The Rise of Agribusiness and the Demise of the New Deal Order: Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy

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, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. xii+305, $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...