Ralph Nader

By Tom Kirvan

“Your best teacher is your last mistake.”

So said Ralph Nader, the consumer crusader and political activist who believes that “the only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door.”

A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Nader served in the U.S. Army for six months before turning his career to becoming a lawyer dedicated to auto safety issues.

On February 10, 1966, Nader testified before Congress for the first time about unsafe practices in the auto industry, based on his ground-breaking book, “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile.”

The book, published in November 1965, accused car companies of designing vehicles with an emphasis on style and power at the expense of consumer safety. Nader focused particular attention on handling problems with the Chevrolet Corvair, a car manufactured by General Motors (GM).

Ralph Nader*

Nader’s stinging criticism was a sore point for GM officials, who reportedly sent private investigators to spy on Nader in an effort to discredit him. Nader, in turn, sued GM for harassment and invasion of privacy, winning a settlement from the giant automaker. The legal triumph also launched his book into the bestseller list and made Ralph Nader a household name.

“Turn on politics, or politics will turn on you,” Nader declared. “There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”

The author of more than a dozen books, the 91-year-old Nader has been a consumer and environmental advocate for decades, and has made several unsuccessful runs for the U.S. presidency as a third-party candidate. He was heavily criticized for siphoning away votes from Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in the hotly-contested 2000 election against Republican George W. Bush.

“This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies,” Nader insisted.

*Don LaVange (https://www.flickr.com/photos/wickenden/), CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons