I’m a big fan of free things, so when Kembrew McLeod posted a Creative Commons-licensed PDF of his new book, Freedom of Expression, I downloaded it, printed it out and read it in about three days. Here’s the bottom line about the book — its a bunch of good ideas and insightful commentary sandwiched by Kembrew’s inclusion of a number of hoaxes/myths that really diminish the value of the book.
As I mentioned shortly after starting the book, McLeod falls for a hoax in the first couple of pages — he repeats the claim that Fox News threatened to sue The Simpsons, which is also a Fox property. A lot of people fell for that hoax, but in this case its quite understandable since it Matt Groenig himself started the hoax by satirically claiming that Fox News had threatened to sue The Simpson’s (Groenig was making fun of Fox News’ decision to sue comedian Al Franken).
Toward the end of his book, however, McLeod falls for a popular, but false, Left-wing conspiracy theory. McLeod wants to tie the case against the ridiculous extensions of intellectual property to what, to my mind, is a general case against private property itself. So in Chapter Five, Our Privatized World, Kembrew pulls out a laundry list of other supposed horror stories where power has been transferred from the public sphere to the private sphere. The very first example he gives is the deterioration of downtowns, and in the Left wing conspiracy theory, said deterioration is partly the fault of General Motors,
The deterioration of the American downtown began after World War II, and its slow, chocking death wasn’t natural. It had more to do with certain local and federal government policies, including those that undermined public transportation in favor of the automobile and an elaborate interstate system. It also didn’t help that General Motors bought up public-transportation companies in most American cities and systematically dismantled the streetcar system. In doing so, they replaced it with a fleet of GM buses, ripping up trolley tracks, and making way for the post-WWII flood of automobiles. The streetcars were the arteries that made downtowns accessible to large numbers of people, but by 1950 the number of streetcars in the United States fell to eighteen thousand, down from seventy-three thousands in 1936 — despite an explosion in the nation’s population.
In 1949 the federal government found GM (and its partners in crime, Firestone and Standard Oil) guilty of “conspiracy to monopolize the local transportation field,” and seven high-ranking executives at those companies were individually found guilty. However, the companies were fined only five thousand dollars each and the execs were slapped on the wrist with a one-dollar fine. Investigative journalist Jonathan Kwitny argues that the case was “a fine example of what can happen when important matters of public policy are abandoned by government to the self-interest of corporations.”
Except for the fact that GM did produce buses, pretty much every single claim in the above two paragraphs about GM is simply not true.
Was GM found guilty of monopolizing local transportation? No. Rather it and the other defendants were found guilty of attempting “to monopolize the sale of supplies used by the local transportation companies controlled by the City Lines defendants” (City Lines ran the streetcar system in Los Angeles). GM, Firestone and Standard Oil wanted to make sure City Lines bought parts, gasoline, etc. from them rather than their competitors, not to shut down City Lines or monopolize the entire transportation system in Los Angeles.
Did GM buy up street car companies just to shut them down? No. In fact, as far as I can tell, neither GM nor any of its subsidiaries ever purchased any streetcar companies.
Automobiles began replacing streetcars in the 1910s, and the advent of buses accelerated that replacement. Streetcar ridership peaked in 1920. Automobiles and buses were faster, ultimately cheaper, and could be adapted easily to new routes and areas rather than requiring laying expensive track and electric lines. They were also widely viewed as more comfortable to ride in, thanks to superior handling and features such as the advent of balloon-style tires.
Where did the myth originate? In February 1974 antitrust attorney Bradford Snell pretty much invented it out of whole cloth in testimony to the U.S. Senate. Snell’s research was funded by Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen and had the same. Snell was followed by a number of mayors who more-or-less corroborated Snell’s outrageous claims, and a myth was born.
Since then the myth has been repeated everywhere from PBS documentaries to left wing magazines to McLeod’s new book, where its appearance doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the veracity of the rest of Kembrew’s claims.
Source:
General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars. Cliff Slater, Transportation Quarterly, V.51, No.3, Summer 1997 (45-66).