Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)

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Speaker 7 The year is 1960.

Speaker 5 Now, what kind of car are we looking for today?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 5 I think you're going to love this.

Speaker 7 Now, all you need is the perfect car.

Speaker 5 They just released this model.

Speaker 7 Compact, sleek, a thing of beauty.

Speaker 8 Have a safe drive.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 This is the American dream, riding in an American car on an American road, boundless and free.

Speaker 7 When you come up across a slight turn, you keep your foot on the gas, cruising along.

Speaker 7 For a moment, you feel the wheels slip, the car no longer in your control, but then it comes back again.

Speaker 7 You think it's fine, it's a brand new car right off the dealership block.

Speaker 7 You come up on another turn, this time a wider one. You stay the course when

Speaker 7 all of a sudden, your wheels lose traction with the road.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 How could driving a brand new car end up with me lying on the road?

Speaker 10 This is my point.

Speaker 11 Either it's sheer callousness or indifference, or they don't bother to find out how their cars behave.

Speaker 12 That's a young Ralph Nader talking about car safety.

Speaker 13 Ralph Nader has announced he will run for president as a third-party candidate again.

Speaker 12 Yes, that Ralph Nader.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 7 Bush. So if you're feeling skeptical, we get it.
But bear with us, because before Ralph Nader was infamous, he was famous.

Speaker 14 I was better known by more people in the United States than Taylor Swift is today.

Speaker 12 Okay, 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 St.
Ralph.

Speaker 12 He's the reason any new car that gets sold today has to comply with a set of federal safety standards.

Speaker 15 This is a bill for the vast number of millions of unrepresented American consumers who need representation before federal regulatory agencies.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 He fought to guarantee them and in many cases, he won.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 17 Several brands of ground cinnamon containing elevated levels of lead. It now recommends recalls recalls of ground cinema from six distributors.

Speaker 14 Toyota recalling 1 million vehicles worldwide over a potential airbag issue.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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 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.

Speaker 7 I'm Randad Defatta and I'm Ramteen Arabloui. Today on the show, the story of consumer activism in the U.S.
and what we can learn from Ralph Nader's wins and losses.

Speaker 12 Coming up, Nader opens up the dream of the American car and takes a look under the hood.

Speaker 21 Hi, I'm Faith Garrison. I'm from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and you're listening to Thru Line.

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Speaker 9 part one

Speaker 12 life is a highway

Speaker 14 freedom of the road

Speaker 14 When you were in the car driving, you were the queen or king of the car.

Speaker 12 In the 1950s, the car was becoming as much a symbol of American freedom as the bald eagle.

Speaker 14 And what you did in the back seat was no one else's business.

Speaker 25 And listen,

Speaker 26 outside a Rambler.

Speaker 25 Horsepower, the pound, pound, pound as the wheels hit the ground.

Speaker 14 Domination.

Speaker 25 With the famous rocket engine, new hydromatic drive, and future rambling.

Speaker 14 Hey, they love it. These dream boats, psychosexual vehicles.

Speaker 27 Say it, Mel.

Speaker 27 What a thrill to take the wheel of a rocket oldsmobile.

Speaker 27 In performance, it's a story.

Speaker 14 It was all revolting to me.

Speaker 12 Ralph Nader was born in 1934.

Speaker 14 Well, my parents were immigrants from Lebanon, and they sailed past the Statue of Liberty that took it seriously, which means that it isn't just freedom freedom they were after.

Speaker 14 They wanted freedom to make a difference.

Speaker 12 Nader came of age during the post-war era, a time when peace and economic prosperity collided with looming fears of nuclear war.

Speaker 12 His parents wanted Nader and his siblings to trust their own instincts instead of blindly accepting what they were told by other authority figures.

Speaker 14 One time I came home from school, my dad said, What'd you learn today?

Speaker 14 Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 The American dream was more of an American massacre.

Speaker 14 I lost a lot of friends in car crashes.

Speaker 14 They were killed or they were permanently disabled.

Speaker 14 It's far, far worse then than it is today.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 How could it be that commuting to work or going grocery shopping could amount to a death sentence for so many people?

Speaker 14 I kept thinking of people who could be living productive lives today and who were killed in totally survivable crashes.

Speaker 14 You know, I began looking at the cars and how they were crushed in and when I was at law school.

Speaker 12 He set out to bust the myth of the open road.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 9 And I mean a a lot.

Speaker 7 Nader sifted through court documents and case law.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 This is a CBS report about that research.

Speaker 25 We're at the scene of a pretty bad smashup here on U.S. Highway No.
1 near Laurel, Maryland.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Doctors and researchers had repeatedly recommended features to add to the cars to make them safe. Seatbelts, padded dash panels, rollover bars.

Speaker 7 But the car makers often shied away from putting these features into cars on the market.

Speaker 14 It punctured the advertising fantasy of these auto companies.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 13 I have sent to the Congress today a special message on protecting the consumer interests. All of us are consumers.

Speaker 7 That's President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1962, and he was identifying a powerful new current in American life.

Speaker 28 Across the American 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 interest of the individual?

Speaker 7 This is Paul Sabin. He's a professor of history and American studies at Yale University.

Speaker 28 There's a sense that really there needs to be someone looking out for this consumer.

Speaker 13 All of us deserve the right to be protected against fraudulent or misleading advertisements and labels.

Speaker 7 There was a growing call for consumers to take up that charge themselves, and Nader was at the front of the line.

Speaker 28 I think for Nader, the consumer citizen is an active citizen, one that is investigating, learning, and engaging in political processes.

Speaker 28 And so he wanted the informed citizen.

Speaker 12 But that informed consumer citizen first had to be awakened. And so Nader threw up his bat signal to concern consumers across the nation.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 7 You are about to meet a true international beauty.

Speaker 26 Corvair.

Speaker 14 And the Corvir was a unique design because it had its engine in the rear. Someone once said, you were the bumper on the Corvir.

Speaker 12 Mrs. Pirini'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 dangers of the American automobile.

Speaker 12 And then, all of a sudden, the vehicle made a sharp cut to the left and swerved over.

Speaker 14 It would veer out of control and roll over and

Speaker 14 kill people.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 14 I knew it was a book that had dynamite potential.

Speaker 12 The tragedy was overwhelmingly the fault of cutting corners to shave costs. This happens all the time in the automobile industry.

Speaker 12 What was there for General Motors to say?

Speaker 12 Publicly, General Motors had nothing to say, but the allegations hit hard because GM was a Titan.

Speaker 12 At the time the book was published, they were the world's largest car manufacturer, responsible for nearly half of all U.S. automotive sales.

Speaker 7 Years later, a government study found that the Corvair wasn't any more dangerous than other similar cars. Nader disputed the study.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 12 It didn't take long for Unsafe at Any Speed to start drawing the attention of important people in the capital, including a young woman who would be instrumental in turning Ralph's words into action.

Speaker 10 My name is Joan Claybrook, C-L-A-Y-B-R-O-O-K.

Speaker 12 At the time, Joan was in Washington, D.C. on a fellowship working with James A.
Mackey, a U.S. Representative from Georgia.

Speaker 10 He said he wanted me to work on auto safety, which totally dumbfounded me because I didn't know anything about it at all.

Speaker 10 He gave me Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which had just come out a month before.

Speaker 12 The book hit home for Joan.

Speaker 10 My boss had a Corvair and she had a car crash shortly after I got to Washington.

Speaker 10 She was very badly injured.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 10 That was easier said than done because no one knew where he lived.

Speaker 12 All she had to go off of was a phone number.

Speaker 10 And I called him, you know, like 20 times in the next week.

Speaker 10 Never answered the phone. And finally, in total anger, one evening at midnight, I called him and he answered the phone.

Speaker 30 Ralph Nader.

Speaker 12 She convinces him to visit Representative Mackey's office. When he walks in, he's a towering presence.

Speaker 10 He's six feet four and lanky.

Speaker 12 But when he sits down, he kind of

Speaker 10 goes into this mode where you think he's not so tall.

Speaker 10 He's very shy. Unless you ask him something, he's not going to interrupt you or start the conversation.

Speaker 10 And Mr. Mackey was a very talkative southerner.
And so he talked for about 45 minutes.

Speaker 12 Just a straight monologue.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 12 And so Nader said his piece. Write a bill with teeth that wrangles this Wild West auto industry and saves lives in the process.

Speaker 10 And so then he left and I suddenly realized I only had the Rooming House phone number, so I ran down the hall and I said, Mr. Nader, is there a better phone number to reach you? And he said, no.

Speaker 10 So I knew I was going to be calling him at midnight a lot.

Speaker 12 And with that, their work together really began.

Speaker 12 And so did the pushback.

Speaker 10 General Motors said this was a great threat.

Speaker 14 They had been unleashing private detectives month after month, following me everywhere.

Speaker 12 Nader suspected they were wiretapping his phone. He says he'd get strange calls in the middle of the night, threatening and harassing him.

Speaker 14 They used ex-FBI agents often for their so-called investigation of critics. They tried to seduce me with young ladies.

Speaker 10 So you followed him into the Safeway.

Speaker 14 I would be shopping.

Speaker 10 And he was here at the cookie counter. He loves sweets.
And

Speaker 10 this woman approached him

Speaker 10 and said, would he like to come up to her apartment?

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 10 And he said, No, thank you.

Speaker 12 A private detective who investigated Nader later denied making any attempt to put him in a compromising position with these women.

Speaker 12 But he did admit to surveilling Nader and trying to dig up dirt on his private life.

Speaker 10 There were just, you know, endless attempts to kind of document where he was,

Speaker 10 you know, a bad person or he was taking money from somebody to do this.

Speaker 7 The press got wind of the story, along with Congress.

Speaker 10 And so Senator Rubikoff decided to have a public hearing.

Speaker 14 And I was invited to testify.

Speaker 31 I don't 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.

Speaker 10 And he commanded the president of General Motors, whose name was Roach. I love the name, Roach.

Speaker 10 He has

Speaker 10 told Mr. Roach to come and testify.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 But he discovered, quote, to my dismay, we were indeed involved.

Speaker 5 Let us assume that you found something wrong with the sex life.

Speaker 19 What would that have to do with whether or not he was right or wrong on the car there?

Speaker 7 Nothing. Senator Rybakoff declared in front of the Senate committee that Ralph Nader was squeaky clean.

Speaker 7 He said, quote, they put you through the mill and they haven't found a damn thing out against you.

Speaker 27 I want to apologize here and now to members of this subcommittee and Mr. Nader.

Speaker 7 This public apology couldn't have been a better press moment for Nader's crusade. Try to imagine how monumental this would have been.

Speaker 7 It would be like if Elon Musk apologized for harassing a critic of Tesla. It would be front-page news, and it was.

Speaker 7 People were outraged that a major American corporation would attempt to intimidate a whistleblower. GM's plan to discredit Nader had backfired.

Speaker 10 Ralph became suddenly this national figure.

Speaker 10 Unlike a lot of people who would just be happy to sell some more books, Ralph wanted this law passed.

Speaker 10 So he then lobbied.

Speaker 14 And that's what I did every day in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 10 It was hard for him to lobby because he is shy. He had to push himself to go do that.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 14 Just think of how fast Congress acted compared to the sluggish, indentured corporate gridlock of today

Speaker 14 within six months from March 1966.

Speaker 14 And in September, I was invited to the signing ceremony at the White House, among others, where he handed out the signature pens.

Speaker 14 Six months.

Speaker 7 Ralph Nader had won his first victory on behalf of the American consumer. And

Speaker 7 he was just getting started.

Speaker 7 That's coming up.

Speaker 12 This is Justin Mish from Indianapolis, Indiana, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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Speaker 12 Part two:

Speaker 12 Raider Nation.

Speaker 13 He's an attorney. He's from the nation's capital.
And recently, he's been called the man who makes waves.

Speaker 7 What indeed makes Ralph Nader run?

Speaker 30 The incomparable Mr.

Speaker 13 Ralph Nader.

Speaker 29 Ralph Nader.

Speaker 29 Ralph Nader.

Speaker 23 Ralph Nader.

Speaker 14 He became very famous.

Speaker 12 For years after Nader's very public victory against the auto industry, he seemed to be everywhere.

Speaker 14 I was on the cover of Time at Newsweek when that meant something.

Speaker 12 Newsweek depicted him like a knight in shining armor, the consumer crusader.

Speaker 28 He's seen as this honest, good, good guy who is representing the people.

Speaker 12 He's on Saturday Night Live as a parody of himself.

Speaker 7 It's a hot dog you're eating?

Speaker 27 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 8 A hot dog?

Speaker 27 Do you enjoy eating rat excrement and rodent hairs?

Speaker 12 And he's on all the popular interview shows.

Speaker 15 so you sue it and you you hit it for all it's worth but it isn't worth anything mr.

Speaker 34 Nader I want you to work on this

Speaker 12 including one that was briefly co-hosted by the countercultural icons of the era welcome to the Mike Douglas show this is John Lemon and local owner where Mike's co-host is we

Speaker 35 who asked him to weigh in on the power of voting democracy means in a word self-government and anytime we delegate our responsibilities it's for convenience to government agencies and and other institutions.

Speaker 35 And I don't think we can afford that convenience.

Speaker 12 If people didn't know Ralph Nader's name before, by the 1970s, Nader was a household name.

Speaker 14 And my parents said to me in their own folksy way, say, well, Ralph, now you're very famous.

Speaker 14 So let's see how you endure it.

Speaker 12 For Nader, his fame served one purpose and one purpose only, to continue demanding more protections for consumers.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 12 This is Joan Claybrook again. She stayed in touch with Ralph and continued working on car safety issues.

Speaker 10 I was his inside voice, you know, and so I would tell him what was going on. So, that's how he kept up with the auto safety stuff because now he was onto other tracks.

Speaker 7 All around him, Nader could see how how people were being sold shoddy goods.

Speaker 36 The safety of additives in some baby foods was questioned today by Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate.

Speaker 7 And expected to live and work in unsafe conditions.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 7 So Nader used his newly found fame to bring these issues to the forefront and galvanize people into taking action as consumers

Speaker 7 and form a movement.

Speaker 14 I didn't want to be a Lone Ranger.

Speaker 14 So,

Speaker 14 where do I go for help? Well, law students.

Speaker 7 It started off small. with Nader calling law students, including from his alma mater, Harvard, in search of people eager to make change.

Speaker 14 Hey, Ralph Nader's on the phone.

Speaker 7 It worked. These students knew who he was, and they wanted in.

Speaker 7 I couldn't have been more excited if he said it was the Queen of England. Nader had plenty of work for them, and thanks to his settlement with GM, he had money to fund it.

Speaker 14 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 of members of Congress.

Speaker 14 You have that virtuous circle.

Speaker 7 These young idealistic lawyers and students came to be called Nader's Raiders.

Speaker 12 Come spring, Nader's Raiders will be swooping down. For now, they're lying back in the shadows of Ivy League universities, gathering ammo.

Speaker 40 Funds are low, hours are long, and only intense dedication, determination, and idealism keeps Nader's Raiders going. Can you get me out of the box?

Speaker 10 It was hot. I mean, Ralph would call each one of these staff people every other day.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 7 Joan Claybrook, looking to get out of government work for a while, believed in Nader and joined.

Speaker 10 Oh, definitely. I was one of the raiders.

Speaker 10 These government agencies weren't doing their job and we wanted them to do their job.

Speaker 10 If 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.

Speaker 7 They started with the Federal Trade Commission.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 7 Then they went after the Food and Drug Administration.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 34 Nader and his citizen army of over 1,000 are out to awaken the country to Congress's crying need for reform.

Speaker 28 He publishes what's effectively a consumer guide to Congress, and this was a broadening of his definition of consumer.

Speaker 34 The responsibility for good government does not rest with our politicians, according to Ralph Nader. It rests with each private citizen.

Speaker 7 The driving force of the consumer movement was a reinvigorated view of democracy, where everyone was a consumer and everyone participated. People really responded to this message.

Speaker 7 Across the country, local consumer groups popped up. Today, the buying public has awakened and increasingly demands more information about the American marketplace.

Speaker 7 It wasn't long before Congress began to respond to Ralph Nader and the public's demands for change.

Speaker 14 We got lit out of gasoline and paint.

Speaker 7 They got what now might seem like common sense protections passed.

Speaker 28 These are things that include, you know, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, but it's also

Speaker 28 things like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration getting created.

Speaker 7 OSHA, the Clean Air Act, laws that have made American life healthier and safer. And it wasn't just environmental protections.

Speaker 7 Nader also fought to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act to increase the public's access to federal data and records.

Speaker 14 It's a law for the people.

Speaker 12 The wins were stacking up for Nader and the consumer movement throughout the 1970s.

Speaker 12 But not everyone was on board with this growing consumer movement and Ralph Nader's vision of an energized consumer citizen.

Speaker 28 I think you see an immediate backlash to him from corporate interest.

Speaker 12 Business leaders and of course the car industry had long been wary of Nader.

Speaker 41 I have some very serious reservations about some of his positions and

Speaker 41 some of the levels of expertise that he professes to have.

Speaker 12 But as the power of the consumer movement grew, a conservative political backlash started to take shape, spearheaded by a soon-to-be U.S. Supreme Court justice named Lewis Powell.

Speaker 28 There's a very famous memo that gets written by Lewis Powell, the Powell memo.

Speaker 28 Lewis 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 28 The Powell memo is really a calling to action to conservatives and to business that they need to develop an ideological counterbalance to this new public interest and citizen movement.

Speaker 19 Business must learn the lesson long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 12 Coming up, big business strikes back.

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Speaker 12 Part 3. We the consumer

Speaker 12 It's the summer of 1976. The country is celebrating the nation's bicentennial anniversary and the mood is especially festive in Plains, Georgia.

Speaker 14 Carter and his brother, they're all playing softball.

Speaker 12 Where Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed consumer advocate, is is playing a game of softball with family, Secret Service agents, and Nader is appointed to be the umpire.

Speaker 9 Ralph Nader.

Speaker 28 And Nader's behind the base, you know, in a suit and in a tie, jacket and tie. He's a lifelong Yankees fan, you know, calling balls and strikes and things like that.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 28 Carter is cultivating Nader as a

Speaker 28 candidate would to try to win over his constituency. And Carter declares that he wants to be the great representative of the consumer and he's going to

Speaker 28 sweep the halls of Washington, D.C. clean.
And Nader supports him and is very excited.

Speaker 12 So back to the ballgame.

Speaker 12 Carter doesn't always agree with Nader's calls. It's a spirited game.
And in many ways, it's a symbolic one, too.

Speaker 28 Is Nader going to be an umpire or is is he going to be a player?

Speaker 28 You know, so he's going to join the administration or is he going to stay on the outside watching over the administration and judging it?

Speaker 12 Yeah, not subtle.

Speaker 28 And this is, you know, was a real question.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 42 If we're going to save our government, as I've said a thousand times, as good as our people are,

Speaker 42 that's all we can hope for, and that's all we can expect, and that's enough. We're going to have a great government, a great nation, and it's because of you, not me.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 28 He would have easily had a high-level appointment in the Carter administration. He decides he's going to be an umpire.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 7 Former allies like Joan Claybrook, who he publicly accused of going too easy on the car industry's rollout of airbags.

Speaker 28 He

Speaker 10 blasted me for having betrayed my own personal standards. And so I didn't talk to ral for quite some time after that

Speaker 7 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 for years created this little agency that could take other regulatory agencies to court

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 7 the bill to create it had come close several times but never quite made it through the hope was that carter would be able to push it through

Speaker 7 but unfortunately the crown jewel of the consumer movement never made it into law in 1978 the effort to create the consumer protection agency came to a grinding end

Speaker 14 Looking back on it, that was a high watermark.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 And you're starting to move to a more defensive positioning to try to protect the gains.

Speaker 6 People who want to work but can't find jobs are part of today's other bad economic news.

Speaker 12 By the late 70s, early 80s, the political climate was beginning to change as high inflation, unemployment, and gas shortages rattled the country.

Speaker 16 Isn't this disgusting? Why doesn't anybody contact the president? Why is he letting this happen to us?

Speaker 28 So you have inflation and issues about employment, and

Speaker 28 these things start to get blamed on environmental regulation and safety.

Speaker 28 If only we would get rid of these regulations, things would be cheaper, the economy would be doing better.

Speaker 25 Basically, it boils down to the country is going to the pits.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 13 Many Americans today, just as they did 200 years ago, feel burdened, stifled, and sometimes even oppressed by a government that has grown too large, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, too unresponsive, too uncaring about people and their problems.

Speaker 28 You start to see the emergence of ideas that would be held more,

Speaker 28 that would be articulated by the Reagan Republicans in the early 80s, but this includes an attack on sort of socialistic, nanny-state government interventions, out of control, government agencies, out of control, public interest.

Speaker 13 Americans who have always known that excessive bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion want a change in public life.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 12 The heyday of the consumer movement was over.

Speaker 7 But Ralph Nader wasn't gone from the public eye.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 12 And in 2000, he tried to take on an even more public role.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 From Raiders to Jimmy Carter, many of Nader's long-standing allies turned on him.

Speaker 42 Ralph,

Speaker 43 go back to examining the rear end of automobiles

Speaker 43 and don't risk costing the Democrats a White House this year as you did four years ago.

Speaker 7 People were angry.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 12 Once hailed as a knight in shining armor, Nader was no longer the heroic consumer crusader.

Speaker 9 Far from it.

Speaker 12 He was now the country's nag, the irresponsible spoiler.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 So when we interviewed him for this episode, we had to ask him about it.

Speaker 7 You ran for president in 2000.

Speaker 7 You got a lot of criticism. for

Speaker 7 quote unquote, I'm putting air quotes here, ruining the election, right, for the Democrats, et cetera.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Do you feel like the results of the elections we've seen ever since, where we are today,

Speaker 7 validates your run or further gives weight to the people who criticized you?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 The two parties have got to earn their votes. They don't own the votes.
They have to earn them.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 10 He made it acceptable to criticize big companies.

Speaker 12 Again, Nader's longtime friend and one-time enemy, Joan Claybrook.

Speaker 10 I think it's imbued politics in that way that people absolutely do see themselves as consumers.

Speaker 12 And with or without him, we're still living in a world that calls for this kind of consumer advocacy.

Speaker 38 Consumer Reports is pushing for a recall of two bassinets. They say the bassinet may tilt, causing the infant to roll over and possibly suffocate.

Speaker 7 Product recalls reached a seven-year high in the U.S. in 2023.

Speaker 29 Health officials say there's a possibility of salmonella contaminations.

Speaker 7 Almost 50% of the U.S.'s tap water could contain forever chemicals, which have been linked to certain cancers and decreased fertility.

Speaker 12 With PFA, if you look for it, you will find it.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 14 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, 1970.

Speaker 14 It was because a fraction of the citizenry

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 This was done by less than 1%.

Speaker 14 of the public.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Because to me, it feels like I, 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's toward

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 14 You just mentioned the word cynicism, didn't you? That's a cop-out.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You're playing into the hands of the corporate supremacists.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 7 Paul Sabin says Nader's legacy is complicated and not just because of his political ambitions.

Speaker 28 There's a little bit of lack of accountability about the ways in which the public interest movement itself might be flawed and limited.

Speaker 7 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 with today.

Speaker 28 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 7 So, where do we go from here?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 14 Nothing can surpass the impact of organized citizenry. Year after year,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It doesn't start with we the Congress. It starts with we the people.

Speaker 12 That's it for this week's show. I'm Rand Abdul Fattah.

Speaker 7 And I'm Ramteen Arab Louis. And you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 12 This episode episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Peter Balinon Rosen, Irene Noguchi.

Speaker 7 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

Speaker 12 We reached out to General Motors for comment on this episode, but did not receive a response.

Speaker 12 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara.

Speaker 7 Thank you to Brandon Ongsi, Phil Harrell, Dan Girma, Adrian Martinez, Devin Katiyama, Christina Kim, Anya Steinberg, Peter Balinon-Rosen, and Lawrence Wu for their voiceover work.

Speaker 12 Special thanks also to the producers of Daytime Revolution, Global Imageworks, 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.

Speaker 7 And as always, thank you to Johannes Durgee, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Speaker 12 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org.

Speaker 7 Thanks for listening.

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