Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy by Shane Hamilton
Princeton University Press, £20.95

It is easy to see the beauty in the beast when you look at those huge American trucks with their distinctive driver’s cabs and aura of majesty on the freeway. They have featured in red neck movies and bring together the outlaw swagger and romantic tenderness of modern Western heroes. Country music lauds truckers as gritty yet sentimental. They are as much a part of American life as burgers and fries, endless highways and Wal-Mart superstores. But they are much, much more than machines.

As Shane Hamilton, Assistant Professor of History at Georgia University, tells it trucks and truckers have played a major role in defining and helping the US way of life to evolve, feeding on the population’s high expectations of product availability in stores from coast to coast and, as a result, to end up heavily dependent on voracious consumerism.

In Trucking Country, Hamilton analyses the significance of US industrial transportation and distribution mutations and the effects on cultural evolution, regional identity, economic upheaval, legal changes, political debate and policy amendments. We are taken on a journey from the 1920s to the present day that reveals the shifts in social dynamics and the ensuing pressures on economists and politicians to find ways to free up the food supply market but to retain a grip on its reins, to deregulate but keep control, to fragment but maintain some degree of cohesion.

Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s included initiatives to ease unemployment and to reform financial and business practices to help the national recovery from the Great Depression. How efficiently products were transported around the country from farm to table was a key element to restoring stability and morale.

We find out about the reality of distribution upheaval under the layers of trucking romance as debate, aggression, protest and, sometimes, violence erupted in several tangles over the years involving politicians, independent truckers, unionised truckers, cattle farmers, dairy farmers and retailers, all claiming the high moral ground as champions of the consumer.

From this unsettled situation came Wal-Mart in the early 1960s as a kind of “white knight” provider of products, available in abundance and at cheap prices. Its existence today as a low-cost, low-wage, anti-union economic retailing behemoth suggests that the so-called free market flourished because the US population was lulled into a dubious sense of satisfaction at the thought of endless supplies of merchandise available 24 hours a day, all made possible by freeways full of trucks and truckers.

If you want to know what really drives the US economy, then this thoroughly researched and well-written book is for you – and that’s a big 10-4, Rubber Duck.

Joe Cushnan