Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on October 3, 2006
Enterprise and Society 2006 7(4):666-674; doi:10.1093/es/khl041
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Trucking Country: Food Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America
SHANE HAMILTON is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia. This dissertation was completed in June 2005 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Deborah K. Fitzgerald, Merritt Roe Smith, and Meg Jacobs. Contact information: 306 LeConte Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA. E-mail: shamilto@uga.edu.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
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 mid-twentieth 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