WILL AMERICA’S TRUCKERS LISTEN TO VOICES OF ANARCHY?
Canadian truck drivers are currently blockading international traffic into Canada. With the suggestion being raised that perhaps American truckers should adapt similar tactics in order to force the Biden administration to lift “fascistic” public health mandates, it is worth recollecting that not too long ago a national truckers strike in America was a very real possibility.
It was during the cold rainy fall of 1974, a time of oil and gasoline shortages, historically high gasoline prices and long lines at the pump, on the tail-end of a devastating OPEC oil embargo. The nation was being torn by scores of labor strikes around the country.
We’ve never experienced a nationwide work stoppage of truck drivers, and most people have probably never given much thought to what such a coordinated action could do to cripple the country. During that fall we were on the brink of finding out.
First, the Independent Truckers went on strike. The Independent Truckers is an association of truckers not organized by the Teamsters union. Their strike was causing quite a bit of confusion, and worse, the independents were trying to convince the Teamsters to strike as well. In some places violence erupted, when truck drivers still on the road found themselves being shot at, allegedly by striking independents who were trying to shut down all of the truck traffic.
At that time I was an activist member of a radical lefty organization. It is ironic that today Fox News and other radical rightwing shills promote the idea of allowing the nation’s transportation industry to collapse under the weight of coordinated trucker disobedience. At that time my lefty pals were ecstatic with fantasies of a completely paralyzed nation feeding into the mass-strike fervor, which we considered to be the path to revolution. Our group’s street organizing expanded to include truck stops.
Our headquarters considered the Independent Truckers Association to be a Rockefeller operation. (The Rockefellers were our go-to bad guys). The Rockefellers wanted to use this crisis to militarize the country,that is to move into the chaos imposed by a shut-down of transportation and let the military run things, while further pressing down on the working class.
This analysis wasn’t so farfetched. We had the example, only a year earlier, of how in Chile a truck strike had been instrumental in creating the chaos that had toppled President Salvador Allende. The media had already disclosed how that truck strike and ensuing military coup had been a CIA-Kissinger affair. (See C.I.A. is Linked to Strikes in Chile That Beset Allende, New York Times, September 20, 1974). Things in our own economy were so bad, there was an underground current of opinion that said the truckers’ strike could be just the thing to tip the scales for a more democratic kind of militarism, or as the catchfrase went, “Fascism with a Democratic Face.” More and more union truckers were deciding to sit out the independents’ strike rather than running the risk of being shot at. The press was having a field day with the incidents of shootings.
Our group reasoned that there must be, in some bureaucrat’s desk in Washington, a contingency plan to militarize the economy in the event of a national truckers’ strike. Those in charge would be aware of the severity of the crisis and would not allow such a situation to simply creep up on them without having contingency plans to deal with it. I was to be the intrepid warrior who would ferret it out.
Our staff in Washington had been mapping out the federal government for some time, while making inroads into the various agencies, establishing contacts among people with whom we could trade ideas and information. Some of the agencies were considered more Rockefeller-controlled than others. My colleague Joe had been given the task of finding out what he could about a contingency plan for a truck strike. He had been making exploratory telephone calls into the Emergency Preparedness Agency, the forerunner of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for several weeks but without much luck. When I heard of what he was trying to accomplish I approached Art, who was our national intelligence coordinator, and I said, “Leave it to me.”
I adopted the persona of a Georgetown undergrad student writing a paper on the structure of the Emergency Preparedness Agency. I was only out of college one year, and I still looked like a student with my full beard and grunge dress style. (I never have changed the grunge dress code.) I used the telephone only for the initial, superficial contacts. I knew that I wasn’t going to get anyone in government to confess over the phone to being responsible for planning an authoritarian takeover of the nation’s transportation system.
As I soon discovered, within the EPA there were people responsible for every sector of the economy, for every geographic region, and for every conceivable contingency, from floods, hurricanes and earthquakes right on up to nuclear holocaust. Their planning responsibility was for a civilian interface with the military in the event that a military mobilization should be foreseen in the plan. There were contingency experts who could tell you what our civil defense response would be in the event that a tactical nuclear weapon took out Hoover Dam.
As luck would have it, most of the men making these kinds of contingency plans were retired military officers. They tended to be the same age as my father, who was a retired Marine Colonel. These same bureaucrats had administered the U.S. occupation of Japan after the war, or of Korea after the Korean Conflict. Just as my father had spent nearly 20 years after the war in an administrative position in the military, so had they mostly come from similar backgrounds in all four branches of the service. This gave me a considerable edge — I knew how to talk to them.
I arranged meetings with their secretaries on the phone and then meet with them in person in the agency’s behemoth building. It was much like conducting a dozen interviews with variations of my Dad. I was a welcome disruption to their daily routine and they enjoyed bragging about their responsibilities and expertise. Each interview partner kept pointing me in the right direction: “Yes, there’s somebody here who would know about the truck strike situation, he must be over in such and such department.” It took me about a week of chatting and drinking coffee with this elite club of former military officers until I tracked down the individual who had drawn up the plans for a National Guard mobilization, with regular army back-up if necessary, to impose order in the event of a debilitating national truck strike. I called him and he invited me right over.
I spoke to him in his office, once again explaining my research into the EPA for a student paper, and how his particular expertise interested me because of the topical newsworthiness of what was happening in the nation at the time with all of the strikes going on. He was proud of his plans, which provided for military tanks guaranteeing that the trucks rolled, after a certain number of days of humoring the truckers in their strike. He assured me that his insight into the truck strike was just the thing to top off my research paper for my political science professor. He opened his drawer and handed me a 50 page document, saying, “There it is, take your time and look at it.” I glanced through the pages hurriedly, astounded, trying to hold back my disbelief that he would let me touch it. Then he had to run off to a meeting. Of course he couldn’t let me make any copies of any part of it. He placed it in his desk drawer and I thanked him for his assistance and left.
I walked down the corridor, turned two corners, then turned around and went back to his office. His door was open and he was gone. My heart was pounding. I was in fight or flight mode. I was doing this for the revolution — risking charges of theft and possibly even espionage. But of what significance is our personal well-being when the whole human race is at stake?
I went to his desk, keeping an eye on the door, pulling the drawer. It wasn’t locked. I found the document. Now it was hot in my hands. I looked out his door into the hall, no sign of him. I went three doors down to a copy room and ran off a complete copy, then returned the original to his desk. I returned to the copy room and ran off two more copies, and I was out of there.
That evening at our office, I walked up to Art and placed the document in his hands. He stood dumbfounded, aware of the coup that I had accomplished in the face of the national staff’s failure to produce the plan. Our national newspaper published a two-page centerfold excerpt of my stolen document. I was a hero for a week.
We distributed that issue of the paper at all of our truck stop sites, causing quite a stir. A while later the independent truckers strike petered out. The transportation crisis was over for the time being.
Will today’s American truck drivers listen to the tantalizing voices on the right urging chaos?
Paul Grussendorf’s legal memoir is My Trials: Inside America’s Deportation Factories