Trucking Country: Food Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America

By showing how trucking reconfigured the technological, political, and cultural relationships between rural producers and urban consumers from the 1930s to the 1970s, my dissertation reveals the rural roots of a radical transformation of American capitalism in the midtwentieth century. Highway transportation provided the infrastructure for a transition from the New Deal–era political economy—based on centralized political authority, a highly regulated economy, and collective social values—to a post–New Deal capitalist culture marked by widespread antistatism, minimal market regulation, and fierce individualism. From the 1930s to the late 1970s, consumer demand for low-priced food, coupled with farmers' demands for high commodity prices, prompted the federal government to encourage agribusinesses to use long-haul trucks, piloted by fiercely independent "truck drivin' men," to privatize the politics of food. Western meatpackers and other agribusinesses were determined to shred government regulations and labor unions in the name of "free enterprise," low wages, and irresistibly low consumer prices for goods such as well-marbled steaks, jugs of milk, and frozen orange juice. The post–World War II highway-based food economy began unraveling the social fabric of rural America for the sake of low consumer prices—long before Wal-Mart became infamous for said strategy.¹ Trucks, I contend, were political technologies, used to define the contours of public policy regarding foods and farmers; at the same time, trucks as technologies shaped the economic and social structures underlying those political debates. In doing so, long-haul trucking in the rural countryside set the pace for the low-price, low-wage, "free-market" economic ideologies of late twentieth-century American capitalism.

Originally, I had not expected this dissertation to deal with such heady issues of political economy. In fact, I started out with two questions that at first seemed to have little to do with business or economics. The first question emerged from my interest—both academic and recreational—in country music. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, country musicians and record labels released dozens of songs about "Looking at the World through a Windshield" while spending "Six Days on the Road" as an "Asphalt Cowboy." Trucking songs, I noticed, are almost always country songs. Why, I wondered? Was there something specifically "country" about trucking as a way of life, as a metaphor, as a technology?

The second question emerged from personal experience. Growing up on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, I knew almost as many truck drivers as I knew farmers. Many of the truckers I knew hauled farm products—hogs, cattle, fertilizers, grain, milk, and so on—although many also hauled manufactured goods such as processed foods. This seemed to make sense, because farmers need to get their products to market, and food processors turn those products into finished goods. But I also thought there might be more, because all these truckers had begun driving at a time when the business of farming had become so tenuous that everyone I knew was either selling their farm and getting a steadier job, or buying someone else's farm in an effort to stay competitive. Besides, trucking was a job that allowed for a chance to be one's own man—much like farming was imagined to be. So I began to wonder if there were larger structural forces at play, making trucking "country" akin to farming in a cultural sense, even as farming became more and more businesslike?

I set out to see if this might lead anywhere. First I had to explain why farmers were shipping products by truck rather than rail. The Midwestern farms I grew up on and around, after all, were created by railroads, not highways.² Other scholars have argued that trucks replaced trains in the mid-twentieth century as America's primary mode of general transportation because the U.S. government played favorites. Truckers received low-cost infrastructure through the construction of highways, according to the standard interpretation, and also benefited from an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) that favored trucking firms while tightening regulation of the railroads.³ Neither of these...