Enterprise and Society Advance Access published online on May 3, 2008
Enterprise and Society, doi:10.1093/es/khn042
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
The Populist Appeal of Deregulation: Independent Truckers and the Politics of Free Enterprise, 1935–1980
SHANE HAMILTON is an assistant professor in history at the University of Georgia
Contact information: 306 LeConte Hall, Athens, GA 30602. E-mail: shamilto@uga.edu
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After spending a decade as an independent trucker hauling milk, watermelons, and paper across the United States, Mike Parkhurst sold his tractor-trailer in 1961 and used the proceeds to establish Overdrive magazine—the "Voice of the American Trucker." Believing "truckers were ready for a magazine that would pull no punches," Parkhurst launched a decades-long editorial assault on transportation regulations that he believed bound American enterprise in the chains of corporate control, government malfeasance, and brutish boss unionism.1 By the mid-1970s, Parkhurst became one of the nation's most outspoken advocates of transportation deregulation. As he told a reporter for Time in 1975, he hoped "to wake the truckers up to the fact that they’re slaves to a monopoly"—a monopoly on freight transportation maintained by corporate trucking firms, abetted by the Teamsters Union, and sanctioned by corrupt government officials.2 In the summer of 1979, Parkhurst helped to orchestrate a nationwide strike by tens