The Big Question: Who Wrecked the U.S. Auto Industry?
A Q&A with author Kenneth Whyte on how Ralph Nader brought down General Motors — and poisoned the American public’s view of business forever.
The Big Three ain’t what they used to be.
Photographer: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images North America
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve today’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been condensed and edited.
Joe Nocera: Over the last six decades, America’s Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — have seen their share of the U.S. market decline from more than 90% to under 50% today. Your book is about what happened to General Motors in the mid-1960s, and how that not just damaged the American automobile industry but set the U.S. on an anti-business path from which it has never completely recovered. I guess if I were to sum up your thesis in one sentence, it would be, “It’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.”
Kenneth Whyte, author, “The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise:” Something semi-disastrous happened to General Motors in the sixties and its repercussions are still with us today. Ralph Nader was at the fore of that phenomenon, but he wasn’t alone. He was part of an intellectual movement that was interested in reducing, if not denigrating, the role of business in American life. He was closely associated with people in the higher reaches of the American government, along with the tort industry and a lot of intellectuals sympathetic to an anti-business message. And the fact that they were all in this together created the momentum for what befell Detroit.