Did the battle over automotive safety topple General Motors?

Canadian journalist Kenneth Whyte’s new book, “The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise,” is a close examination of the impact of consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his bestselling book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Whyte believes its effect on GM in the mid-’60s led to the eventual decline of the automotive behemoth.

“Things were going in the right direction for GM – as it pertains to safety — when Ralph Nader came along,” Whyte said. 

Whyte contends that GM understood the need to compete with the emerging import market of small cars and had been investing heavily in the overseas market when a campaign to regulate safety in the auto industry was kickstarted by Nader, Congress and a cadre of safety experts. Until then, safety experts primarily blamed drivers and bad roads for accidents, but a growing body of evidence began to show that the second violent collision of drivers and passengers with the interior of their automobile was the real culprit in the growing number of deaths.

After World War II, the auto industry was riding high. It contributed one in six of the nation’s jobs and one in five of its retail dollars, while GM was directly employing nearly 1 million workers. Although often misinterpreted and misattributed, the book quotes Charles E. Wilson, who was nominated for secretary of defense by President Eisenhower in 1953. In the confirmation hearing, Wilson, the former president of GM, told the committee, “For years, I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of our country.” 

A little more than 13 years later, GM executives would be in front of another congressional committee led by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, defending themselves against the claim they made unsafe cars. Nader — who became a self-trained expert on auto safety and, unbeknownst to most at the time, was working hand-in-glove with the committee — was not the federal payroll and, on the surface, had no formal role. 

Whyte describes how Nader, hidden behind a door, would pass notes to the committee.

Whyte said he reviewed nearly 6,000 pages of testimony and concluded that GM was its own worst enemy. He also makes the case that Nader “wasn’t who he appeared to be.”

“He wasn’t a crusading journalist. He was an activist who was working closely with government and with the tort industry,” Whyte said. 

Following the hearings, Nader would use all his research to pen “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which itself would become the topic of a later hearing.

The meat of that hearing centered on the instability of the Corvair, a smaller, sporty rear engine vehicle designed to compete with the rising tide of imports. Whyte explains that GM saw the argument more as a PR battle and set out to diminish the importance of Nader and “Unsafe at Any Speed.” 

In the chapter titled “Exposed,” Whyte details how GM hired private investigators to find ways to discredit Nader. At the time, Nader went so far as to allege that GM, through its investigators, set up a “honey trap” to snare him. Whyte calls GM’s action boneheaded. Whyte said he could find no corroborating evidence that happened in any of the material he reviewed.

However, it went public that GM put Nader under investigation, enraging Congress and those who were pushing for regulatory oversight. Ultimately, more strict safety standards were enacted.

Early in his book, Whyte writes that by 1966, “the time was right for a well-educated, well placed, suit and tie wearing band of crusaders united by a determination to knock automakers and the whole of corporate American down a peg. Preaching new theories and belittling the ideas, evidence and experience of others, they brought the greatest industrial enterprise in human history to its knees.”

Nader’s book was one of several published in an era that could be classified as anti-establishment. Other popular books at the time included Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Jane Jacob’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” and Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death.”

“There is a ton of mythology about the U.S. auto industry — everything from how the Mustang killed GM to the impact of fuel-guzzling cars –— but we don’t realize how devastating the safety battle was.”

Whyte provides a different point of view in his book about why GM faltered. He attributes its decline in part to the “monastic” life of the chief executives, who dressed alike, lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same churches and dined together in corporate dining rooms that were off limits to everyone else.

Whyte said he was inspired by his work with a Canadian telecom company.

“I was amazed at how both sides talked past each other. Something similar was going on in the automotive industry,” he said.