Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy
Book Review by: Matthew N. Eisler
For Citation: Business History Review 83 (Autumn 2009)
“Con-voy!” For many who remember the 1970s hit by William Fries (alias C. W. McCall), the indelible image of the big-rig trucker, reinforced by the movies and television shows the song helped inspire, was that of the rebel adventurer, a fun-loving rogue flouting the law on America’s freeways. This romantic stereotype undergoes a makeover at the hands of Shane Hamilton, a professor of history at the University of Georgia. In Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, he illustrates the hard realities of the profession. As the title of this engaging book indicates, however, Hamilton’s agenda is much broader than updating the record. His chief target is the theory, popularized most recently by Thomas Frank, that the growth of conservatism in hinterland states over the last thirty years stems primarily from cultural causes. In these regions, blue-collar Americans vote Republican, and against their economic interests, ostensibly in reaction to the perversion of traditional values by liberal elites. In fact, says Hamilton, the kulturkampf reflects deep dissatisfaction with liberal economic management, especially in the food sector.
Hamilton takes a novel approach in analyzing agricultural policy, showing how it was shaped by conflicting ideologies, the state of preservation and transportation technology, and the rhythms of an industry producing many perishable goods. In the 1920s and 1930s, American agriculture was a victim of its own success, producing far more than consumers could absorb. During the Depression, agrarian interests and their champions in government agreed on the necessity of state intervention, but not on its implementation. Populists like Henry A. Wallace supported the demands of small farmers for market access and the end of transportation and food-processing monopolies. Urban liberals like Jerome Frank sought to regulate agriculture along industrial lines, aligning the interests of technocrats, consumers, and larger farmers. Actual New Deal agricultural policy combined these planning strains in unequal measure. Marketing orders stabilizing milk and beef prices bolstered larger producers and reinforced the existing distribution system built around a railway network that had limited refrigeration capacity and relied on labor-intensive horse and truck transport for local distribution. These relations were reinforced by congressional passage of the Motor Carrier Act of 1935. Regulating the trucking industry, this legislation cemented a business–labor pact in the food distribution system that would last for two generations. To mollify agrarian populists, Congress exempted agricultural trucking from certification, allowing rural operators to haul raw produce to market using their own routes and charging their own rates. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) supported research in capital-intensive industrial farming.
In the aggregate, these policies produced decidedly mixed results. On the one hand, monopoly agribusiness and transport unions flourished. On the other, consumers suffered from high food prices, and thousands of small farms were ruined. The motor-vehicle exemption had been intended to aid small farmers, but, in concert with New Deal policies that undermined their interests, it actually helped transform them into country truckers. For white ex-farmers steeped in the Jeffersonian tradition, truck driving was a form of self-employment and a means of preserving a way of life that was gradually disappearing, one that enabled them to continue living in the countryside and retain their self-image as small businessmen. The reality was that, for most, trucking offered only the illusion of independence. Country truckers earned much less than their unionized urban counterparts and often became indebted while acquiring expensive equipment, mirroring their experience as small farmers.
The consequences, writes Hamilton, were far-reaching. The trucking exemption became a key weapon in the USDA’s campaign to dismantle New Deal–initiated central planning in the food economy after World War II. Led by Ezra Taft Benson, the USDA championed a supply-side approach. It aimed to cut retail costs drastically, without lowering farm prices by supporting innovation in food preservation and processing technology. The advent of frozen food and refrigerated trucking on a massive scale provided the means to liberate agriculture from the technopolitics of perishability. But, as Hamilton notes, politics remained central to Benson’s vision. As the USDA and agribusiness successfully broadened the interpretation of the Motor Carrier Act exemption over the years, allowing independent country truckers to haul an ever-larger variety of foods, the days of the old unionized rail- and truck-based distribution system were numbered. Creeping deregulation of the trucking industry, argues Hamilton, prepared the ground for Congress to formally decontrol the sector in 1980, an effort championed by Jimmy Carter and Edward Kennedy.
A cogent synthesis of the history of transportation, consumerism, and agribusiness, Trucking Country builds considerably on recent work in these fields by Gijs Mom, Lizabeth Cohen, Deborah K. Fitzgerald, and Bruce E. Seely, among others, ushering truckers from the sideshow of popular culture to center stage in the American drama. This book has broad appeal and will be of particular interest to readers of business history. At one level, Trucking Country is a requiem for the small agrarian entrepreneur. But Hamilton sees the country trucker as not only a casualty of government’s failure to balance individual liberties with the common good, but as a cause of that failure as well. It is a story that reveals the paradoxes of American-style capitalism and challenges cherished assumptions about the liberal marketplace and upward mobility. Agribusiness and the USDA brought consumers cheap processed food at a price paid by truckers of all stripes. For country truckers who had long advocated free enterprise, deregulation proved an especially bitter pill as earnings plummeted in a fiercely competitive environment. Out of the restructuring of the transport industry came, “just in time,” an integrated inventory and distribution management system that found its apotheosis in the Wal-Mart merchandising monopoly, the quintessential institution of the post-welfare state. In a world only partly of their making, argues Hamilton, rural truckers and other workers gravitated to the GOP, not for cultural reasons but because they felt betrayed by the liberal economic project, one associated primarily with Democrats but, ironically, pursued with equal vigor by Republican leaders. Gripping and topical, Trucking Country resonates in the current economic climate.