Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322 pp., 1960s, 1950s, 1949, 1940s, 1930s
" . . . Between 1940 and 1944 . . . Santa Monica . . . experienced a 40 percent population growth during the decade.
"Southern California was also on the brink of the Automobile Age. In the 1930s, General Motors bought up the Pacific Electric Railway system to scrap it. The corporation replaced trains with diesel buses that it manufactured. The buses did not carry freight, so merchants were forced to buy or rent trucks that General Motors also manufactured. The buses were uncomfortable and unreliable, which encouraged Southern Californians to purchase automobiles that General Motors gladly sold to them. The corporation was convicted in 1949 of having conspired to replace municipal transit systems with products that it monopolized. The $5,000 fine, however, did not deter General Motors from continuing its practices or from putting its considerable weight behind the $70 billion Interstate Highway Act that reinforced consumer demand for automobiles by underwriting massive highway construction throughout the United States."