Ralph Nader Interview (page: 7 / 8) Consumer Crusader	Print Interview

What excited you so much about the books you read as a kid?

Ralph Nader: Well, I was very interested in books that detailed injustice, and how people who are underdogs were mistreated, throughout history, whether they were peasants, or workers in the industrial plants a hundred years ago. And these books exposed the brutality or injustice or unfairness that powerful political and business and other interests dealt out to workers and some children -- child labor. These kids would be working in these industrial plants in England and the United States, sometimes 16 hours a day, six days a week, impairing their health. And the books usually analyzed why these things occurred and what reforms needed to be made. So I was very fascinated by it, just as a person my age, at age 11 or 12, would be reading detective stories, or the stories of explorers and the dangers they were exposed to as they discovered continents. I would be fascinated by the muckrakers, who were called muckrakers by President Theodore Roosevelt, because these were the reporters who would rake the muck and expose a bad situation in government or business.

Eleven and twelve year olds can read that stuff and say, "Boy, I'm glad that's not me." You had a different response. Why did these events and these people and this writing so move you?

Ralph Nader: That's what life was all about: the struggle for decency and fairness and opportunity and justice. We were taught that a long time ago that that's what's important in life. It doesn't mean you don't go out and play ball or ride a bicycle or have fun. It means that the reason why you can sit there in a living room in a nice town is because there were people before you who paid some attention to reducing or eliminating injustice in society and we have the same obligation to do that for our and future generations. We were taught that indirectly by our parents and our friends as small children.
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What kind of reactions have you heard during your career from your old classmates from Princeton or Harvard, people who clearly went in different directions?

Ralph Nader: They couldn't understand what I was doing. When I was in Washington in the early 60s, and I was talking to some of my old classmates about auto safety, and I was going to try to get General Motors and other companies to adhere to mandatory safety standards, they thought I was a front for the CIA! (Laughs) They thought it was just a cover story! But they realized later that it was a genuine issue.

They couldn't believe that their classmate was doing this kind of thing?

Ralph Nader: No, they couldn't, but now they're in their mid-50s, they are beginning to want to do the same thing. They've raised their children, they have some financial security, and they are looking back saying, "I want to do what I want to do for once." And I think there are a lot of problems in the country, and I want to try to work on one or more of them.

We actually have set up a center for civic leadership in Princeton, supported by our class (the Princeton class of '55) precisely because more and more members of the class, as they went into their 50s, began to realize that there were important things they hadn't been doing. They wanted to make up for it by contributing to this society. Now that they had attained some measure of influence and skill, they wanted to give something back. Organizing alumni classes is a great frontier of expanding the citizen movement in the country. We all knew each other when we were 17 and 18, and when you know each other at that age, you don't take any malarkey from one another. You can be very candid with on another, and you are not posturing, because you knew each other so many years ago. I think alumni classes are cohesive associations that can do wonderful things as they move into their 35th reunion and on.

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