Internal Combustion by Edwin Black

Author:Edwin Black [BLACK, EDWIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-35907-2
Publisher: Dialog Press

Most people have never heard of the nationwide mass transit conspiracy set in motion by GM and its coterie of petroleum and automotive confederates. But to a small corps of argumentative urban historians and Internet activists, the entire story has become a virtual urban legend that has continuously and vituperatively been debated for years. No one can properly delve into what GM and its partners actually did without first comprehending how this arcane debate among experts—real and self-appointed—has obscured and prevented the extraordinary details about GM and mass transit from coming to the fore.

In brief, GM’s conspiracy had its roots in the twenties when the automobile market became so saturated that auto sales slowed significantly and GM lost $65 million. GM targeted trolley systems across the country for monopolistic takeovers and systematic irreversible conversion from electric streetcars to gasoline- and diesel-burning buses. A series of stealthy mergers and acquisitions began in the midthirties and continued unabated until GM and its corporate cohorts achieved a monopolistic market presence in dozens of cities from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Los Angeles. The conspirators—GM, Mack Truck, Phillips Petroleum, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tires—acted through a front company called National City Lines, which they secretly financed. Once National City Lines purchased a transit company, electric trolley service was immediately discontinued, the tracks quickly pulled up, the wires dismantled, and the company switched to GM-made petroleum-burning motor buses.25

In 1947, in a landmark case, the federal government prosecuted GM and its corporate partners for a criminal conspiracy to monopolize bus sales and foreclose competition across the United States in the many cities where National City Lines operated. The entire group of oil and automotive companies, as well as their executives, were convicted on one of two similar counts of conspiracy. Despite vigorous appeals by the best defense attorneys in the nation, the Supreme Court allowed the convictions to stand. Eventually, even though GM and National City Lines continued their monopolistic entrenchment in urban mass transit, the scandal faded off the nation’s headlines.26

A generation later, in 1974, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab-imposed 1973 oil shock, the GM Conspiracy was resurrected by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. In an exhaustively documented study entitled “American Ground Transport,” Judiciary Committee staff attorney Bradford Snell accused GM of contributing to the nation’s petroleum woes by a deliberate conspiracy against scores of local mass transit systems.27

Snell’s work was largely, but not exclusively, based upon thousands of pages of documents arising from the Department of Justice’s 1947 prosecution of GM and the consortium that had created National City Lines. But going beyond the prosecution, Snell asserted that GM’s true motives were not just to convert electric trolley systems into bus lines so it could sell more diesel buses and eliminate competitive electric systems, but also to then cause the abandonment of those very bus companies, thus killing mass transit altogether.28

Snell’s logic was that with those newly transformed bus companies defunct, America would be converted within

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