Some of you may know about the
GM Streetcar Conspiracy of the '20s and '30s, wherein, GM and Firestone, and others were ultimately found not-guilty (lower courts overturned in SCOTUS) of a criminal conspiracy to acquire and shut down electric streetcar lines through a holding company called National City Lines.
...General Motors had been involved in replacing more than 100 electric transit systems with GM buses in 45 cities including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Tulsa, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City...Here's an interesting editorial on how this legacy still adversely affects
Salt Lake CityI never realized that Tulsa's lines were fairly central in the shenanigans and in the court cases. Here's a
brief article on the conspiracy by Bradford Snell, who presented a report to the US Senate in 1974.
Tulsa's lines, it turns out, may have helped exonerate GM, though maybe they shouldn't have:
"...Van Wilkins sought to diminish the significance of National City Lines by claiming that, with regard to railways acquired in Tulsa, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, the decision to abandon at least some of the electric lines had already been made. Yet this was not at all unexpected, for National was but part of GM's multifaceted anti-rail strategy. Tulsa, for example, (w)as acquired and converted by another GM-assisted holding company, Rex Finance, before it was turned over to National. GM agents pressed Salt Lake City to convert to buses before GM's Pacific City Lines bought the system..."
