NADER, RALPH 1934-

CONSUMER ADVOCATE

True Believer

Ralph Nader is both a reformer and a visionary. His roots extended to the early-twentieth-century muckrakers, to Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and others who roused the nation against business exploitation. So he launched fact-filled thunder-bolts from the 1960s onward against hazardous automobiles and natural gas pipelines, unsafe mining methods, unwholesome meat processing, and other dangers to the consumers.

David versus Goliath

Nader was a virtually monkish idealist who was single, lived ascetically, owned no property, and cared only for the truth he was uncovering. Nader's assaults fitted the temper of the Vietnam War era and the growing assumption that the country's leaders and institutions were self-centered and deceitful. Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: the Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1965) was a smash hit, and the thin, thirtyish man became an overnight folk hero.

Background

Nader grew up in a Lebanese immigrant family where politics was taken seriously. He went on to Princeton and Harvard Law School, where he raised doubts about the conventional argument regarding the driver's culpability in auto accidents. Could the vehicle itself be a factor? Nader continued this argument in Washington, D.C., where he found allies in Congress and in the Johnson administration who pushed through the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1967. Nader had raised a furor in 1966 by charging that General Motors had counterattacked his criticism of the Chevrolet Corvair by having private detectives harass him with investigations and sexual enticement schemes. The GM president apologized, and Nader filed a multimillion-dollar suit for damages, from which he collected $425,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

Creating an Infrastructure

Inevitably, Nader attracted followers, often young lawyers and college students who wanted to join his consumer-rights crusade and who became known as Nader's Raiders. He strengthened the crusade in 1971 by founding a network of organizations, Public Citizen, which grew out of his Washington-based Center for the Study of Responsive Law. He also established the Corporate Accountability Research Group, financing it with the money gained from GM. Finally, from 1970 onward there was the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which was associated with groups in twenty-six states at the community and campus level. Nader had institutionalized his movement with a variety of watchdog, lobbying, and investigative groups that probed into both corporations and the regulatory agencies that he insisted had allied themselves with the very enterprises they were supposed to supervise. By 1971 Nader stood as the sixth most popular figure in the country, according to a Harris poll, and his position with the media was unrivaled as a reliable source of news that affected everyone. Nader helped create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and the Freedom of Information Act in 1974.

Backlash

There was, however, a backlash against Nader's sustained critique of the American corporate structure as the 1970s wore on, conservatism increased, the economy declined, and Americans feared the loss of jobs more than the loss of health. His criticism had become familiar, his face yet another on television. In 1978 Congress narrowly failed to establish the Consumer Protection Agency, which he had advocated, and the automakers continued to stave off his attempts to impose inflatable air bags on their products. Nader's astringent, highly individualistic personality also cost him support, and it became easy to regard him as an uncompromising zealot.

A Deeper Commitment

Behind his concern with consumerism lay a deeper commitment, that of building structures to engage Americans deeply in political action, pulling them away from political parties per se and into the realm of independent citizenship. Being a citizen has been, to Nader, the very essence of a democracy; consumer action is simply a means to that end.