, people like you and me, can and should hold governments and corporations accountable to our needs.
4:23 Speaker 02 Several brands of ground cinnamon containing elevated levels of lead now recommends recalls.
4:29 Speaker 00 Ground cinema from six distributors. Toyota recalling 1 million vehicles worldwide over a potential airbag issue. FDA is reporting another baby formula recall. Health officials say an infant has died from a listeria outbreak that's tied to ready to eat meat.
4:45 Rund Abdelfatah? And today, when product recalls are at the highest level since before the pandemic, when our own expectations of safety and government trust are eroding, we're going to revisit a time where a generation of people felt activated and empowered to take matters into their own hands, to demand the government back them up so they could stand up to corporations and say enough is enough. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
5:11 Speaker 02 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. Today on the show, the story of consumer activism in the US and what we can learn from Ralph Nader's wins and losses.
5:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, Nader opens up the dream of the American car and takes a look under the hood.
5:34 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Faith Garrison. I'm from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and you're listening to Throughline.
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7:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Part One.
7:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Life is a highway.
7:13 Speaker 06 It was certainly freedom of the road.
7:18 Speaker 06 When you were in the car, driving, you were the queen or king of the car.
7:23 Rund Abdelfatah? In the 1950s, the car was becoming as much a symbol of American freedom as the bald eagle.
7:29 Speaker 06 And what you did in the backseat was no one else's business. And listen. Outside a rambler. Horsepower.
7:36 Speaker 05 The pound, pound, pound as the wheels hit the ground.
7:40 Speaker 06 Domination. With the famous rocket engine, new hydromantic drive, and future. Hey, they love it, these dreamboats, psychosexual vehicles. Sing it now.
7:53 Speaker 03 What a thrill to take the wheel of a rocket Oldsmobile. In performance, it's a spore.
8:05 Speaker 06 It was all revolting to me.
8:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Ralph Nader was born in 1934.
8:12 Speaker 06 Well, my parents were immigrants from Lebanon, and they sailed past the Statue of Liberty, they took it seriously, which means that it isn't just freedom they were after, they wanted freedom to make a difference.
8:27 Rund Abdelfatah? Nader came of age during the post-war era, a time when peace and economic prosperity collided with looming fears of nuclear war. His parents wanted Nader and his siblings to trust their own instincts, instead of blindly accepting what they were told by other authority figures.
8:43 Speaker 06 One time I came home from school, my dad said, "What'd you learn today? Did you learn how to believe, or did you learn how to think?"
8:54 Rund Abdelfatah? In the heyday of automobiles, amid all these commercials with gleaming tailfins and chrome bumpers, Nader saw through the romanticism of the open road, straight to its dark underbelly. The American dream was more of an American massacre.
9:11 Speaker 06 I lost a lot of friends in car crashes. They were killed, or they were permanently disabled. It's far, far worse then than it is today.
9:25 Rund Abdelfatah? Fatal car crashes were nearly five times more common back then, and it seemed like everyone knew someone who'd been in a serious accident. But the prevailing narrative was that this was a matter of user error. People were being reckless drivers. And that didn't make sense to Nader. How could it be that commuting to work or going grocery shopping could amount to a death sentence for so many people?
9:50 Speaker 06 I kept thinking of people who could be living productive lives today and who were killed in totally survivable crashes. You know, I began looking at the cars and how they were crushed in. And when I was at law school...
10:08 Rund Abdelfatah? He set out to bust the myth of the open road.
10:12 Speaker 02 As glamorous as that may sound, solving the mystery of these grisly car crash deaths mostly involved a lot of reading of very wonky documents. And I mean, a lot. Nader sifted through court documents and case law. He dug into a whole series of research studies from Cornell Medical College funded by Ford, Chrysler, and the Pentagon that looked into what could make cars safer. This is a CBS report about that research.
10:45 Speaker 05 We're at the scene of a pretty bad smash-up here on US Highway Number One near Laurel, Maryland. Pushing that out now. There were three people in this car. And the driver stayed in the car, but now the other two people hit the windshield and then...
10:58 Speaker 02 Apparently, they went out of the right-hand door. Oh, the right-hand door. Like any good detective, Nader even pounded the pavement. What he found was that the auto industry knew that it was cars themselves that were unsafe. Doctors and researchers had repeatedly recommended features to add to the cars to make them safe: seat belts, padded dash panels, rollover bars. But the carmakers often shied away from putting these features into cars on the market.
11:28 Speaker 06 It punctured the advertising fantasy of these auto companies.
11:34 Speaker 02 So Nader set out to take down the auto industry. To do that, he knew he was going to need to harness the power of the consumer.
11:44 Speaker 05 I've sent to the Congress today a special message on protecting the consumer interests. All of us are consumers.
11:52 Speaker 02 That's President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1962, and he was identifying a powerful new current in American life. Across the American, you know, consumer landscape of this time period is the question of can companies and governments that have become increasingly powerful, can they be trusted to look out for the interests of the individual? This is Paul Sabin. He's a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. There's a sense that that really there needs to be someone looking out for this consumer.
12:23 Speaker 05 All of us deserve the right to be protected against fraudulent or misleading advertisements and labels.
12:31 Speaker 02 There was a growing call for consumers to take up that charge themselves, and Nader was at the front of the line. I think for Nader, the consumer citizen is a is an active citizen, one that is investigating, learning, and engaging in political processes. And and so he wanted the informed citizen.
12:52 Rund Abdelfatah? But that informed consumer citizen first had to be awakened. And so Nader threw up his bat signal to concern consumers across the nation. It came in the form of a book that he started to write after graduating law school, and the book opened with the case of one car in particular.
13:10 Speaker 05 You are about to meet a true international beauty. Orver.
13:22 Speaker 06 The Corvair was a unique design because it had its engine in the rear. Someone once said, "You were the bumper on the Corvair."
13:31 Rund Abdelfatah? Mrs. Perini's vehicle was traveling about 35 miles per hour in a 35 mile per hour zone. These are excerpts from that book, "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangerous of the American Automobile." And then, all of a sudden, the vehicle made a sharp cut to the left and swerved over.
13:48 Speaker 06 It would veer out of control and roll over and kill people.
13:54 Rund Abdelfatah? He rushed over to the wreck and saw an arm with a wedding band and a wristwatch lying on the ground. Ms. Perini was very calm, only saying, "That something went wrong with my steering."
14:05 Speaker 06 I knew it was a book that had dynamite potential.
14:10 Rund Abdelfatah? The tragedy was overwhelmingly the fault of cutting corners to shave costs. This happens all the time in the automobile industry. What was there for General Motors to say? Publicly, General Motors had nothing to say, but the allegations hit hard because GM was a titan. At the time the book was published, they were the world's largest car manufacturer, responsible for nearly half of all US automotive sales.
14:39 Speaker 02 Years later, a government study found that the Corvair wasn't any more dangerous than other similar cars. Nader disputed the study, but by that time, there was no turning back the movement Nader had started. In response to the criticism, GM created a position for Coordinator of Auto Safety. But Nader's book wasn't just about exposing a problem with the Corvair or even with General Motors. It was about revealing failures across the entire auto industry.
15:10 Rund Abdelfatah? It didn't take long for "Unsafe at Any Speed" to start drawing the attention of important people in the Capitol, including a young woman who would be instrumental in turning Ralph's words into action.
15:24 Rund Abdelfatah? My name is Joan Claybrook, C-L-A-Y-B-R-O-O-K. At the time, Joan was in Washington DC on a fellowship, working with James A. Mackey, a US representative from Georgia. He said he wanted me to work on auto safety, which totally dumbfounded me because I didn't know anything about it at all.
15:43 Speaker 07 He gave me Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed, which had just come out a month before.
15:50 Rund Abdelfatah? The book hit home for Joan.
15:53 Speaker 07 My boss had a Corvair, and she had a car crash shortly after I got to Washington. She was very badly injured.
16:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Joan knew that Nader's allegations against the auto industry were monumental, and Representative Mackey tasked her with tracking down Nader and getting him into the office for a discussion.
16:14 Speaker 07 That was easier said than done because no one knew where he lived.
16:19 Rund Abdelfatah? All she had to go off of was a phone number.
16:25 Speaker 07 And I called him, you know, like 20 times in the next week.
16:31 Speaker 07 Never answered the phone. And finally, in total anger, one evening at midnight, I called him, and he answered the phone.
16:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Ralph Nader.
16:46 Rund Abdelfatah? She convinces him to visit Representative Mackey's office. When he walks in, he's a towering presence.
16:53 Speaker 07 He's six feet four and lanky.
16:55 Rund Abdelfatah? But when he sits down...
16:56 Speaker 07 He kind of goes into this mode where you think he's not so tall. He's very shy. Unless you ask him something, he's not going to interrupt you or start the conversation. And Mr. Mackey was a very talkative senator. And so he talked for about 45 minutes.
17:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Just a straight monologue.
17:19 Speaker 07 And then he looked at his watch and he said, "Oh, my goodness. I have to go to a meeting in 15 minutes. Mr. Nader, what should we do?"
17:24 Rund Abdelfatah? And so Nader said his piece. Write a bill with teeth that wrangles this Wild West auto industry and saves lives in the process.
17:33 Speaker 07 And so then he left, and I suddenly realized I only had the Rimminghouse phone number. So I ran down the hall and I said, "Mr. Nader, is there a better phone number to reach you?"
17:42 Speaker 03 He said, no. So I knew I was going to be calling him at midnight a lot.
17:48 Rund Abdelfatah? And with that, their work together really began.
17:54 Rund Abdelfatah? And so did the pushback.
17:57 Speaker 03 General Motors decided this was a great threat.
17:59 Speaker 06 They had been unleashing private detectives month after month, following me everywhere.
18:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Nader suspected they were wiretapping his phone. He says he'd get strange calls in the middle of the night, threatening and harassing him.
18:15 Speaker 06 They used ex-FBI agents often for their so-called investigation of critics. They tried to seduce me with young ladies.
18:27 Speaker 03 They followed him into the Safeway.
18:29 Speaker 06 I would be shopping.
18:31 Speaker 03 And he was there at the cookie counter, and he loves sweets. And this woman approached him
18:39 Speaker 03 and said, well, he'd like to come up to her apartment.
18:45 Speaker 06 Another time, a young lady came up and she said, you look like a studious fellow. We're forming a study group to study foreign affairs. How would you like to join us?
18:58 Speaker 03 And he said, no, thank you.
19:01 Rund Abdelfatah? A private detective who investigated Nader later denied making any attempt to put him in a compromising position with these women. But he did admit to surveilling Nader and trying to dig up dirt on his private life.
19:13 Speaker 03 There were just endless attempts to kind of document that he was a bad person or he was taking money from somebody to do this.
19:26 Speaker 02 The press got wind of the story, along with Congress.
19:32 Speaker 03 And so Senator Rubikoff decided to have a public hearing.
19:34 Speaker 06 And I was invited to testify.
19:39 Speaker 03 want to have a climate in this country where one has to have an ascetic existence and steely determinations in order to speak truthfully and candidly and critically of American industry. And he commanded the president of General Motors, his name was Roach. I love the name, Roach. He asked Mr. Roach, told Mr. Roach to come and testify.
20:02 Speaker 02 Roach got up and said that when he first heard of the allegations against GM, he was shocked. He immediately ordered a statement to be released denying GM's involvement. But he discovered, quote, "To my dismay, we were indeed involved." Let us assume that you found something wrong with his sex life. What would that have to do with whether or not he was right or wrong on the court there? Nothing. Senator Rybikoff declared in front of the Senate Committee that Ralph Nader was squeaky clean. He said, quote, "They put you through the mill and they haven't found a damn thing out against you."
20:36 Speaker 05 I want to apologize here and now to members of this subcommittee and Mr. Nader.
20:43 Speaker 02 This public apology couldn't have been a better press moment for Nader's crusade. Try to imagine how monumental this would have been. It would be like if Elon Musk apologized for harassing a critic of Tesla. It would be front page news, and it was. People were outraged that a major American corporation would attempt to intimidate a whistleblower. GM's plan to discredit Nader had backfired.
21:07 Speaker 03 Ralph became suddenly this national figure. Unlike a lot of people who would just be happy to sell some more books, Ralph wanted this law passed, so he then lobbied.
21:22 Speaker 06 And that's what I did every day in Washington, DC.
21:26 Speaker 03 It was hard for him to lobby because he is shy. He had to push himself to go do that.
21:31 Speaker 02 But he kept at it, and Joan Claybrook and Representative Mackey introduced their bill. And within a few short months, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed into law.
21:46 Speaker 06 Just think of how fast Congress acted compared to the sluggish, indentured corporate gridlock of today, within six months from March 1966.
21:59 Speaker 06 And in September, I was invited to the signing ceremony at the White House, among others, where he handed out the signature pens. Six months.
22:11 Speaker 02 Ralph Nader had won his first victory on behalf of the American consumer. And he was just getting started.
22:22 Speaker 02 That's coming up.
22:30 Speaker 03 This is Justin Mish from Indianapolis, Indiana, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
22:37 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances. Understand your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. Support for NPR and the following message come from Random House, publishers of The Things We Never Say, the new novel from Elizabeth Strout. The Things We Never Say follows Artie Dam, a beloved teacher and earnest father. He doesn't know it yet, but Artie's world was built on a major secret. And when it comes out, Artie is about to have his life turned upside down. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout is available everywhere books are sold.
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23:55 Speaker 03 He's an attorney. He's from the nation's capital. And recently, he's been called the man who makes waves.
24:03 Speaker 05 What indeed makes Ralph Nader run?
24:07 Rund Abdelfatah? The incomparable Mr. Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader. Ralph Nate. Ralph Nate. Ralph Nate. Ralph Nate.
24:11 Speaker 05 Ralph Nader.
24:12 Speaker 06 I became very famous.
24:14 Rund Abdelfatah? For years after Nader's very public victory against the auto industry, he seemed to be everywhere.
24:20 Speaker 06 I was on the cover of Time, Newsweek, when that meant something.
24:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Newsweek depicted him like a knight in shining armor, the consumer crusader. He's seen as this honest, good guy who is representing the people. He's on Saturday Night Live as a parody of himself. It's the hot dog you're eating? Mm-hmm. The hot dog? Mm-hmm. Do you enjoy eating rat excrement and rodent hairs? And he's on all the popular interview shows. So you sue it, and you hit it for all it's worth, but it isn't worth anything. Mr. Nader, I want you to work on this. Including one that was briefly co-hosted by the countercultural icons of the era.
24:58 Speaker 03 Welcome to The Mike Douglas Show. This is John Lemon. I'm Yoko Ono, where Mike's co-hosts be.
25:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Who asked him to weigh in on the power of voting.
25:08 Speaker 06 Democracy means, in a word, self-government. And anytime we delegate our responsibilities, it's for convenience to government agencies and other institutions. And I don't think we can afford that convenience.
25:21 Rund Abdelfatah? If people didn't know Ralph Nader's name before, by the 1970s, Nader was a household name.
25:29 Speaker 06 And my parents said to me, in their own folksy way, said, "Well, Ralph, now you're very famous, so let's see how you endure it."
25:40 Rund Abdelfatah? For Nader, his fame served one purpose and one purpose only: to continue demanding more protections for consumers. He just called all the time. I mean, he'd love to use the telephone. So he was checking with me all the time. What's going on? Who's doing this? What's happening? This is Joan Claybrook again. She stayed in touch with Ralph and continued working on car safety issues. I was his inside voice, you know? And so I would tell him what was going on. So that's how he kept up.
26:07 Speaker 02 With the auto safety staff because now he was on to other tracks.
26:14 Speaker 02 All around him, Nader could see how people were being sold shoddy goods.
26:19 Speaker 03 The safety of additives in some baby foods was questioned today by Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate.
26:26 Speaker 02 And expected to live and work in unsafe conditions.
26:30 Speaker 03 Even if we stop all mercury dumping into the water and onto the land, the existing amount of mercury will stay with us for up to 100 years.
26:38 Speaker 02 So Nader used his newly found fame to bring these issues to the forefront and galvanize people into taking action as consumers and form a movement.
26:50 Speaker 06 I didn't want to be a Lone Ranger.
27:00 Speaker 06 So where do I go for help? Well, law students.
27:07 Speaker 02 It started off small with Nader calling law students, including from his alma mater, Harvard, in search of people eager to make change.
27:19 Speaker 06 Hey, Ralph Nader is on the phone.
27:21 Speaker 02 It worked. These students knew who he was and they wanted in.
27:26 Speaker 05 I couldn't have been more excited if he said it was the Queen of England.
27:30 Speaker 02 Nader had plenty of work for them. And thanks to his settlement with GM, he had money to fund it.
27:36 Speaker 06 It was a perfect opportunity to get some students, interns during the summer, put them on projects investigating the Food and Drug Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission and on. And they would have press conferences and they would get great press coverage. And that would get the attention again, the members of Congress. You have that virtuous circle.
28:00 Speaker 02 These young, idealistic lawyers and students came to be called Nader's Raiders.
28:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Come spring, Nader's Raiders will be swooping down. For now, they're lying back in the shadows of Ivy League universities gathering ammo. Funds are low, hours are long, and only intense dedication determines.
28:26 Speaker 03 And idealism keeps Nader's Raiders going.
28:32 Speaker 03 It was hot. I mean, Ralph would call each one of these staff people every other day. And then he would ask them to write memos on what they'd found and he would sort of guide them on to what to investigate.
28:46 Speaker 02 Joan Claybrook, looking to get out of government work for a while, believed in Nader and joined.
28:51 Speaker 03 Oh, definitely. I was one of the Raiders. These government agencies weren't doing their job. And we wanted them to do their job. They had authority to do things and weren't paying any attention to it, which was the case in many cases. We were there to badger them and to push them.
29:09 Speaker 02 They started with the Federal Trade Commission.
29:12 Speaker 01 The Commission does not view American industry as a wild horse at all, but rather as a docile beast who now and then needs a mild whoa.
29:21 Speaker 02 Then they went after the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has so minimized the dangers from food additives that it has effectively destroyed the letter and spirit of the Food Additives Amendment. And kept going all the way to the halls of Congress. Nader and his citizen army of over 1,000 are out to awaken the country to Congress's crying need for reform. He publishes what's effectively a consumer guide to Congress. And this was a broadening of his definition of consumer. The responsibility for good government does not rest with our politicians, according to Ralph Nader. It rests with each private citizen. The driving force of the consumer movement was a reinvigorated view of democracy,
30:05 Speaker 02 where everyone was a consumer and everyone participated. People really responded to this message. Across the country, local consumer groups popped up.
30:15 Speaker 03 Today, the buying public has awakened and increasingly demands more information about the American marketplace.
30:26 Speaker 02 It wasn't long before Congress began to respond to Ralph Nader and the public's demands for change.
30:33 Speaker 06 We got lead out of gasoline and paint.
30:36 Speaker 02 They got what now might seem like common sense protections passed.
30:40 Speaker 03 These are things that include Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, but it's also things like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration getting created.
30:51 Speaker 02 OSHA, the Clean Air Act, laws that have made American life healthier and safer. And it wasn't just environmental protections. Nader also fought to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act to increase the public's access to federal data and records.
31:06 Speaker 06 It's a law for the people.
31:09 Rund Abdelfatah? The winds were stacking up for Nader and the consumer movement throughout the 1970s, but not everyone was on board with this growing consumer movement and Ralph Nader's vision of an energized consumer citizen.
31:21 Speaker 03 I think you see an immediate backlash to him from corporate interests.
31:26 Rund Abdelfatah? Business leaders and of course, the car industry had long been wary of Nader.
31:31 Speaker 03 I have some very serious reservations about some of his positions and some of the levels of expertise that he professes to have.
31:41 Rund Abdelfatah? But as the power of the consumer movement grew, a conservative political backlash started to take shape, spearheaded by a soon to be US Supreme Court Justice named Louis Powell.
31:54 Speaker 03 There's a very famous memo that gets written by Louis Powell, the Powell memo. Louis Powell, who becomes a justice, but at the time, he is working with the Chamber of Commerce, and he publishes this sort of confidential memo at the time, which later gets leaked, in which he is warning of these threats on the horizon, and Nader is very prominent in that.
32:18 Speaker 02 Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who thanks largely to the media, has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.
32:30 Speaker 03 The Powell memo is really a calling to action to conservatives and to business that
32:36 Speaker 02 They need to develop an ideological counterbalance to this new public interest and citizen movement.
32:44 Speaker 07 Business must learn the lesson long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary, that such power must be assiduously cultivated, and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively.
33:02 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, big business strikes back.
33:13 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Bailey. I'm calling from Austin, Texas, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
33:19 Speaker 07 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
33:24 Speaker 00 This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances. Understand your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. Support for NPR and the following message come from Random House, publishers of The Things We Never Say, the new novel from Elizabeth Strout. The Things We Never Say follows Artie Dam, a beloved teacher and earnest father. He doesn't know it yet, but Artie's world was built on a major secret. And when it comes out, Artie is about to have his life turned upside down. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout is available everywhere books are sold.
34:05 Speaker 07 This message comes from Open Door. With cash now, more later. Get cash upfront for your home, plus all the profit later. That's no chaos now, no cash left behind later. Skip the showings now and move on your own timeline. Cash now, more later. Now available nationwide. Start your offer at opendoor.com/NPR. Profits calculated after fees and costs. Eligibility and offer price may vary. Part three, we, the
34:33 Rund Abdelfatah? It's the summer of 1976. The country is celebrating the nation's bicentennial anniversary, and the mood is especially festive in Plains, Georgia.
34:47 Speaker 03 Carter and his brother, they're all playing softball.
34:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Where Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed consumer advocate, is playing a game of softball with family, Secret Service agents, and...
34:59 Speaker 03 Nader is appointed to be the umpire.
35:02 Rund Abdelfatah? Ralph Nader.
35:03 Speaker 03 And Nader's behind the base, you know, in a suit and a tie, jacket and tie. He's a lifelong Yankees fan, you know, calling balls and strikes and things like that.
35:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Nader had traveled down to Georgia to outline what he thought needed to be done to further consumer rights. Number one on that list: create a consumer protection agency.
35:22 Speaker 03 Carter is cultivating Nader as a candidate would to try to, you know, win over his constituency. And Carter, you know, declares that he wants to be the great representative of the consumer. And he's gonna sweep, you know, sweep the halls of, you know, Washington DC clean. And Nader, you know, supports him and is very excited.
35:43 Rund Abdelfatah? So, back to the ballgame. Carter doesn't always agree with Nader's calls. It's a spirited game. And in many ways, it's a symbolic one, too.
35:52 Speaker 03 Is Nader gonna be an umpire? Or is he gonna be a player? You know, so he gonna join the administration? Or is he gonna stay on the outside, watching over the administration and judging it?
36:04 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah, not settled.
36:05 Speaker 03 And this is, you know, was a real question.
36:09 Speaker 02 A few months after their softball game in Georgia, Jimmy Carter wins the presidential election. At the election celebration, he promised to be a president for the people.
36:21 Speaker 03 If we could just have a government, as I've said a thousand times, as good as our people are, that's all we can hope for, and that's all we can expect, and that's enough. We're gonna have a great government, a great nation, and it's because of you, not me.
36:38 Speaker 02 And it looked like a real win for the consumer rights movement. Many former Nader's raiders actually joined Carter's administration. But not Nader.
36:49 Speaker 03 He would have easily had a high-level appointment in the Carter administration. He decides he's going to be an umpire. He believes in the permanence of this whole sector that he's been involved in creating, and they need to stay outside the government, and they need to watch over the agencies and hold even their allies accountable.
37:07 Speaker 02 Former allies like Joan Claybrook, who he publicly accused of going too easy on the car industry's rollout of airbags. He blasted me for having betrayed my own personal standards. And so I didn't talk to Ralph for quite some time after that. Nader wasn't going to hold back against friends or foes. He was still fighting for the consumer, and his number one goal was to finally get the Consumer Protection Agency he'd been fighting for four years created.
37:41 Speaker 06 This little agency that could take other regulatory agencies to court and make them change their behavior, make them go from inaction to action, or make them strengthen weak standards into stronger standards. And it would be the voice and the muscle of the consumer movement.
38:03 Speaker 02 The bill created had come close several times, but never quite made it through. The hope was that Carter would be able to push it through.
38:11 Speaker 06 But unfortunately, the crown jewel of the consumer movement never made it into law.
38:17 Speaker 02 In 1978, the effort to create the Consumer Protection Agency came to a grinding end.
38:26 Speaker 06 Looking back on it, that was the high watermark.
38:29 Speaker 03 The failure of the Consumer Protection Agency, that is his life's work, and it fails. And it's a sign that he's no longer on the ascendance, and you're starting to move to a more defensive positioning to try to protect the gains.
38:43 Speaker 05 People who want to work but can't find jobs are part of today's other bad economic news.
38:48 Rund Abdelfatah? By the late 70s, early 80s, the political climate was beginning to change as high inflation, unemployment, and gas shortages rattled the country.
39:00 Speaker 03 Contact the president. Why is he letting this happen to us? So you have inflation and issues of unemployment and you, you know, these things start to get blamed on environmental regulation and safety. If only we would get rid of these regulations, you know, things would be cheaper. The economy would be doing better.
39:19 Speaker 05 Basically, it boils down to the country is going to the pits.
39:25 Rund Abdelfatah? But it was too late. Carter had lost the trust of the people and Nader's call for more regulations wasn't resonating anymore. In their stead was a new voice.
39:41 Speaker 03 Many Americans today, just as they did 200 years ago, feel burdened, stifled, and sometimes even oppressed by government that has grown too large, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, too unresponsive, too uncaring about people and their problems. You start to see the emergence of ideas that would be held more, that would be articulated by the Reagan Republicans in the early 80s. But the, you know, this includes attack on sort of socialistic nanny state, you know, government interventions, out of control, you know, government agencies, out of control, public interest. Americans who have always known that excessive bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion want a change in public life.
40:30 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president, he immediately started to roll back many of the regulatory protections that Nader and the consumer movement had fought for, including gutting the EPA's budget and refocusing OSHA to benefit small businesses rather than workers.
40:48 Speaker 03 I put a freeze on pending regulations and set up a task force under Vice President Bush to review regulations with an eye toward getting rid of as many as possible.
41:00 Rund Abdelfatah? The heyday of the consumer movement was over.
41:05 Speaker 02 But Ralph Nader wasn't gone from the public eye. Throughout the 80s and 90s, he won some key fights for consumers, like finally making airbags a federal requirement and rolling back steep car insurance rates in California.
41:19 Rund Abdelfatah? And in 2000, he tried to take on an even more public role.
41:24 Speaker 05 Ralph Nader campaigning in Madison today despite mounting criticism that he might cost Al Gore the election. His top priority is creating a viable third party for the future.
41:34 Speaker 02 Today, Nader is mostly known for his run for president in the year 2000, which many Democrats say cost Al Gore the election against George W. Bush. From Raiders to Jimmy Carter, many of Nader's longstanding allies turned on him.
41:50 Speaker 03 Ralph,
41:52 Speaker 03 go back to examining the rear end of automobiles
41:57 Speaker 03 and don't risk costing the Democrats the White House this year as you did four years ago.
42:04 Speaker 02 People were angry.
42:07 Speaker 01 Thank you, Ralph, for the Iraq War. Thank you, Ralph, for the tax cuts. Thank you, Ralph, for the destruction of the environment. Thank you, Ralph, for the destruction of the Constitution.
42:14 Rund Abdelfatah? Once hailed as a knight in shining armor, Nader was no longer the heroic consumer crusader. Far from it. He was now the country's nag, the irresponsible spoiler.
42:26 Speaker 02 And even now, more than 20 years later, Ralph Nader's presidential ambitions still continue to eclipse his past work as a consumer advocate for many people. So when we interviewed him for this episode, we had to ask him about it. You ran for president in 2000. You got a lot of criticism for, quote unquote, I'm putting air quotes here, ruining the election, right? For the Democrats, et cetera. Since that time, we've seen similar attacks to other third-party candidates or people who are running outside of the Republican and Democratic system. Do you feel like the results of the elections we've seen ever since where we are today
43:11 Speaker 02 validates your run or further gives way to the people who criticized you?
43:18 Speaker 06 Scapegoating by the two parties is a form of political bigotry that says to reform-minded third-party candidates, no, we're not going to let you appeal to the voters. We want the voters.
43:38 Speaker 06 The two parties have got to earn their votes. They don't own the votes. They have to earn them.
43:43 Rund Abdelfatah? Whatever you think of his decision to run for president, that belief that politicians like corporations should be accountable to us, the citizens, it's a big part of Nader's legacy. He made it acceptable to criticize big companies. Again, Nader's longtime friend and one-time enemy, Joan Claybrook. I think it's imbued politics in that way that people absolutely do see themselves as consumers. And with or without him, we're still living in a world that calls for this kind of consumer advocacy.
44:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Consumer Reports is pushing for a recall of two bassinets.
44:21 Speaker 02 They say the bassinet may tilt, causing the infant to roll over and possibly suffocate. Product recalls reached a seven-year high in the U.S. in 2023. Health officials say there's a possibility of Salmonella contaminations. Almost 50% of the U.S.'s tap water could contain forever chemicals, which have been linked to certain cancers and decreased fertility. With PFA, if you look for it, you will find it. So it's worth revisiting the question that Ralph Nader and the consumer movement posed for all of us. What kind of government do we want? And what role do we play in it?
44:59 Speaker 06 Anybody who thinks that our democracy has not deteriorated in so many ways over the last 50 years ought to study how things got through Congress and state legislators in the 1960s, 1970s. It was because a fraction of the citizenry.
45:20 Speaker 06 Decided to be active, decided to organize communities, decided to buttonhole their members of Congress, decided to march, to demonstrate, to file lawsuits, to lobby, to get the Environmental Protection Agency created, the Occupational Safety Health Administration created, to get the critical air and water pollution laws through, the drinking water safety law. This was done by less than 1% of the public.
45:51 Speaker 02 How much of it do you think has to do with the zeitgeist, the culture at that time in the 1960s and 70s, where there was a kind of, what we would call now, a kind of punk rock, anti-establishment, we're tired of tradition, we're trying to push through and create a new world, culture? Because to me, it feels like I didn't grow up as a millennial, I didn't grow up with that similar kind of broader culture. There's a lot more cynicism now towards what is capable of being done, how much change can actually be made? How much of it had to do with the culture of that time?
46:29 Speaker 06 You just mentioned the word cynicism, didn't you? That's a cop-out. That's an indulgence, that's an indulgence of quitters that makes them feel good. Because when you're cynical, you're obviously smart, aren't you? You think you're smart. No, you're not smart. You're playing into the hands of the corporate supremacists. You're playing into the hands of the few who want to control the many, who could easily outvote the few and make the corporations our servants, not our masters.
47:02 Speaker 02 Paul Saban says Nader's legacy is complicated, and not just because of his political ambitions.
47:09 Speaker 03 There's a little bit of lack of accountability about the ways in which the public interest movement itself might be flawed and limited.
47:16 Speaker 02 By becoming the nation's critic, he also helped to sow a mistrust in the government that Reagan seized on and which we live with today.
47:26 Speaker 03 People are looking to the government to try to do big things, and there's a question of like, why can't we do these big things?
47:32 Rund Abdelfatah? Trust in the government has been low for decades. A recent Pew study found that less than a quarter of Americans believe in Washington to do the right thing most of the time.
47:43 Speaker 02 So where do we go from here?
47:47 Rund Abdelfatah? To this day, at 90 years old, Ralph Nader still believes that the answer to a democracy that works lies in us, the consumer citizens of America.
48:00 Speaker 06 Nothing can surprise the impact of organized citizenry. Year after year, the young generation forgets on how there was a time when Congress worked for us to some degree. There was a time when citizen action was worthwhile and produced results. So as we get, a younger generation doesn't have the historical context. The preamble of the Constitution starts with "we, the people." It doesn't start with "we, the corporation." It doesn't start with "we, the Congress." It starts with "we, the people."
48:46 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Rande Abdelfatah.
48:50 Speaker 02 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
48:54 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
48:56 Speaker 02 And me, and?
48:58 Speaker 03 Lawrence Wu.
48:59 Rund Abdelfatah? Julie Kane.
49:00 Speaker 03 Anya Steinberg.
49:01 Speaker 01 Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
49:04 Speaker 03 Devon Katayama.
49:05 Speaker 01 Peter Balanon-Rosen. Irene Noguchi.
49:09 Speaker 02 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell.
49:16 Rund Abdelfatah? We reached out to General Motors for comment on this episode, but did not receive a response.
49:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes...
49:29 Speaker 03 Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.
49:35 Speaker 02 Thank you to Brandon Ongsi, Phil Harrell, Dan Germa, Adrian Martinez, Devon Katayama, Christina Kim, Anya Steinberg, Peter Balanon-Rosen, and Lawrence Wu for their voiceover work.
49:52 Rund Abdelfatah? Special thanks also to the producers of Daytime Revolution, Global Image Works, and Steve Scrovan for providing us with archival footage of Ralph Nader, as well as Yoshikazu Fojimoto of Kodo, Sarah Gilbert, and the North American Taiko Taikai.
50:10 Speaker 02 And as always, thank you to Johannes Dergy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
50:16 Rund Abdelfatah? And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] .
50:24 Speaker 02 Thanks for listening.
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Previous History of the Self: Dreams Next We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated