America through a political, social, and cultural history of trucking

book: Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) | Shane Hamilton

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	• Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) Shane Hamilton Princeton University Press, 2008 - 344 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Great book, just needed to not end so abruptly

If anyone wants a better understanding of hour their "stuff" (food, electronics, furniture, etc.) gets from point A to B so fast and cheap today, they need to read this book. It is an outstanding history, from the Depression through the 1980's, of how products were moved in this country and the political and commercial forces who helped set the rules for said movement. It explains how the Teamsters, along with New Deal politicians, set up a framework of regulated trucking routes that restricted competition and kept transport prices high. That framework was steadily eroded through an exemption in the regulation that allowed farmers to use unregulated trucks to bring their product to market. The ensuing four-and-a-half decades were spent battling over what the meaning of the words "farm products" meant in an economy increasingly dominated by consumers want for cheap products and farmers want for maximum profit in their pockets (and not truckers). Pulling on a voluminous list of citations, the author turns what could be a dry topic into one of fascinating statistics, first person accounts, and cultural references that make one feel like they are riding shotgun with a driver trying to eek out a living as "the last American cowboy".

The only reason that this book didn't receive 5 stars from me was it's abrupt ending. Once through President Carter's de-regulation era, the author attempts to sum up the last 30 years of trucking in several concluding pages. Perhaps there weren't as many primary sources as there were for earlier decades, or maybe the point of the book was to stop with Carter's actions. Whatever the reason, it seemed a bit abrupt given the volume and depth of the previous chapters. It's the one blemish in an otherwise outstanding documentary on the nearly 80 years of trucking since the Great Depression.

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America through a political, social, and cultural history of trucking

"Trucking Country" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Hamilton's book interview ran here as cover feature on May 1, 2009.

Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.

Hamilton challenges the popular notion of "red state" conservatism as a devil's bargain between culturally conservative rural workers and economically conservative demagogues in the Republican Party. The roots of rural conservatism, Hamilton demonstrates, took hold long before the culture wars and free-market fanaticism of the 1990s. As Hamilton shows, truckers helped build an economic order that brought low-priced consumer goods to a greater number of Americans. They piloted the big rigs that linked America's factory farms and agribusiness food processors to suburban supermarkets across the country.

Trucking Country is the gripping account of truckers whose support of post-New Deal free enterprise was so virulent that it sparked violent highway blockades in the 1970s. It's the story of "bandit" drivers who inspired country songwriters and Hollywood filmmakers to celebrate the "last American cowboy," and of ordinary blue-collar workers who helped make possible the deregulatory policies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and set the stage for Wal-Mart to become America's most powerful corporation in today's low-price, low-wage economy.

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