As I was reading Paul Niedermeyer’s critique of Kenneth Whyte’s new anti-Nader book, I found myself wondering how the auto buff press would have responded if the book had been published in the early-70s. In those days Ralph Nader tended to be vilified for his auto safety crusade, so I imagine a goodly number of pundits might have applauded The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise (2021).
Even so, Whyte’s book is radical enough that it could have put some reviewers in a difficult position. Whyte espouses a hard-core libertarian perspective. For example, in an interview with Bloomberg, he challenged the need to establish automotive safety regulations in 1966 because “all of the concerns of the American medical establishment about the interior of Detroit automobiles had been taken care of” by 1964 (Noreca, 2021).
Whyte went on to argue that the reputation of U.S. automakers was so badly hurt by Nader’s attacks against the safety of American cars that it spurred the public’s turn to imports. “Detroit had been doing an excellent job of beating back imports up until the mid-sixties,” Whyte insisted. “Then the safety crisis hits, and within five years import automobiles went from an afterthought in the American market to almost 25% of vehicle sales” (Noreca, 2021). And that, he concluded, was the beginning of the end for GM.
How would Yates have reacted to this book?
Car and Driver writer Brock Yates might have appreciated the Nader bashing, but I could see him question Whyte’s distorted view of reality. After all, in 1968 Yates (2018) called Detroit executives “myopic” for failing to design and manufacture cars that were competitive with the imports.
Yates’ views were subsequently turned into a book that declared, “All of the government interference could have been avoided if the industry had demonstrated some social responsibility during the 1960s. . . . Bad automobiles came before bad laws” (1983, p. 254).
So would Yates have panned The Sack of Detroit for giving U.S. automotive executives a free pass on safety? Or would he have found some nice things to say and then slipped in a modest caveat or two?
Niedermeyer didn’t bother with any “yes, buts” — he quite rightly dismissed the book as “inane blather” (2021a). Perhaps just as importantly, in a follow-up post Niedermeyer (2021b) referred readers to a review of The Sack of Detroit in The New Yorker magazine.
Lemann: Whyte’s schtick is a relic of a bygone era
Nicholas Lemann (2021) used fancier language than Niedermeyer but appeared to come to a similar conclusion. He described Whyte’s perspective as “a strain of business-oriented conservatism” that “will not entertain the idea that government is capable of doing something useful, rather than simply tearing down what business has built up.” In making that case, Whyte dismissed liberals such as Nader as “grandstanders, weirdos, or hypocrites.”
In other words, Whyte idolized corporate executives and demonized liberals.
Lemann (2021) dispatched Whyte’s cartoonish argument fairly quickly by noting the gaping holes in his logic chain. For example, “how could safety regulations have destroyed General Motors but not, say, Toyota and Honda, which also had to comply with the regulations in order to sell cars in the American market?” And if the rise of the regulatory state has ruined American enterprise, how come the libertarian Cato Institute ranks the U.S. as the world’s sixth-most “economically free” country — well ahead of Japan and Germany?
Whyte’s argument is so old school that it might not gain traction among newer conservatives, Lemann (2021) implied. “The idea that Democratic Party liberalism is centrally devoted to attacking business, especially big corporations, also seems like a relic: Republicans are launching antitrust actions and attacking ‘woke corporations,’ and business sectors like Wall Street and Silicon Valley are either divided in their political loyalties or pro-Democratic.”
Nader championed a new approach to regulation
The bulk of Lemann’s essay sketched how Nader fit into the evolution of the regulatory state. Perhaps most notably, he pointed out that Nader’s focus wasn’t so much to increase regulations as to champion consumer rights. Indeed, he has sometimes favored deregulation when an agency did more to protect an industry rather than address consumers concerns.
“He wanted regulators to be fiercely oppositional,” wrote Lemann (2021). This “consumerist liberalism” inevitably created friction with more traditional Democratic politicians who sought to regulate a given industry “in a manner that represented a sort of brokered peace among the major companies within the industry, the government, and organized labor, which was the New Deal’s major supportive interest group.”
Also see ‘Why does The Daily Drive repost discredited anti-Nader rant?’
As the years went by, Nader’s distaste for conventional politics reduced his influence with liberals. Lemann presented a key moment: “During the 1980 Presidential campaign, he claimed that there was no real difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He never again had entrée into the White House.”
I would suggest that Lemann (2021) pushed his criticism of Nader too far by arguing that “consumerism did not develop the kind of formal structures that can maintain consistent pressure on government for decades.” Nader deserves credit for creating a handful of organizations that are still around and appear to engage in the “relentless bargaining and dealmaking” needed to get their policy agendas approved. However, I would agree with Lemann that Nader’s brand of consumerism has displayed a key limitation: A relative lack of concern about industry concentration.
Consumerism led to the excesses of the tech giants
Despite Nader’s declining influence in recent decades, Lemann argued that consumerism has changed the focus of American regulation. He pointed to the relative lack of antitrust regulation of the high-tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google.
“If the only test of a big corporation’s behavior is whether it provides consumers with good products, good service, and low prices — rather than how it treats its competitors or what it does with the information it gathers about its customers — the tech giants pass with flying colors,” Lemann argued. That mentality ignores the problems that can result from the rise of monopolies.
Also see ‘Antitrust regulations: Lack of enforcement fueled U.S. industry’s decline’
Is it mere coincidence that the political pressure to break up General Motors dissipated once consumerism became popular beginning in the mid-60s? Given how fearful GM executives were about the prospects of antitrust action against them, I would think that Whyte should be thanking Nader for helping GM dodge that bullet. Alas, the ideological lenses he views the world through are apparently too heavily colored for him to see that.
Whyte’s book needs more critiques by auto historians
Whyte’s book was just published but has already received mixed reviews. For example, Publisher’s Weekly (2021) concluded that “Whyte’s antipathy toward the ‘regulatory state’ and ardent sympathy for corporate executives cast doubt on the fairness of his analysis. This agenda-driven history overstates its case.”
On the other side of the coin, Kirkus Reviews (2021) has lauded The Sack of Detroit as an “authoritative contribution to business and automotive history.” Perhaps we will see similarly friendly reviews from more libertarian-leaning auto media outlets. But who knows — books don’t get the same attention as they used to. And even the legacy buff magazines seem to be making more of an attempt these days to appeal to more liberal readers.
I suspect that the biggest danger of Whyte’s book is that it rewrites automotive history in ways that younger readers might not recognize, simply because they didn’t live through the 1960s and 1970s. That’s why I think it is important for media outlets committed to serious historical research to call out The Sack of Detroit for what it is — propaganda. Thank you, Paul Niedermeyer, for getting the ball rolling.
NOTES:
Whyte’s book appears to have two titles. Amazon lists The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American. In contrast, Publisher’s Weekly shows a picture of the book’s cover with the title, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors, Its Enemies, and the End of American Enterprise.
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RE:SOURCES
- Lemann, Nicholas; 2021. “The Last Battle Over Big Business: Ralph Nader, General Motors, and what we get wrong about regulation.” The New Yorker. Posted May 31.
- Kirkus Reviews; 2021. “The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise.” Posted June 1.
- Niedermeyer, Paul; 2021a. “The Non-Book Review: Why I Won’t Be Buying “The Sack Of Detroit – General Motors and the End of American Enterprise”” Curbside Classic. Posted May 25.
- ——; 2021b. “Another Take-Down Of “The Sack Of Detroit”, This Time Much More Comprehensively – A Primer On Regulation.” Curbside Classic. Posted June 3.
- Noreca, Joe; 2021. “The Big Question: Who Wrecked the U.S. Auto Industry?” Bloomberg. Posted May 23.
- Publisher’s Weekly; 2021. “The Sack of Detroit: General Motors, Its Enemies, and the End of American Enterprise.” Posted June.
- Whyte, Kenneth; 2021. The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise. Knoft.
- Yates, Brock; 1983. The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry. Empire Books, New York, NY.
- ——; 2018. “The Grosse Pointe Myopians.” Car and Driver. Posted May 2.
Hi Steve — appreciate your attention to my book. If you’d like, I’ll send you a copy. I need people to start reading it before drawing conclusions on it from second-hand sources. I understand how you would get the idea that I’m a hard-core libertarian by reading the New Yorker, but it’s a loopy designation (Lemann wrote a book that wants Biden to usher in an aggressive new era of business regulation, and my book calls for care and caution in regulation so as not to harm important industries). One of the major points of the book is that Nader, in his haste to blame Detroit for every fatality on the roads, got in the way of regulations that would have brought down the fatality rate much more swiftly: drunk driving legislation and mandatory seat-belt regulation. The libertarians were against both of those. I’m not. I think the US should have moved on them much more quickly than it did.
Ken, thank you for stopping by. As soon as I saw your comment I assumed that Curbside Classic already had a robust debate going on with you, so I took a quick look (go here).
I’m on deadline over the next few days so only have time for an on-the-fly response. I will read your book (do not need a review copy). That said, I understand why Paul didn’t think it was worth the bother. The Bloomberg interview, despite its softball questions, makes you look like an ideologue who cherry picks facts. That sensibility is not challenged by the conclusion of a Publisher’s Weekly review.
I assume that you would disagree with the PW review that your book “overstates its case.” What I’m curious about is whether you would agree that your book is “agenda driven” and displays “antipathy toward the ‘regulatory state’ and ardent sympathy for corporate executives”?
In reading through the back-and-forth at Curbside Classic, my main goal was to get a better sense of your debating style. I’ll need to go back and take another read when I have more time, but my first reaction is that your approach has a lot in common with a trial lawyer — you are fast on your feet in marshaling facts and logic to fit your agenda.
You seem like a smart guy who has done a lot of research. Thus, it’s perplexing to me how you come to certain conclusions. For example, I have a very hard time taking seriously your contention that the Corvair was a “successful concept” and that the Falcon was a “flawed concept.” Even if the Corvair’s safety had never become a factor, in general rear-engined cars were an evolutionary dead end. They were particularly problematic at GM, which tended to place an emphasis on maximizing the economies of scale of its platforms. The Corvair was too different to survive at GM.
If I am reading you correctly, you also insist that Nader’s attacks killed the Corvair. That goes against what the auto editors of Consumer Guide have to say: “Contrary to myth, the Corvair was not scrubbed because of Ralph Nader’s attacks. Chevrolet documents examined by several writers prove that the word had been passed to start development of a front-engine, rear-drive car in 1964, before the new Corvairs hit the streets. This was likely prompted by the phenomenal success of the Mustang, introduced in the spring of that year, as it was well before Nader’s book was published.”
Perhaps I’m missing something, but in looking through your Curbside Classic comments I’m not seeing anything that directly challenges the above quote. Instead, you throw out a lot of information that’s really beside the point. That seems to be your general approach when challenged. So I can admire the depth of your research and yet not trust the solidity of your conclusions.
I assume that you’ve gone back and read the anti-auto regulation literature published in the 1960s and 1970s. Your rhetoric seems to have a lot in common with it. Indeed, my main reaction is how retro your basic argument sounds in an era where autonomous vehicles are the hot new thing.
Thanks Steve. Publisher’s Weekly dismissed the book because they think it’s got a political agenda. It’s free to do that. Kirkus, which is just as authoritative, found it persuasive and authoritative: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kenneth-whyte/the-sack-of-detroit/
The New Yorker writer didn’t like it. The Wall Street Journal thought it was great. As you’ll see here, the book has received more positive than negative reviews thus far. https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-sack-of-detroit-general-motors-and-the-end-of-american-enterprise/
As for “agenda driven” and “antipathy toward the ‘regulatory state’ and ardent sympathy for corporate executives”?
My agenda was to figure out to the best of my ability what happened in the safety crisis of the mid-sixties, and what it’s repercussions are. What I found is at odds with the conventional narrative of what happened. I knew a lot of people weren’t going to like that, that they were invested in the conventional narrative and would resist opening their minds to another point of view. But if you’re only going to write books that tell people what they already know, you’re not making a contribution to the sum of human knowledge, which is, at the end of the day, my agenda.
I can see why people think I’m sympathetic to the auto industry. I do think it was mistreated in the safety debates, and I deliberately humanized the executives and tried to understand what was going on in their minds, because they’re portrayed as complete idiots in the conventional narrative. They weren’t complete idiots. They weren’t saints either. GM, as I say in the book, was a corporate bully. It did abuse its dominance. Its attempts to dig up dirt on Nader were boneheaded. I say repeatedly in the book that big corporations have a natural tendency to mistake their business interests for the public good, which is why we need to regulate business.
As for “antipathy” to the regulatory state, I do find (especially in the US) that it is flawed and sometimes wasteful and not terribly interested in outcomes. If that’s “antipathy,” I guess I’m guilty. But I believe in state regulation. Smart regulation. And as I say in the book, I think the US was doing a good job of regulating for traffic safety until Nader came along. My evidence (and the work of people like Leonard Evans and Kevin McDonald file:///Users/kenwhyte/Downloads/Auto%20Recalls%20Article%20-%20Regulation%20-%20July%202009%20(2).pdf) raises real questions about the effectiveness of the NHTSA, both on its own terms, and in a global context. So I think I have a healthy skepticism towards regulation (and business). I don’t think it’s antipathy.
The whole point of the Corvair was to beat back imports. It wasn’t designed to compete with Ford or any other domestic automaker. It wasn’t designed as a Mustang competitor (Mustangs weren’t contemplated at the time it was designed). Other front-engine cars were later introduced as Mustang competitors. We agree on that. We also agree the Corvair was a rear-engined orphan by the mid-sixties and wasn’t going to have a long future, but that doesn’t explain why its sales held up fine, only to fall through the floor in the immediate wake of Nader’s attack.
On the topic of throwing out information that’s beside the point, I feel you car guys are all doing that with all the Mustang talk. I show that Corvair sales were fine all thru 1965, and that GM was looking at expanding Willow Run, but sales collapsed in a matter of weeks at the beginning of 1966 when the safety crusaders targetted the car. Its sales dropped further and faster than sales of any Chevrolet have ever dropped, and auto writers and GM executives (and even Ford executives!) at the time drew a direct line between the sales drop and the safety crisis, and you all start talking about how the Monza saved the Corvair’s ass and the Mustang was really popular. Interesting, but beside the point.
Finally, the anti-regulation literature of the sixties and seventies, like the auto industry’s complaints that America was sliding into socialism, is mostly silly. As I said earlier, some regulation of auto interiors was absolutely necessary, and wouldn’t have got done without government intervention. And the most important regulations of all (and the ones I support most strenuously) were the ones that impinged furthest on individual liberties.
Anyway, I do hope you read the book and I hope I haven’t just further convinced you I’m a trial lawyer (what an insult!). kw