At the first school-board meeting I cov-
ered, Michael arrived late from Hart-
ford. He was wearing a suit that hung
loosely on his lanky six-foot-one-inch
frame. He carried a briefcase. He was
only twenty-nine, but he looked every
bit the engaged citizen and responsi-
ble father.
Michael and I met a few times at a
gloomy bar on Main Street, where he
offered a wry perspective on Winsted
politics and the plight of small-town
America. He invited me over for break-
fast. I remember warm sunlight, pan-
cakes, small kids, and being impressed
by Nadia, a tall woman with long dark
hair and an intently appraising gaze.
I was soon gone from Winsted, to a
daily paper near Hartford. In 1999, after
the birth of Tor and the death of Nels,
the Stumo family bought a ramshackle
eighteenth-century house on a farm,
over the Massachusetts line. It had been
owned by sheep farmers who published
a magazine called The Shepherd; old is-
sues were strewn about the house, and
manure was piled four feet high in the
barn. Michael worked for months clean-
ing the house and clearing out the barn
with a tractor.
A year later, Nader ran for Presi-
dent as a member of the Green Party.
He had made his name in auto safety.
In 1965, when he was thirty-one, he
published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a
book that focussed on the Chevrolet
Corvair, which he said had prioritized
“stylistic pornography over engineer-
ing integrity.” The book contrasted the
negligent safety standards of automo-
biles with the approach of airlines, in
which safety was encouraged by mar-
ket reality. “Plane crashes... jeopar-
dize the attraction of flying for poten-
tial passengers and therefore strike at
the heart of the air transport economy,”
he wrote. “They motivate preventa-
tive efforts.”
A few months later, Nader testified
before Congress. His performance made
his book a best-seller and spurred con-
sumers to abandon the Corvair. Im-
provements in car safety sparked by his
revelations contributed to a decades-long
decline in highway fatalities. In 1971,
Nader founded Public Citizen, a non-
profit that expanded his crusades to
campaign finance, health care, and re-
newable energy. In the eyes of many,
he became an unimpeachable advocate
for the common good.
Nader ran for President in 1996, but
his impact was negligible. In 2000, he
tried again, tapping into dissatisfaction
with Al Gore, the Democratic candi-
date. “Corporations were designed to
be our servants, not our masters,” Nader
declared at a rally, at Madison Square
Garden, attended by fifteen thousand
people. He got onto the ballot in forty-
three states and received nearly three
million votes. Many of his former ad-
mirers turned against him, however,
regarding him as a spoiler. In Florida,
which George W. Bush won by five
hundred and thirty-seven votes, Nader
received 97,488 votes.M
ichael Stumo bought two hun-
dred pigs to raise without anti-
biotics, but they got sick, the farm was
quarantined, and he was forced to sell
them at a loss. Nadia, who raised poul-
try, managed better, selling three hun-dred chickens and sixty turkeys one year.
But her main focus was the children,
whom she homeschooled and drove to
far-flung music lessons and to church.
When, at fourteen, Samya felt that she
needed a more challenging academic
program, Nadia drove her to an early-
college program at Mary Baldwin Uni-
versity, in Virginia.
Michael rented out part of their land
and started spending more time on the
issues we’d talked about in Winsted. He
developed ideas for antitrust and trade
policy, and in 2007 he helped found the
Coalition for a Prosperous America, to
fight for small farmers and manufac-
turers—“producers,” he called them—
against large foreign rivals.
With backing from farmers, unions,
and manufacturers, he became a lob-
byist. On one of his trips to Washing-
ton, I met him in a House cafeteria,
where he was fresh from a short-lived
win on trade policy. He flashed a gap-
toothed smile, unself-conscious about“So, in writing, there are six basic plots, and their
sequels and derivative franchises.”