Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Behind the Six Companies (Kaiser in particular) with a big sack of money was A. P. Giannini, whose bank stood to gain the most from an increase in California land values. Hoover’s private associates were up and down the project, especially the Southern California Edison chairman Henry Robinson, to whose firm Secretary Wilbur originally appropriated 25 percent (!) of the Hoover Dam power output, before criticism forced him to reduce it to 9 percent.16 Harry Chandler—conservative publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Stanford dad, and Hoover’s confederate on the university board—became the city’s most important capitalist by riding the Hoover real estate and manufacturing boom into the 1930s. These men poured the concrete foundation for what was shaping up to be California’s century.