Keep on Truckin’

The road to right-wing deregulation began on our nation’s highways.

In the popular memory of the 1970s, truckers appear mainly as the source of the CB radio fad and the outlaws featured in country music songs and the Smokey and the Bandit films. In that decade of oil shortages, economic stagflation, women’s liberation, and culture wars, this obscure corner of the transportation sector seems far removed from the political conflicts that were reshaping the nation. Yet on three dramatic occasions, a loose coalition of independent truckers attempted to shut down the interstate highway system and disrupt the distribution network that carried food across the United States. In effect, they tried to shut down America.

The OPEC oil embargo triggered the first two strikes, in late 1973 and early 1974, as long-haul truckers protested skyrocketing fuel costs, blockaded highways and gas stations, and engaged in sporadic violence against drivers who did not respect the boycott. The truckers demanded federal intervention to protect their economic interests, including price caps on diesel fuel, a government investigation of alleged profit gouging by oil companies, and the lifting of the recently imposed 55 mile-per-hour speed limit. President Richard Nixon responded by refusing to bargain with “a handful of desperadoes.” In 1979, when the Iranian Revolution worsened the energy crisis, about 75,000 truckers went back on strike, calling for federal action to freeze diesel prices and provide subsidies for independent owner-operators through a surcharge on the large, unionized trucking corporations regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). The Independent Truckers Association, a newly formed group that organized the 1979 shutdown, also seized the opportunity to press for the complete deregulation of the industry. The Democratically-controlled Congress responded by deregulating freight trucking in the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, six months before Ronald Reagan entered the White House.

In the conventional narrative of political realignment, economic deregulation represents a key stage in the collapse of New Deal liberalism and the triumph of free-market conservatism with the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s. But where on the political spectrum should we locate the independent trucker revolts, which combined “liberal” demands for substantial government intervention with “conservative” calls for freedom of enterprise? Mike Parkhurst, the leader of the Independent Truckers Association and a self-defined “radical conservative,” portrayed deregulation as the antidote to a corrupt system of monopoly capitalism dominated by big corporations, big unions, and big government. And yet leading liberals such as Senator Ted Kennedy and activist Ralph Nader also championed trucking deregulation as a pocketbook reform that would break up government-sanctioned freight shipping cartels and reduce prices for American consumers. President Jimmy Carter endorsed this approach to fight inflation and restore economic growth, an agenda that also shaped his administration’s deregulation initiatives in the airline, railroad, telecommunications, natural gas, and banking industries. The Teamsters Union and the large firms in the American Trucking Associations bitterly resisted deregulation, but the Motor Carrier Act drew support from a broad alliance that included liberal consumer groups, the small-business lobby, agribusiness corporations, and conservative economists such as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. Deregulation, far from being solely a right-wing cause, had surprising bedfellows.

The current crisis in the global credit markets and the massive taxpayer bailout for Wall Street have led many Democratic politicians and liberal policymakers to rethink the free-market mantras of the past three decades and reconsider the virtues of the New Deal regulatory state. “Of course, something must be done–and quickly,” wrote Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Eric Schlosser in the Wall Street Journal. “What we really need is a new New Deal”–not just a bailout for large banks, but “relief for ordinary Americans.” But if today’s progressives hope to resurrect the lessons of the New Deal in order to address the nation’s worst financial emergency since the 1930s, it is imperative that they recognize the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the regulatory policies that shaped America’s political economy from the Great Depression through the recession of the 1970s.

The New Deal state always contained two competing strains of economic regulation: a top-down market stimulus approach that favored large corporations and monopoly capitalism, and a more bottom-up redistributionist approach promoted by progressive labor and consumer groups that supported curbs on the power of big business. The history of the unusual coalition that advocated trucking deregulation in the 1970s serves as a timely reminder that the contradictory features of New Deal economic policymaking cannot be reduced to a simple battle between liberal support for government intervention and conservative demands for free enterprise.

In Trucking Country, University of Georgia historian Shane Hamilton argues that trucking deregulation reflected a “categorical embrace of free-market ideology by workers, consumers and politicians who, since the height of the New Deal in the 1930s, had called upon labor unions and a powerful central government to strike a balance between private economic gain and equality of educational opportunity.” The trucker revolts, a short chapter in this much larger story, contributed to a bipartisan enthusiasm for deregulation that helped lay the foundation for the runaway corporate capitalism that brought with it low consumer prices and rising economic inequality. But the shift from an “equity-oriented” to a “growth-oriented” liberalism began long before, during the World War II era itself, when New Deal regulators began to abandon policies of redistribution and efforts to restrain monopoly capitalism in favor of a Keynesian program to intervene in the economy by stimulating and subsidizing private enterprise. Was New Deal liberalism, built on a contradictory foundation, doomed to fail? And if so, what does that mean for today’s calls to resurrect it? With corporate regulation now back on the political agenda, it’s worth revisiting the story of what New Deal liberalism–and its eventual displacement by the free-market dogmatism of the Reagan/Clinton/Bush era–was all about in the first place.

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