[This is reader comment from Chronicles magazine.]

45PcH

RMP @ 43

When I was growing up out West, I remember walking and biking around the valley where I was born. Every half mile was a long, straight concrete road. Every few yards was a stamp: “Bickenbaugh Construction Co. 1928.” I knew from photographs that until after WWII, the area was dry farming, meaning unirrigated wheat. There were no home anywhere around until long after the war. I used to wonder why all the roads to nowhere.

A few years ago, I lived in a cabin in the mountains and a retired LAPD captain took a liking to me. He it thought funny the way I spoke frankly with a cherubic face. One day he lent me a book a friend of his had self-published. It was the history of Southern California that no one knows. Since his friend was also a former officer, he had access to records that no other historian has had.

The book named the Chandlers, the Otises and other old families from Massachussetts who sent their second sons out West in the years following the Civil War. With their money and connections, they soon took over the dusty little town of Los Angeles. These people are still in power (look at the masthead of the LA Times), so it is no wonder the book was not published.

Anyways, the book was well cited and of a scholarly quality. It detailed just how LA was built after the War. To summarize, the West was taken over and run by organized crime and one of the principle means was to build roads that no one needed at exorbitant prices to tax-payers. The contracts were awarded to close friends of officials and by a system of bribing more sophisticated than that associated with the Third World. Business licenses were awarded to car dealers on the same principles. The same pattern applied to the oil companies, particularly notable since up to around WWII, Southern California dominated oil production like Kuwait does today. So the whole economy was tied together and run by one small gang.

I want to repeat “organized crime;” the system of bribes, beatings, hits, thefts, slander, and censorship documented in the book can be described as nothing else.

I am sure Southern California is one example of a pattern that happened everywhere in the US after the Civil War and is being repeated the world over today. Even the physical appearance of every city is the same.

As Clyde Wilson says above: “Most roadbuilding in the U.S. results from the fact that it provides tremedous profits for companies favoured by politicians and lucrative kickbacks to the politicians.”

Now I know why there were all these old concrete roads everywhere where I grew up.

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