The Great Trolley Car Conspiracy: Yes It Was

Andy Singer

"The Great Trolley Conspiracy that Wasn't" has some inaccurate information. National City Lines was reorganized as a holding company in 1936 ...but it actually dated from 1920 and GM was involved much earlier. In 1923, General Motors president Alfred Sloan, said, "[the leveling of demand for new cars] means a change from easy selling to hard selling ... [it is necessary to do nothing less than] reorder society, to alter the environment in which automobiles are sold."

Under Sloan's direction GM formed and took a controlling interest in Greyhound in 1925 and there is a lot of evidence that NCL's partner corporations (GM, Philips, Standard Oil, etc.) actively lobbied for "The Public Utilities Holding Company Act" and were involved in a Sherman Antitrust suit against utilities. Also, the act was from 1935 ...and it meant that hundreds of streetcar lines were dumped on the market in the middle of a depression, further driving down their price. Beefing up NCL to a holding company was part of GMs plan to buy up streetcar lines and convert them to bus service. And there is plenty of evidence that GM was actively pursuing this on its own as early as 1923 with only limited success. In 1949 GM and its partners were CONVICTED of conspiracy, in a Chicago court-- a conviction that was upheld by a federal appeals court. It's all part of the public record.

Obviously, the fact that the federal government was subsidizing direct competition to rail transit (in the form of highways), contributed to transit's demise ...but even this subsidy GM had a hand in. GM was able to pass the Hayden-Cartwright Act in 1934, which removed limits on constructing highways through municipalities and forced states to dedicate their fuel taxes to highway construction. The legacy of this act is still felt today, as most states still have constitutional amendments mandating that fuel taxes and motor vehicle fees be spent on roads. Also, President Roosevelt was GM's buddy, having been molded into a motorcar advocate by Robert Moses (who worked for Roosevelt when he was governor of New York) ...and from his own limited mobility due to polio. Roosevelt's surgeon General went around the world promoting the "safety" of tetra-ethyl lead in gasoline (to which GM owned the patent and made billions of dollars) and helped make it the world standard despite lots of evidence that it was horrifically toxic. See--http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/papers/ethylconflict.html ...also there was a brilliant feature on this in the Nation many years back (by Jamie Lincoln Kitman).

It is true that coincidentally most transit and rail lines in the U.S.A. were in private hands in the 1930s, so roads were an easier way to funnel public WPA money into the economy since the government could own roads. (In Europe, most rail and transit had already been nationalized ...and this is where much of their pre and post war money went).

This point aside, the Wohlwill article greatly underestimates/understates the raw political power that GM and car and oil companies had in the 1920s and 30s. They were determined to increase the market for their products and wielded a massive propaganda campaign on every front-- radio, films (like "Highway Hearing" made by Dow Chemical), print, political lobbying ...and even outright criminal activity like NCL.