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  • Driving Away from the New Deal:Independent Trucking and the Deregulatory State
  • Jeffrey P. Moran (bio)
Shane Hamilton . Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii + 305 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $29.95.

Breaker 1-9, we've got us a new book on trucks, trucking, and truckers. In Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy, Shane Hamilton makes the case for trucking's centrality not only to CB radio and country music, but to the modern nexus of agribusiness, virulent anti-statism, and consumer gratification. Independent, unregulated trucking, Hamilton argues, dissolved the old railroad monopolies, highlighted the limits of the New Deal approach to governmental regulation, weakened organized labor, and made possible the connection between modern agribusiness and consumers' tables. These are weighty changes to ascribe to a single technology, but Hamilton's clear prose and careful analysis bear the burden well.

At the heart of Hamilton's thesis is the so-called "farm problem" of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although Hamilton never quite comes out and defines the phrase, the farm problem was (and is) roughly this: farmers want high returns for their products, but consumers want to pay as little for them as possible. While the explosion in farm productivity and the growth of an urban consumer population would seem tailor-made for solving the problem, from the era of Populist revolt onward the two trends never fully meshed.

The Great Depression was the critical moment for this farm problem. Farmers had done very well during the Great War, and in the 1920s they continued to invest in tractors and other heavy equipment to chase the lure of prosperity. In order to pay off their debts, they needed to cultivate still more land. The result was, in part, a boom in productivity, but this boom also caused agricultural prices to plummet, as productivity outstripped domestic and foreign demand; thus, the Depression hit farmers particularly hard. Initially, New Dealers vacillated between seeing this problem as one of underconsumption and viewing it as one of overproduction. As in other New Deal initiatives, the overproductionists soon won out, their victory exemplified [End Page 617] by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's notorious programs for killing six million hogs and plowing under one fourth of the Southern cotton crop—solving the problem of want amidst plenty by doing away with plenty, as Roosevelt's critics charged.

After that initial shock, New Dealers tried to hold together a coalition of farmers and consumers with production limits and price supports, but with limited success in propping up farmers or feeding the hungry. Historians have also found that these programs led to greater agricultural consolidation, as large landowners found it more remunerative to kick sharecroppers and other laborers off their land in order to collect government subsidies for reducing production. For different reasons, New Deal attempts to regulate beef prices also generally failed, for the meatpackers strenuously evaded regulations; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for its part, was never fully invested in busting the "Beef Trust" in the first place.

Most of the New Deal agricultural initiatives failed, Hamilton argues, because they ignored the major connection between overproducing farmers and underconsuming urbanites: transportation. While he denies that transportation technologies were determinative, Hamilton points out that railroads were almost the sole means of moving goods from the farm to the table, and thus all farm problems in the Depression era occurred within the framework of a "rail-bound nation" (p. 24). As the Populists had charged long before, the railroads were by nature monopolistic and thus wielded disproportionate power over the prices farmers paid to have their goods shipped to market. Further, railroad access helped determine which companies would succeed or fail. In certain cases, such as the beef industry, railway transportation heavily favored large companies that could afford the massive capital investments for stockyards and refrigerated railcars needed to do business by rail. This high barrier to entry fostered the development of an agricultural oligopoly, the so-called Beef Trust. Only when independent truckers became a force did this framework begin to crumble and to take down...

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