“What we are dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the law.” Smokey and the Bandit and the Portrayal of U.S. Trucking Politics In Popular Film (1940-1980)

May 28

Written By Melissa MacDonald

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin'

Oh, we gonna do what they say can't be done

We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there

I'm east bound, just watch ol' Bandit run

-Dick Feller / Jerry Reed,

“East Bound and Down”

Revving over the winding Georgia byways, Bo Darville and Cledus Snow— regionally revered by their respective CB-handles, “the Bandit” and “the Snowman”— are on a quest: to pick up four hundred cases of Coors beer from Texas and deliver it, within twenty-eight hours, to Big Enos Burdette and his prodigal son, Lil Enos, back in Georgia. Nearing two thousand miles roundtrip, the daring feat will not only require the Bandit and the Snowman to obliterate the still adolescent National Maximum Speed Law (enacted by Congress in 1973 in response to the nation’s oil crisis), but turn them into good ol’ bootleggers- trafficking a then illegal beverage into unlicensed territory.

An upbeat sequence of our steel cowboy—the dashing Burt Reynolds clad in an RCA-style tan cowboy hat and crisp crimson Western shirt—underscored by jolly co-star Jerry Reed’s ballad “East Bound and Down”, wherein the Bandit skates across the southern U.S. Interstate, weaving and whizzing past dosing cop cars, “blocking” for the Snowman as he rumbles behind the speeding Pontiac Trans Am in their cargo-stuffed tractor trailer, is at last dashed as the pursuit from police finally erupts. A caricature-rich tale unfolds, punctuated by romance, rest-stops, and Jackie Gleason’s reddened mien, portraying and contributing to the 1970’s heyday of the American trucker driver and trucker culture.

The “Outlaw”—largely claimed as a distinctive American folktype— has held an overwhelming presence in U.S. pop culture from vaudeville to Hollywood. How do artefacts from this prime time for truckers in American media, the 1977 box office hit film Smokey and the Bandit as lead example, present their stories of the mischievous outlaw trucker figure, his rival pursuer, and the world through which these characters were molded? Shane Hamilton, author of the 2008 book Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, argues the stagflationary economics of the decade combined with the void of trust in New Deal economic liberalism crafted an inevitable deregulation of the transportation industry as enacted through the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. In review of Hamilton’s aforementioned book, Matthew Lassiter asserts that the unusual coalition that advocated for trucking deregulation signals that the antithetical aspects of New Deal economic policymaking cannot be simplified to a polarized putt-off between liberal support for government intervention and conservative demands for free enterprise.

Does the distinctive period of late 1970’s romanticism towards the American truck driver, and the pop culture media it produced, illustrate the boundary-blending politics that Hamilton and Lassiter point to as the energy behind the major deregulation of the freight trucking industry in 1980, and its connection to “the runaway corporate capitalism that brought with it low consumer prices and rising economic inequality” (Lassiter, 102)? Or do popular trucker films such as Smokey and the Bandit represent, as Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield argues in his article “Driving the Deadhead Off the Big Road: Pre-interstate Representations of the American Trucker in Raoul Walsh's They Drive By Night and Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway” for Film International, apolitical entertainment profiting off of a fad fascination with trucker culture, using it as a new dressing for the “American outlaw” archetype that had begun to grow stale as audiences tired of the formulaic Western genre?

Considering elements related to the passage of the initial Motor Carrier Act of 1935 through its eventual demise in 1980, and an analysis of the portrayal of these turbulent trucking politics in the film Smokey and the Bandit, I will argue that the cinematic relics of the popular truck driver culture of the late 1970’s, which foamed on the surface of the churning waters of post-New Deal American capitalism, offer a nuanced and worthwhile perspective on the bipartisan love affair with the “American outlaw”. Portraying the political and economic burdens that erupted in the 1970s and constricted the livelihoods of independent truckers, through a mixture of farce and folk tale aesthetics, popular films born from the heyday of the American trucker remain important artifacts— offering glimpses into a complex culture that successfully contributed to the massive deregulation of the American transportation market (ironically, and tragically, hastening their own demise).

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The independent truckers’ estrangement in American capitalism can be traced back to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, marking the start of federal regulation of the freight trucking industry. Hamilton expounds on the economic conditions that pushed regulation to the table:

Faced with apparently “chaotic” competition, established trucking firms and railroads both pushed for regulation to bring order to an upstart industry [...] Small trucking firms rose quickly in the 1920s and 1930s due to the low capital costs of entry, but often fell just as rapidly as inexperienced truckers failed to calculate the costs involved in their operations [...] “Wildcat” truckers also threatened the bottom lines of the nation’s railroads. Although truckers provided little to no competition on long hauls, the railroads depended on short hauls of highly perishable (and highly valuable) freight for a significant portion of their revenues. Trucks traveling only short distances, however, could easily undercut the rail rates, as well as provide faster, point-to-point service for transporting such time-sensitive loads as milk, produce, meat, and mail. (p.142).

The inception of the New Deal in 1933 provided frustrated trucking firms and railroads with a sympathetic ear in the federal government, particularly that of the freshly appointed Federal Coordinator of Transportation, Joseph B. Eastman. Eastman’s orientation was towards bringing the efficiency of big business to the arena of small-time trucking, and he conveyed to the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce in 1935 that the “rapid rise of the trucking industry created wasteful competition between trucks and railroads, leading to ‘an oversupply of transportation facilities’ that harmed the interests of railroad investors, shippers, and truck drivers alike” (Hamilton, 142). The successful passage of the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 drastically altered the economic framework through which independent owner-operator truckers were able to compile a liveable income. Hamilton details the implications of this new regulatory regime:

After 1935, the U.S. highway transportation market was defined more by government policy than by competition on price and service. Operators of a new trucking firm suddenly needed much more than just a truck and trailer to start in business. They now also needed operating authority, which the ICC granted only after lengthy and expensive proceedings meant to discourage competition. To engage in interstate commerce, a trucking firm owner had to apply to the ICC for a certificate of “public convenience and necessity,” which was only awarded if the firm’s attorneys convinced ICC administrators that the geographical areas to be served were not adequately served by existing railroad or trucking routes. Certificated trucking firms also had to publish their freight rates, which ICC officials closely administered to prevent rampant price-cutting (p. 143).

Alongside these cartelized trucking firms rolled the members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters: a labor union formed in 1903 that became the nation’s largest and most powerful trade union by the mid-1950’s, captained at the time by their pragmatic president James R. Hoffa. Due to the required publishing of freight rates following the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, trucking firms were incentivized to charge the same rates as the other firms, leaving little reason for corporations to resist the increased wage demands of their organized labourers and instead pass on the higher labor costs to consumers (Hamilton, 144).

Following the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, independent truckers, defined here as self-employed owner/operator truck drivers, were sequestered to operating only through a short clause inserted into the act by congressmen from farm states, which came to be known as the “agricultural exemption” (Sec. 203(b)). Hamilton examines the implications of the exception and its ties to the powerful farm lobbyists of the era and its influence on the continuance of independent trucking:

Bowing to the farm lobby, Congress wrote into the Motor Carrier Act a clause exempting all “agricultural commodities (not including manufactured products thereof).” With this phrasing, any trucker who hauled agricultural goods that were not “manufactured” was exempt from ICC regulation, whether he was a farmer or not. Without this amendment, the Motor Carrier Act would never have become law under a Congress beholden to agricultural interests [...] This exemption created a rural transportation market regulated only in regard to safety. Truckers hauling “unmanufactured” agricultural commodities did not fall under the ambit of the ICC, and could haul products over any geographical route they wished, without having to publish their rates or file for an expensive certificate of public convenience and necessity. While the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 dampened chaos in the intercity freight trucking industry, the agricultural exemption clause carved out space for a parallel, hyper-competitive market to emerge in rural transportation (p. 145).

With farm lobbyists backing the need for malleable and cost-effective means to transport perishable foodstuffs from the heartlands to the market hubs, independent trucking maintained a subculture outside of the highly regulated and cartelized transportation industry that blossomed out of the controlled freight trucking economy of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act. By the 1960’s, beholden to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and these powerful agribusiness lobbyist for continuing to uphold this exemption clause (despite repeated attempts by the corporate trucking firms and Teamsters to limit the syphoning off of business to the derided “gypsy” truckers), independent truckers had carved out an economically-viable role in the transportation market for small-scale trucking.

Hamilton, describing a possible misconception from the truckers’ point of view that would feed into their regulatory rebellion during the 1970’s, posits that the independent trucker’s viability during the initial decades following the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 was not due to the success of a “free market” that remained available to them through the narrow channel of exempt agricultural goods, but instead was largely the product of immense intervention from federal agencies, such as the USDA, who were protecting their own particular economic interests, namely controlling consumers’ costs for food and other agricultural products (p. 145). He points to the efforts of the USDA’s Bureau of Public Roads, for example, to construct the rural highway network in the interwar period as an additional player inflating the potential for small-scale truckers to corner a sector of the transportation market as their own:

As trucks grew larger and the government pumped billions of dollars into the U.S. highway network in the post-war period, farmers increasingly turned to full-time truckers to haul their goods to market. This was especially the case for highly perishable commodities such as produce, milk, and livestock. By 1958, nearly ninety percent of all agricultural commodities traveled from farm to first market by truck. At the same time, trucks became the primary transportation mode for foodstuffs; by 1964, half of all foods (by volume) moved by truck (Hamilton, 146).

Discussing the outcomes of this unregulated outlet for independent trucking, Hamilton contends that owner-operator truckers prized their perceived “independence” and revelled in their operable circumstances that the agribusiness sector had secured for them. However, upon the arrival of the stagflationary economic reality of the 1970’s, many independent truckers began to view the regulated sector of freight trucking as a limitation on their ability to make a living during the rocky climate of the 1970’s, such as during the OPEC oil crisis of 1973.

Hamilton contends that “many [independent truckers] decided that regulated freight hauling should be opened up to untrammeled competition [and that] [t]ruckers’ antistatist, antiunion, and antiauthoritarian neopopulist politics ultimately exploded into a violent rebuke of New Deal–era regulatory structures in the summer of 1979” (p. 152). Added is the witnessed corruption of one of the regulatory regime’s main benefactors, The Teamsters. “The Teamsters”, notes Hamilton, “ 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” (p. 154).

Another strain came from the OPEC oil crisis, where Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries halted production and raised crude oil prices in the fall of 1973 in retaliation for the United States and Western European countries for supporting Israel, spiking already steep fuel prices, compounded by high demand and unsteady world markets; the Nixon administration responded with the implementation of a national 55-mph highway speed limit, which truckers correctly asserted increased their fuel usage rates, as the freight trucks were outfitted for greatest efficiency around 70-mph, and greatly reduced their income by hampering their productivity, as many truckers were paid by the mile rather than by the hour. By the winter of 1974, independent truckers had organized short strikes and a call for demands on the Nixon administration (in addition to pockets of violent harassment towards unsympathetic truckers who refused to participate in the strikes), of which they garnered only a minimal concession in the form of a price freeze on diesel.

Not until the summer of 1979 would the non-unionized truckers present another organized protest (coordinated largely through the popular independent trucker magazine, Overdrive) again with spatterings of violent resistance, to stop the flow of agricultural commodities to cities and large markets through physical blockades and violent attacks on truckers who chose to continue moving products. Added to this simmering pot of economic calamities, truckers began to more greatly utilize the then decades-old Citizens Band radio to aid one another in identifying service stations with sufficient fuel supplies, warn of the positionings of any speed-gun wielding highway troopers (whom were given many a CB-slang nickname, such as “Smokey”, after the common highway patrol uniform hat’s resemblance to that of the U.S. Forest Service mascot, Smokey Bear), and organize convoys and other coordinated events to protest transportation regulation.

With this tumultuous reality ensnaring the economic viability of independent truckers in the 1970’s, how did trucker-centric films, such as 1977’s second highest-grossing film of the year (behind only Steven Spielberg’s Star Wars) Smokey and the Bandit, portray and play on these detailed aspects of American trucking politics? Was their brand of the “rebel cowboy loner” archetype simply, as Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield poses, an outcome of Hollywood filling the void left as “film culture grew tired of the western in an era marked by the end of the Vietnam War and the acceleration of the Cold War”, leading to the proliferation of trucker films such as “the James Brolin vehicle Steel Cowboy (1978), the female trucker comedy Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie (1978), the Peter Fonda trucker action film High Ballin' (1978), the romantic comedy Coast to Coast (1980), the unrelated to the 'Bandit' Smokey and the Red Hot Gang (1979) and the two sequels to Smokey and the Bandit in 1980 and 1983” (Hollyfield 22)? Hollyfield notes a smaller subset of trucker films as exceptions, but otherwise states that the larger majority of trucker centric films “ of the 1970s and 1980s revelled in the rebellion and individualism of the trucker without engaging with the social problems of marginalization and exploitation that plague the American trucking industry” (p. 22). I contend that, while not directly or didactically portraying the everyday elements of the economic stagflation on the wallets of independent truckers, the iconic emblems of the 1970’s trucker culture heyday do engage with the social problems of their audience but rather approach it through a more nuanced lens of comedy, farce, and folk hero aesthetics.

Hollyfield continues their stance on the depoliticized nature of these popular trucker films, claiming that “[o]nly in the handful of 'important'- and much less financially successful - films by politically conscious directors who were relics of the 'New' American Cinema did glimpses into the working-class struggles of trucking culture wedge their way onto film (p.22). In contrast, I hold that films, in particular Smokey and the Bandit, are instead glimpses into the working-class culture that, rather than bemoaning the social woes and weariness of these “commoners”, celebrates the genuine joy, living culture, and community that took shape around these antiauthoritarian truckers. This stance does not condone particular oppressive attitudes and systems that these trucker films overtly and covertly maintain, largely in the realms of gender, but rebukes the assumption that these comedic and “light-hearted” films do not themselves contain striking cultural artefacts of a bipartisan-led and fed movement to deregulate the 45-year long cartelization of the American trucking industry.

Jesse Walker, books editor and author for American Libertarian magazine Reason, in his article “The Hippie and the Redneck Can Be Friends”, draws parallels between these successful trucker films and lauded “outlaw” narratives of the Western world:

Hollywood has always celebrated individualist rebels, and the Southern backcountry has a longstanding anti-authoritarian tradition that, as the historian David Hackett Fisher put it in Albion's seed, was "more radically libertarian, more strenuously hostile to ordering institutions than were the other cultures of British America." Smokey and the Bandit was not a story that could be imagined only after 1969. It was a classic bandit narrative in the tradition of Robin Hood and Jesse James, with an invulnerable hero who defies unjust laws (in this case, speed limits and alcohol regulations), battles an oppressive sheriff (in this case, Jackie Gleason), and can move almost invisibly among the common folk who admire his heroic deeds (in this case, other drivers).

But this Robin Hood was rebelling at a time when the word rebellion invariably suggested the word freak. This Little John was played by Jerry Reed, a guy who used to jam with Elvis. This Sheriff of Nottingham was a fat racist cop, a cultural archetype that took hold during the civil rights movement and was most evocative among those who sided with the protesters. The genre that begat them reached its peak after the country relaxed its attitudes toward on-screen sex, violence, and sympathy for lawbreakers, a change largely driven by the cultural revolution (p. 64).

Building off of Walker’s offering, I assert that the contextual elements of Smokey and the Bandit, such as the egregiously offensive Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) and his oafish son Junior (Mike Henry), the diverse and relatively inclusive community of friends and supporters the Bandit and Snowman encounter throughout the film, and the charm and charisma of the “invulnerable hero” coalesce to form a politically-imbued folk narrative that deepened the empathy, connection and attention of the movie-going public to the story of one of America’s most essential labor sects of the time: independent owner-operator truckers. Speaking to the cultural impact of this film on the American public, Hollyfield notes that “CB-radio sales grew exponentially and Jerry Reed’s theme song for the film, ‘East Bound and Down’, became a crossover hit and the most successful song of his career” (p.22).

However, Hollyfield later labels the 1978 film Convoy as one of the earlier noted “exceptions” to his depoliticized genre of truckers films without discussing the fact of the film being entirely premised off a highly-successful eponymous novelty trucker song, detailing in comedic verses of CB-slang dialogue, story narration, and group-sung chorus the fictional rebellion by a massive convoy of truckers protesting the laws they find unjust and oppressive to their livelihoods (Hollyfield, 22). While the novelty song “Convoy” (1975) was distinctly political in nature, with lines such as “We tore up all of our swindle sheets / And left 'em settin' on the scales” berating the regulation log sheets that recorded trucker’s driving hours (“swindle sheets” mocking the log sheets for their typically falsified entries), I believe the use of farcical absurdity and folk music stylings evoke the same methods employed by films like Smokey and the Bandit, differing more so in the overtness of their political messaging rather than in the perceivable political ethos that color both cultural artifacts.

If not directly displaying, representing or dialoguing the particular stings of American trucking politics of its time, Smokey and the Bandit gave audiences a farcical folk tale for the late 1970’s truck driver that bolstered support and sympathy for the plight of independent truckers against the laws they claimed unjustly hampered their economic viability: by valorizing characters who audiences giddily watch engage with the “unjust” law system through equally absurd and fantastical adventure, these films do not aim to exemplify a method of dismantling said law system but rather to bolster pride and identification with the independent trucker.

As Bo “Bandit” Darville (Burt Reynolds) cajoles his best friend and trucking partner Cledus “Snowman” Snow (Jerry Reed) into tackling this improbable bet from the overstuffed, baby-blue suit and walrus-style mustache wearing Texas millionaire Big Enos Burdette (performed by the 6’7” Pat McCormick), the Snowman asks the Bandit why they should bother with the all the trouble this endeavor will likely create, to which the Bandit quickly quips “For the good ol’ American life: for the money, for the glory, and for the fun. Mostly for the money.” While the film does not give air to the fraught economic circumstances independent truckers operated under at the time, beyond a brief scene passing through Cledus’ home filled with a laughable number of young children and his stressed out wife Wynette, it undeniably frames the impetus for the “adventure” as one rooted in a fiscal reality, later adding that the pair intends to use the bet money to purchase a new “rig” (a trucking rig consisting of both a truck and a trailer), presumably to bolster their lawful trucking work.

This analysis serves as contrast to Hollyfield’s assertion that earlier “trucker noir” films from the 1940’s, by “direct[ly] address[ing] the tragic circumstances of exploitation that plagued the trucking industry during the time of their release”, better served the voice of independent truckers than do these trucker films of the late 1970’s (p. 34). He argues that “as the interstate highway system rose to prominence and led to increased exploitation within the trucking industry, cinematic representations of truckers in [the late 1970’s and early 1980’s became] farcical, neglecting the plight of the trucker in favour of a carefully constructed meta-narrative of American independence” (Hollyfield, 34). Why is a farcical representation of trucking politics condemned to being apolitical, despite its tangible references to the precise political circumstances (the speed limit and unlicensed beverage laws, in particular) driving the exaggerated storyline? Hollyfield conflates “political concern” with didactic dialogue, denying these 70’s era trucker films of their worthiness for cultural analysis:

[...] Hollywood's depiction of the trucker in this era lacks the political concerns vital to Adorno's characterization of the individual's revolutionary potential. Rather than use their individuality to resist the totality of authority, truckers in films released since the rise of the interstate system neglect the social concerns of the American trucker, acting instead as characters more in the service of forming iconic screen presences than models for a sustained resistance to authority.[...] In their light-hearted and apolitical depictions of truckers, the trucker films of the 1970s and 1980s attempt to preserve the status quo by presenting an industry rife with exploitation as a subculture of rebellious independence unencumbered by the rigorous demands those who control the means of production assert over it. (p.24)

I contend that this perspective belittles the utility of folk-styled and farcical narratives in exerting influence and building support for working-class concerns. Hollyfield considers Karl Marx’s characterization of history, as posed in his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, quoting Marx’s discussion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s view of repetition in history: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (Hollyfield 34, Marx 594). Hollyfield’s summation of the farcical trucker comedies of the late 1970’s as apolitical is a misguided interpretation of this theory, ignoring the cultural merit and bipartisan coalition-building prowess of this period of trucker culture and its pop culture products.

Returning to the political and economic history of this period, the late 1970’s saw a swell of support for the deregulation of the transportation industry and the seeds of the “Reaganomics” that came to define the America of the 1980’s. Shane Hamilton outlines the amalgamated factors coalescing around deregulation:

Like the protests of 1973–1974, the shutdowns of the summer of 1979 were provoked by a rapid rise in fuel costs—this time due to petroleum market instabilities in the wake of the Iranian Revolution [...] By the end of June, approximately seventy-five thousand truckers heeded [Mike] Parkhurst’s call [founder of the independent trucker magazine Overdrive] and stopped driving. Once again the protests were violent, as roving bands of truckers set fire to empty trucks and shot at the windshields of drivers who refused to stop. Nine states called out the National Guard. By the time the shutdown ended in early July, one driver had been shot and killed, dozens more injured.

[...] Violent strikes would not bring down the ICC, Mike Parkhurst realized. The decades-long legacy of the agricultural exemption clause of the Motor Carrier Act, however, could provide a key lobbying tool before Congress [...] tens of thousands of independent truckers could simultaneously draw on consumerist and agrarian language to cultivate just that support. If both farm-friendly congressmen and consumer-friendly Democrats could be convinced that deregulated trucking would lower the price of food at the supermarket without lowering farm prices, Parkhurst could attack the ICC as an outmoded relic and the Teamsters as selfish brutes who contributed to runaway inflation. (p. 164-165)

Senator Edward Kennedy [D-MA] joined the deregulatory push alongside Carter as he began staking his claim for the 1980 Democratic nomination, flanked by “consumer crusader” Ralph Nader, seeing trucking deregulation as a means “to appeal to worker and consumer interests simultaneously in an age of stagnating wages and inflationary living costs” (Hamilton 165). Together, Kennedy and Carter co-sponsored the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which brought independent truckers the economic freedom to compete with larger trucking firms for the transport of manufactured and lucrative goods in addition to the already unregulated sector of agriculture transport. Hamilton extrapolates:

Deregulation transformed the trucking industry in the 1980s, bringing chaotic and cut-throat competition reminiscent of the 1920s “dog-eat-dog world” described by Jack Keeshin. The easing of market entry restrictions encouraged the proliferation of small trucking firms located in rural areas, following the pattern set over the previous decades by the unregulated agricultural trucking industry. Larger firms also joined in the competition, with the new firm J. B. Hunt quickly emerging after 1978 as one of the largest and most successful trucking industries in the deregulated era. But whether the new trucking companies were small or large, nearly all were nonunion, and wage-cutting became a business imperative. By 1996—a year after Congress formally abolished the Interstate Com- merce Commission—the nation’s freight bill reached an all-time low, but at the cost of transforming big rigs into “sweatshops on wheels,” as firms slashed wages while Teamster power collapsed in long-haul trucking. By the turn of the twenty-first century, upwards of three hundred and fifty thousand owner-operator truckers counted on the “free market” to provide paying loads, but only those with keen accounting skills and a significant streak of luck could count on stable incomes. (p.169)

And so again the narrative turns tragic, as the independent trucker succeeded in reforming the laws they perceived as the cause of the economic misfortune and inability to build a sustainable and independent existence inside American capitalism, only to discover that federal regulations limiting the free market within the freight trucking industry were not the unruly monsters gobbling up all their potential income sources. The heyday of trucker culture in the U.S. slowly receded from the American mainstream, and the inclusive and community-based culture that was depicted in these folk-hero trucker narratives has rarely been further depicted or discussed. Can the bipartisan nature of the push for deregulation be simply tied to the fact that the economic imperatives of both the Democrat and Republican parties stood to benefit from increased competition in the transportation market? If that is a defensible stance, can the unique trucker culture of the 1970’s be seen as a third prong, that of the attempts of the common American to figure out how to sustain life, achieve liberty, and pursue happiness inside of the capitalist system that arguably coerces the general public to rely on governmental organization to access the essentials of life? Smokey and the Bandit, to some a trivial replication of the “American outlaw” archetype dressed in the trappings of a “fad” fascination with trucker culture, presents, when viewed through a contextualized lens, a comedic folktale enshrining the legacy of independent truckers. When viewing the cultural artifacts of trucker culture today, these films serve to heighten the tragic reading of the working-classes history of entrapment in exploitive systems of a capitalistic world order.

Works Cited

Hamilton, Shane. Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2008.

Hollyfield, Jerod, Raoul Walsh, and Jules Dassin. “Driving the Deadhead Off the Big Road: Pre-Interstate Representations of the American Trucker in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night and Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway.” Film International, 2010, Vol.VIII (45), pp.21-35. Web.

Lassiter, Matthew. "Keep on Truckin'." Democracy, no. 11, Winter, 2009, pp. 100-107.

Smokey and the Bandit. Directed by Hal Needham. Performances by Burt Reylonds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, and Jackie Gleason, Universal Pictures, 1977.

United States, Congress, Amendment to the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887: Motor Carrier Act, 1935

United States, Congress, Motor Carrier Regulatory Reform and Modernization Act, 1980.

Walker, Jesse. “The Hippie and The Redneck Can Be Friends” Reason. Vol.36(11), 2005, p.64-65. Web.

“What we are dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the law.” Smokey and the Bandit and the Portrayal of U.S. Trucking Politics In Popular Film (1940-1980)

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