2020-04-01 Smithsonian Magazine

Illustration by

Marc Aspinall

In a famous 1970 mock trial,

prosecutors hammered away

at the nation’s most powerful

defendant

By

Kate Wheeling

prologue

EARTH DAY

16 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020

G

The Case

Against

the Car

ORDON LIGHTFOOT and the Broadway cast

of Hair performed. Barry Commoner and

Ralph Nader spoke. But the most bizarre

event at the University of Michigan’s teach-

in the month before the fi rst Earth Day was a

mock legal trial for a 1959 Ford sedan.

About 1,000 people gathered at high

noon on March 11, 1970, on the grassy

quad at the center of the Ann Arbor campus to watch the

blue-and-white clunker face charges of “murder of the Amer-

ican public, crossing state lines to pollute, inciting traffi c

jams, creating physical and psychological dependence, and