In this timely new book, Shane Hamilton offers a compelling account of the politics of long-haul trucking in the postwar United States and, in particular, its contribution to the rise of economic conservatism by the end of the 1970s. This work, exhaustive in its research, explains a range of critical developments in twentieth-century political economy from the perspective of trucking: from the struggles within and between various federal agencies over farm, labor and consumption policies; to advances in truck design, highway construction, refrigeration, and food packaging technologies; to the cultural development of a trucking genre within country music and Hollywood films.

Hamilton's broad argument is that over the latter half of the twentieth century, agribusiness found ways to effectively bypass both New Deal regulatory schemes and union control of food transportation through the increased use of independent trucking firms. These truckers, he asserts, as nonunionized haulers of unprocessed and unregulated farm products, became important carriers of antistatist economic politics by the 1970s.

At one level, Hamilton offers an important story of institutional tensions within New Deal agencies, and in doing so helps us understand the decline of the New Deal political order. Progressive liberal attempts to simultaneously provide good prices to farmers, guarantee affordable food to working and middle-class consumers, and protect the labor that went into the production and delivery of that food produced a regulatory matrix among agribusiness firms, rail companies, and the Teamsters union. But Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) exemptions were made for certain “unprocessed” products that could be transported by truck from farm to market. Over the following decades, the Department of Agriculture pushed to expand these exemptions and fend off attempts at further regulation by the ICC. With the growth of the federal highway system, the advance of food preserving techniques, and the advent of the modern supermarket, unregulated, nonunionized, long-haul trucking blossomed into a basic aspect of postindustrial U.S. capitalism.

As Hamilton explains it, trucking firms developed as small enterprises in rural areas to bring produce to market in the 1920s and 1930s. These truckers, mostly from rural areas where family farming was no longer an option, saw the value and prize in their work through gendered understandings of freedom and independence—from bosses, from unions, and from state regulation. Over the course of decades, long-haul trucking grew to occupy an ever greater share of the transportation of foods. The receipt of broader exemptions to ICC regulations on processed foods also undercut union control of this sector. Yet as he points out, for all of their perceived freedoms, “independent” truckers operated within severe constraints, often tantamount to sharecropping, and were caught in a bewildering array of state- and federal-level regulations on weight, length and content of trucks, and layers of taxation. The squeeze experienced by truckers made them ripe for revolt by the 1970s, and many engaged in episodic, intense, and sometimes violent strikes against federal regulation in that decade. The political culture of those strikes was reflected in both country music and the movies, and Hamilton offers a rich cultural analysis of the trucking genre in country music and in Hollywood, which in the 1970s championed a defiance of state authority among truckers.

Hamilton's depiction of the relationship among major food monopolies (particularly milk and beef), relatively autonomous New Deal agencies, and organized labor demonstrates how contradictory institutional imperatives within the New Deal order brought about—or at least made likely—its demise by the late 1970s. Such analysis speaks directly to debates about political order and change in political science, particularly within the American political development field. Hamilton's book challenges theories of punctuated equilibrium, such as realignment, or, more recently, regime theory and path dependence, each of which treats political eras as internally homogeneous and stable until their sudden transformation by exogenous shocks. By contrast, his account illuminates the ways in which political orders are often internally riven and incoherent, and how politically transformative crises can emerge endogenously. Seen this way, reigning accounts of order and change within political science appear mechanistic and overly determined.

Yet for his many great achievements here, Hamilton has perhaps overreached with one of his central arguments—that the “neopopulism expressed by the country-bred truckers of the 1970s marked the triumph of a radically antistatist capitalist ideology embraced by farmers, workers, consumers, and politicians alike,” and that “truckers were key to this broad transformation of this U.S. political culture” (p. 4). While the trucking strikes expressed opposition to specific federal regulations, and while these workers consistently resisted unionization, the author may be giving them more political freight than they can legitimately carry here. By the 1970s, the New Deal state was under assault from both the Left and Right. The antiauthoritarianism articulated by the striking truckers looks, by Hamilton's description, not that different from much of the politically heterogeneous antipathy toward the state that was so pronounced across that decade: from the antiwar, antinuke, ecology, and black nationalist politics on the Left to the antiabortion, antiwelfare, and antilabor politics on the Right. (Anecdotally, a trucker once told a hitchhiking friend of mine that the 1971 Mayday antiwar actions in Washington, DC, inspired their strike tactics.) Even a popular-culture representation like Jackie Gleason's Texas sheriff in the Hollywood trucking movie Smokey and the Bandit is easily identifiable as a stock villain of civil rights or counterculture narratives of the era.

Trucker opposition to specific federal regulations, like Nixon's imposed fuel-saving speed limit, may have contributed to a broader groundswell of antiliberal sentiment that ultimately helped dismantle the New Deal order, but their actions or politics do not seem central to the rise of the Right. Indeed, as Hamilton describes independent truckers and their politics, they are at best ambivalent Reaganites in 1980, and by the early years into his administration, they seemed to have reversed their understanding of how deregulation would affect them. As is the case with every successful political regime, the architects of the modern Right selectively appropriated various forms of discontent in the land and turned them to their own purposes, just as they exploited conflicts within the New Deal.

Nevertheless, by drawing together structural, institutional, economic, and cultural analyses, Hamilton has offered a dense, textured, and complex account of his subject. Trucking Country is essential to any understanding of the decline of the New Deal and the rise of economic conservatism at the end of the twentieth century.