Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)

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. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline http://plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24Speaker 01

  Hi, nice to meet you. Come on in.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  The year is 1960.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Now, what kind of car are we looking for today?

• 0:31Speaker 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.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I think you're gonna love this.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Now, all you need is the perfect car.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  They just released this model.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Compact, sleek, a thing of beauty.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Have a safe drive.

• 0:57Speaker 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.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  When you come up across a slight turn, you keep your foot on the gas, cruising along.

• 1:32Speaker 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.

• 2:05Speaker 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?

• 2:22Speaker 03

  This is my point. Either it's sheer callousness or indifference, or they don't bother to find out how their cars behave.

• 2:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's a young Ralph Nader talking about car safety.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  Ralph Nader has announced he will run for president as a third-party candidate again.

• 2:38Rund 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.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  So if you're feeling skeptical, we get it. But bear with us, because before Ralph Nader was infamous, he was famous.

• 3:01Speaker 06

  I was better known by more people in the United States than Taylor Swift is today.

• 3:07Rund 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.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  And this is a bill for the vast number of millions of unrepresented American consumers who need representation before federal regulatory agencies.

• 3:35Rund 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.

• 3:53Speaker 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.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Several brands of ground cinnamon containing elevated levels of lead now recommends recalls.

• 4:29Speaker 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.

• 4:45Rund 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.

• 5:11Speaker 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.

• 5:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Nader opens up the dream of the American car and takes a look under the hood.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Faith Garrison. I'm from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and you're listening to Throughline.

• 5:42Speaker 00

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• 6:26Speaker 00

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• 6:31Speaker 07

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• 7:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part One.

• 7:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Life is a highway.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  It was certainly freedom of the road.

• 7:18Speaker 06

  When you were in the car, driving, you were the queen or king of the car.

• 7:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the 1950s, the car was becoming as much a symbol of American freedom as the bald eagle.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  And what you did in the backseat was no one else's business. And listen. Outside a rambler. Horsepower.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  The pound, pound, pound as the wheels hit the ground.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  Domination. With the famous rocket engine, new hydromantic drive, and future. Hey, they love it, these dreamboats, psychosexual vehicles. Sing it now.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  What a thrill to take the wheel of a rocket Oldsmobile. In performance, it's a spore.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  It was all revolting to me.

• 8:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ralph Nader was born in 1934.

• 8:12Speaker 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.

• 8:27Rund 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.

• 8:43Speaker 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?"

• 8:54Rund 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.

• 9:11Speaker 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.

• 9:25Rund 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?

• 9:50Speaker 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...

• 10:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  He set out to bust the myth of the open road.

• 10:12Speaker 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.

• 10:45Speaker 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...

• 10:58Speaker 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.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  It punctured the advertising fantasy of these auto companies.

• 11:34Speaker 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.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  I've sent to the Congress today a special message on protecting the consumer interests. All of us are consumers.

• 11:52Speaker 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.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  All of us deserve the right to be protected against fraudulent or misleading advertisements and labels.

• 12:31Speaker 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.

• 12:52Rund 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.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  You are about to meet a true international beauty. Orver.

• 13:22Speaker 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."

• 13:31Rund 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.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  It would veer out of control and roll over and kill people.

• 13:54Rund 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."

• 14:05Speaker 06

  I knew it was a book that had dynamite potential.

• 14:10Rund 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.

• 14:39Speaker 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.

• 15:10Rund 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.

• 15:24Rund 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.

• 15:43Speaker 07

  He gave me Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed, which had just come out a month before.

• 15:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  The book hit home for Joan.

• 15:53Speaker 07

  My boss had a Corvair, and she had a car crash shortly after I got to Washington. She was very badly injured.

• 16:03Rund 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.

• 16:14Speaker 07

  That was easier said than done because no one knew where he lived.

• 16:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  All she had to go off of was a phone number.

• 16:25Speaker 07

  And I called him, you know, like 20 times in the next week.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  Never answered the phone. And finally, in total anger, one evening at midnight, I called him, and he answered the phone.

• 16:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ralph Nader.

• 16:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  She convinces him to visit Representative Mackey's office. When he walks in, he's a towering presence.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  He's six feet four and lanky.

• 16:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  But when he sits down...

• 16:56Speaker 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.

• 17:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Just a straight monologue.

• 17:19Speaker 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?"

• 17:24Rund 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.

• 17:33Speaker 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?"

• 17:42Speaker 03

  He said, no. So I knew I was going to be calling him at midnight a lot.

• 17:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  And with that, their work together really began.

• 17:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  And so did the pushback.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  General Motors decided this was a great threat.

• 17:59Speaker 06

  They had been unleashing private detectives month after month, following me everywhere.

• 18:07Rund 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.

• 18:15Speaker 06

  They used ex-FBI agents often for their so-called investigation of critics. They tried to seduce me with young ladies.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  They followed him into the Safeway.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  I would be shopping.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  And he was there at the cookie counter, and he loves sweets. And this woman approached him

• 18:39Speaker 03

  and said, well, he'd like to come up to her apartment.

• 18:45Speaker 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?

• 18:58Speaker 03

  And he said, no, thank you.

• 19:01Rund 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.

• 19:13Speaker 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.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  The press got wind of the story, along with Congress.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  And so Senator Rubikoff decided to have a public hearing.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  And I was invited to testify.

• 19:39Speaker 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.

• 20:02Speaker 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."

• 20:36Speaker 05

  I want to apologize here and now to members of this subcommittee and Mr. Nader.

• 20:43Speaker 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.

• 21:07Speaker 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.

• 21:22Speaker 06

  And that's what I did every day in Washington, DC.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  It was hard for him to lobby because he is shy. He had to push himself to go do that.

• 21:31Speaker 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.

• 21:46Speaker 06

  Just think of how fast Congress acted compared to the sluggish, indentured corporate gridlock of today, within six months from March 1966.

• 21:59Speaker 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.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Ralph Nader had won his first victory on behalf of the American consumer. And he was just getting started.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  That's coming up.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  This is Justin Mish from Indianapolis, Indiana, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 22:37Speaker 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.

• 23:22Speaker 07

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• 23:55Speaker 03

  He's an attorney. He's from the nation's capital. And recently, he's been called the man who makes waves.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  What indeed makes Ralph Nader run?

• 24:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  The incomparable Mr. Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader. Ralph Nate. Ralph Nate. Ralph Nate. Ralph Nate.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Ralph Nader.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  I became very famous.

• 24:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  For years after Nader's very public victory against the auto industry, he seemed to be everywhere.

• 24:20Speaker 06

  I was on the cover of Time, Newsweek, when that meant something.

• 24:23Rund 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.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Welcome to The Mike Douglas Show. This is John Lemon. I'm Yoko Ono, where Mike's co-hosts be.

• 25:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Who asked him to weigh in on the power of voting.

• 25:08Speaker 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.

• 25:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  If people didn't know Ralph Nader's name before, by the 1970s, Nader was a household name.

• 25:29Speaker 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."

• 25:40Rund 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.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  With the auto safety staff because now he was on to other tracks.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  All around him, Nader could see how people were being sold shoddy goods.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  The safety of additives in some baby foods was questioned today by Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  And expected to live and work in unsafe conditions.

• 26:30Speaker 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.

• 26:38Speaker 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.

• 26:50Speaker 06

  I didn't want to be a Lone Ranger.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  So where do I go for help? Well, law students.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  It started off small with Nader calling law students, including from his alma mater, Harvard, in search of people eager to make change.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  Hey, Ralph Nader is on the phone.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  It worked. These students knew who he was and they wanted in.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  I couldn't have been more excited if he said it was the Queen of England.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Nader had plenty of work for them. And thanks to his settlement with GM, he had money to fund it.

• 27:36Speaker 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.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  These young, idealistic lawyers and students came to be called Nader's Raiders.

• 28:10Rund 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.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  And idealism keeps Nader's Raiders going.

• 28:32Speaker 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.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Joan Claybrook, looking to get out of government work for a while, believed in Nader and joined.

• 28:51Speaker 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.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  They started with the Federal Trade Commission.

• 29:12Speaker 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.

• 29:21Speaker 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,

• 30:05Speaker 02

  where everyone was a consumer and everyone participated. People really responded to this message. Across the country, local consumer groups popped up.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Today, the buying public has awakened and increasingly demands more information about the American marketplace.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  It wasn't long before Congress began to respond to Ralph Nader and the public's demands for change.

• 30:33Speaker 06

  We got lead out of gasoline and paint.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  They got what now might seem like common sense protections passed.

• 30:40Speaker 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.

• 30:51Speaker 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.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  It's a law for the people.

• 31:09Rund 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.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  I think you see an immediate backlash to him from corporate interests.

• 31:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Business leaders and of course, the car industry had long been wary of Nader.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  I have some very serious reservations about some of his positions and some of the levels of expertise that he professes to have.

• 31:41Rund 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.

• 31:54Speaker 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.

• 32:18Speaker 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.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  The Powell memo is really a calling to action to conservatives and to business that

• 32:36Speaker 02

  They need to develop an ideological counterbalance to this new public interest and citizen movement.

• 32:44Speaker 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.

• 33:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, big business strikes back.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Bailey. I'm calling from Austin, Texas, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 33:19Speaker 07

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 33:24Speaker 00

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• 34:05Speaker 07

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• 34:33Rund 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.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Carter and his brother, they're all playing softball.

• 34:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Where Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed consumer advocate, is playing a game of softball with family, Secret Service agents, and...

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Nader is appointed to be the umpire.

• 35:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ralph Nader.

• 35:03Speaker 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.

• 35:11Rund 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.

• 35:22Speaker 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.

• 35:43Rund 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.

• 35:52Speaker 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?

• 36:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, not settled.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  And this is, you know, was a real question.

• 36:09Speaker 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.

• 36:21Speaker 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.

• 36:38Speaker 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.

• 36:49Speaker 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.

• 37:07Speaker 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.

• 37:41Speaker 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.

• 38:03Speaker 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.

• 38:11Speaker 06

  But unfortunately, the crown jewel of the consumer movement never made it into law.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  In 1978, the effort to create the Consumer Protection Agency came to a grinding end.

• 38:26Speaker 06

  Looking back on it, that was the high watermark.

• 38:29Speaker 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.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  People who want to work but can't find jobs are part of today's other bad economic news.

• 38:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the late 70s, early 80s, the political climate was beginning to change as high inflation, unemployment, and gas shortages rattled the country.

• 39:00Speaker 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.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  Basically, it boils down to the country is going to the pits.

• 39:25Rund 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.

• 39:41Speaker 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.

• 40:30Rund 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.

• 40:48Speaker 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.

• 41:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  The heyday of the consumer movement was over.

• 41:05Speaker 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.

• 41:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  And in 2000, he tried to take on an even more public role.

• 41:24Speaker 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.

• 41:34Speaker 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.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Ralph,

• 41:52Speaker 03

  go back to examining the rear end of automobiles

• 41:57Speaker 03

  and don't risk costing the Democrats the White House this year as you did four years ago.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  People were angry.

• 42:07Speaker 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.

• 42:14Rund 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.

• 42:26Speaker 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

• 43:11Speaker 02

  validates your run or further gives way to the people who criticized you?

• 43:18Speaker 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.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  The two parties have got to earn their votes. They don't own the votes. They have to earn them.

• 43:43Rund 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.

• 44:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Consumer Reports is pushing for a recall of two bassinets.

• 44:21Speaker 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?

• 44:59Speaker 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.

• 45:20Speaker 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.

• 45:51Speaker 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?

• 46:29Speaker 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.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Paul Saban says Nader's legacy is complicated, and not just because of his political ambitions.

• 47:09Speaker 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.

• 47:16Speaker 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.

• 47:26Speaker 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?

• 47:32Rund 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.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  So where do we go from here?

• 47:47Rund 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.

• 48:00Speaker 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."

• 48:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rande Abdelfatah.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 48:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  And me, and?

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Lawrence Wu.

• 48:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Kane.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Anya Steinberg.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Devon Katayama.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Peter Balanon-Rosen. Irene Noguchi.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

• 49:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  We reached out to General Motors for comment on this episode, but did not receive a response.

• 49:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes...

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 49:35Speaker 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.

• 49:52Rund 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.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  And as always, thank you to Johannes Dergy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 50:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected].

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.