AMERICA WAS FASCINATED with trucking culture in the late 1970s. Movies such as Every Which Way But Loose, Smokey and the Bandit, Breaker! Breaker!, and White Line Fever, along with television shows B.J. and the Bear and country songs by Merle Haggard glorified the trucking lifestyle and the freedom of the open road.
Truck drivers — particularly independent truckers — were regularly portrayed as freewheeling open-road outlaws and concrete cowboys. Once a profession hidden in the background, truckers became a cultural icon as plaid shirts and mesh-backed baseball hats proliferated. Families looking to entertain themselves on long drives bought CB radios.
Much of the fascination with trucking culminated in the 1978 blockbuster movie Convoy, about a group of rebellious independent truckers that fight for their freedom against the police, the trucking unions, and speed limits. Not only was Convoy a huge box-office success with a self-titled hit song, it sparked a nationwide independent truckers’ strike partially due to its timeliness: it was released in 1978.
In the midst of skyrocketing diesel fuel prices, independent truckers demanded cheaper gasoline, higher speed limits, fewer limits on truck size, and removal of what they considered petty regulations on their cargo. Independent truckers not only refused to make shipments, they actively blocked traffic on highways, around gas stations, and nearby oil refineries. They emulated the final scene in Convoy by bringing the nation’s highways to a standstill with a caravan of tractor-trailers destined for the White House. The strike, which was exponentially more disruptive than previous union-led trucking strikes, also turned much more violent. Fistfights regularly broke out, and strikers attacked trucks with rocks and gunfire from highway overpasses.
The havoc of the independent truckers’ strike only exacerbated the economic chaos caused by stagflation: the simultaneous inflation and skyrocketing unemployment that had crippled the country as a result of the oil crisis. As jobs were scarce, gasoline was expensive, and money was increasingly worth less, industries that relied on independent trucking came to a standstill. The strike’s blockade of gas stations and oil refineries only compounded the woes of a country desperately dependent on oil.
Eventually, the combination of stagflation, the oil crisis, and the independent truckers’ strike helped push through trucking and railway deregulation. Led by Senator Ted Kennedy and economist Alfred Kahn and signed into law by President Carter, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 would eliminate oversight on shipping rates and competition in the trucking and railway industry. It limited the Interstate Commerce Commission’s (ICC) authority over trucking (the ICC was later abolished in 1995), which had overseen the transportation industry for over 40 years. Combined with airline deregulation in 1978, it was the complete deregulation of the transportation industry.