-
Chapter 11. Consumer Product Safety
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
11 Consumer Product Safety The story was both tragic and familiar. Eleven-year-old Carole Hackes accidently set fire to her blouse while playing with matches. She sustained serious burns on her neck and chest before her mother managed to put out the flames.1 Both Benjamin Franklin and Elizabeth Drinker would have recognized the nature of the accident, but they might have been astonished by where Carole’s storywasretoldandthelessondrawnfromit.Intheireighteenth-centuryworld, even eleven-year-old girls supposedly knew the risks of mixing fire and clothing . Those who ignored that bit of common knowledge were labeled careless or unlucky or perhaps both. The law offered neither a means to prevent such incidents nor a way for victims to obtain compensation by holding someone else responsible. As far as we know, Franklin never turned his fertile imagination to the problem of making everyday clothing less flammable. But Carole Hackes’s accident took place in the mid-1960s, by which time a growing number of activists, safety experts, and ordinary citizens had come to believe that consumers, particularly children, could not be expected to anticipate or ward against the hidden dangers of everyday technologies. In their formulation ,accidentshappenedtopeoplewhowere“unsuspecting,”or“victims,” implying that these events were neither random nor the fault of the injured person. Increasingly, courts and legislators agreed. In this new safety paradigm, manufacturers should be held responsible for anticipating risks and should be willing to redesign, install guards on, or at least warn consumers about the potentialdangersoftheirproducts .Iftheyrefusedtodoso,thestateshouldstepin with appropriate regulations. Strict liability in tort cases would provide an addi- c o n s u m e r p r o d u c t s a f e t y 237 tional incentive, while simultaneously compensating victims. Testifying before a U.S. Senate hearing on proposed new standards for cloth and clothing manufacturers , Carole’s father, CBS news commentator Peter Hackes, voiced this twentieth-century set of expectations: “Consumers like me think we are buying safe products. I assumed that under the law I was protected against any harmful item, be it an explosive toy, a poisoned food, or a hazardous electrical fixture.”2 In Hackes’s view, responsibility for his daughter’s injury rested with fabric and clothing manufactures. They had a moral if not a legal obligation “to produce a safer clothing fabric.”3 The most influential postwar advocates of consumer product safety also departedfromtheirearliercounterpartsbyrejectingconsumersafetyeducationas aviablemeansofcontrollingrisk.Somewentsofarastodescribethesafety-first approach as “notoriously ineffective.”4 Instead, they put technology at the centeroftheframeasboththecauseandpotentialcureforaccidents .Thisapproach acknowledged the extraordinary difficulty of compelling changes of behavior, especially from people engaging in elective behaviors in the privacy of their own homes. It also reflected mid-century Americans’ complicated relationship with scientific and technological progress. Over and over again, advocates argued thatthetechnologiesofeverydaylifehadgrowntoocomplexandwerechanging too rapidly to be understood, let alone managed, by ordinary users. The subtext, voicedmostloudlybyRalphNader,allegedthatmanufacturershadthescientific and engineering know-how to make consumer technologies safer. They were just too greedy to do so without government compulsion. As Mike Pertschuk, a leadingconsumeradvocateasacongressionalstafferinthe1960sandlaterhead of the Federal Trade Commission, reflected, “We never thought to question the capacity of business to meet any standard imposed, efficiently, and at a minimal cost.”5 To set standards, Pertschuk and others worked to create a government agency staffed with experts who could dictate the terms under which products would be designated safe enough to be made available to consumers. Thus, adherents of what came to be called the consumer products safety movement set about to breach the last strongholds of the vernacular risk culture—the house, the yard, and the nursery. Save the Children In the summer of 1955, Texas representative Martin Dies shared a story of childhood trauma with his congressional colleagues. “I was locked in an icebox myself once, and it scared me half to death, and I stayed there until I was just about [54.224.90.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:01 GMT) 238 r i s k i n a c o n s u m e r s o c i e t y frozen stiff. It was one of those great big things.”6 Psycho-historians could probably have a field day analyzing the impact of this event on a man who had made his political name chairing the first House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and waxing apoplectic about the evils of the New Deal. But, in fact, DieswasjustusingapersonalexampletosupporthiscolleagueKennethA.Roberts ’s proposed bill requiring that refrigerator manufacturers redesign...