Unsafe at Any Speed-Ralph Nader
https://youtu.be/NI9Hq0_Mhy0
Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” Links to an external site.-History.orgOn November 30, 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 Links to an external site.) 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.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
The Story of Silent Spring Links to an external site.- NRDC.orgHow a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind's impact on nature.
Although they will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots, or stormy political campaigns, books have at times been the most powerful influencer of social change in American life. Thomas Paine's Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the Revolution; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused the North's antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War; and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity's faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement.
Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for FWS, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.
"Things go out of kilter"
Carson was happiest writing about the strength and resilience of natural systems. Her books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us (which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks), and The Edge of the Sea were hymns to the interconnectedness of nature and all living things. Although she rarely used the term, Carson held an ecological view of nature, describing in precise yet poetic language the complex web of life that linked mollusks to seabirds to the fish swimming in the ocean's deepest and most inaccessible reaches.
DDT, the most powerful pesticide the world had ever known, exposed nature's vulnerability. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once. Developed in 1939, it first distinguished itself during World War II, clearing South Pacific islands of malaria-causing insects for U.S. troops while being used as an effective delousing powder in Europe. Its inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize.
When DDT became available for civilian use in 1945, there were only a few people who expressed second thoughts about this new miracle compound. One was nature writer Edwin Way Teale, who warned, "A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. Ninety percent of all insects are good, and if they are killed, things go out of kilter right away." Another was Carson, who wrote to Reader's Digest to propose an article about a series of tests on DDT being conducted not far from where she lived in Maryland. The magazine rejected the idea.
Silent Spring
Thirteen years later, in 1958, Carson's interest in writing about the dangers of DDT was rekindled when she received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts bemoaning the large bird kills that had occurred on Cape Cod as the result of DDT sprayings. The use of the pesticide had proliferated greatly since 1945, and Carson again tried, unsuccessfully, to interest a magazine in assigning her the story of its less desirable effects. By 1958, Carson was a best-selling author, and the fact that she could not obtain an assignment to write about DDT is indicative of how heretical and controversial her views on the subject must have seemed. Having already amassed a large quantity of research on the subject, however, Carson decided to go ahead and tackle the issue in a book.
Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months—not only the targeted insects but countless more—and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed animals and had contaminated the world's food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life—from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children—had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.
First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.
Vindication
Her careful preparation, however, had paid off. Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which ones were dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the manufacturers.
The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined—the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, the deaths of entire species—were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born.
Carson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
One of the landmark books of the 20th century, Silent Spring's message resonates loudly today, even several decades after its publication. And equally inspiring is the example of Rachel Carson herself. Against overwhelming difficulties and adversity, but motivated by her unabashed love of nature, she rose like a gladiator in its defense.
3.1 Assigned Videos- Interest Groups
Typology of Public Policy Movement
Distributed Costs
Concentrated Costs
Distributed Benefits
Majoritarian politics
Entrepreneurial politics
Concentrated Benefits
Client politics
Interest-group politics
Majoritarian politics pit the general public against itself, as it considers or reconsiders programs with broadly distributed costs and benefits. For example, these politics partly control automobile pollution; reduction of gasoline consumption and exhaust pollutants through car pooling and low speeds gives everyone cleaner air, and inconvenience.
Majoritarian politics are fought out through broad public debate. They address basic ideological beliefs and occur in the visible institutions of governments, particularly elections and legislative debates. They engage the political parties and are addressed by presidents, governors, and mayors. Special interest groups use mass communication to appeal for support. These politics build upon, and build, basic public values and attitudes. Debate may end with a resolution marking a shift in community values, for example, to accept pollution control as a legitimate constraint on development.
Disease prevention and health promotion often involve benefits and costs which are broadly distributed, but they do not necessarily generate majoritarian politics. The public may be more aware of the costs than the benefits, so that health professionals must carry the burden to expand public appreciation of the benefits. If professionals have only limited success in sharing their convictions, for example in immunizations, the politics approach client politics, wherein the costs are widely shared but the benefits more narrowly distributed. These contests may be reshaped, however, by actual or perceived health disasters, such as Three Mile Island, in which public opinion is so strongly shifted that costs become secondary, broadly felt fears command the public's attention, and politics fit the entrepreneurial model.
Discussion Question
- Discuss the impact of Nader's efforts to make cars safe. This is an open ended question as you may comment on any/all safety innovations that are due to Nader?
- What do you believe was Carson's impact on the environmental movement as a result of her book and efforts?
- How are Nader and Carson Policy Entrepreneurs? Who pays for these regulations? Who benefits?