In weighing the significance of this book, the first thing to note is the modesty of its title. In Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton University Press, 2008, $29.95), Shane Hamilton has certainly written the most authoritative history of the independent trucking industry, from its inception in the 1920s to the present. And as the subtitle indicates, he links the rise of that industry to the emergence of a low-wage, low-price, retail-driven economy in the postwar United States. These alone are important contributions. But Hamilton offers something more profound in this groundbreaking book: a strikingly original and meticulously researched explanation of the demise of the New Deal order. The originality of his effort is all the more impressive given how much attention historians have already devoted to this important subject.

At the core of Hamilton’s account of the demise of economic liberalism lies the claim that rural-based independent trucking offered policymakers a politically viable solution to a thorny dilemma: how to fix the perennial “farm problem” (i.e., chronic overproduction) without alienating urban consumers by driving up food prices. Departing decisively from the inflationary “planned scarcity” approach of the 1930s, the new strategy aimed to boost farmers’ net profits not by limiting output, but rather by decreasing the cost of shipping farm products to market. More broadly, the rise of nonunionized independent trucking—in conjunction with an array of “political technologies” ranging from paper milk-cartons, boxed beef, and frozen convenience foods to “reefers” (mechanically refrigerated tractor trailers), highways, industrial feedlots, and “dynamic” warehousing systems—provided policymakers and agribusiness interests with the tools to create a new food distribution system that could deliver vast quantities of cheap food to the supermarkets springing up in the wake of suburban sprawl.

Successful implementation of this new system, Hamilton argues, relied above all on the availability of cheap transportation that could link increasingly decentralized production and warehousing facilities to suburban supermarkets. To achieve this goal, postwar policymakers exploited a loophole in the 1935 Motor Carrier Act that exempted unprocessed agricultural goods from federal trucking regulations and thus allowed farmers and agribusiness interests to do an end run around the unionized transportation firms that dominated the trucking industry. As the sweated labor of independent truckers (Hamilton likens them to sharecroppers) began to undercut the more lucrative rates charged by unionized trucking firms, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, weakened further by a 1959 Senate investigation that led to the outlawing of secondary boycotts, began to lose its grip on the trucking industry. Meanwhile, Department of Agriculture secretaries under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon progressively expanded the category of exempted agricultural goods until President Carter, at the urging of Senator Ted Kennedy, finally deregulated the entire trucking industry in 1980. Democratic leadership in this deregulatory effort, Hamilton argues, signaled the culmination of the party’s postwar shift away from New Deal economic liberalism toward “rights-based social liberalism combined with growth-oriented economic policies that primarily benefited business interests and relatively affluent consumers” (p. 227). Moreover, deregulation of the trucking industry served as a model for similar efforts in other sectors of the postwar economy and thus played an important role in the demise of the New Deal order.

As the federal government whittled away at the regulated sector of the trucking industry from 1935 to 1980, it also placed the USDA’s scientific and technological research services at the disposal of agribusiness corporations and large-scale farming interests. This two-prong effort, Hamilton shows, was intended to prop up farm profits by cutting transportation costs while simultaneously mollifying inflation-stressed consumers by flooding supermarkets with an abundance of cheap industrial food. Put more bluntly, Hamilton argues that the bipartisan effort to remake the postwar American food system balanced the interests of corporate agribusiness, large farms, and consumers on the backs of organized labor, small farms, and, ironically, anti-statist independent truckers, whose entrepreneurial ambitions were largely thwarted by the postwar neoliberal order they themselves helped to usher in.

But if independent truckers were quick to jump on the emerging laissez-faire–antiunion bandwagon, Hamilton argues, they were not conservative by nature. Nor were their increasingly militant protests in the 1970s part of a blue-collar “backlash” against permissive liberal elites. The “anarchic libertarianism” of independent truckers was driven not by cultural angst or racial prejudice, Hamilton argues, but rather by “pocketbook politics”—in particular, the firm belief that “neither labor unions nor government regulators had the power to protect their economic interests” (p. 164). The corruption-ridden Teamsters, in their view, were simply not up to the task of safeguarding either job security or purchasing power in the face of devastating stagflation. And the state, truckers believed, had proven no more effective than the Teamsters in this regard. Indeed, it had frequently subverted the interests of the overwhelmingly white, deracinated farm boys who became independent truckers—first by encouraging the industrialization of the countryside that simultaneously foreclosed their opportunity to become farmers and drove them into long-haul trucking; then by issuing regulations that encouraged the cartelization of unionized trucking firms in the 1930s; and finally by failing to curb the entrenched power of agribusinesses that readily ate the lunch of nonunionized truckers.

In making this case, Hamilton directly challenges “backlash” historians in general (Thomas J. Sugrue, Robert O. Self, Kevin Kruse, et al.), and Thomas Frank in particular. In What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Frank argues that white working people were driven into the GOP in recent decades not by a rational calculation of their economic self-interest, but rather by the Democratic Party’s abandonment of economic liberalism, which left them vulnerable to conservatives’ clever use of cultural wedge issues and relentless positioning of liberals as latte-sipping elitists. To the extent that independent truckers represent the white working class as a whole, Hamilton poses a serious challenge to Frank’s influential thesis. Yet Hamilton’s research, while shedding considerable light on the complex ideological motivations of white rural workers, does not necessarily refute the notion that conservative efforts to redefine class-based politics in cultural terms may have played an important role in the defection of white workers from the Democratic Party. Perhaps they left for both economic and cultural reasons, just as farm boys gravitated to nonunionized trucking not only because it seemed to make economic sense to them but because it allowed them to hang onto a rural identity emphasizing masculinity and independence even as they knowingly drove their rigs into the maw of the “agroindustrial complex.”

Nor does Hamilton’s research refute the argument of Sugrue and others that racial demagoguery—frequently infused with a racist version of pocketbook politics manifested in systematic residential and workplace discrimination—contributed significantly to the white working-class abandonment of the Democratic Party. Hamilton himself acknowledges the role of racism in a footnote appearing late in the book. In this tempered version of his argument, pocketbook politics is downgraded from leading cause to “a durable component of white working-class disillusionment,” taking its place alongside “George Wallace’s racial demagoguery and Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’” (p. 288, n. 40, my emphasis). Instead of overturning the backlash thesis in its entirety, then, Hamilton unearths an important but overlooked factor—the remaking of the modern food system—in the demise of economic liberalism.

But none of this diminishes what is undeniably a major achievement. Shane Hamilton has written a brilliant book that will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the conservative groundswell of the postwar era. His empathy for long-haul truckers left with few good options in the face of a state-sponsored agribusiness juggernaut—an empathy perhaps owing in part to his own farm upbringing—makes the book all the more compelling. Trucking culture, like Bakersfield in the hands of Johnny Carson, is easily mocked. To his credit, Hamilton resists the temptation, offering instead a respectful yet unromanticized analysis of the trucking life and the myths that have grown up around it, all of which should be of considerable interest to social, cultural, and rural historians. Trucking Country will also be of great interest to historians of technology. Indeed, Hamilton offers wonderfully nuanced histories of the half-dozen or so “political technologies” listed above, along with tractor trailers themselves. While acknowledging the power of technological momentum to shape social relations, he wisely steers clear of full-blown technological determinism by showing how technological innovations are products of human struggle and choice mediated by political ideology, economic motivations, and cultural identity. In the end, Hamilton convincingly links these innovations to the rise of an agribusiness-dominated food system and the demise of the New Deal order.

Dr. Kleiman is an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York, Geneseo.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 1 (January 2010)