INTRODUCTION
“One guy. One guy and a fish.”
In a very real sense Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner haven’t done anything new. In this sense they are just old-time muckrakers carrying on, in America’s best national tradition, the literature of exposure.
However as we look to the matter more closely we see that this view of Nader and Commoner obscures much that is important about their work. Nader and Commoner differ in profound ways from the muckrakers of the first period, 1902 through 1912.
True, the early muckrakers treated many of the same subjects that Nader and Commoner have written about in recent years. For example, with only minor changes this description of the early muckrakers might be applied to Nader and Commoner (and their associates):1
The muckrake touched practically every phase of American life; nothing was immune from it. The flaws were photographed, analyzed, pinpointed. The men engaged in muckraking were bold. Their accusations were specific, direct. Names were named. They pointed to sore spots in business, in politics. They found food adulteration, unscrupulous practices in finance and insurance companies, fraudulent claims for and injurious ingredients in patent medicines, rape of natural resources, bureaucracy, prostitution, a link between government and vice. Prison conditions were exposed as were newspapers and their domination by advertisers. The church was not spared from the muckrakers’ probing. . . . The evils of child labor were exposed.
If it is true, as Harvey Swados has said, that “The [main] issues which exercised these [early muckraking] writers were three: corruption in government, the irresponsibility of the trusts, and the exploitation of women and children,” 2 then we can continue to draw close parallel between Nader and Commoner and the early muckrakers. The differences are in emphasis: Nader gives prime focus to the trusts (now called oligopolistic multinational corporations) and the ways in which these corporations have corrupted government regulatory agencies and now seem to exploit almost everyone.
Both Nader and Commoner share with their forerunners a strong moral commitment. Mr. Nader has described his approach to consumer problems as essentially “ethical” rather than “ideological”3 and Dr. Commoner has discussed the matter at some length:4
In recent times the gap between traditional moral principles and the realities of modern life has become so large as to precipitate, beginning in the Catholic church, and less spectacularly in other religious denominations, urgent demands for renewal—for the development of statements of moral purpose which are directly relevant to the modern world. But in the modern world the substance of moral issues cannot be perceived in terms of the casting of stones or the theft of a neighbor’s ox. The moral issues of the modern world are embedded in the complex substance of science and technology. The exercise of morality now requires the determination of right between the farmers whose pesticides poison the water and the fishermen whose livelihood may thereby be destroyed. . . .The ethical principles involved are no different from those invoked in earlier times, but the moral issues cannot be discerned unless the new substance in which they are expressed is understood. And since the substance of science is still often poorly perceived by most citizens, the technical content of the issues of the modern world shields them from moral judgment. [Emphasis added.]
As is obvious, Dr. Commoner’s analysis leads him to try to bring information to the public. Thus Dr. Commoner is known as the father of the “scientific information movement” (which is discussed below). He has said that the movement aims to create “the Jeffersonian concept of an educated, informed electorate . . .”5 and he has said, “I am fully convinced that the citizen can and must study and come to understand the underlying facts about modern technological problems.”6
For his part Mr. Nader has continually stressed the need for giving citizens access to information. Toward this end one of the earliest task forces of “Nader’s raiders” produced a critique of shortcomings in the federal Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Reacting to this early report, the Washington Post noted that Nader’s people had “rendered a real and vital public service, a service that should have been rendered by a free press.”7
This passage implies one of the signal differences between Mr. Nader and his muckraker predecessors. The early muckrakers were members of the American press corps. They published their investigative reports and their indictments in the then-new mass-circulation magazines (McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, Hampton’s, American, Everybody’s). As muckrakers they were frequently employed by the magazines in which their work appeared. In contrast, the new muckrakers are independent. The new muckrakers supplement the press corps. We shall return to this important point below.
Probably the key difference between the new muckrakers and the old can be found in the analysis, which underlies the work of the new muckrakers. Both Dr. Commoner and Mr. Nader are convinced, thoroughly convinced, that we have about one generation -- 25 years—to solve our major problems. If we fail, the species homo sapiens may well be doomed to extinction from the earth. No muckraker between 1902 and 1912 could say, as Dr. Commoner has said, “The time is at hand to devote the wisdom of science and the power of technology not simply to the welfare but to the survival of man.”8 No earlier muckraker could say, as Dr. Commoner has said, “Thus, I believe that we have, as of now, a single decade in which to design the fundamental changes in technology that we must put into effect in the 1980s—if we are to survive.”9
This sense of urgency suffuses all of Mr. Nader’s activities; he says that he, personally, no longer can justify taking time out for hikes or for any sort of recreation.10 He works a 100-hour week himself (and accepts nothing less than a 70-hour week from his associates). He lives in an $80-a-month room in northwest Washington, D.C. and directs most of his diverse activities from a payphone in the hallway. He does not own an automobile. In this sense, Mr. Nader lives an alternative to the affluent “system” and thus escapes the criticism which Lewis Mumford leveled (with perspicuity) against the old muckrakers: “Life was more complicated in America but not more significant; life was richer in material goods but not in creative energies. These eager and relentless journalists were unaware of the necessity for establishing different kinds of goods than the existing ones; they had no notion of other values, other modes, other forms of activity than those practiced by the society around them.”11 Mr. Nader has some idea of other modes and he lives them.
A more immediately important distinction between the old muckrakers and the new is their differing relations to the press. The old muckrakers published their work mainly in a group of magazines which built their circulations upon the salability of the expose’. This meant that the magazines (and the muckraking writers who depended upon them for sustenance) were vulnerable to focused pressures from their opposition.
Upton Sinclair, reminiscing upon the time of the great muckrakers, said that some of the magazines, such as Everybody’s and American, disappeared because banks cut off their lines of credit.12 In a more complex analysis Professor Jacob Sher of Northwestern University attributes the end of the muckraking period to four causes: (1) WW I turned the public’s attention from national to foreign affairs; (2) Wilson’s New Freedom put into practice (or at least convincing preachment) many of the reforms which seemed to hold promise of relieving the worst social evils the muckrakers had revealed; (3) advertisers withdrew from muckraking magazines, thus depriving the muckraking writers of their base of support; and (4) the era of the press agent emerged with Rockefeller’s employment of Ivy Lee and thenceforward made it possible for big business “to unsell the public on almost anything”.13
This last point is the most telling, in this writer’s opinion. The point has been emphasized by Professor Eric Goldman of Princeton University:14
Perhaps the most helpful point I could make about the muckrakers is their critically important role in discovering “publicity.” . . .Up to the early 1900’s, most Americans, including much of American industry, considered publicity a bad thing. The idea was to operate in secrecy. Then T.R. led in discovering publicity as a political weapon. The muckrakers used publicity as an anti-business weapon and industry, in direct reply to the muckrakers, began to feel that if publicity could be used against them, it could also be used for them. Hence the birth of the whole public relations industry.
In contrast to the original muckrakers the new muckrakers do not depend upon any single group of publications for their support. Dr. Commoner and his associates in St. Louis started a small magazine, Nuclear Information, in 1958; it has since changed names twice, first to Scientist and Citizen, finally to Environment, and its circulation has grown steadily (to the present 25,000 paid subscribers). But only a handful of editors make their living putting out Environment and it is not a mass-circulation magazine. In addition, Environment accepts no advertising. Basically Environment is subsidized by philanthropic foundations, and by research monies, which trickle down to it through the federally supported scientific research industry.
Mr. Nader for his part has started no new publications whatever. He apparently perceived early in his public career (which can be dated from the 1965 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed) that the so-called establishment media (the major east-coast newspapers and the national wire services) would pick up and publicize almost anything he had to say if he would just give his words a bold, factually-accurate tenor and a dramatic inflection. Thus Mr. Nader casts his reports in terms which fit the current definitions of “news” and he makes headlines on the east coast an average of three or four times each week. The major media are starved for investigative reports based on solid, factual data; they haven’t the money or the technical expertise to produce the reports themselves but they’re perfectly willing to take Mr. Nader’s work and fill their columns with it. Thus Mr. Nader gets his ideas before the public and runs little risk of being cut off by rancorous advertisers or banks.
Dr. Commoner has apparently come to share Mr. Nader’s perception of the press. In a recent interview with a radical young journalist, Dr. Commoner said, “You can set up, let’s say, in Berkeley, with people ranging from the high schools right up to the professors, you can set up a vast, well equipped and supplied organization for describing the California environment. Just think of it. You could be grinding out data day after day, issuing reports that will stand the newspapers on their heads. That’s what I would call taking power.”15
Issuing reports that stand the newspapers on their heads has been Mr. Nader’s chief strategy since 1965 when he published Unsafe at Any Speed. This impeccably documented expose’ revealed that the nation’s largest manufacturing firm (General Motors) had been operating for years almost without regard for the precepts of fairness, safety and service to the consuming public.
The final passage in Unsafe at Any Speed gives us the flavor of Nader’s language (and nearly mirrors the ideas that Dr. Commoner expressed [above] regarding morality and technology):16
The gap between existing design and attainable safety [in American automobiles] has widened enormously in the post-war period. As these attainable levels of safety rise, so do the moral imperatives to use them. For the tremendous range of opportunity of science-technology—by providing easier and better solutions—serves to clarify ethical choices and to ease the conditions for their exercise by the manufacturers. There are men in the automobile industry who know both the technical capability and appreciate the moral imperatives. But their timidity and conformity to the rigidities of the corporate bureaucracies have prevailed. When and if the automobile is designed to free millions of human beings from unnecessary mutilation, these men, like their counterparts in universities and government who knew of the suppression of safer automobile development yet remained silent year after year, will look back with shame on the time when common candor was considered courage.
Unsafe at Any Speed turned out to be the opening shot in what has become the most significant attack ever launched against the multinational corporations. The book succeeded spectacularly for Mr. Nader in at least three ways. First, it gave Mr. Nader sufficient funds to begin establishing an independent organization to investigate consumer problems. Second, the book succeeded in getting America’s largest manufacturer to withdraw one of its automobiles from production (the Corvair), thus indicating that Nader had, in fact, been right and that the manufacturer—General Motors, with gross sales in 1969 of $24 billion—the nation’s largest automobile manufacturer had been wrong, culpably wrong, guilty of irresponsible, dishonest, venal behavior at the expense of the health, the safety and the purse of Mr. and Mrs. American Housefamily. Third, the book succeeded for Mr. Nader because GM reacted to Nader’s attack by ordering Nader followed and harassed, thus focusing attention on the corporation as Goliath attacking virtue. Nader says he has succeeded at least partly because America is “starved for acts of the individual in a conflict situation outside the sports arena.”17
Mr. Nader’s first team of “raiders” numbered only six, and they took on the job of studying a major Washington bureaucracy, the Federal Trade Commission. These first six (in the summer of 1968) set the pattern for subsequent teams of “raiders,” investigating the agency’s activities with a thoroughness that stunned the bureaucrats. When the first taskforce report was issued, it spared nothing and no one. It described the agency’s ineptitude, timidity, venality, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness. It called for a total revamping of agency practices and personnel.