No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality

By Paul Adler

Amid the mass protests of the 1960s, another, less heralded political force arose: public interest progressivism. Led by activists like Ralph Nader, organizations of lawyers and experts worked "inside the system." They confronted corporate power and helped win major consumer and environmental protections. By the late 1970s, some public interest groups moved beyond U.S. borders to challenge multinational corporations. This happened at the same time that neoliberalism, a politics of empowerment for big business, gained strength in the U.S. and around the world.

No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close. NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen helped forge a progressive coalition that lobbied against the emerging neoliberal world order and in favor of what they called "fair globalization." From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, these groups have made a profound mark.

This book tells their stories while showing how public interest groups helped ensure that a version of liberalism willing to challenge corporate power did not vanish from U.S. politics. Public interest groups believed that preserving liberalism at home meant confronting attempts to perpetuate conservative policies through global economic rules. No Globalization Without Representation also illuminates how professionalized organizations became such a critical part of liberal activism—and how that has affected the course of U.S. politics to the present day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812299663

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No Globalization Without Representation

POWER, POLITICS, AND THE WORLD

Series editors: Christopher Dietrich, Jennifer Mittelstadt, and Russell Rickford

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

NO GLOBALIZATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

U.S. Activists and World Inequality

Paul Adler

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5317-7

For My Parents

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Prologue. The Good Parts of the System to Beat the Bad

PART I. DON’T BUY NESTLÉ

1.  Of Big Business and Baby Bottles

2.  A Strong Boycott Is One Way

3.  From Grassroots Boycotters to Global Advocates

4.  Evolving Global Responses

PART II. A NEW INTERNATIONAL REGULATORY ORDER?

5.  You Must Keep the Struggle Visible

6.  A Mixture of Relief, Anger, Joy, Sadness

7.  Our New Way of Global Organizing

8.  The Limitations of Victories

PART III. REVOLUTION WITHIN THE WORLD CAPITALIST SYSTEM

9.  Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll

10.  What’s This GATT?

11.  An Independent Voice on Behalf of the Majority

12.  A Coalescing Coalition

PART IV. WE FOUGHT BIG AGAINST NAFTA AND LOST

13.  What Do You All Export?

14.  New Schisms and New Alliances

15.  Our Job Is to Get Him to Bend in Our Direction

16.  NAFTA Is the Future

PART V. REBUILDING TO VICTORY IN THE 1990S

17.  We Are All Asking, Where Are We?

18.  Exposing the Entire Free-Trade Model

19.  Derailing Fast Track

20.  We Seem to Be Winning

PART VI. YOU MUST COME TO SEATTLE!

21.  Everybody Clear Your Calendars

22.  Shut Down the WTO!

23.  Battling in Seattle

24.  A Messy Miracle

Coda. A Multiheaded Swarm of a Movement

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

A few blocks from the imposing dome of the U.S. Capitol lies a nondescript, grey, three-story building tucked among restaurants, coffee shops, and offices. From outside, this edifice’s occupants seem clear—the Hunan Dynasty restaurant and a Wells Fargo branch. Look closer and you’ll notice a small, golden plaque to the right of a door, etched with the words Public Citizen. Walk in and climb to the top of the stairs and you’ll find the cramped offices of a decades-old, liberal advocacy nonprofit, full of frenzied, often young, staffers. Walking through the halls, you’ll see people diving into complex public policy documents, writing press releases, planning protests, editing grant applications, and more. From 2005 to 2007, I was one of them, working as an entry-level staffer at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division.

During my time there, amid the chaos, I encountered something unexpected. Every week, we gathered for our staff meetings in a long, rectangular fishbowl of a room, inexplicably raised several feet off the floor. On the surface, these meetings were what you might expect, filled with reports about upcoming free-trade bills and strategy brainstorms. What surprised me was how staff meetings also acted as history seminars. These gatherings offered as good an advertisement as I can imagine for why remembering and grappling with the past is important—from discussions of long-ago fights with other progressive groups to analyses of legislators’ voting records to summaries of social struggles from around the world.

Yet, as much as I learned, many questions remained only partially answered. How did the corporate or neoliberal globalization we opposed come into being and evolve? What reasons accounted for progressives’ marginal status in the U.S. political scene? Why did various intra-activist tensions exist? And what roles did the small nonprofits that we (and so many of our dearest friends) were throwing our energies into have to play in the great debates of the moment?

My path to working at Public Citizen (and writing this book) began in the early 2000s, when agitation against neoliberal globalization occupied a central place in national and global politics. In the United States, considerations about these issues peaked in the last days of 1999. During the Battle in Seattle, forty thousand demonstrators took over the streets, helping to catalyze the implosion of a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Seattle protests garnered an avalanche of media coverage and generated intense public discussion and activist mobilization.

To the extent a mainstream public memory of this upsurge exists in the United States, it recalls Seattle as the beginning of a blip of activism that ended on September 11, 2001.¹ What mostly remains are faint memories and lingering questions. To cite but one example, most activist movements have a few widely used names (civil rights movement, labor movement, etc.) Yet, to this day, no single name identifies the groups that fought—and, in many cases, continue to confront—institutions such as the WTO or deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Were they antiglobalization? Pro–fair trade? Members of the Global Justice movement? Parts of the alter-globalization movement?²

This book attempts to lift some of this haze by telling a longer history of challenges to late twentieth-century globalization. To be clear, this book is not a chronicle of the entirety of the mobilizations, organizations, and movements that, even just in the United States of America, took on global neoliberalism. Rather, this work focuses on one important node of that opposition within the United States—the history of what I call public interest progressivism.³ Put succinctly, public interest progressive groups were (and are) professionalized advocacy nonprofits. They rely on lobbying, lawsuits, and other insider tactics to bring about social change. Like their predecessors in the Progressive and New Deal eras, they believe that the private sector’s pursuit of profit causes social ills, from unsafe products, to a degraded environment, to economic and democratic inequalities. Public interest progressives, who hit the heights of their influence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, aimed to rejuvenate the regulatory state and revive U.S. liberalism.

Accounts of public interest progressives are relatively absent from histories of late twentieth-century U.S. politics.⁴ To find them, one has to look to histories of particular issue-based mobilizations, such as consumer rights or environmentalism.⁵ However, as this book shows, public interest progressivism deserves study as a coherent and influential policy and political formation.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, public interest progressives became key critics of the political and economic changes sweeping the globe. We will start this story in the 1970s, when activists such as socialist feminist Leah Margulies joined forces with two Midwest farm boys, Doug Johnson and Mark Ritchie, to ignite a global boycott of Nestlé. The impulse to tackle global inequalities continued through the 1980s, as policy intellectuals such as John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies grappled with the rise of neoliberalism. These waves of advocacy grew stronger in the 1990s, when people such as Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, an energetic lawyer and activist, mobilized against what they saw as the deprivations of a new era of globalization.

In focusing on the history of dissenters against the policies of late twentieth-century economic globalization, public interest progressives were crucial not only for their own actions but for their roles as conveners of larger coalitions. They helped build alliances of labor unions, farmers’ groups, grassroots activists, and others, creating what I call the fair globalization coalition. I use the term fairness to invoke the ultimately reformist politics of most of these groups.⁶ Calling this formation a coalition rather than a movement is also deliberate. Most of the organizations involved did not arise to confront global neoliberalism. From trade unionists to farmers to advocacy nonprofits, these groups tended to divide their attentions among many issues. With the brief (and complex) exception of the period between the Battle in Seattle and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, they did not possess the high degree of shared collective identity that many scholars argue defines social movements, such as labor or feminism.⁷ Rather, fair globalizers formed a coalition because they shared common enemies, coordinated on distinct campaigns, and created organizations to tie disparate constituencies together.

Highlighting public interest progressives does not diminish the importance of other U.S.-based advocates and activists in recent globalization struggles. Other parts of the wider set of mobilizations against neoliberalism have, and continue to receive, substantial scholarly attention. This work builds upon these already rich and growing literatures concerning political forces, such as organized labor and grassroots leftists and radicals.⁸

Understanding the fair globalization coalition requires examining what animated their activism. This necessitates engaging with ongoing debates about globalization. Examining the coalition’s mobilizations reinforces the argument that, rather than some uncontrollable force of nature, globalization is a set of processes shaped by and (at least) partially governed by institutions. As Mark Ritchie, an activist whose career spans the entirety of this book’s story, declared at the Seattle protests, We now have come to understand that the need for global governance is a necessary topic for us in confronting globalization.⁹

Governance can be defined as the web of laws, norms, and institutions that set the rules and establish the processes molding how societies function. While the idea of governance connotes government, as political scientist Mark Bevir notes, the term applies more broadly. Multilateral institutions (such as the United Nations and World Bank), private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also participate in governance.¹⁰ Fundamentally, questions of governance hinge on power: who has it, who does not, how those who have it use it, and how power imbalances can change.¹¹

While particular individuals and NGOs in the fair globalization coalition engaged with questions of global economic governance starting in the mid-1970s, in the coalition’s time as a political force, fair globalizers have struggled against neoliberal governance. Neoliberalism remains a hotly debated concept. In some academic discussions and popular narratives, neoliberalism is often defined, as explained by historian Daniel Stedman Jones, as a free market ideology based on individual liberty and limited government that connected human freedom to the actions of the rational, self-interested actor in the competitive marketplace.¹² From this starting point, it might seem that neoliberals would look askance at governance, which, after all, connotes ideas of regulation and bureaucracy. In the words of one historian, neoliberals denied the desirability of any robust international governance of the global economy.¹³

Certainly, neoliberalism, especially in its proponents’ public rhetoric, decries attempts to oversee or shape the workings of capitalist markets. However, this does not mean that neoliberals disdain governance: in fact, governance lies at the core of the neoliberal project. What distinguishes neoliberalism most from older notions of classical liberalism does not lie in its followers’ devotion to notions of the free market. Rather, neoliberalism’s distinctiveness stems from the proactive role its backers imagine for governmental, intergovernmental, and multilateral bodies in structuring the economic order.

Neoliberalism arose as a rejection, starting in the late nineteenth century, of mass political forces—socialism, trade unionism, communism, social democracy, and so on—that sought to reform or overturn capitalism. Instead, neoliberals believed in the need to create governmental (and especially legal) instruments to protect capitalism from the masses. As historian Quinn Slobodian has convincingly demonstrated, the real focus of neoliberal proposals is not on the market per se but on redesigning states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market.¹⁴ In other words, at its core, neoliberal politics uses mechanisms of governance to protect and promote the prerogatives of private enterprise.¹⁵

To confront international neoliberal governance naturally requires global agitation.¹⁶ Of course, the fair globalizers were far from the first U.S. activists to engage in internationalism.¹⁷ While they rarely invoked older moments of cross-border solidarity, they faced many of the same challenges as past mobilizations in forging and maintaining relationships with friends and foes around the world. While this book primarily concentrates on how U.S.-based activists attempted to become global citizens, it is vital to remember that these tales are but pieces of larger international histories.¹⁸

Advocates from the U.S. fair globalization coalition were not the only U.S. NGO staffers trying to become internationally influential at the twentieth century’s close.¹⁹ During the 1970s, the number of nonprofit advocacy groups that focused on issues of torture, censorship, and other attacks on civil and personal liberties grew rapidly, as seen in the rise of such organizations as Amnesty USA and Human Rights Watch. For those taking part in the human rights revolution, individual rights served as the rallying cry and governments as the chief villains. Meanwhile, fair globalization activists, while supportive of individual rights, emphasized socioeconomic questions. Over the past two decades, a blossoming of scholarship on human rights has often portrayed discourses and politics of human rights as overshadowing or even replacing those of social welfare. However, a fuller narrative shows that economically minded discourses did not disappear. Instead, they became one of many languages of international social justice.²⁰

Even within the realm of U.S.-based nonprofits engaging with socioeconomic inequalities between the Global North and the Global South, fair globalizers also differed from many of their contemporaries.²¹ The majority of U.S.-based humanitarian and development nonprofits (which often predated public interest progressive groups), whether major foundations such as Rockefeller and Ford or large relief NGOs such as CARE, have tended to agree with, rather than contest, development orthodoxies.²² While these groups preached the gospel that development involved a series of technocratic challenges, activists in the fair globalization coalition countered that inequality and politics are inseparable.²³ They argued that greater worldwide social welfare would not result from reifying technology or markets or through paternalistic aid programs, but rather would grow from respect for local particularities and fighting to restrain global capitalism.

Histories of how people in the United States act in transnational and global fields are deeply intertwined with histories of racism.²⁴ As a slowly diversifying, post-1960s, predominantly white political force, public interest progressives believed in an anti-racism that was not often introspective or self-critical. In approaching economic governance issues at home and abroad, public interest advocates often embraced what American Studies scholar Eric Larson calls colorblind anti-corporatism. As Larson describes, this worldview pits the people against corporations, without disentangling the unequal ways that corporate activities or larger political economic structures affect communities of color versus white communities.²⁵ Public interest progressives hoped that anticorporate politics could unite disparate communities around shared problems. However, the lack of emphasis on inequities suffered distinctively and disproportionately by marginalized and oppressed communities limited the fair globalization coalition’s ability to profoundly confront societal inequalities.²⁶

At the same time, public interest progressives’ philosophies, especially among the most internationalist groups, did not ignore multiple vectors of oppression. Public interest advocates believed in using their relative privilege within the U.S. political system to diminish or remove what they argued were harmful influences from the U.S. government and multinational companies on peoples in the Global South. Such actions often followed the advice of Global South activists, who indicated that the best solidarity U.S. organizations could provide was making change at home. As this book shows, Global South activists confronting international neoliberalism refused to follow a script of being the subordinated victims of condescension from the Global North. They negotiated with, maneuvered around, and pushed back on their colleagues in the North—forging imperfect but relatively effective international networks.

Accounts of resistance to neoliberal globalization point to many start dates for this agitation—some as early as the Book of Genesis.²⁷ My book embraces a more modest timespan, seeing the 1970s as a turning point.²⁸ It begins with an early episode of public interest progressives tackling global inequality: the Nestlé boycott launched in 1977. Started by a ragtag group of activists in New York City and Minneapolis, the boycott grew into a powerful international force. It also inspired a wave of global campaigns aimed at winning regulations for other industries, such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals. Yet, over the course of the 1980s, the ambitions of public interest groups to remake global economic governance collapsed under the weight of the debt crisis, the decline of the left around the world, and the rising power of corporations and rich countries’ governments. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies and individuals such as Nestlé boycott cofounder Mark Ritchie tried to comprehend a rapidly changing world economy.

By the late 1980s, rather than fighting for a better future, public interest progressives devoted themselves to preventing an unacceptable present from becoming a horrifying future. No conflict more starkly illustrated the new political landscape than the battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Because it directly affected organized labor, farmers, environmentalists, and public interest groups in the United States, NAFTA crystalized the formation of the fair globalization coalition. Represented by such umbrella groups as the Citizens Trade Campaign and the Alliance for Responsible Trade, the fair globalization coalition made the effort to pass NAFTA into one of the bitterest legislative fights of recent decades.

Following the passage of NAFTA and the coalition’s failure to halt the creation of the World Trade Organization, public interest advocates and their allies regrouped. They spent the mid-1990s refining their understandings of the world economy and reenergizing their coalitions. These efforts bore fruit, as fair globalization advocates scored three major wins in 1998 and 1999. Domestically, advocates succeeded in blocking Fast Track, legislation vital to passing future free-trade agreements. The second win happened globally, as activists defeated the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, a proposed treaty to expand the rights of multinational corporations.

The fair globalization coalition’s third victory came with the Battle of Seattle. Following the Seattle victory, there came a moment when questions of globalization and development dominated headlines and inspired massive protests from Quebec City to Genoa, Italy. Briefly, the fair globalization coalition became part of a wider mass movement. Yet, soon after, the September 11 attacks all but ended (in the United States) the budding movement.

The U.S. fair globalization coalition’s work continues to the present day. Fair globalization advocates hold a permanent place in the policy dialogue. Most recently, they played a crucial role in making support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership politically untenable across much of the political spectrum. Some groups also helped to shape the rewriting of NAFTA into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. More broadly, the questions of global inequality raised by fair globalizers have only become more pressing, especially as climate change intensifies. How we reached this historical juncture is the story to which we shall now turn.

Prologue

The Good Parts of the System to Beat the Bad

Putting aside tired clichés about small groups of people changing the world, the fact that nonprofits such as Public Citizen or the Institute for Policy Studies became influential players globally is, on its surface, a confounding one. Understanding this trajectory starts with a slightly earlier tale—the rise of public interest progressives in domestic U.S. politics.

As good a place as any to begin is November 16 and 17, 1970. Over the course of these two days, the U.S. Senate’s Labor and Public Welfare Committee held hearings on public interest progressives. The question at hand was the right of public interest law-firms and other charitable organizations to engage in litigation in the public interest.¹ Responding to threats from the Internal Revenue Service to rescind their tax-exempt statuses, representatives from a flood of organizations—from the Center for Law and Social Policy to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to the American Civil Liberties Union—pled their case (successfully, as it turned out). Amid all the verbiage, one phrase sticks out. Spoken by then former Sierra Club leader and Friends of the Earth founder David Brower, it encapsulated public interest progressivism’s politics. We … are convinced, Brower stated, it is possible to use the good parts of the system to beat the bad parts of the system.²

These words illustrated public interest progressivism’s reformist heart. Hailing from a political lineage running from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century muckrakers and consumer advocates through the technocratic foot soldiers of the New Deal, public interest progressivism emerged in the 1960s determined to confront challenges both familiar and distinct.³ As with their forebears, they viewed the power of Big Business as society’s greatest challenge. Business writer Hazel Henderson outlined this perspective in the Nation, noting that corporate power was encountered daily by millions of citizens who attempt to fight polluted air, oil-smeared beaches … rampant freeways, deceptive advertising, and more.⁴ Or as the most influential public interest progressive, Ralph Nader, stated in February 1970, big business represented the country’s most powerful, consistent, and coordinated power grid.⁵

Of course, criticism of large corporations did not start with Ralph Nader. Concerns about business influence date back as far as corporations have existed.⁶ What differentiated public interest progressives’ worldviews and approaches stemmed from their historical moment. Their political ancestors in the Progressive and New Deal eras fought to create government agencies and legal frameworks to constrain business power. By the 1960s, a robust array of regulatory agencies existed, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Labor, and the Federal Trade Commission. Public interest progressives became active at a moment in which the question of whether the federal government would regulate private enterprise appeared settled. Instead, the question hanging over 1960s reformers asked if the regulatory state could remain vigorous over the long term.

The health of the federal regulatory state weighed on a few young liberals in the mid- to late 1960s. They lauded the positive effects of past governmental actions to hold business accountable. But they also found troubling realities within the federal regulatory apparatus. Many agencies had been captured by private interests; as staff from the Center for Law and Social Policy stated in 1969, government agencies cannot be relied upon to resolve all policy questions in the public interest when the only advocates before them are the articulate spokesmen of private interests.⁷ Even when agencies (or at least parts of them) operated effectively, lack of funding and bureaucratic malaise weakened their efficacy. Furthermore, much work remained in ensuring workplace, consumer, and, ecological protection.

Surveying this landscape, some liberals in the late 1960s felt frustration, anger, [and] loss of confidence in the future.⁸ As Charles Halpern, a leading public interest attorney, explained, many who became public interest progressives believed in New Deal liberalism. Reflecting decades later, Halpern stated that such people, if they had been coming of age in the 1930s instead of the 1960s … would have looked to the federal government for solutions. However, the 1960s were not the 1930s. Now many liberals believed that the federal government was not on its own going to be the effective source of innovation and reform.⁹ They longed for a different form of politics.

Some scholars have claimed that public interest progressives’ politics entailed putting a liberal sheen on Reagan-style neoliberalism. One such historian castigated Nader for embracing a slash-and-burn rhetoric … [that] planted an antigovernment legacy that coarsened political discourse and undermined popular support for social democratic solutions.¹⁰ What such critiques seem to miss is that not all criticism of government cuts from the same cloth. When public interest progressives lambasted the regulatory state, it was for falling short or for serving corporate interests, not for being too aggressive in checking corporate power. At a few times, such skepticism resulted in some public interest champions advocating deregulation of certain sectors (such as airlines and trucking). Yet, when measured against their overall legislative records and the consistent hostility of large corporations and right-wing activists to their advocacy, it is hard to see public interest progressives as mere unwitting shills for conservatism or neoliberalism.

Public interest progressives’ critiques of government also arose from the larger horrors inflicted by the U.S. government during the 1960s, especially its war in Southeast Asia. The U.S. war in Vietnam intensified distrust of government and, with such liberals as John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson residing in the White House, prompted reconsiderations of liberalism. However, as opposed to radicals who saw the war as a manifestation of the nation’s imperialist soul, public interest progressives viewed the conflict as a betrayal of both American and liberal values.

Disillusionment with mid-century liberalism inspired progressive and liberal-minded people in the United States to embark on several paths. A few tried to keep one foot in the liberal world and one in the radical New Left world.¹¹ The epicenter of this approach arose in the offices of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-wing think tank. While frequently frustrated or enraged with mainstream liberalism, IPS’s staff did not reject it outright. Instead, as IPS fellow Arthur Waskow explained, those working at the Institute for Policy Studies hoped to unite the generation of liberal reformers with the sit-in generation by developing policy ideas that were both pragmatic and transformational.¹²

Most public interest progressives followed a distinct path from IPS, modeling their work on the example set by Ralph Nader. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ralph Nader was one of the most respected people and effective political actors in the United States.¹³ Leaping onto the national stage in 1965 with his best-selling book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader epitomized public interest progressives’ confrontational and reformist politics. He called for a new kind of citizenship in which everyday people engaged in sustained efforts to keep government responsive and to challenge business power.¹⁴ Answering a question about society’s evils, Nader noted that evils are an inevitable result of concentrated power that’s insulated from broader human value … no matter where [power] is located, it’s going to be abused if the pathways are not open for a broader spectrum of values.¹⁵

In trying to open those pathways, Nader helped to found numerous nonprofits, including Public Citizen, the Public Interest Research Group, and the Center for Responsive Law. While Nader proved prolific at starting organizations, the growth of public interest advocacy went beyond just him. Kicking off in the mid-1960s, the number of public interest groups ballooned in a process that political scientist Jeffrey Berry calls the advocacy explosion.¹⁶ This growth reached its zenith in the last years of the 1960s and first years of the 1970s; as a survey of eighty-three major public interest nonprofits started before 1972 showed, almost half emerged between 1968 and 1972.¹⁷ Many of these new groups quickly became leaders in their fields: of twelve major national environmental groups founded between 1892 and 1972, five of them were created between 1967 and 1972.¹⁸

Within a short time, public interest progressives’ influence became impossible to deny. On the consumer front, of the forty-seven major federal consumer safety laws enacted between 1890 and 1972, more than half took effect between 1966 and 1972, peak years of public interest agitation.¹⁹ Concurrently, environmental advocates assisted in writing, passing, and implementing a raft of laws, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act of 1970. Reflecting on this legacy, historian Meg Jacobs characterizes the advances in environmental protection alone as marking a new era of business regulation … at least as momentous as the Progressive and New Deal eras.²⁰ The effectiveness of public interest advocacy inspired intense disdain and mobilization by significant parts of the business community. In the 1971 Powell Memorandum, which became the informal and later infamous manifesto for the modern U.S. corporate lobby, Lewis Powell described Nader as perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business.²¹

Several factors gave coherence to public interest progressivism. One was its demographics. Public interest groups consisted of middle-class individuals, often boasting a master’s or a law degree from a prestigious university. Most public interest progressives were white. At first, the staff tended to be majority male, but by the early 1970s, more and more women joined the ranks. The staffs of these groups viewed social change as both a calling and a profession.²²

Organizationally, the professionalized nonprofit served as their chosen vehicle. As Institute for Policy Studies cofounders Richard Barnet and Marc Raskin explained in 1962, it was imperative to have institutions outside the government, thinking, planning, and suggesting alternatives while simultaneously staying intimately in touch with the decision making process.²³ To that end, relying on foundations and individual donors for funding, activists created nonprofits. Frequently either based in or gravitating toward Washington, D.C., their offices impressed only in the towers of papers filling every corner and the collections of second-hand desks and hand-me-down chairs occupying their workspaces. The number of full-time staffers could vary from less than ten to around fifty, with many groups operating at the lower end of that spectrum.²⁴

From the moderates at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to the leftists at the Institute for Policy Studies, public interest groups’ day-to-day work lay at the intersections of expertise, responsible militancy, and participation. To wield power, public interest groups first gained and applied expertise about how government and business operated. Large companies kept their internal workings secretive. Government ostensibly had to be open, but as lawyers from the Center for Law and Social Policy noted, the operations of federal agencies were often so complex and demanding as to be almost unintelligible. In both cases, the sheer weight of technical procedures and papers could easily overwhelm, especially to anyone without the time, resources, and skills to make their voices heard in agency decision-making.²⁵

This is where public interest advocates entered. They saw themselves as the people’s experts. From Nader’s early 1960s forays into auto safety onward, advocates proved adept at interpreting and translating highly complex policy language into comprehensible prose. Advocates disseminated their analyses widely—through articles, books, appearances in media, and more. Individuals, media outlets, congressional offices, and federal regulatory officials soon began turning to public interest advocates to help explain and advise on complex matters. As Environmental Protection Agency deputy administrator John Quarles Jr. noted in 1973, On occasions too numerous to mention … [public interest] groups have surfaced weaknesses or errors in the governmental activities, bringing such problems to the attention of high officials where corrective action might be taken.²⁶

As important as technical knowledge could be, advocates recognized that to achieve change, it is necessary to use political action.²⁷ To turn their values into policy, public interest progressives embraced approaches that NRDC co-founder John Adams called responsible militancy.²⁸ Many of these tactics grew from advocates’ policy expertise. For example, reaching out to news media did not merely convey information. As with Progressive-era muckrakers, public interest progressives expected news coverage to energize everyday people to mobilize and act.²⁹ Seeing article after article on a given controversy—and the resulting public anger—made legislators fearful that public interest progressives could, in the words of former Federal Trade Commission head Michael Pertschuk, exact political retribution if they [Congress] failed … to address the sources of that outrage.³⁰

Public interest progressives also engaged in more proactive actions. Following the lead of older legal advocacy groups, especially the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense Fund, their essential tool became the lawsuit. Sue the bastards! served as public interest progressives’ unofficial motto.³¹ Advocates benefited from legal changes in the 1950s and early 1960s that made legal action easier to take. One of the most critical changes involved expansions in standing rights—the ability of a person or group to claim a grievance and to sue for damages—which gave advocates greater ability to use legal remedies.³²

If aggressive lobbying and lawsuits represented the militant part of responsible militancy, the responsible part pointed to public interest groups’ avoidance of more confrontational tactics. As EDF leader Charles Wurster reassured Sports Illustrated readers in 1969, We don’t block traffic. We don’t sit in. We don’t riot.³³ Public interest progressives emphasized what they deemed pragmatism and measurable accomplishments. As Sierra Club executive director Michael McCloskey explained, One can have heady dreams of sweeping revolutions, but revolutions are not made in the dream world. Instead, he insisted, change happened when people entered the political process and showed their willingness to suffer all its frustrations and limitations to win concrete achievements.³⁴

McCloskey’s call for more people to enter the political process spoke to the third pillar of public interest progressivism: the idea of participation. Positioning their work within U.S. history, one set of public interest advocates declared that much of the history of this nation could be written around movements by the public-at-large to democratize those institutions exercising political and social power over them.³⁵ Practically speaking, achieving widened participation meant increasing the number of access points through which citizens (or the public interest groups serving as the people’s ostensible representatives) could have a say in policy makers’ deliberations.

While public interest progressives endorsed citizen participation