Public Citizens

June 7, 2021
In this enlightening account, Yale history professor Sabin (Crude Politics) details how left-wing efforts in the 1960s and ’70s to reform “the cozy post-World War II alliance between government, business, and labor” helped pave the way for Reagan-era deregulation. Sabin details how public interest advocates such as Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Ralph Nader led crusades against government agencies for failing to properly regulate private industry and undertaking infrastructure projects that threatened the environment. By the time Jimmy Carter came to office in 1976, public advocacy groups and environmental law firms such as the National Resources Defense Council had become a potent part of the government regulatory process, filing lawsuits to halt construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline and other development projects. But tensions soon emerged between reformers outside the new administration and those within it, who resented the relentless criticism. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 unleashed an unprecedented assault on regulatory agencies from within the government, eventually pushing liberal activists to soften their attacks on the administrative state. Sabin crafts a coherent historical narrative out of the alphabet soup of government agencies and public interest groups, and sheds light on major developments in American politics. This deep dive delivers plenty of rewards.

August 1, 2021

In this wide-ranging study, Sabin (history, Yale Univ.) explores the rise of the public interest movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The book focuses on Ralph Nader, the crusader for auto safety, who Sabin argues was the catalyst for other citizen advocacy groups that changed the way government worked and the way people viewed government. Nader and his allies had a major impact on the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act and guided consumer-focused litigation through the 1970s. However, Sabin writes, Nader had an "ambivalent relationship" with the Democratic Party; the Reagan years energized the progressive movement, and Nader became focused on finding "alternative strategies for building citizen and consumer power." By then, Nader was less central in the public interest movement. In the book's epilogue, Sabin briefly considers Bill Clinton and Al Gore's plans to reinvent the federal government, which resulted in political stalemate. After calling for a new political party in the 1980s, Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and, perhaps more disruptively, in 2000. VERDICT This important book will be useful for students of late 20th-century politics and society, and of the legacy of public interest movements.--Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

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Starred review from June 15, 2021
A focused study of 1960s and '70s American politics and the effects of the public interest liberalism that emerged. Most histories of this period explain that the liberal heirs of the New Deal overwhelmingly supported government programs. This may be the popular view of events, but history professor Sabin, who directs the Yale Environmental Humanities Program, tells a different and disturbing story. Many readers only recall the vivid civil rights and anti-war campaigns of the era, but the author emphasizes equally influential--and liberal--movements that attacked government itself. He reminds us that Rachel Carson's bombshell, Silent Spring (1962), blamed the massive damage caused by insecticides on dimwitted bureaucrats who were supposed to be "looking after things." In the same vein, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) attacked government planners who bulldozed vibrant neighborhoods in favor of immense, sterile landscapes. Sabin directs much of his attention to Ralph Nader, whose 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, criticized government traffic safety agencies, entirely subservient to an auto industry that denied responsibility for injuries and deaths from accidents and proclaimed that driver education was the key to saving lives. Nader devoted the rest of his life to denouncing the government, becoming a major figure in the rise of public interest law. The Clean Air Act (1970) and Clean Water Act (1972) would have been weaker if Nader's activists had not passed over Republicans and polluters and attacked liberal Democrats for their modest commitment. Stung, they denounced Nader but passed laws with more teeth. Despite approving these liberal movements, Sabin comes to the grim conclusion that "Nader and his fellow activists helped destroy a political economic system that served the working class" and "helped fuel a corrosive antigovernment legacy." That may be a tough pill to swallow for progressive activists today, but the author's cogent history is timely and likely to be enduring. An insightful and squirm-inducing account of how the good guys won and then lost.

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