Trucking Culture and Politics in the Agribusiness Era, 1953–61
Robert Vandivier’s first experience as a truck driver came before he was tall enough to see over the steering wheel, hauling skim milk and grain to feed the livestock on his parents’ southern Indiana farm during the Depression. After serving briefly in World War II, he was on the verge of making a down payment on a farm when a local trucker advertised a sale on several used trucks. Without any knowledge of the livestock hauling business, Vandivier soon found himself running a ten-truck operation, hauling sheep, hogs, and cattle from the Midwest to New Jersey and West Virginia. Lawrence Pilgrim, born on a farm in northern Georgia in the late 1930s, followed a southern version of the same path. After the war, as pine thickets and Jesse Jewell’s chicken processing plants replaced depleted cotton fields, Pilgrim decided to follow his father and older brother into the trucking industry—though at the age of sixteen he had to forge his driver’s license to be able to haul chicken feed throughout the South and dressed chickens as far north as Detroit. The unregulated nature of most agricultural trucking allowed young men like Vandivier and Pilgrim to enter the business relatively easily—and buying a truck to haul livestock or grain seemed a surer bet than buying a farm during an era of industrialized agriculture. Both of these men watched as the rural landscapes into which they had been born became industrial landscapes after World War II and both chose to become truckers to maintain a sense of rural identity and manly independence in an era when agribusiness limited the possibilities of doing so as farmers. Even so, both men refused to romanticize their work as “asphalt cowboys.” As Vandivier put it, the main thing cowboys and truckers shared was a culture of hard, lonesome work that neither “should have got into.” Like the range-riding cowboy of old, the truck driving man of the 1950s and 1960s was “independent” only in the sense that his work did not take place within the four walls of an office or factory; the work was nonetheless fully integrated into the machinery of industrial capitalism.1
Many would-be farmers who became “kings of the open road” in this period recognized that they could be considered modern-day “sharecroppers” upon whose backs the industrial machinery of capitalist agribusiness rode. Rural truckers of the 1950s and 1960s often worked as drivers for small, unregulated trucking firms, specializing in hauling agricultural products and foodstuffs from factory farms to the supermarkets springing up across the suburban landscape. By hauling the products of a mass-production agricultural economy to the warehouses and retail stores of a mass-consumption food economy, rural truckers unintentionally contributed to a material undermining of economic liberalism within U.S. farm and food politics. Under the guiding hand of President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, the Department of Agriculture relied upon the “flexibility” of rural truckers to make a full-scale assault on economic liberalism within the farm and food economy. Through close cooperation with agribusiness firms—such as the frozen food packers, beefpackers, and milk dealers discussed in this chapter and the following two chapters—Benson’s USDA encouraged private firms to use highway transportation to engineer attacks on labor unions and small farmers as part of his efforts to repeal the New Deal in agriculture. Without actually overturning any New Deal farm policies, Benson upheld the “free market” and modern technology as the solution to the decades-old farm problem. The expansion of long-haul trucking and new warehousing methods allowed agribusinesses such as frozen food packers to triumphantly claim they could construct a “classless society” of satisfied supermarket consumers. By producing “luxuries for the masses”—from frozen orange juice to TV dinners—food processors in the agribusiness era overturned liberal efforts to administer private enterprise in the name of farm prosperity and consumer purchasing power. In their stead, agribusinesses constructed a new geography of food production and consumption that embodied conservative ideologies of “free enterprise.”
TRUCKING IN THE RURAL INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE
The expansion of long-haul trucking in the countryside came at a key moment in rural U.S. history, as industrialized agriculture made the practice of farming increasingly peripheral to the economic and social lives of most rural people. Over the long twentieth century, and with especial rapidity following the end of World War II, a set of wrenching economic and social changes redefined rural life in the United States. The size, scale, and sophistication of the average farming operation increased dramatically after World War II, leading to a rapid decline in the number of people who made their living directly from the land. The number of farms in the United States decreased by 32 percent between 1945 and 1960, while the average farm size increased by approximately 34 percent. At the same time, the proportion of the U.S. population living on farms declined by half from 1945 to 1960. Fossil fuel-powered tractors and combines replaced oat-powered mules and horses, while also lessening farmers’ reliance on human labor; the number of unpaid family members and hired hands working on farms decreased by 29 percent between 1945 and 1960. For those Americans who continued to eke out a living on the farm, off-farm employment became essential to the household economy; nonfarm jobs contributed 26 percent of the total farm income of the nation in 1945, but by 1960, nonfarm sources accounted for 38 percent of the farm population’s income. Such grim prospects for U.S. farmers—which only grew dimmer over the years—help explain why trucking would seem such an attractive option for so many young men entering adulthood in 1950s rural America.2
Dry statistics mask the role of powerful government and business agents in fomenting the depopulation and industrialization of the postwar countryside, as if the process were the product of inevitable technological forces or of the “logic” of industrial capitalism. In one of the great ironies of twentieth-century U.S. history, the “farm problem” that so bedeviled agricultural policymakers from the 1920s through the 1960s was in large part a product of federal government policies. Since the 1862 founding of the Department of Agriculture as a cabinet-level federal agency, government researchers had guided “progressive” farmers to adopt ever more industrial-style techniques and machines to intensify and expand their operations. Federally funded agricultural scientists, engineers, and extension agents, along with bankers, land-grant university researchers, and agromachinery and agrochemical companies, urged farmers to rely on tractors, mechanical cotton pickers, grain combines, hybrid seeds, pesticides, and inorganic fertilizers to transform their mixed farming operations into giant monocropped fields. The state of Iowa, which in 1920 had produced everything from apricots to pigs to watermelons for on-farm consumption and off-farm sale, had by the 1960s become an enormous corn and soybean factory producing grain and hogs primarily for out-of-state markets. This “rationalization” of American agriculture produced anything but rational results after World War II, as would-be farmers were forced to seek off-farm employment while agricultural policymakers were forced to wrestle with declining farm incomes at a time of unprecedented prosperity for the nation as a whole. The growth of long-haul trucking played a key role in both of these struggles. Trucking offered nonfarm jobs to rural men, while simultaneously contributing to a shift in agricultural politics toward abundant marketing of farm products rather than planned scarcity as in the New Deal era.3
For rural men seeking off-farm employment in the 1950s and 1960s, trucking provided a career that would allow them to stay close to home. Census data (see table B.1 in appendix B) show that truck drivers in the postwar period were more likely than the average worker to live outside of major metropolitan areas. In 1960, for example, nearly a third of truck drivers lived in nonmetropolitan areas, compared to only a quarter of all workers. Regions in which agribusiness dominated the economy generally had high concentrations of truck drivers, especially owner-operator truckers—a point graphically demonstrated in figure 2.1 (see chapter 2). In Kansas in 1950, for instance, the trucking industry provided the second-highest number of jobs in the state, behind only agriculture. In a state with two major manufacturing industries—aeronautics and meatpacking—this was a remarkable fact. Part of the reason for the availability of driving jobs in agricultural states like Kansas was the fact that farmers became increasingly dependent on trucking rather than railroads for shipping goods to market. In the era of agribusiness, as farm owners used tractors and other machines to do work themselves that had previously been done by hired hands and family members, farm owners had less time to do their own trucking. Farm-to-market hauling became a full-time occupation in its own right, as farmers who had once used pickups to haul their goods to market came to rely upon for-hire truckers with larger tractor-trailers to do their hauling. Another key factor was the social process by which many drivers entered the trucking industry in the postwar period. Although formal driver-training schools existed from the earliest days of long-haul trucking, a significant percentage of drivers in the postwar years learned to drive from a relative or friend. Two sociological studies from the late 1960s found that approximately one of every three drivers was related to another driver who had convinced and trained him to enter the occupation. Fathers who had left the farm to become truckers in the 1930s, moreover, commonly brought their sons into trucking after the war. Friends and neighbors also recruited individuals into trucking. Richard Gingerich, who grew up on a farm near Kouts, Indiana, in the 1950s, remembers spending his early teenage years doing odd jobs around local livestock yards to help out his parents who were “having a tough time financially.” When invited to ride along with livestock truckers, Gingerich would enthusiastically accept—especially because the drivers would let young Gingerich take the wheel “with orders to ‘wake me up when you approach the east gate [the border checkpoint between Indiana and Ohio].’” After graduating from high school in 1965, Gingerich’s informal driving experience helped him to be hired “on the spot” by a local fertilizer and grain trucking firm, a job that would allow him to save up enough money to buy his own tractor-trailer in due course.4
Perhaps most importantly, rural men were able to enter the unregulated farm hauling market much more easily than they could enter the regulated freight hauling market. As detailed in previous chapters, the Department of Agriculture had worked since 1935 to make sure that agricultural truckers would remain exempt from Interstate Commerce Commission regulations that restricted entry into the freight trucking industry. Although rural men could become owner-operator farm truckers without having to file papers with government regulators, they were also forced to accept more economic uncertainty than their unionized counterparts in the regulated freight trucking industry. The distance between nonunion and union drivers widened during the 1950s, as the Teamsters achieved unprecedented power within the urban freight trucking industry. With their dominance in regulated freight trucking established by the end of World War II, the Teamsters were able to refuse deliveries or pickups at the docks of businesses that had not yet signed up with the union, allowing the union to pad its rolls with plant and warehouse workers. This was particularly the case after Dave Beck replaced Daniel Tobin as president of the IBT in 1952. Beck, unlike Tobin, had no qualms about boosting the union’s membership by organizing nondrivers. As one of Beck’s colleagues told a reporter in 1953, “Dave will take anybody he can get his hands on, then he’ll find some kind of justification for it. A ‘teamster’ to him is anybody who sleeps on a bed with movable casters.” By 1957, the Teamsters claimed the largest membership of any union in the nation, with 1.5 million members, of which half a million were truck drivers. Those half-million organized truck drivers, employed primarily by regulated common-carrier trucking firms, earned very good wages. In 1957, the average annual pay of a Teamster driver was $6,886, significantly better than the average annual earnings of $4,242 for workers in manufacturing or the $5,214 of workers in construction. Along with high wages, Teamsters enjoyed seniority rights, health and pension benefits, and job security. The benefits of union membership, however, rarely extended very far outside of urban centers.5
Most rural trucking firms remained small and nonunionized throughout the postwar period. In Kansas in 1962, for instance, 95 percent of the state’s trucking companies had fewer than five employees each. Such small rural firms proved consistently difficult for the Teamsters to organize, as exemplified by a failed effort in the summer of 1960 by a Teamster recruiter to organize Hanefeld Trucking, a cattle-hauling firm in central Wisconsin. Hanefeld employed twelve drivers, making it the largest—yes, the largest—cattle-hauling firm in the state at the time. Though union organizers assured drivers that “only through the Teamsters Union can you make this job a decent one,” the Hanefeld brothers who owned the firm threatened to cease operations if the workers organized. Only six of the drivers voted to accept Teamster representation, with the other six drivers and four additional employees—dispatchers and office staff—opting out. Certainly the antiunion hostility of the Hanefeld brothers drew on a rural antipathy toward labor organizations, but more important was the fact that such a firm—which hauled live cattle, officially considered “agricultural commodities (not including manufactured products thereof)” according to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935—did not have to publish its rates with the ICC. As an exempt agricultural trucking firm, Hanefeld had little incentive to welcome the Teamsters. If such a firm drew up a union contract with its workers, it would almost assuredly go out of business as nonunionized owner-operators rushed in to capture their market with cut-rate freight charges. The “independent” rural truck driver was thus as much a creature of federal transportation policies as of cultural resistance to urban union organizers, much as the “independent” yeoman farmer had always been a creature of agrarian politics that privileged white male land owners as the backbone of U.S. democracy.6
Even for drivers who owned their own rigs, the appropriate occupational analogy was often the sharecropper rather than the yeoman farmer. After interviewing a group of long-haul truckers in Livingston, Alabama, in 1953, Alfred Maund wrote in the Nation magazine that the typical owner-operator “is apparently no better off than a share-cropper, being held in similar peonage by his employer.” In order to purchase a truck and trailer, truckers often relied on installment loans provided by the trucking firm to whom they contracted their labor. In return, owner-operators received a specified share of the revenue for each load. The typical contract, however, did not guarantee a minimum number of loads for the driver. During slow business periods, it was all too easy for an owner-operator to miss a payment on his loan, sending “his” truck and trailer directly to the firm. Even obtaining the pink slip on a rig rarely propelled a driver into the managerial class. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out in its 1959 guide to careers, “Promotional opportunities in [truck driving] are limited,” no matter whether drivers owned their trucks or worked for wages. Still the “sharecropper” analogy is remarkably apt, for it highlights rural working-class men’s deep attachment to self-directed work and their intense desire to own their own property. Agricultural sharecropping, for all its oppressive features, provided an important sense of autonomy to both black and white landless farmers in the post–Civil War South. The system of share-cropping emerged in the postbellum period as a way for cash-poor but landrich plantation owners to secure a steady workforce of free laborers; in order to do so without paying cash wages, plantation owners had to negotiate with freed blacks and poor whites who found the self-directed work of cropping on shares to be socially empowering if not necessarily economically remunerative. Similarly the post–World War II truck drivers whom journalist Alfred Maund labeled “sharecroppers” had reason to believe that leasing a truck from a larger trucking firm was preferable to wage work. Even when the firms captured most of the profits while drivers shed most of the sweat, the lease provided a potential ticket to business ownership in one’s own right.7
The “sharecropper” analogy also opens a window onto the racial hierarchy of trucking culture in the mid-twentieth century. Much as the crop-lien system of agricultural sharecropping tended to reinforce economic discrimination against African American farmers by creating perpetual cycles of debt, the racially inscribed provision of truck leases, loans, and hauling contracts tended to benefit white truckers disproportionately to blacks. As the census data in table B.2 (see appendix B) illustrate, white truckers were far more likely than black truckers to be self-employed. Although black drivers made up 12 percent of the trucking labor force as of 1950, only 5 percent of owner-operator truckers were African American. By contrast, at a time when whites comprised 88 percent of all truckers, 94 percent of self-employed truckers were white. This racial disparity in truck ownership resulted from numerous factors. One was that the most common route for a wage worker to become a truck owner was to save up one’s earnings until a down payment could be made on a truck. Unfortunately rampant discrimination within the for-hire trucking industry and within the Teamsters Union generally kept black drivers’ take-home pay dispiritingly low in comparison to their white counterparts. As the data on income in table B.2 illustrate, white truck drivers earned median incomes more than one and a half times greater than black drivers in 1950, and in 1960 the income gap was even wider. Furthermore even if an African American truck driver managed to save up enough money for a down payment on a truck, he would likely face daily discrimination that would make repaying the loan difficult. To earn a steady income as an owner-operator, a trucker needed to receive loads from brokers, shippers, or larger trucking firms willing to contract out hauls. Even when the dispatchers for such firms were willing to offer paying loads, receiving firms were likely to refuse loads delivered by black drivers. Local chapters of the Teamsters union commonly participated in such discriminatory arrangements. An owner-operator trucker did not necessarily need to belong to the Teamsters to make deliveries, but when delivering to a warehouse organized by the union he needed the cooperation of the workers there to unload his truck. Teamster locals in the urban North, in particular, were dominated by tightly knit groups of ethnic whites who treated membership in their union as a prerogative of whiteness. The national leaders of the union in the 1940s and early 1950s—Daniel Tobin and Dave Beck—did little to counteract the racial exclusion built into many local Teamsters chapters. Even when James R. Hoffa took over the IBT in 1957 after having gained a reputation as a champion of African American access to decent jobs, the union’s headquarters did little to rein in the formal and informal rules used by local chapters to prevent blacks from rising in the trucking ranks. Both white and black truck drivers faced challenges in escaping their “sharecropper” status to become full-fledged owners, but the challenges faced by African Americans seeking the “independence” of truck ownership were extraordinary.8
For both white and black truckers seeking to become small business owners, membership in the Teamsters often presented an obstacle rather than an opportunity. Conservative politicians seized on this fact in the late 1940s and into the 1950s to undermine the power of organized labor within the nation’s economy. The Republican-led passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Truman’s veto had placed significant checks on organized labor’s power, but union membership nonetheless continued to swell in the 1950s. By 1955, one-third of all nonfarm workers in the nation belonged to unions. Despite gains in membership, national union leaders such as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers made deep compromises in the labor movement’s agenda. Labor leaders accepted annual cost-of-living adjustments and expanded fringe benefits, while retreating from demands for systemic political and economic changes that would benefit not only white, northern, industrial workers but also women, black, southern, and unorganized farm workers. Although such compromises were widely hailed at the time by journalists and corporate leaders as a new “social compact” based on a “labor-capital accord,” many rank-and-filers in the labor movement continued to agitate for better economic opportunities and increased autonomy in the workplace and within their unions. Over the course of the supposedly quiescent 1950s, organized labor averaged 352 massive work stoppages per year; the largest strike in U.S. history occurred not in the 1930s but in 1959 when over half a million steelworkers walked off the job for 116 days. Although such massive strikes helped many workers make important gains, they also encouraged corporations and conservative groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers to redouble their efforts to quash labor militancy through anti-Communist propaganda, political lobbying, and welfare capitalist strategies. But the strike wave of the 1950s also highlighted the growing sense among not only conservatives and corporate leaders but also liberal politicians and the general public that organized labor had become overly greedy, self-interested, and undemocratic.9
The Teamsters in particular came under repeated fire in the 1950s as the epitome of “Big Labor,” with widely publicized scandals involving bribery, organized crime, and embezzled pension funds bringing government and public censure. From 1957 to 1959, Senator John L. McClellan (D-AR) chaired a special investigatory committee that heard testimony from over 1,500 witnesses, the bulk of whom either charged the Teamsters Union with shocking and systemic corruption or refused to speak up on behalf of the positive contributions the union had made to the living standards of millions of working Americans. The conservative southerner McClellan was joined by a northern Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy, who served as the McClellan Committee’s chief counsel and who considered himself a friend of labor but bitter enemy of James R. Hoffa. Together McClellan and Kennedy denounced Teamsters leaders for having abused their power at the expense of the U.S. public and of the rank-and-file members of the working class. The McClellan Committee convinced many Americans that the 1954 film On the Waterfront accurately represented organized labor’s betrayal of the rank-and-file working class. The committee also signaled the willingness of key liberals within the Democratic Party—including Robert Kennedy—to defect from that party’s tight alliance forged with organized labor during the Roosevelt-Truman era. Furthermore the Mc-Clellan hearings boosted corporate lobbyists’ ongoing efforts to pass a severely restrictive piece of labor legislation: the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. Landrum-Griffin clamped down on secondary boycotts and empowered the Labor Department to closely regulate union financial affairs. Government oversight of union finances probably helped existing union members by limiting opportunities for embezzlement and pension fraud, but the crackdown on secondary boycotts spelled the doom of Teamster power. Although the Taft-Hartley Act had technically outlawed the secondary boycott twenty-two years earlier, the Teamsters had nonetheless continued to use their most effective organizing tool by exploiting a technical loophole. Landrum-Griffin closed that loophole, forcing the union to rely solely on less effective organizing methods, such as picketing and firm-by-firm balloting. Without the secondary boycott, the Teamsters faced an almost impossible battle in efforts to organize the small, rural firms that would spring up in the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s—particularly in the strongly antiunion Sunbelt South, where state “right-to-work” laws already constricted labor organizing and provided a probusiness “corporate climate.”10
Neither conservative nor liberal attacks on the Teamsters explain, however, why so many long-haul truckers would choose to work either for themselves or for small nonunionized firms despite the economic risks involved. The blue-collar culture of trucking cultivated a deep sense of separation from bourgeois urban society. Understanding this oppositional culture helps to explain why rural owner-operator truckers could fully realize that they worked within a capitalist world of rigid class lines, yet would nonetheless maintain a deep hostility to labor unions. Working-class manhood, particularly in a rural context, has traditionally been defined less by whether one owns the means of production than by an ethos shaped by economic uncertainty and the pride of overcoming that uncertainty on one’s own terms. As George Raft’s character, Joe Fabrini, stated in They Drive by Night, working for a guaranteed salary was “the easy way.” Yet the masculine ideal portrayed by George Raft in They Drive by Night, even if it was rooted in an oppositional ethos, nonetheless made respectability in the eyes of the bourgeois world a valid goal. Joe Fabrini was willing to use his fists in defense of his perceived rights, but he did right by women, refused to drink alcohol, and avoided unnecessary violence. Joe Fabrini was a man to be admired—as indicated by Raft’s eagerness to take the part to shed his reputation as a “heavy” in gangster films such as Scarface. The image of the respectable trucker circulated outside the world of Hollywood in the 1950s, as truckers became known as “Knights of the Road” for helping stranded motorists and using their blinkers and headlights as courtesy signals. This image was further reinforced by the standard driver’s uniform of the era: trim, neat pants and buttoned shirt and a chauffeur’s cap. The masculine mythologies of trucking moved increasingly into a wider cultural world in the 1950s and 1960s, as the image of the truck driving man was reflected back to truckers by movies and music. However, the greater currency of this imagery should not be taken to imply that truckers necessarily “bought” those ideas wholesale—or that by buying those ideas they were duped into a sense of “false consciousness,” preventing them from understanding the exploitative nature of their work. Truckers were continually aware that the economic and political machinery that their work contributed to quite literally rode on their backs—and yet, they had legitimate reasons to value their work culture as distinct from other jobs that might well have earned them higher incomes.11
Above all, long-haul trucking provided many white rural men the chance to maintain a sense of rural identity and rootedness in an urban-industrial world. Country music artists and marketers were among the first to recognize this in the 1950s, which helps explain why nearly all trucking songs are country songs. Country music as a commercial form of entertainment was distinguished from other popular music forms primarily by its reliance on the lived experiences of rural people, particularly southern whites, as the inspiration for its tales and sonic textures.12 Working-class whites fled the rural South in waves in the 1940s and 1950s, seeking industrial employment in the booming wartime and postwar factories of the urban North, West, and Sunbelt. Country musicians, dance hall operators, and record producers sought out these recently urbanized audiences and their crisp new dollar bills, offering everything from fast-paced blue-grass to jazzy western swing to “hillbilly” honky-tonk to sell tickets and records on a national scale. All of these relatively new forms of country music explored the intersection of white rural culture and urban industrial life, though in distinct ways. The bluegrass of performers such as Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers melded jazz-like musical virtuosity with traditional acoustic instruments and nostalgic lyrics about the “old home place.” Western swing bandleaders such as Bob Wills and Spade Cooley cribbed simultaneously from the big band standards and “cowboy” tunes popular in the 1930s and 1940s, while mixing jazz instruments such as vibraphones and saxophones with pedal steel guitars and fiddles—whatever it took to draw huge crowds of white factory workers to the dance halls dotting the southwestern and western landscapes of the emerging Sunbelt. In the honky-tonk subgenre of postwar country music, musicians used electric guitars and pedal steels to fill smaller venues with emotionally raw, hard-driving music for hard-working folks. Honky-tonkers such as Ernest Tubb, Faron Young, and Kitty Wells crafted lyrics and tunes that, much as electric bluesmen John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters were doing at the same time for black audiences in Detroit and Chicago, dealt with the day-to-day concerns of working-class rural migrants into urban environments. Country music of the 1940s and 1950s was far whiter in terms of musicians and audiences than jazz, blues, or rock n’ roll, but even influential black artists such as rocker Chuck Berry and soulman Ray Charles recognized the power of country music’s working-class narratives and the raw emotive power of “hillbilly” music. Blues musician Jimmy Witherspoon, for instance, declared that “if Chuck Berry was white … he would be the top country star in the world.” Ray Charles famously despised rock music, yet declared he “could do a good job with the right hillbilly song”—and proved his case when he released Modern Sounds in Country and Western in 1962, which quickly became his most popular record. Country music of the period was white music, but just as importantly it was working-class music with rural roots.13
Trucking songs would figure most prominently within the honky-tonk wing of country music in the 1940s and 1950s, as songwriters and record producers began to see truck drivers—whether southern or not—as a distinct working-class market segment with disposable incomes. The first original song about truck driving appeared in 1939 when Cliff Bruner and His Boys recorded Ted Daffan’s “Truck Driver’s Blues,” a song explicitly marketed to roadside café owners who were installing jukeboxes in record numbers to serve truckers and other motorists. Bigger truck driving hits followed on the tails of Daffan’s tune, particularly “I’m a Truck Driving Man” by Art Gibson (1947) and Terry Fell’s “Truck Drivin’ Man” (1954). Besides being a rollicking harmonica-driven tune, Fell’s song used an ingenious marketing device, referring to itself being played on a truckstop jukebox in the chorus (“I’ll put a nickel in the jukebox / And play the ‘Truck Drivin’ Man’”). Less upbeat was Joe “Cannonball” Lewis’s “Truck Driver’s Night Run Blues” (1951), which narrates the tale of a southern cotton farmer, who, forced off the land and into a truck cab in a northern city, wishes that he “had stayed down South, this night run’s killin’ me.”14
In their effort to merge rural cultural traditions with the realities of urban-industrial lifestyles, musicians who recorded early trucking songs adapted country music’s long-lived theme of the “wanderer.” By singing about stopping at a “roadhouse in Texas / A little place called Hamburger Dan’s,” Terry Fell helped promote the idea that a trucker’s life consisted mainly of playing pinball while sipping coffee poured by a red-headed waitress. The truck driver, as a man in control of his time and possessing an untamed sexuality, was the antithesis of the “organization man” or the “man in the gray flannel suit” or the member of the “lonely crowd” that sociologists of the 1950s identified as the primary victim of an increasingly corporatized, bureaucratic urban society. Few truckers would have taken Terry Fell’s song as an accurate representation of their work culture, yet few would dispute that the sense of mobility that trucking provided was an important attraction of the work. When a man’s workplace was the road, a trucker took no orders from the factory foreman and faced no line speed-ups or stopwatch-toting scientific managers. Trucking firm owners did attempt to gain control over the work process of truckers in the postwar period, but with little success. The tachograph was a good example. Introduced to U.S. markets in 1940 by the Sangamo Electric Company, the tachograph supposedly provided an objective measure of a driver’s productivity by measuring distance traveled, speed, and the frequency and duration of stops, recording these data on a wax chart. An advertisement for Wagner Electric’s version proclaimed in 1956 that a tachograph would provide clear evidence of a trucker making “unscheduled stops,” a point graphically presented as a trucker drinking coffee and chatting with a truck-stop waitress. Tachographs proved easy for truckers to outwit, however, as the manager of a trucking firm found in 1960 when he noted that “90% of the cutting knives in the doors of the tachograph clocks have been removed and destroyed by drivers.” Besides breaking the machine, drivers could leave the clock open while driving, or set the clock back or ahead, falsifying the machine’s records. The company manager was quite familiar with these tactics, stating that he knew “there are exactly 41 ways that tampering has appeared on these clocks and every one of them [is] known to management.” But because the manager could not actually ride in the cab with each driver, there was no way to prevent such tampering. Although premised on the methods of scientific management, the tachograph could not bring factory-style discipline to the cab.15
Truckers could thus imagine themselves as relatively independent workers while on the road, even if they also knew that the image of the “knight of the road” was more façade than reality. For the thousands of rural men who worked as truckers in the 1950s and 1960s, even the possibility of being something more than a highway version of a sharecropper seemed better than casting one’s lot as a farmer within the economic strictures of capital-intensive agribusiness. Farm boys who made the choice to become truckers in the 1950s and 1960s did so in a world not of their own making, yet had legitimate reasons to believe that trucking—especially unregulated, nonunionized trucking—would offer a sense of independence akin to that of the small business-owning farmer. But as truckers became responsible for hauling the majority of U.S. farm and food products by the early 1960s, “independent” truckers also became fully integrated into the modern marketing machinery of the agroindustrial complex. By hauling live cattle, dressed chickens, pasteurized milk, milled grain, and packaged processed foods from factory farms to suburban supermarkets, independent truckers contributed to a resurgence of economic conservatism in farm politics.
THE FARM PROBLEM AS INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM
Ezra Taft Benson never touched the steering wheel of a big rig, but as secretary of agriculture from 1953 to 1961, he understood that transportation technology provided a powerful tool for undermining political support for unions and state regulatory policies within the farm and food economy. Benson claimed to be “above politics” due to his deep Mormon faith and his training as an economist, but his actions as head of the USDA were explicitly aimed at dismantling the centralized planning of New Deal agricultural policy. Brought on board by Eisenhower to woo the farm vote away from Democrats after five consecutive presidential losses for the Republicans, Benson worked to develop cooperative relationships between the federal government and private industry to solve the farm problem in the ostensibly “free” market. Under Ezra Taft Benson, the Department of Agriculture’s efforts to solve the farm problem would shift away from planned scarcity or antitrust actions toward full-fledged efforts to boost the marketing power of food processors and factory farmers. Trucks driven by nonunionized drivers were central to this new distribution- and marketing-driven approach to the political economy of farm production and food consumption. Agribusinesses and agribusiness-friendly bureaucrats quite literally worked to engineer the increasingly conservative consumerism that characterized the 1950s and 1960s, by making low-priced foods available to U.S. consumers in a lightly regulated, increasingly nonunionized food economy. The privatized, individualistic landscape of mass consumption in the postwar economy emerged from transformations in the rural United States as well as in suburbia, impacting farm producers, rural and urban workers, and supermarket shoppers alike.16
In direct contrast to his predecessor Charles F. Brannan, Ezra Taft Benson harbored a lifelong mistrust of New Deal farm policies. Born in Whitney, Idaho, in 1899 to descendants of pioneers who had followed Brigham Young westward in 1847, Benson was raised as a devout Mormon, keen Boy Scout, and avid Republican. While running his father’s farm from 1923 to 1929, Benson studied agricultural economics at Brigham Young University and Iowa State College. In the early 1930s he worked as a county agricultural agent for the University of Idaho Extension Service. From 1933 to 1939 he served as secretary of the Idaho Cooperative Council, a group dedicated to boosting Idaho farm incomes through voluntary marketing associations—a form of political-economic organization closely aligned with the associationalist approach of the Hoover era. Benson took his associationalist faith to Washington in 1939, when he became executive secretary of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives—a lobby group representing powerful agricultural marketing associations such as the California Fruit Growers Exchange (producers of Sunkist brand products), the California Associated Raisin Company (Sun-Maid), and the giant Land O’ Lakes dairy cooperative, along with a host of smaller concerns. As head of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives, Benson was a reliable source for journalists and congressional leaders seeking a quotable critique of New Deal farm and food policies. Benson often decried the “paternalistic government” of Franklin D. Roosevelt for quashing “free enterprise” in U.S. agriculture and rallied members of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives to fight the actions of the Office of Price Administration during the war. In later years, Benson would make much of the fact that during his time as a farmer, he “never took a subsidy” from the federal government (though, of course, his farming experience predated the New Deal). In 1944 Benson left Washington to assume a position with the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, the ruling body of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He returned to his political calling in 1953 after Dwight Eisenhower, unable to convince his brother Milton Eisenhower to accept the helm of the Department of Agriculture, tapped Benson instead—partly to appease conservatives within the Republican Party who demanded an ardent anti–New Dealer for the post.17
Immediately after taking office in 1953, Benson set about the task of dismantling New Deal farm policy. At his first press conference he distributed copies of a 1,200-word “General Statement on Agricultural Policy,” a free-market manifesto that declared, among other ideas, that “a completely planned and subsidized economy weakens initiative, discourages industry, destroys character, and demoralizes the people.” Benson’s primary goal was to scale back the New Deal price-support system, which he believed drained government coffers and stifled free enterprise. Much as Charles F. Brannan had learned before him, however, Benson’s efforts to dramatically revise farm policy ran up against a Congress dominated by an unbending farm bloc wedded to maintaining the New Deal economic safety net for farmers. Paying lip service to “free enterprise” was one thing; slashing payments to commercial farmers whose votes kept many southern, midwestern, and western legislators in office was entirely another. Although Benson succeeded in convincing Congress to revise agricultural price support formulas in 1954 to allow for “flexible” payments, Congress refused to significantly overhaul the crop subsidy system. In fact, Benson’s ardent attempts to undermine the price support system made him a widely reviled figure among many farmers, even among Republicans who otherwise backed President Eisenhower’s procorporate policies. Contemporary political commentators blamed Benson’s heavy-handed approach to the price-support issue for preventing the Republicans from retaking control of Congress after Democrats won the majority in 1954. A 1957 Wallace’s Farmer poll found that only 15 percent of Iowa farmers believed Eisenhower was doing a poor job as president, while 60 percent rated Benson’s performance as poor. Despite repeated calls for his dismissal both from the Democratic and Republican sides of the congressional aisle, Benson continued in his Cabinet post through the entire Eisenhower presidency.18
Benson failed to eliminate the price-support system, but he successfully used government funds to usher in an era of corporate-dominated agribusiness. Just after proclaiming his “General Statement on Agricultural Policy” in 1953, Benson eliminated the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), claiming that too much of the BAE’s economic research supported statist New Deal policies.19 In the BAE’s stead, Benson erected two agencies, the Agricultural Research Service and the Agricultural Marketing Service. Benson expected these agencies to redirect the work of agricultural engineers and economists toward what he considered more “objective” marketing research. Though Benson summed up his approach to agricultural policy as the “freedom to farm,” the term “agribusiness” was a more accurate descriptor. “Agribusiness” was a neologism proposed in 1955 by Harvard Business School professor John H. Davis. Davis was in many ways Benson’s protégé; Benson had selected Davis to take over his position as executive secretary of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives in 1944, and Davis served as Benson’s assistant secretary of agriculture from 1953 to 1954. Davis defined the word “agribusiness” in inherently political terms, declaring that “the old idea of trying to solve the farm problem on the farm is outmoded.” Rather than use New Deal-era price supports and production controls to keep farm prices high, Davis declared that government agencies and corporations should cooperate to boost the marketing of farm products. The “objective” marketing research undertaken by Ezra Taft Benson’s reorganized Department of Agriculture during the era of agribusiness was thus fully intended to be most beneficial to nonfarm agricultural industries, especially food processors and supermarkets.20
The intent of Benson’s “objective” approach was to convert the farm problem into an industrial problem. Much as the Research and Marketing Act of 1946 had promised to do, Benson expected the engineers and economists in the permanently funded Agricultural Marketing Service to place in the hands of private industry, rather than the federal government, the burden of assuring high prices for farmers while offering consumers abundance at acceptable prices. As Bushrod Allin, a sympathetic agricultural economist, explained to Benson’s assistant secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, in 1956, the department’s new focus on marketing research was “safe, sane, conservative [and] socially desirable [because] everybody, including farmers, stands to gain from it.” But the new approach to marketing research was not entirely without controversy. Wesley McCune, a journalist who served as an agricultural policy advisor to Charles F. Brannan in the Truman administration, attacked Benson’s reorganization plan as a corporate plot to remake farm policy in the interests of big business: “Everyone expected a certain amount of change in personnel at the Department of Agriculture when the political majority changed, but a shift toward middlemen was hardly expected.” Benson’s overhaul of USDA research was also unpopular within the department itself, as Harry C. Trelogan, director of the USDA’s Marketing Research Division, noted in responding to Bushrod Allin’s letter. In particular, the applications of marketing research appeared to be most directly beneficial to food processors and supermarkets rather than to farmers or consumers. The term “agribusiness,” though still not in wide circulation, could hold negative connotations for economists who did not fully agree with the corporate-welfare vision of Ezra Taft Benson. Trelogan’s note exposed a tension within the USDA’s ranks. While Secretary of Agriculture Benson touted “objective” marketing research as a means of using state power to influence practices in private food distribution, some agricultural economists who had been transferred from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics to the Agricultural Marketing Service preferred a “strong program of fundamental longer-run research” rather than “being too closely associated with ‘action’ programs.” In the long run, though, Benson’s approach won out within the USDA, as he pushed the Agricultural Marketing Service to work closely with private industry, particularly food processors and supermarkets, to develop lower-cost marketing and distribution methods as a demand-side approach to increasing the farmer’s share of the consumer’s dollar.21
Benson thus built upon the efforts of his liberal predecessor, Charles F. Brannan, by defining the farm problem as an issue to be confronted through abundant marketing rather than planned scarcity. During the Great Depression, agricultural experts had seen the farm problem as an issue of overproduction. But in a Cold War political culture focused on maintaining economic stability and growth without the use of “socialistic” methods of heavy-handed government economic intervention, the problem seemed to be “underconsumption”—a product of inefficient marketing. Agricultural economists came to see marketing—understood as “the link between production and consumption … assembly, transportation, packing, packaging, processing, preservation, storing, wholesaling, and retailing—all the steps between producer and consumer”—as the point of attack. Efficient marketing machinery could simultaneously bring abundance to consumers and high prices to commercial farmers—and, in marked contrast to the Brannan Plan, without government support of the incomes of small farmers or of the wage demands of organized laborers in the food distribution economy. In particular, if the cost of transportation could only be kept down, argued a 1956 USDA pamphlet entitled Food Transportation and What It Costs Us, farmers’ incomes would automatically rise even as consumer prices dropped. According to the USDA’s economic research, the cost of transportation since the end of World War II had outpaced all other inflationary factors in the farm and food economy, simultaneously making food more expensive for consumers while taking a larger piece of the farmer’s share of the farm marketing dollar (see figure 4.1).22
Long-haul trucking provided the essential mechanism for driving down the cost of transporting food from factory farm to suburban supermarket. Whereas the farming communities and food processors of the nineteenth century relied upon railroads to market their products to urban consumers, by the 1970s empty train tracks ran parallel to jam-packed highways in the rural landscape. Trucks increasingly replaced trains as the transportation mode of choice for farmers and food processors and retailers—not because trucking was inherently “better” or less costly than shipping by rail, but because trucks provided the technological flexibility required for the new distribution methods that supported Ezra Taft Benson’s vision of marketing-driven agribusiness. This flexibility took several forms. For one, trains were tied to steel rails, but trucks could travel anywhere a road led. A trucker could thus haul directly from point-to-point, from loading dock to unloading dock—allowing for speedier service and just-in-time deliveries. This geographical mobility was in great part a product of political action, as truckers relied upon government-subsidized construction of highways in the mid-twentieth century, particularly the 41,000 miles of high-speed interstate highways funded under the Federal-Aid High-way Act of 1956. As engineers expanded and modernized the nation’s highway network, truck and trailer manufacturers sold larger machines capable of competing directly with railroads on long-haul (rather than just short-haul) trips. While trains remained far more fuel- and cost-efficient over long hauls, tractor-trailers offered the flexibility of traveling either long or short distances. Trains undergirded the expansion of the U.S. industrial manufacturing economy in the late nineteenth century, but highways formed the backbone of the post–World War II “postindustrial” economy of fast-paced, retailer-driven distribution.
Figure 4.1. Transportation Portion of the Food Dollar, 1945–55.
Department of Agriculture economists in 1956 declared that transportation costs had risen more rapidly for both food consumers and farm producers than any other component of the food dollar since World War II. In this image the price of transportation is depicted eating away at the purchasing power of retail consumers and the incomes of farmers who marketed agricultural commodities. From Food Transportation and What It Costs Us (Source: Washington: USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, 1956).
The nation’s railroads faced stiff competition from truckers in the 1950s and 1960s. Rails increasingly lost valuable freight to truckers so that railroads’ share of gross freight revenues dropped from 80 percent in 1944 to 52 percent in 1958, while truck revenues increased from 15 to 39 percent of total revenues in that period. Railroads continued to haul nearly twice as much freight as trucks by 1960, as measured in ton-miles (one ton of freight carried one mile), but trucks increasingly captured the market for short- and medium-length hauls of higher-value freight. Lower labor costs were not the primary reason for trucking’s successful capture of market share in the 1950s and 1960s. Trucking firms did, on average, pay lower wages per employee than did the nation’s railroads in the period. Despite paying higher wages per employee, however, railroads consistently enjoyed lower labor costs in proportion to their operating revenues. Railroad workers were also far more productive, in terms of ton-miles hauled per employee, in the postwar period. As the data in table B.6 (see appendix B) illustrate, railroads in 1960 had operating revenues 1.64 times as great as wage costs, while the ratio for trucking firms was 1.56. Railroads paid their employees better than trucking firms did in that year, but were also nearly 2.2 times as productive in terms of ton-miles carried per employee. Railroads would continue to outpace trucking firms in terms of operating efficiency and employee productivity through the end of the century.23
The efficiency and labor productivity of railroads could not, however, trump the flexible, customized service provided by trucking firms in the postwar “just-in-time” economy. Trucks, unlike railroads, could provide customized hauling for particular loads of goods—particularly for highly perishable (and more valuable) items such as frozen foods, milk, and beef. Trains hauled an incredibly diverse range of products, but even with specialized railcars, each load was just one unit among many with widely varying needs and destinations. Each semi-trailer, on the other hand, hauled only one commodity, directly from the point of origin to its destination. When shipped by truck, the commodity itself rather than the transporter’s cost structure determined the type of hauling equipment used. Furthermore truckers could provide the specialized service needed to make sure that each load arrived quickly at its destination with little damage—an issue that, as we shall see below, was particularly relevant for highly perishable goods such as frozen foods. Trucks did not replace trains in the 1950s and 1960s; they simply replaced trains as the primary general-purpose mode of freight transportation, while trains became specialized carriers—primarily for bulky, low-value freight traveling long distances (such as coal). But although trucks would dominate general freight hauling after 1960, they would never capture the overwhelming market share and extraordinary revenue production that railroads had enjoyed at the start of the century. Whereas railroads of the early twentieth century had carried passengers as well as all types of freight, by the late twentieth century the nation’s transportation system was highly fragmented. Trucks provided general freight transport, but railroads, pipelines, barges, and airplanes carried specialized freight loads, while airplanes and automobiles became the preferred modes of passenger travel. In 1970, motor carriers’ revenues accounted for 1.34 percent of the gross national product, compared to the railroads’ contribution of just over one percent of the GNP (see table B.6). Both figures paled in comparison to the railroads’ 6.7 percent share of GNP in 1900.24
Trucking firms made their most impressive gains in agricultural and food hauling in the post–World War II period. By 1958, nearly 90 percent of all agricultural commodities traveled from farm to first market by truck. This was especially the case for highly perishable commodities such as milk, fruits and vegetables, and livestock. Take the case of cattle: in 1945, a little more than half—58 percent—of cattle arrived at livestock terminals by truck; by 1958, 88 percent did so, and a decade later nearly all cattle traveled to market in trucks. At the same time, trucks became the primary transportation mode for foodstuffs; in 1964, half of all foods (by volume) moved by truck. Trucks were especially important in moving meat, milk, cheese, and frozen foods, though railroads continued to be the primary transporters of less perishable goods such as grain mill products and canned foods. But the shift from trains to trucks in agricultural and food hauling was not an automatic consequence of the availability of good roads and big trucks, as if the technology itself were driving history. Instead the flexibility that trucking provided was crucial to the construction of Ezra Taft Benson’s vision of a countryside populated by large-scale industrial farmers and nonunionized transportation and food industry workers. The example of the frozen food industry, one of the fastest-growing agribusinesses during Benson’s years in office, provides a window into the ways in which the flexibility of country trucking helped transform Benson’s antiunion, procorporate farm and food politics into material reality.25
FROZEN FOOD AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CONVENIENCE
In January 1955, Life magazine published a photo spread on Seabrook Farms of New Jersey, calling it the “Biggest Vegetable Factory on Earth.” The article sought to show Life’s readers how frozen vegetables started life on an industrial farm and ended up in suburban home freezers. For readers of Life, many of whom were new inhabitants of the booming postwar U.S. suburbs, the photo essay promoted a vision of a miraculous new food economy. Food processors like Nabisco had pioneered the packaging of cereals decades before, replacing anonymous barrels with branded boxes. But the postwar food economy brought vegetables in a box, processed at a megascale industrial plant, and delivered at low prices with guarantees of uniformity and “freshness” via self-serve supermarket shelves. Vegetables had once traveled to consumers either unprocessed or processed to the point of tastelessness; now they flowed through Ford-style assembly lines, but still emerged with their flavor and color preserved by freezers and plastic wraps. The Life article was just one entry in a long line of extravagant promises for frozen food. During the early years of the frozen food industry in the 1930s, frozen food promoters touted the product as a way for private industry to rationalize food production and marketing along Fordist lines—to make the luxury of, say, orange juice in the wintertime available to Americans of even modest means. In reality, however, it was not until the postwar expansion of long-haul trucking and new refrigeration technologies became available that frozen food processors achieved mass distribution of their product. The success of mass marketing in the 1950s gave frozen food a powerful political valence. Economists and policymakers in the era of agribusiness, including Ezra Taft Benson, hailed frozen food as a symbol of the power of “free enterprise” to trump New Dealism in the farm and food economy.26
The General Foods Corporation introduced Birds Eye brand frozen food as the “Most Revolutionary Idea in the History of Food” on March 8, 1930. Within seven years, Birds Eye frozen food could be purchased in over 3,000 retail and wholesale outlets in forty-five states. Expecting to make even fresh unbranded produce and seafood into profitable, branded, nationally distributed packages, General Foods invested heavily in the enterprise for several decades. The company also teamed up with Charles F. Seabrook, owner of the aforementioned southern New Jersey farm who earned the sobriquet “the Henry Ford of Agriculture” for his efforts to mass produce spinach; by 1938, Seabrook produced two-thirds of the nation’s frozen vegetables. But despite the fact that General Foods pumped millions of dollars into the Birds Eye brand, while farmers such as Seabrook produced vegetables and fruits in mass quantities, frozen food was anything but a revolutionary industry through the 1940s—in fact, it remained dismally unprofitable until the 1950s. Fortune magazine wryly pointed out in 1946 that the “vast to-do” regarding frozen food involved “a line of merchandise whose total national tonnage does not yet equal that of sauerkraut and pickles.”27
Despite the promises of a revolution in food production and marketing, frozen food fulfilled only one half of the Fordist equation of mass production until the mid-1950s. The industry could produce standardized commodities and branded goods in mass volumes, but could not move those goods to the masses. Even though a package of frozen food might leave the factory as a “perfect piece of merchandise” (as Edwin W. Williams, editor of Quick Frozen Foods, put it in 1939), too often it would arrive in the consumer’s hands as either a product of dubious quality or at such a high price as to discourage mass consumption. “Distribution,” opined Williams, “there’s the rub.” Distributing frozen food required technological systems of unprecedented scale, scope, and complexity—systems that simply did not exist in the 1930s. The refrigeration equipment required to maintain frozen food at extremely low temperatures was rare or nonexistent in most warehousing, transportation, and retail facilities. Although an extensive nationwide network of refrigeration existed, that distribution network had been built primarily for the movement of Chicago dressed beef, California produce, and midwestern butter and cheese—all products that required cool temperatures, not freezing temperatures. But in the 1950s, frozen food packers relied on new warehousing and transportation technologies to convince U.S. consumers that frozen orange juice and TV dinners were truly “luxuries for the masses.” In doing so, frozen food producers contributed to the post–World War II transformation of the U.S. economy, as manufacturing took a back seat to distribution and retailing in driving economic growth and consumer abundance.28
The first step to achieving economically viable nationwide distribution was to find a cost-effective method for storing frozen food on its way to the supermarket. In the decade following World War II, warehousing underwent a dramatic if largely invisible revolution.29 The change came as a response to the high cost of storage, a problem that was especially apparent in the frozen food industry. In 1946, the Wall Street Journal estimated that the cost of storing frozen food amounted to $0.025 per pound per month. This seems like a miniscule amount, but when frozen food packers computed the expense of holding several million tons at 3 cents per pound per year, the impact on price structures became dramatically apparent. Perhaps most important, frozen food warehousers were confronted by Benjamin Franklin’s famous maxim that “time is money.” The longer food remained frozen in a warehouse, the more it cost. This was partly due to the cost of electricity needed to run refrigeration equipment, but even more a result of the fact that a package of frozen food in storage represented tied-up capital. Not only was the stored package not earning profits for food processors in the marketplace, but its production required capital investment that accrued interest charges as it lay—quite literally a frozen asset.30
The postwar revolution in warehousing centered on achieving a steady flow of goods to minimize time in storage. Two key technologies lay at the heart of the new system: forklift trucks and standardized pallets, both of which were first used together on a large scale by the U.S. military during World War II. Forklifts and pallets made it possible to move and stack enormous quantities of goods at stunning speed, especially when compared to the previously widespread practice of moving irregularly shaped cartons with hand-operated two-wheeled trucks or dollies. As the navy discovered in a 1947 study, palletized loading could allow one man to accomplish in two hours a job that would otherwise take fourteen men four hours. Commercial warehousers quickly recognized the potential of palletization to reduce labor costs; with fewer workers required to move much greater quantities of goods, managers could limit their single largest category of operating expense while simultaneously minimizing the power of unions to dictate work conditions. As one distribution executive noted in 1968, “[Mechanical] equipment is never absent or temperamental and draws no fringe benefits.” Palletization greatly amplified the power of an individual warehouse worker at the expense of his laid-off compatriots, but its impact on a warehouse’s rate of throughput was just one part of a larger effort of mechanization. Ultimately warehouse designers and managers hoped to reconceptualize the warehouse as a place of dynamic movement rather than “dead” space. Continuous-flow principles of assembly line manufacturing were imported to the warehouse, with overhead or in-floor towlines and conveyor belts installed in single-story structures to move goods horizontally rather than vertically (as in older multistory buildings). One of the best examples of the modern continuous-flow warehouse was the 7.5 million cubic foot Alford Refrigerated Warehouse constructed outside Dallas, Texas, in 1949. “Keep it moving, preferably by machinery,” was the motto of Fred F. Alford, who could brag that his new structure was not only the largest of its kind in the world, but was also capable of moving packages of frozen food from the “in” to the “out” dock without ever being touched by a human hand.31
The search for efficiency in frozen food warehousing gained new urgency in 1951 when Birds Eye announced a paradigm shift in its distribution policy. For the previous two decades, the Birds Eye division of General Foods Corporation had relied on independent wholesalers to distribute its products to retailers, but as of June 1951, the firm decided to sell as much as possible directly to supermarkets to drive up sales volume. Known as “direct selling,” the new approach to frozen food distribution threatened to bypass independent wholesalers both economically and literally. Economically independents were increasingly excluded from getting their fingers in the markup pie; whereas distributor markups prior to 1950 averaged around 30 percent, by 1954 the average wholesale markup had dropped to 16 percent. Most large chain store buyers could get a cheaper price by buying directly from a processor like Birds Eye. Wholesalers were also literally bypassed in the distribution chain, as both packers and supermarkets built their own warehouses (or leased space in existing warehouses) to gain control of distribution logistics. The new machinery of movement radically restructured time as a factor in the cost of distributing frozen food, as the traditional role of the warehouse as a place of storage was increasingly replaced by the warehouse as a place of movement. The warehouse “middleman” either had to adopt the new creed of speed or else get out of the supply chain. These techniques, first developed in the food distribution industry, would later play a key role in the business models of discount retailers such as Wal-Mart, helping to drive down consumer prices for everything from clothing to televisions.32
Long-haul refrigerated trucking tied the dynamic warehouses of the streamlined frozen food industry to the supermarkets of booming suburbia. With supermarkets and warehouses dedicated to high-volume, high-turnover throughput of frozen food by the mid-1950s, the speed of transportation among the nodes in the distribution network became more essential than ever before. Frozen food packers relied on trucking to fundamentally reshape the economic geography of production in the early 1950s. Before then, the majority of frozen food factories were located on either the East Coast or the West Coast, primarily in New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, and California. Beginning in 1944, however, Birds Eye began a five-year program of building and buying plants throughout the country, following the expanding federally funded highway system into the rural Midwest and South. Birds Eye’s managers sought to supply their factories with raw materials from “widely dispersed” sites in order to be “practically weatherproof.” Selection of new factory sites was far from random; Birds Eye and other major packers sought to gain access to harvests in places where the environment—including not only weather and soil conditions, but also the cost of land and labor—suited the production of particular fruits and vegetables at the lowest possible cost. Furthermore the climate and soil conditions at those sites would ideally allow harvests to fall in different times of the year so that the firm’s factories could maintain a steady flow of production, allowing popular items to be marketed throughout the year, while simultaneously minimizing the time any one particular lot of frozen food had to spend in storage.33
In order to realize the advantages of decentralized production, however, packers had to rely on flexible transportation to move their products from farm regions to suburban consumers. One of the great economic promises of freezing food was the theoretical ability to remove perishability as a factor in distribution, allowing agricultural production to take place where and when it could be done most cheaply, yet permit placement of those goods on the market where and when they would bring the best prices. With packers moving to decentralized production after the war, the distance between producers and consumers expanded quite dramatically, increasing the necessity for reliable long-haul transportation. Railroads might have seemed the logical choice for long-distance transportation, because the unit cost of moving goods over distances of several hundred miles or more has always been lower for rails than for trucks, primarily because of lower fuel costs. But at the same time as frozen food packers began decentralizing their production, they were also faced with an increasing decentralization of consumption as Americans and their supermarkets moved into suburbs following World War II. Furthermore the sprawling one-story warehouses supplying these suburban centers of consumption required large plots of land, which could only be had cheaply in suburban or rural areas. This often meant the new warehouses had only highways, not rails, connecting them to their customers. In the postwar geography of suburban consumption, shipping by truck became necessary to move frozen food from rural areas of production to the suburban areas where warehousers, supermarkets, and consumers were located. Geography did not dictate a shift to shipment by truck, but for frozen food packers seeking to distribute their products as widely as possible, trucks became an increasingly attractive mode of transportation despite the higher cost compared to railroads. As a North Dakota food processor noted in a 1963 survey, “Trucking can go anywhere. Rail can’t.”34
Trucks also provided a form of technological flexibility—mechanical refrigeration—that proved essential for the frozen food industry to cultivate a mass market for its goods in the postwar period. Mechanical refrigeration became cheap, reliable, and widely available in truck trailers in the late 1940s. “Reefers,” as the devices were known, were not new; an African American inventor named Frederick McKinley Jones had developed a mechanical refrigerator small and lightweight enough to be used in truck trailers in 1938. After establishing the Thermo King Corporation with a business partner, Jones sold thousands of his reefer units just before the war, especially to meat haulers anxious to reduce the spoilage common with the use of ice. The popularity of the first Thermo Kings came from their ability to provide truck drivers with an unprecedented degree of control over the temperature maintained in a trailer. Mechanical refrigerators work by forced convection of air past coils filled with compressed refrigerant; unlike ice or cold plate systems, a mechanical refrigerator does not merely absorb ambient heat but continually circulates cold air through a space. As a result, a mechanical system’s degree of refrigeration is controllable and adaptable to multiple conditions (such as either cold or hot outside temperatures). Ice, on the other hand, refrigerates by absorbing heat at a more or less constant rate; temperatures can only be controlled by changing the quantity of ice used. Shippers had long recognized the theoretical advantages of mechanical refrigeration; the Pacific Fruit Growers Express company had been working on a mechanical unit to be used in railcars since the early 1930s. Until the arrival of the Thermo King, however, such efforts were impeded by the expense of constructing a unit that was simultaneously lightweight, compact, and yet able to operate reliably under the constant strain of vibration experienced in transit.35
With the release of the Thermo King Model R in 1949, frozen food shippers gained the power to maintain unprecedented control over their products in transit. Prior to the Model R, Thermo Kings had been designed and used primarily to keep meat and produce in the 35° to 45°F range, not to keep frozen food near 0°F. The Model R packed a more powerful 4-cylinder gasoline engine than previous Thermo Kings, allowing the compressor to produce extremely low temperatures. This engine was coupled to an automatic electric starter, allowing for constant operation of the unit’s compressor even when the truck engine was not running. Controlled by a thermostat, the electric starter allowed a steady temperature to be maintained by starting, stopping, and restarting the compressor motor as needed. As a result, the Model R could not only produce very low temperatures, but it could do so by operating its engine only when needed to achieve the desired temperature. Furthermore the Model R incorporated Frederick McKinley Jones’s latest innovation—a feedback device that kept the unit’s engine running at peak efficiency at multiple settings. With these innovations, the Model R needed only a relatively small amount of fuel to keep an entire load of frozen food at or near 0°F. In a 1957 study, for instance, a group of agricultural engineers found that on a shipment of frozen food from Waseca, Minnesota, to Jersey City, New Jersey, a mechanical reefer used $20 of fuel and maintained a steady temperature of 0°F in transit, while an iced railcar used $214 of ice and salt with temperature spikes up to 14.6°F. As a consequence, frozen food packers quickly found mechanical reefers to be the cheapest and most reliable form of refrigerated transportation available.36
Mechanical refrigeration was cheaper and more reliable than ice, but even so the cost of shipping frozen food over very long distances by truck usually made rail shipment more economical. For instance, a survey of frozen food processors in 1955 found that the primary reason shippers chose rails over trucks was the simple fact that it was “cheaper”—in some cases, truck rates from West Coast factories to markets east of Chicago were as much as 62 percent higher than rail rates. But taking advantage of mechanical refrigeration necessitated the use of tractor-trailer transportation in the late 1940s and early 1950s, because railroads proved reluctant to adopt mechanical reefers. The Fruit Growers Express Company teamed up with Frigidaire to deploy the first large-scale fleet of 102 diesel-powered mechanical reefer railcars in 1951, but even four years later the nation’s railroads had only 934 mechanical units in operation. As late as 1958, mechanical reefers represented less than 2 percent of the total number of refrigerated rail cars in use. Railroad managers were reluctant to invest $20,000 for each reefer car in the 1950s because, for three-quarters of a century, railroads had sunk significant capital into ice manufacturing and harvesting plants. Converting to mechanical reefers would make the rails’ ice-producing infrastructure obsolete. Many trucking firms, on the other hand, had just entered the transportation business following the war’s end, had no capital sunk in ice-making systems, and saw investment in specialized reefer equipment as a means to gain customers. In 1949, for instance, while railroads had no commercially available mechanical reefers, approximately 11,000 mechanical units were installed in the nation’s trucks. If frozen food packers wanted to mass distribute frozen foods to suburban supermarkets without incurring significant losses in quality, truck transportation was essential.37
By the mid-1950s, the integration of long-haul reefer trucking and modern warehousing significantly reduced the cost of frozen food distribution, paving the way for mass consumption of the product for the first time in history. In 1953, truckers using mechanical refrigeration hauled the vast majority of frozen food—72 percent of all shipments by volume. Four years later, when that proportion had risen to 77.7 percent, an industry observer noted that “the only proper way [to distribute frozen foods] is in a refrigerated truck.” Trucking tied together a distribution system characterized by decentralized mass production, low-margin direct selling to suburban supermarkets, and minimal time in transit and storage. The combination allowed frozen food packers to achieve reliable profits by selling high volumes on thin margins. Frozen food finally became price-competitive with canned food in the early 1950s. In 1953, for the first time in history, an average package of frozen peas could be purchased for less than a comparable can of peas. Improved distribution not only brought lower prices, but helped convince consumers that frozen food was a good value. Through the 1930s and 1940s, frozen food packers had faced considerable resistance from consumers who associated quick-freezing with spoilage, often with good reason. By shifting to a distribution system based on speedy movement and reliable refrigeration, packers were able to change many consumers’ minds about the quality of the product. From 1949 to 1956, consumer purchases of frozen food expanded dramatically, accounting for $2 billion or 3.93 percent of total food store sales in the latter year. Frozen food outpaced the sales growth of all other food items in this period. This increased consumption came at the expense of fresh and canned fruits and vegetables. Although overall consumption of fruits and vegetables dropped in the period, consumption of frozen produce increased by a remarkable 170 percent. Especially popular were peas, green beans, lima beans, asparagus, and spinach, as well as orange juice concentrate. Advertisements of the period proclaimed frozen food to be “fresher than fresh,” offering consumers a convenient and nutritious product at a low price. Improvements in distribution made such claims more than just empty rhetoric.38
Consumer acceptance of frozen food as a “convenience food” carried significant implications for the political economy of agribusiness in the era of Ezra Taft Benson. Marketers increasingly found consumers “more than willing to pay extra” for frozen food that provided consistent flavor and required only minimal preparation time. As one frozen food marketer put it in 1957: “Mama buys frozen foods not because they are cheaper but because of their superior taste, quality, and convenience.” And the new frozen food items marketed in the 1950s were convenient, as packers unveiled a string of products to capitalize on consumer demand for simple foods that could be easily prepared. Frozen orange juice concentrate paved the way; after 1948, when Minute Maid began mass-marketing the product first developed by USDA researchers under an army contract during the war, frozen orange juice quickly became the nation’s favorite breakfast drink. Birds Eye unveiled the “fish stick” in 1951 after seven years of research and development to assure consumer acceptance. The work paid off, as consumption of fish sticks rose from 7 million pounds in 1953 to 44 million pounds a year later. Pot pies, TV dinners, french fries, and pizzas all achieved similar instant success in the mass market over the next four years. Sales of potatoes for use in frozen french fries, for example, increased 1,800 percent between 1946 and 1956, driven largely by the rise of the McDonald’s fast food chain—the most recognizable symbol of Americans’ desire for convenience food in the period. It would seem easy to write off french fries and fish sticks as examples of consumers being duped by corporate marketers, but evidence suggests that consumers understood such foods to be truly convenient. Especially among working-class families in which women performed the “double duty” of working for pay outside the home and working without wages inside the home, consumers who bought frozen food such as pot pies or TV dinners generally did so because they appreciated the speed of preparation and believed that freezing provided the most nutrition and flavor for the money. For instance, a 1957 marketing survey of Birmingham, Alabama, steelworker families found that working-class purchases of frozen food were increasing at a much faster rate than purchases by higher-income groups.39
The most “convenient” aspect of frozen food, however, may have been its potential to restructure the political economy of food in the 1950s. Ever since the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933, farm policymakers had sought politically acceptable means for getting consumers to pay more money for their food products to help stabilize farm incomes. Through the Depression and World War II, organized consumers and economic liberals had fought to keep New Deal farm policies from driving up the retail price of food, with only mixed success. But when postwar consumers willingly paid higher prices for frozen food for its convenience, they helped push pricing decisions “downstream” in the agrofood economy. That is, food processors and supermarket managers gained increasing power to determine the prices paid to farmers and by consumers, rather than having such decisions made “upstream” by farmers or government planners. Consequently food processors and supermarkets could boost their profits significantly even when consumers believed frozen food to be a good value. Consumers did, in fact, pay handsomely for the convenience of having some of the work of food preparation transferred out of the kitchen and into the factory. In 1939, the value added to the food economy by manufacturing amounted to $3.5 billion; by 1954, that amount had risen to $13.5 billion. Even after adjustment for inflation, consumers paid an additional $4 billion per year for convenience in the latter year, prompting two agricultural economists to observe that “it is obvious that [processed] food does cost more.” But because consumers proved willing to pay for convenience, there was no sustained political protest from consumer groups about the fairness of price or the problem of monopoly in frozen food as had occurred in the milk and beef industries since the early twentieth century. The actual cost of convenience foods was further masked by the rapid decline of food costs as a percentage of family budgets in the postwar period; in 1947, U.S. families spent on average nearly 24 percent of their disposable income on food, but a decade later spent only 18 percent on food. Consumers spent more in absolute terms on food in 1957 than they did in 1947, but food costs remained low relative to increasing household expenditures on other consumer goods such as automobiles, televisions, and the many other conveniences of postwar suburban living. Furthermore the farmers who provided the raw materials that allowed frozen food packers and supermarkets to profit from the manufacture of convenience never took political action against the increasingly “downstream” economy. Because frozen food packers bought agricultural products in large volumes and on contract, farmers valued the security of selling their produce at a fixed, guaranteed price. Much like the price supports of New Deal farm policies, food processor contracts assured some measure of economic stability—if only for the largest farmers, such as Seabrook Farms, willing to invest in the capital equipment necessary to produce farm commodities in mass quantities. Quick freezing would consequently appear to agricultural policymakers in the 1950s to be an ideal solution to one version of the “farm problem,” simultaneously bringing high prices to produce farmers and high value to consumers without the need for significant state intervention in either production or marketing decisions within the economy.40
The upshot of this was that in the 1950s the Department of Agriculture cooperated closely with frozen food packers to consolidate their power in the food economy. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson was one of the most avid supporters of quick freezing as a solution to the surplus problem. Speaking to a group of frozen food industry leaders in 1954, Benson congratulated them on their “spectacular achievements” in “revolutioniz[ing] the marketing of oranges.” As Benson saw it, quick freezing replaced seasonal marketing of perishable commodities with “year-around markets for products in essentially fresh form.” As the frozen orange juice example took hold among other fruits and vegetables, Benson predicted the achievement of “real stability of prices of so many highly perishable foods which traditionally sold for a song when the markets were glutted at harvest time.” Such a statement may seem inconsequential in terms of agricultural policy goals, given its context as a laudatory speech at an industry banquet, but this was exactly the point. Benson’s speech was not a statement of a new governmental approach to the surplus problem, but a pat on the frozen food industry’s back for taking care of the problem themselves, without the need for government regulation of production or marketing. Benson literally showed his appreciation by presenting a certificate of achievement to Charles G. Mortimer, president of General Foods Corporation. But Benson offered more than just a plaque to the frozen food industry. As he continued his speech, Benson explained his faith in government research in science and technology, when undertaken “in close cooperation” with industry, to achieve the surplus-reducing goals of New Deal-era agricultural policies—without the policies. In particular, Benson offered to the frozen food industry the services of agricultural engineers and scientists working on improved methods for “processing, transportation, distribution, and storage of frozen foods.” As Benson saw it, state-funded research on specific technological problems of the frozen food industry could create not only higher farm incomes, but also industrial stability.41
Perhaps most significantly, bureaucrats in Ezra Taft Benson’s USDA pursued an ambitious deregulatory agenda in the realm of food transportation politics. Because the cost of transportation played such a crucial role in the profit structure and mass distribution capabilities of frozen food processors, any change in transportation regulatory structures could have a transformative effect on the industry. In particular, agribusiness-friendly economists in the USDA understood that unregulated, nonunionized trucking could put significant downward pressure on food prices through cut-rate competition with regulated, unionized freight truckers and railroads. The crowning triumph of this effort to inject more “flexibility” into the highway transportation system came in 1956 in a bizarre legal-ontological debate over whether a frozen chicken was in fact a chicken.
The chicken quandary arose after a series of battles between the Department of Agriculture and the Interstate Commerce Commission in the mid-1950s over the agricultural exemption clause of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act. As explained in the previous chapter, the USDA’s efforts to broaden the exemption clause of the act took shape during the tenure of Charles F. Brannan, when Department of Agriculture bureaucrats sought to help small, decentralized trucking firms haul agricultural commodities to and from anywhere, at rates of their own choosing, without first receiving authority from the ICC. In the case of frozen food, the USDA’s legal team came to believe in the mid-1950s that if truckers hauling frozen goods were exempt from ICC regulation, they would be able to provide geographically flexible service that would benefit both farmers and processors. As Mark L. Keith of the Farm Bureau Cooperative Association stated the farmers’ interest in exemption in 1957, farmers selling perishable products to frozen food packers required “complete flexibility of truck service … so that trucks [can] move from producing areas to any market dictated by the ‘unpredictable’ forces of supply and demand.” In other words, farmers wanted trucks to be available on short notice to haul produce to whichever processor was offering the best price at any particular moment. For regulated truckers who were not exempt from ICC regulations, this was often not possible, considering that they might not have the ICC-sanctioned operating authority to haul loads to or from certain states. And in any case, the regulated trucking firms also generally paid union-scale wages to their organized drivers. The “flexibility” of long-haul trucking was thus as much a product of political maneuvering as it was of the technological ability of a truck to travel anywhere at high speed.42
Some processors, meanwhile, had also sought help from the USDA to make the transportation of frozen food exempt from ICC regulation. Like farmers, some frozen food packers saw the geographical flexibility of exempt trucking as a way to minimize the risks of selling semiperishable goods in an unpredictable market. For instance, in the early 1950s a group of Florida orange juice processors called on the USDA to help them solve a growing transportation crisis. Few Florida processors had access to sufficient cold storage warehouse space at the time, meaning that packers often had to search far and wide for a warehouse capable of storing cans of orange juice during busy processing seasons. Even when the juice processors were able to ship their products directly up the coast to the major consuming centers of the Northeast, they generally found that truckers did not have operating authorities that would allow them to bring back a cost-reducing backhaul of, say, meat or dairy products. Both of these situations could be easily fixed, the processors told the USDA’s legal team in 1953, if the truck transportation of frozen orange juice were exempted from ICC regulation. Exempt truckers could haul juice to any available warehouse space without going through the expensive and time-consuming process of receiving additional geographic operating authority from the ICC. In this particular case, the USDA’s legal team successfully petitioned the ICC to grant temporary authority to eight Florida trucking firms to haul frozen orange juice. At the same time, the USDA hoped to find a more permanent expansion of trucking services available to frozen food processors.43
The opportunity arose in 1955, when Frozen Food Express, a regulated trucking company based in Texas, sued the ICC in federal district court. Frozen Food Express argued that the ICC was usurping its regulatory authority to deprive the firm of the right to haul frozen poultry to and from all points within the United States. The Department of Agriculture’s solicitor general signed on to the case as an intervening plaintiff, seeing an opportunity to broaden the agricultural exemption to include frozen food. The Federal District Court for the Southern District of Texas decided against the plaintiffs in 1955, but Frozen Food Express and the USDA appealed the decision, bringing it before the Supreme Court in the spring of 1956. In the hearings before the Supreme Court, USDA lawyers argued that a frozen chicken maintained a “continuing substantial identity” with an unfrozen chicken. In simpler words, if a frozen chicken still looked like a chicken, it was still a chicken. Because the chicken had not taken on a new name or identity through the process of freezing in the way that, say, crude oil became polyurethane, the chicken was not “manufactured” and thus should be exempt from ICC regulation. Perhaps surprisingly, the Supreme Court agreed with the USDA, stating that “A chicken that has been killed and dressed is still a chicken…. We cannot conclude that this processing which merely makes the chicken marketable turns it into a ‘manufactured’ commodity.” This decision was soon made applicable to nearly all frozen foods in November 1956, when the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that had granted the Home Transfer and Storage trucking firm the right to haul frozen fruits and vegetables without first receiving ICC authority.44
As a consequence of these two cases, the ICC declared all frozen food to be exempt from economic regulation in late 1956, providing a template for later efforts to deregulate the entire trucking industry. One year after the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Frozen Food Express and Home Transfer and Storage cases, over half of all frozen food shippers began relying on exempt truckers to haul their products. The cost of shipping frozen food dropped rapidly in response to the exemption decision. Two USDA economists, James Snitzler and Robert Byrne, found that in the two years following exemption, motor carrier rates on frozen food shipment dropped by 19 percent overall, and up to 36 percent on certain frozen items, even as railroad rates rose from 6 to 14 percent. This finding, as we shall see in chapter 7, would be cited in the 1970s by both neopopulist truckers and neoliberal economists as clear evidence that deregulation benefited both producers and consumers. In fighting to broaden the applicability of the agricultural exemption in the 1950s, Ezra Taft Benson’s USDA created a template and a justification for the deregulation of highway transportation several decades before Jimmy Carter and Edward M. Kennedy pushed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 through Congress.45
The time was not yet ripe, however, for full deregulation of the trucking industry. Outside the world of agribusiness transportation in the mid-1950s, relatively little support existed for efforts to limit the ICC’s authority. In 1955, for instance, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks called for limited deregulation of railroad and trucking freight rates, intending to help railroads compete more effectively with truckers. The well-organized American Trucking Associations, however, waged a massive publicity campaign in the nation’s newspapers, attacking the railroads as “monopolies” bent on gouging U.S. consumers during a period of inflation. Supported by the ICC—which saw the Weeks proposal as an attack on its institutional authority—and by the Teamsters—who denounced rate deregulation as a threat to their hard-won wage gains since 1935—the ATA wielded its lobbying power in Congress to crush the Weeks proposal.46
Even within agribusiness hauling, not all shippers agreed that the “freemarket” approach to trucking was as beneficial as USDA economists declared it to be. Some frozen food shippers determined in 1957 that exempt hauling, rather than providing needed flexibility, posed serious threats to their industry. Ray V. Harron, traffic manager at Birds Eye, decided that even if exempt haulers provided more flexible service, regulated carriers provided better equipment. As a general rule, regulated truckers were larger firms with greater financial stability, able to invest in the latest refrigeration equipment. Good refrigeration was no small matter in an industry that for decades had found it difficult to deliver a high-quality product to consumers. By 1958 several large packers had decided that exemption had gone too far. Led by Birds Eye, Welch’s Grape Juice, and Stokely-Van Camp, frozen food packers joined up with the ICC and regulated common carriers to petition Congress to amend the Motor Carrier Act to exclude frozen food from the agricultural exemption clause. Ironically one of the common carriers joining in the effort was Frozen Food Express—the firm that had initiated the court case that led to the Supreme Court’s definition of a frozen chicken as a nonmanufactured chicken. Apparently the firm’s chairman of the board, Cyrus B. Weller, had found that a year’s worth of exemption had brought too much competition into the field of frozen food hauling. Whereas Frozen Food Express had previously argued that a frozen chicken was not manufactured, in testifying before Congress Weller argued that “Frozen fruits and vegetables are not farm commodities. They are the products of a substantially centralized, highly competitive industry characterized by large commercial firms.” As Weller and the ICC saw it, frozen foods were manufactured goods, and so should be forced to travel to supermarket consumers via ICC-regulated carriers.47
Other groups who maintained a stake in a sound regulatory structure also contested the USDA’s efforts to expand the agricultural exemption to all frozen foods. The American Trucking Associations, the Teamsters, and the nation’s railroads were particularly concerned. Howard G. Freas of the ICC testified before the House Interstate Commerce Committee that the USDA’s efforts to broaden the agricultural exemption threatened to destabilize the entire transportation industry. The exemption that Congress had originally intended to allow farmers to truck their products to market with minimal oversight was becoming, according to Freas, a free pass for agribusinesses to ship processed foods via “gypsy” truckers who would drive regulated carriers out of business. The American Trucking Associations agreed, informing William Crow at the USDA that the department’s transportation work, which had previously served only farmers, was now “serving processors and manufacturers.” The USDA admitted that food processors benefited most from the exemption, but insisted that farmers also gained from the flexibility of just-in-time transportation services. As George Dice, a USDA transportation economist, informed Congress: “There can be no question but that efficiencies and economies which are injected into the marketing process at any point affect producers [i.e., farmers].” The Farm Bureau agreed, stating the antiunion implications of exemption quite clearly by arguing that exempt hauling prevented the Teamsters from instituting “the same featherbedding and make-work practices that add costs to rail and truck common carrier operations,” practices the Farm Bureau saw driving up the price of food for consumers while depressing farm prices. Nonetheless, with the two largest frozen food packers (Birds Eye and Stokely-Van Camp) calling for an end to the exemption, the passage of an amendment to the Motor Carrier Act was inevitable. The amendment came as part of the Transportation Act of 1958, which proclaimed frozen food to be ineligible under the agricultural exemption clause of the Motor Carrier Act of 1935.48
This was the first and last setback the USDA would ever be dealt in its efforts to use deregulatory politics to boost agribusiness firms’ marketing power and limit the power of the Teamsters Union in the food economy. The episode demonstrated that “flexibility” was itself a flexible concept. For the economists and bureaucrats who served in Ezra Taft Benson’s Department of Agriculture, “flexibility” represented a high degree of competition, even chaos, in the transportation industries, characterized by thousands of small trucking firms unfettered by ICC restrictions or by union organizers. Frozen food packers found significant drawbacks to the system, however, after experiencing this kind of flexibility for a year and a half. They appreciated the lower rates, faster service, and unrestricted point-to-point delivery of deregulated trucking. But some found that “flexibility” entailed reliance on carriers who often used ineffective refrigeration equipment and were likely to go out of business at any moment—the kind of truckers that Nation writer Alfred Maund had labeled “sharecroppers” in 1953 and that Teamster president Daniel Tobin had called “trash” in the early 1930s. Although frozen food packers agreed with Ezra Taft Benson that transportation costs had to be driven down—and also that the Teamsters should have less power in the food transportation industry—frozen food businessmen did not agree with agricultural economists who believed the “free market” was the most effective means of achieving more efficient transportation. Just as Progressive-era and New Deal-era big businessmen had come to accept certain government regulations as essential tools for achieving business and labor stability, the post–World War II frozen food packers who participated in the Eisenhower-era “corporate commonwealth” expected and even desired some degree of state intervention in the economy.49
By the end of Ezra Taft Benson’s time in office, a great irony of the agricultural exemption clause of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act had been exposed. Farmstate congressmen had intended the exemption clause to help family farmers haul their own products to market, but by the end of the 1950s, the loophole had become a powerful tool for agribusiness corporations to drive down the labor costs of marketing processed foods. As of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission estimated that at least 37,000 exempt motor carriers operated more than 199,000 vehicles in the nation. Because these unregulated carriers did not need to report their activities to federal agencies, the ICC could not determine either the exact number or their geographical location or even what these truckers were hauling. Reports from ICC field officers, though, confirmed that much of the “gray area” of unregulated truck transportation was undertaken by drivers who illegally abused the agricultural exemption clause of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act to avoid regulatory oversight. The American Trucking Associations estimated that as of 1960 unregulated motor carriers hauled two-thirds of the nation’s highway tonnage (see table B.5 in appendix B). In January 1961, a special congressional study group on national transportation policy condemned the USDA’s efforts over the previous decade to expand unregulated trucking at the expense of the stable, unionized, regulated general freight trucking force. “Much is made of the benefits of motor carrier exemptions to the small farmer or fisherman whose personal labor directly produces our perishable foods,” noted the study group. “Less is said about the benefits of bargain [trucking] rates to the corporations that assemble, process, and distribute these foodstuffs.” Acknowledging that exempt long-haul trucking provided needed flexibility in terms of geographical reach and on-demand service for U.S. agriculture, the study group nonetheless questioned whether “these [exempt] carriers represent a more economic means of transportation or … a cutrate, sweatshop operation” that served large agribusiness corporations more effectively than either family farmers or independent truck drivers.50
While the case of frozen foods demonstrated that at least some agribusinesses realized that the “flexibility” of a hypercompetitive trucking market based on sweated labor might not redound to their economic benefit, two other agribusinesses of the 1950s and 1960s would accept the free-market ideology of the USDA’s transportation economists. In the beef and milk industries—the subjects of chapters 5 and 6—corporate agribusinesses would come to see exempt trucks piloted by antiunion “asphalt cowboys” as effective tools for dealing a fatal blow to economic liberalism.