General Motors and the End of American Enterprise
April 5, 2021
Sutherland House Books president Whyte (Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times) delivers a strident revisionist history of the 1960s consumer safety movement and its impact on the U.S. auto industry. In Whyte’s telling, automakers were targeted by a coalition of crusading intellectuals, grandstanding politicians, and ambulance-chasing lawyers bent on reducing the influence of business in American life and enhancing their own prestige. Congressional hearings convened in 1966 by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff in conjunction with consumer advocate Ralph Nader drew public attention to traffic safety and portrayed General Motors executives in particular as uninformed or uncaring about auto safety. (They were also forced to admit to hiring a private investigator to turn up dirt on Nader.) Whyte argues that the subsequent proliferation of federal regulations, along with the damage to the General Motors brand and executives’ confidence, impaired the company’s tolerance for risk and left it unable to respond effectively to foreign competition. Though some intriguing points are raised (after the Corvair was discontinued, independent studies showed it was not as dangerous or poorly designed as Nader claimed), 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.