Ralph Nader Ralph Nader Nationality: United States Executive summary: Unsafe at Any Speed Before Nader's 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, car dashboards were usually made of metal. Seat belts were available only at exotic auto parts stores, where they were expensive and customers had to bolt them to the car's floorboards. Even at low speeds, a car wreck could propel passengers into the metal dashboard or snap the driver's neck on the metal steering wheel. At mid-speed wrecks (say, 20 miles an hour), passengers could be thrown into the windshield, which was made of "safety glass" that could chisel a passenger's face and body. Car doors were not attached to the car's body firmly enough to withstand collision forces, and would often pop open or off in an accident, which would instantly make the car's frame (and the passengers inside) much more likely to be crumpled by the crash. Nader's book focused mostly on the Chevrolet Corvair, but many of the problems detailed were applicable in every auto showroom and highway smash-up. The response to Unsafe at Any Speed led Congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.

And since then, everything that adds the word "safety" to the word "automotive" -- seat belts, air bags, even the idea of manufacturers' recalls, or requiring crash tests -- can be traced to that act of Congress, and to Nader's book. His parents were Lebanese immigrants who ran a restaurant. It's said that Nader had no toys as a child, because his mother thought toys were "a waste of time". In grade school, Nader had few friends, but one of them, David Halberstam , became a noted author, and won a Pulitzer Prize. At Princeton, Nader was a straight-A student who, in his spare time, organized an anti-DDT activist group. Once, leaving the Princeton campus for summer break in his 1949 Studebaker, Nader slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid the jaywalking Albert Einstein . He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in politics, writing a thesis on Lebanese Agriculture. Afterward he attended Harvard Law School and graduated with distinction. Nader worked as a lawyer for several years while researching Unsafe at Any Speed. After that book made him famous he formed Public Citizen, a non-profit activist group dedicated to consumer protection.

Its members became known as "Nader's Raiders". Nader also started the U.S. Public Interest Group (PIRG), an umbrella group of state PIRGs fighting corporations and politicians over issues from prescription drug costs to polluted waterways to the economic lunacy of building tax-funded ballparks for billionaire sports team owners. Nader also founded the Center for Study of Responsive Law, Center for Auto Safety, the Disability Rights Center, the Pension Rights Center, the Project for Corporate Responsibility, and the Clean Water Action Project. Without the work of Nader, his followers, and the groups he's organized, there would probably be no Safe Drinking Water Act, no Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), no Environment Protection Agency (EPA), no Consumer Product Safety Administration, and no Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1974. In 1996, Nader ran for President as a Green, mostly scolding Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole over environmental issues. He was able to get on the ballot in 22 states. In 2000, Nader ran for President again, this time using the Green Party to get on the ballot in 44 states.

He received prominent support from liberal stalwarts like Michael Moore , Phil Donahue , Eddie Vedder , and Patti Smith . Nader said he didn't trust Al Gore : "Gore changes his clothes three times a day, and he has absolutely no idea who he is." And he denounced George W. Bush as "a giant corporation disguised as a human being." Nader got about 3% of the vote nationwide, while Gore got 48.4% and Bush got 47.9%. In Florida, where Gore and Bush finished in a dead heat, Nader received 97,000 votes. His detractors called Nader an egomaniac, arguing that his candidacy handed Bush the Presidency. Others, including Nader, say he is entitled to run for public office like any other citizen, and that Americans deserve more than two choices -- and better choices than the two they get. As a result of his perpetual candidacy for President, Nader is despised by many left-wingers who might otherwise be his natural allies, and applauded by right-wingers who sometimes donate to his campaigns after giving Republican candidates the maximum amount allowed by law. It's a backwards world.

In 2004 and 2008, Nader ran for President again without the support of the Green Party, making few ripples and earning few votes. As Barack Obama passed the electoral threshold on election night 2008, Nader, appearing live on Fox News, wondered aloud whether Obama would be "Uncle Sam for the people of his country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations." Father: Nathra Nader (restaurateur, d. 1991) Mother: Rose Bouziane Nader (b. 7-Feb-1907, d. 20-Jan-2006, heart failure) Sister: Claire Nader (PhD, chair, Council for Responsible Genetics) Sister: Laura Nader (PhD, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley) Brother: Shafeek Nader (founder, Northwestern Connecticut Community College; d.

1986) Unsafe at Any Speed hits bookstores - Nov 30, 1965 - HISTORY.com Unsafe at Any Speed hits bookstores Share this: Unsafe at Any Speed hits bookstores Author Unsafe at Any Speed hits bookstores URL Publisher A+E Networks On this day in 1965, 32-year-old lawyer Ralph Nader publishes the muckraking book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. The book became a best-seller right away. It also prompted the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, seat-belt laws in 49 states (all but New Hampshire) and a number of other road-safety initiatives. Today, Nader is perhaps best known for his role in national politics—and in particular for the controversial role he played in the 2000 presidential election—but Unsafe at Any Speed was the book that made him famous and lent credibility to his work as a consumer advocate.

“For over half a century,” Nader’s book began, “the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.” Technology existed that could make cars much safer, he argued, but automakers had little incentive to use them: On the contrary, “the gigantic costs of the highway carnage in this country support a service industry”—doctors, lawyers, police officers, morticians—and “there is little in the dynamics of the automobile accident industry that works for its reduction.” Nader’s book popularized some harsh truths about cars and car companies that auto-safety advocates had known for some time. In 1956, at a series of Congressional hearings on traffic safety, doctors and other experts lamented the “wholesale slaughter” on American highways. (That year, nearly 40,000 people were killed in cars, and the number kept creeping upward.) Safety-conscious car buyers could seek out—and pay extra for—a Ford with seatbelts and a padded dashboard, but very few did: only 2 percent of Ford buyers took the $27 seatbelt option.

In Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader railed in particular against the Chevy Corvair, a sporty car with a swing axle and rear–mounted engine that was introduced in 1959. Nader argued that the car epitomized the triumph of “stylistic pornography over engineering integrity.” (Its swing axle made the back end unstable, he said, causing it to “tuck under during turns and skid or roll over much more frequently than other cars did.) As it turned out, a 1972 government study vindicated the Corvair, finding that it was just as safe as any other car (Nader called that study “rigged”) but the damage was done. The Corvair became an icon of dangerous, even deadly design, and the last one rolled off the assembly line in 1969. Whether or not its particular examples were sound, Unsafe at Any Speed mobilized a mass movement, in which ordinary consumers banded together to demand safer cars and better laws. Today, seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes and other innovations are standard features in almost every new car. Nader went on to advocate for a number of consumer causes and has run for president four times.

Related Videos Ralph Nader's Tort Museum - The New Yorker Ralph Nader’s Tort Museum By September 28, 2015 Ralph Nader in the new American Museum of Tort Law, next to a Chevrolet Corvair, the car he disgraced in his 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed.” CreditPhotograph by Jessica Hill/AP In nineteen-forties Mississippi, William Daniels, an employee of the United Novelty Company, was cleaning a piece of his employer’s machinery. Daniels was using gasoline as a cleaning agent even though the company had repeatedly told its employees not to clean with gasoline. As he cleaned, the gasoline leaked through the machine and soaked a rat hiding underneath it. The rat ran under another machine for cover—a gas heater. The gas heater’s open flame lit the rat’s gasoline-soaked coat on fire, sending the flaming rat scrambling back toward the machine that Daniels was cleaning. Another drop of gasoline may have fallen on the rat. The resulting explosion killed them both. Daniels was nineteen. Daniels’s estate sued the United Novelty Company for wrongful death. In 1949, the Supreme Court of Mississippi upheld a jury’s finding that the company was liable for his death.

The court suggested that the company’s repeated warnings against cleaning with gasoline proved that the company knew that its employees were using gasoline to clean its machinery and that it was dangerous. The company hadn’t presented any evidence that Daniels himself had heard the warnings against using gasoline, but this was beside the point—it was the company’s responsibility, not the nineteen-year-old’s, to make sure its employees were not blown up while they worked. On Sunday morning in Winsted, Connecticut, the American Museum of Tort Law, which features a Flaming Rat Case exhibit, officially opened its doors. In the gift shop, a T-shirt with a drawing of the flammable rat was selling briskly, especially compared to the thousand-two-hundred-and-seventy-six-page author-autographed tort-law textbook “Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz’s Torts,” which sat a few feet away. Quiet confusion was in the air around the entrance to the museum—“What the heck is a tort?” a man whispered to his wife as they walked in. She wasn’t sure. Luckily, the museum made it clear: a tort is any wrongful act that can be the basis for a civil lawsuit.

For example, if you punch the mailman, the county prosecutor can charge you with the crime of assault and the mailman can sue you for the tort of battery. The law looks at the same punch in two different ways. Tort law is essentially the law of personal injury, and the museum’s mission is to restore the idea that personal-injury law is not a way to line the pockets of a few lucky lawyers but rather a way to hold the powerful to account. (The most popular exhibit was dedicated to explaining the McDonald’s hot-coffee lawsuit .) As presented by the museum, personal-injury law may be the only way to hold a corporation accountable to the people it has harmed. Sometimes, even a good lawsuit isn’t powerful enough. Walking through the museum on Sunday was its director, Richard L. Newman, a former personal-injury lawyer who was barred from discussing the case that he said was the signature achievement of his career. “I can’t say anything about that case because the settlement has one of those damned confidentiality agreements,” Newman said. “As a lawyer, you’re torn between getting your client fair compensation and knowing that there are dangerous products out there injuring people.” He reflected for a moment.

“You know, people don’t see the benefits of tort law. Their cars are safer. Their foods are safer. They just live in an improved world.” A few feet away stood thirteen-year-old Alexis Smith. She sported blue hair, a nose ring, a lip ring, and a hat with “#BITEME” printed across its cuff. “It’s boring,” she said, before her mother chastened her. Ralph Nader stood on the museum’s front steps, slightly hunched over, smiling and eagerly greeting guests. “Better a fence at the top of the mountain than an ambulance at the bottom of the valley,” he’d said the day before at a museum event, summing up its ethos. The event had been in the church next door to the museum. At the entrance to the church stood a woman pointing out a slight decline in the flooring. “Watch this slope!” she told guests, occasionally chuckling while keeping the museum free from slip-and-fall liability, i.e., liability for the tort of negligence. Nader, who is now eighty-one, conceived of the museum in 1998 and spent the next seventeen years raising money for it.

“The hardest part of raising the money was getting people to return my calls,” he said. (Nader relishes creating the impression that his phone hasn’t rung since a few minutes after George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election. On Bernie Sanders, he said, “He hasn’t returned my call in fifteen years.” In April, he published a book entitled “Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015.”) Nader continued, “There are thirty-five thousand museums in the United States and not one museum dedicated to law. There are timber and lumber museums.” He shook his head. “There are museums for every fruit and vegetable!” The Museum of American Tort Law itself lies in a prodigious tract of museums. Northwest Connecticut is home to, among many others, the Lock Museum of America, the American Clock & Watch Museum, the New England Carousel Museum, and the Vintage Radio & Communications Museum of Connecticut. The state has four different railroad museums, not including its trolley museums. Winsted, Connecticut, is Nader’s home town. As he stood in front of his museum, he pointed out a creek that runs through nearby woods.

“That’s the Mad River,” he said of the trickling creek. “In 1955, it destroyed half the town in twenty minutes. It took the buildings on Main Street and a car dealership. My mother got the Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam so it would never happen again. When Prescott Bush,” George W. Bush’s grandfather and a U.S. senator for Connecticut, “came to campaign in Winsted in 1955, he shook my mother’s hand. She wouldn’t let it go until he promised to build the dam.” Nader’s consumer-protection advocacy is the lifeblood of the museum. In the center of the museum sits a cherry-red Chevrolet Corvair, the car Nader disgraced in his 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed.” General Motors responded by trying to uncover and publicize his embarrassing secrets, allegedly going so far as to send a woman to seduce him. (He then sued the company for the tort of invasion of privacy and, as part of the settlement, made the President of G.M.

publicly apologize.) An exhibit in front of the Corvair includes a cartoon of the attempted seduction: Nader pushes a shopping cart through a supermarket as a blond woman in a tight dress winks at him. Nader, whose only earthly pleasures are apparently a comfortable pair of shoes and a sense of righteous indignation, responds with a look of suspicion. A question mark, illustrating his distrust, is drawn above his head. In an unfortunate irony for the museum, its building is located directly across the street from the local ambulance service and its fleet of ambulances. But during the opening, a group of E.M.T.s walked across the street with a copy of their training textbook for Mr. Nader to sign. “Why does a car door not fly open in a crash?” one paragraph begins. “The answer is the Nader pin (named for Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who lobbied for the device), a case-hardened pin in an automobile door. In a collision, the cams in the door locks grasp the pin to keep the door from flying open, preventing occupants from being thrown from the vehicle.

All cars sold in the United States since 1966 have the Nader pin.” He signed his name next to this paragraph and requested a copy for the museum. At the museum’s convocation, held at the local high school the day before, some seven hundred and fifty reasonable New Englanders (and a group of Chinese high-school exchange students, whom Nader briefly addressed in Chinese) squeezed into the auditorium to hear Nader rail against corporate America’s sustained attack on tort law, which came to the fore with the tort-reform movement in the nineties. The timing felt right; personal-injury lawyers have long been supplanted at the top of America’s list of public enemies by terrorists, profligate mortgage lenders, the stubborn Congress, Wall Street, and, most recently, the police. Some of the attendees had also come to hear Patti Smith, who performed two songs. Nader introduced her as the greatest living artist in America. “She won the National Book Award! That’s like winning The World Series,” he said. Bashfully, she put her face in her hands and shook her head.

After her performance, Smith explained her connection to Nader: “I learned about Ralph Nader when I was quite young, from my father. He was a strong advocate of Ralph Nader and voted for him every election. He wrote him in. He said Ralph was the man he most trusted in America. My father died in 1999, and shortly after he died I got a call from Mr. Nader’s office asking if I would participate in a rally at Madison Square Garden. It seemed like the most beautiful way to honor my father. After that, I understood why Ralph Nader meant so much to him. Every time I hear him speak, I leave uplifted and inspired. I leave with more tools for conducting myself in the world.” Smith paused. “When I was campaigning with him, we were in upstate New York. We stopped in a town and there were maybe eighteen people there. It was freezing cold, and we were in a little brick building. He stood there with his overcoat on and spoke to the people with the same vigor and indignation as he did at Madison Square Garden.” This indifference to the size of the crowd might come in handy with the American Museum of Tort Law.

“For him, there are no small audiences,” she added. Inside the museum, Nader personally escorted bewildered townspeople through the exhibits. He stopped in front of the McDonald’s Coffee Cup Case exhibit. “The lawyers didn’t tell people that McDonald’s kept their coffee that hot for commercial advantage. So it would stay hotter than Burger King’s as you drove along the highway. They’d already gotten seven hundred complaints about the burns.” Nader shook his head and looked at his guest, who nodded. He had changed one mind. He seemed satisfied. More: Ralph Nader facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Ralph Nader West's Encyclopedia of American Law COPYRIGHT 2005 The Gale Group, Inc. NADER, RALPH Considered the father of the consumer protection movement, Ralph Nader has had a great effect on U.S. law and public policy of the late twentieth century. Nader's advocacy on behalf of consumers and workers hastened into reality many features of the contemporary political landscape.

The work of this lawyer and irrepressible gadfly of the powers that be, which began in the mid-1960s, has led to the passage of numerous consumer-protection laws in such areas as automobiles, mining, insurance, gas pipelines, and meatpacking, as well as the creation of government agencies such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the environmental protection agency, and the consumer product safety commission. Nader himself has founded many well-known consumer advocacy groups, including the Public Interest Research Group, the Clean Water Action Project, the Center for Auto Safety, and the Project on Corporate Responsibility. His goal in these efforts, he has said, is "nothing less than the qualitative reform of the industrial revolution." Nader was born February 27, 1934, in Winsted, Connecticut, to Nadra Nader and Rose Bouziane Nader, Lebanese immigrants who owned and operated a restaurant and bakery. He is the youngest of five children. He attended the Gilbert School and Princeton University on scholarships. At Princeton, he entered the woodrow wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1955.

During an era of conformity, his challenges to school authorities and procedures at Princeton made him stand out. At one point, he protested the use of the poisonous insecticide dichlorodipehnyl-trichloroethane (DDT) on campus trees. "The most important office in America for anyone to achieve is full-time citizen." —Ralph Nader After Princeton, Nader attended Harvard Law School, where he edited the Harvard Law Record, and graduated with distinction in 1958. It was at Harvard that he first became interested in auto safety. After studying auto-injury cases, in 1958 he published his first article on the subject, "American Cars: Designed for Death," in the Harvard Law Record. It contained a thesis that he would bring to national attention in the mid-1960s: Auto fatalities result not just from driver error, as the auto industry had maintained, but also from poor vehicle design. Nader followed his law degree with six months of service in the Army and then a period of personal travel through Latin America, Europe, and Africa.

Upon his return, he established a private law practice in Hartford, Connecticut created an informal legal aid society, and lectured from 1961 to 1963 at the University of Hartford. Having worked at the local level for auto-safety regulations in the years subsequent to his graduation from Harvard, Nader decided to go to Washington, D.C., in 1964, where he hoped to have more influence. Through his friendship with Daniel P. Moynihan, who then was serving as assistant secretary of labor, Nader worked as a consultant at the department of labor and wrote a study that called for federal responsibility over auto safety. Nader left the Department of Labor in May 1965 and devoted himself to completing what would become his most celebrated book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. The book was published later that year and quickly became a best-seller. In it, Nader painted a grim picture of motor vehicle injuries and fatalities, noting that 47,700 people were killed in auto accidents in 1964.

He made an eloquent appeal for federal car-safety standards that would both prevent accidents from occurring and better protect passengers in the event of an accident. The book also communicated a philosophy regarding public regulation of technology that would cause him to do battle on many other issues. "A great problem of contemporary life," he wrote, "is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology." Nader has devoted his life to solving this problem. Taking some of his inspiration from the civil rights movement, Nader stood up to the most powerful companies in the world. His book targeted the safety problems of the Chevrolet Corvair, a product of the world's largest company, General Motors (GM). He convincingly marshaled evidence that the driver could lose control of the Corvair even when it was moving slowly, thus making it "unsafe at any speed." The Goliath GM did not take kindly to the stones thrown by this David, and the company began a campaign of harassment and intimidation that was intended to abort Nader's efforts. Subsequent congressional committee hearings in 1966 revealed that GM's campaign against Nader had involved harassing phone calls and attempts to lure Nader into compromising situations with women.

The company formally apologized before Congress for these tactics. Many politicians in Washington, D.C., and many Americans were receptive to Nader's ideas. In 1966, in his State of the Union address, President lyndon b. johnson called for a national highway safety act. Later that year, Congress passed the Highway Safety Act (80 Stat. 731 [23 U.S.C.A. § 401 note]) and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (80 Stat. 718 [15 U.S.C.A. § 1381 note]). The latter created a new government body, later named the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that oversaw the creation of federal safety standards for automobiles and was also empowered to authorize recalls of unsafe vehicles. In subsequent years, these laws and others for which Nader had advocated helped to bring about a marked decrease in traffic fatalities per vehicle mile. As the Washington Post exclaimed, on August 30, 1966, "[A] one-man lobby for the public prevailed over the nation's most powerful industry." Nader's first work in the area of auto safety remains his most famous consumer advocacy.

However, he has remained a tireless proponent of consumers' and workers' rights on many different fronts. Shortly after his triumph with auto regulation, Nader initiated a publicity campaign that helped to pass the Wholesome Meat Act, 81 Stat. 584, 19 U.S.C.A. 1306 (1967), which established stricter federal guidelines for meatpacking plants. By the late 1960s, he began to mobilize college students who joined him in his investigations of public policy and the effectiveness of government regulations. These young forces came to be called "Nader's Raiders," and many of them eventually rose to positions of influence in the government and in public policy organizations. By the mid-1970s, the various groups that Nader had created, including Public Interest Research Groups in many states, were doing research and financing legal action in relation to myriad public policy issues, including tax reform, consumer-product safety, and corporate responsibility. During Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980s, Nader's influence in Washington, D.C., declined, particularly as the Reagan administration dismantled much of the government regulation that Nader had helped to establish.

He did not give up his cause, however. In the late 1980s, he was again in the media spotlight, this time through his attempts to lower car-insurance rates in California and to block a proposed congressional pay increase. During the 1980s and 1990s, he also addressed the savings-and-loan bailout problem, well before it became high on the nation's agenda; opposed the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which damage the ozone layer; and worked to prevent limitations on damages that consumers may receive from corporations through civil lawsuits. Nader has run for president three times, including the 1992, 1996, and 2000 elections. In 1992, he entered the race as a write-in candidate. Four years later, he was nominated as a candidate by the green party, which has its strongest support in California. With political activist Winona LaDuke as his running mate, he ran a no-frills campaign, accepting no taxpayer money, eschewing advertising, and often traveling alone.

He earned 684,902 votes that year, including two percent of the votes in California. Nader ran again in the 2000 election. He raised more than $8 million for the campaign, some $30 million less than reform party candidate pat buchanan. Running again with LaDuke, Nader finished third in the election, with 2,882,955 votes, while Buchanan finished with 448,895. Several supporters have urged Nader to run again in the 2004 election. Nader has written and edited dozens of books during his career, including Crashing the Party, which details his run during the 2000 presidential election. Other books include The Consumer and Corporate Accountability (1973), Corporate Power in America (1973), Working on the System: A Comprehensive Manual for Citizen Access to Federal Agencies (1974), Government Regulation: What Kind of Reform? (1976), The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business (1986), and Collision Course: The Truthabout Airline Safety (1994).

He also has founded or helped to found a number of consumer and other advocacy organizations. further readings Herrnson, Paul S., and John C. Green, eds. 1998. Multiparty Politics in America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Little-field. Martin, Justin. 2002. Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus. Nader, Ralph. 2002. Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. ——. 2000. The Ralph Nader Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press. ——. 1972. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. Rev. ed. New York: Grossman. Nader, Ralph, and Wesley J. Smith. 1996. No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America. New York: Random House. cross-references Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

Ralph Nader The American social crusader and lawyer Ralph Nader (born 1934) became a symbol of the public's concern over corporate ethics and consumer interests. He inspired investigations that were intended to improve the operations of industries and government bureaus. Ralph Nader was born on February 27, 1934, in Winsted, Connecticut, to Lebanese immigrants. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1955 and then went to Harvard Law School, receiving his degree in 1958. Nader served briefly in the U.S. Army, traveled, then opened a law office in Hartford, Connecticut. He also lectured in history and government at the University of Hartford. Nader was one among many concerned for safety in auto design, but most writers and members of safety and auto associations saw the problem as one in engineering and individual preference in a consumers' market. Nader, while still at Harvard, had studied auto injury cases and was persuaded that faulty design, rather than driver incompetence, was responsible for the staggering accident statistics. He testified before state legislative committees on the subject and wrote articles for magazines.

In 1964 Nader was appointed a consultant to the Department of Labor and undertook to study auto safety in depth. He also worked with Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff's Government Operations Subcommittee, providing it with data on auto accidents. In 1965 he left the department to prepare a book on the subject. Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1965) appeared while Ribicoff's committee was holding hearings on the subject. Nader, a tall, attractive figure, testifying before the committee, became a target of auto manufacturers then coping with lawsuits by victims of auto accidents who were charging faulty car design. Although new safety laws were inevitable, their character was given new facets by Nader's revelations that he had been personally harassed and his private life investigated by detectives. The admission in March 1966 by General Motors president James M. Roche that his firm had indeed had Nader under surveillance received national television coverage and made Nader a public figure. Unsafe at Any Speed became a best seller and a factor in the legislation which in September became law.

Nader enlarged his investigations of the auto industry and the National Traffic Safety Agency, which was responsible for administering the new law. In November he sued General Motors for $26 million, alleging invasion of privacy. He also began a series of studies in various fields intended to upgrade responsible industrial production and human relations. These included safety in mines, control of oil and gas pipes dangerous to people and the environment, and justice for Native Americans. One cause which harked back to Upton Sinclair's 1905-1906 crusade was Nader's activity in behalf of what became the 1967 Wholesome Meat Act. Living austerely, working with swiftness and economy, and supplementing with foundation grants his income from royalties, article writing, and lectures, Nader attracted over a hundred young people—soon known as "Nader's Raiders"—from law schools and elsewhere. They helped him gather data about industries and government bureaus. In 1969 he organized his Center for the Study of Responsive Law.

Its work resulted in such publications as "The Nader Report" on the Federal Trade Commission (1969) and The Interstate Commerce Commission [sic]: The Public Interest and the ICC (1970), with more publications promised in all social fields. In August 1970 Nader was once more in the headlines, having been awarded $425,000 from General Motors, funds promptly put into his expanded crusade. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, Nader's public image faded from his Unsafe at Any Speed heyday. But by 1988, he successfully campaigned to roll back California car insurance rates, then ignited public opinion to block a proposed 50 percent pay hike for members of Congress. He gained notoriety in 1990 when a Forbes magazine story accused him of working together with trial lawyers for supporting Americans' right to sue. The criticism didn't deter him from other investigations, including safety flaws in the airline industry because of financial instability following deregulation. But his book, Collision Course: The Truth About Airline Safety, with Wesley J. Smith, was panned by some for questionable use of statistics.

After failing to stop the North American Free Trade Agreement (1993), he was nominated as 1996 Green Party candidate for President, winning some support in popular polls. Nader himself had summed up his philosophy: "You've got to keep the pressure on, even if you lose. The essence of the citizens' movement is persistence." Nader and his coworkers were patently in the Progressive tradition. However, their precise relation to public wants and preferences remained controversial. His critics held that he sought to impose his own standards of production rather than to help determine public interest. Nevertheless, he appeared to the public as a dedicated and valuable citizen whose full achievement was yet to be determined. Further Reading Nader and his crusades are treated in G.S. McClellan, ed., The Consuming Public (1968); G. De Bell, ed., The Voter's Guide to Environmental Politics (1970); J.G. Mitchell and C.L. Stallings, ed., Ecotactics (1970), with an introduction by Nader; J. Ridgeway, The Politics of Ecology (1970); A. A. Aaker and G. S.

Day, eds., Consumerism (1971); and L. J. White, The Automobile Industry since 1945 (1971). Articles on Nader have appeared in the Ann Arbor News (March 31, 1996); the Nation (January 8, 1996); Business Week (March 6, 1989); and Fortune (May 22, 1989). □ Cite this article The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright The Columbia University Press Ralph Nader (nā´dər), 1934–, U.S. consumer advocate and political reformer, b. Winsted, Conn. Admitted to the bar in 1958, he practiced law in Connecticut and was a lecturer (1961–63) in history and government at the Univ. of Hartford. In 1965, Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a best-selling indictment of the auto industry and its poor safety standards. Largely through his influence, the U.S. Congress passed (1966) a stringent auto safety act.

Nader founded (1969) the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, which exposed both corporate irresponsibility and the federal government's failure to enforce regulation of business. He later founded the Center for Auto Safety (with Consumers' Union ), Public Citizen, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an umbrella for many other such groups. Briefly a presidential candidate in 1992, Nader since has run as the Green party's candidate in 1996 and 2000 and as an independent in 2004 (endorsed by the Reform party but not the Green party) and 2008. In recent years he has been a severe critic of the power of multinational corporations, as in his books The Good Fight (2004) and In Pursuit of Justice (2004), and also has focused on shareholder rights and corporate management. See speeches and writings collected in The Ralph Nader Reader (2000); biographies by R. F. Buckhorn (1972), C. McCarry (1972), and P. C. Marcello (2004).

Cite this article Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History COPYRIGHT 2000 The Gale Group Inc. NADER, RALPH By the 1960s Ralph Nader (1934–), a lawyer and social crusader, had become a symbol of the public's concern about corporate honesty and consumer safety. Largely beginning with the publication of his first book in 1965, Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed In Dangers of the American Automobile, Nader started to aggressively attack the design problems of consumer products. His documentation linked faulty car designs to a staggering number of automobile accidents and legislation was enacted to protect consumers. This inspired Nader to continue his investigations and efforts at legislation, which eventually led to increased safety standards in mines, federal regulations to control environmentally hazardous oil and gas pipes, and a more intense regulation of meat quality. Ralph Nader was born in 1934 in Winsted, Connecticut, the son of immigrant Lebanese parents. He graduated with highest honors from Princeton University in 1955, and then went to Harvard Law School, where he received his degree in 1958. After briefly serving in the U.S.

Army, and following a period of personal travel, Nader opened a law office in Hartford, Connecticut. There he also joined the University of Hartford faculty, teaching history and government while pursuing his law practice. Nader became intensely interested in defective auto design largely through his law practice, where he dealt with auto injury cases. He became convinced that it was generally faulty design of automobiles, rather than driver incompetence, that led to the majority of automobile accidents. Certain that he had convincing statistics on his side, Nader began testifying before state legislative committees, and he frequently wrote magazine articles on the subject. In 1964, when Nader was appointed as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor, he undertook a major study of automobile safety. Having all the data he needed, he left the Department of Labor in 1965 to write his first book, Unsafe At Any Speed. In March 1966, General Motors president James Roche admitted that his firm had Nader under surveillance in an effort to smear Nader with possible scandal. The admission received national television coverage and Nader became a public figure.

Nader's book went on to become a national bestseller and prompted legislation proposals to regulate car safety, which ultimately became federal law in September 1965. The mood of the country during the mid-1960s was dominated by progressive ideas and politics, and it was not long after the publication of his first book that Ralph Nader came to be known as the country's leading consumer advocate. Nader had made it his life's work to defend the public's well being. His relationship to business was often adversarial and critical. He often condemned businesses as overly profit-motivated and lacking in real concern for the safety of the consumer. Nader's industry studies, including the coal mining, meat, poultry, and natural gas industries, all resulted in stricter health and safety laws. Nader also investigated hazards in the pesticide industry and alerted the public to the dangers of food additives, radiation from color television sets, and the excessive use of x-rays. In 1996 Nader ran for the U.S. presidency as the Green Party candidate, winning support in popular polls. While running for president, Nader often summarized his philosophy, insisting: "You've got to keep the pressure on, even if you lose.

The essence of the citizen's movement is persistence!" Nader was not elected president, and he continued to work for the consumer in the Progressive tradition. Though he remained a controversial figure, generally disliked by business, he was trusted by many consumers, and he persisted in his work for consumer advocacy and corporate accountability. FURTHER READING Buckhorn, Robert F. Nader: The People's Lawyer. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Burt, Dan M. Abuse of Treat: A Report on Ralph Nader's Network. Chicago : Regency Gateway, 1982. Griffin, Kelley. Ralph Nader Presents More Action for a Change. New York : Dembner Books, 1987. McCarey, Charles. Citizen Nader. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972. Turner, James S. The Chemical Feast: The Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Food Protection and the Food and Drug Administration. New York: Grossman Publishing, 1970. you've got to keep the pressure on, even if you lose. the essence of the citizen's movement is persistence!

ralph nader July 20, 1972 : U.S. government study disputes Nader’s charges against Corvair Introduction On this day in 1972, the results of a two-year study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation are released; the study concludes that 1960-63 Chevrolet Corvair models are at least as safe as comparable models of other cars sold in the same period, directly contradicting charges made by the leading consumer advocate Ralph Nader. In his bestselling 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile,” Nader had dedicated an entire chapter, titled “The One-Car Accident,” to the Corvair. Upon its debut in 1960, the Corvair won Motor Trend’s “Car of the Year” honors and became an immediate sensation thanks to its innovative design and its lightweight, air-cooled, rear-mounted aluminum engine. However, its deficiencies–including its tendency to oversteer and spin out of control in the hands of the average driver–earned almost as much attention.

After his niece was seriously injured in a Corvair, the general manager of General Motors himself threatened to resign if the car’s suspension was not redesigned (it was, in 1964). By the time the revamped Corvair was released in 1965, Nader had already published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” making 1960-63 Corvair models the target of his most outraged criticism. Sales of the Corvair swiftly dwindled, and GM withdrew the car from production in 1969. At Nader’s own urging, the U.S. government began a comparative study of the 1963 Corvair with other comparable vehicles in September 1970. The other cars used were a 1967 Corvair (featuring the newly redesigned suspension), a 1962 Ford Falcon, a 1960 Plymouth Valiant, a 1962 Volkswagen and a 1963 Renault. Nader had specifically criticized the Corvair’s handling and stability, as well as its tendency to roll over during sharp turns.

In the study’s results, released on July 20, 1972, the government stated, among other conclusions, that the Corvair’s handling in a sharp turn did not “result in abnormal potential for loss of control” and that the rollover rate for the Corvair was comparable to that of “other light domestic cars.” According to The New York Times, Nader spoke out against the study, calling it “a shoddy, internally contradictory whitewash” and accusing the Highway Traffic Administration of using “biased testing procedures and model selection.” He argued against the use of only the 1963 Corvair in the tests, which he said was significantly different from the 1960-62 models–a charge that the government disputed, saying that the first significant changes to the Corvair were made in 1964. Three independent engineers certified the government’s findings, calling them “reasonable, appropriate and sound,” and General Motors issued a statement stating that the study “confirms our position on the handling and stability characteristics of these cars.” Article Details: July 20, 1972 : U.S.

government study disputes Nader’s charges against Corvair Author July 20, 1972 : U.S. government study disputes Nader’s charges against Corvair URL

Question: Ralph Nader's 1965 book "Unsafe at Any Speed" targeted which car?
Answer: Chevrolet Corvair