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By Root 900 0

of age and with just one year of experience as a trucker, McLean owned 2 trucks and 1 tractor trailer, employed nine drivers who owned their own rigs, and had already hauled steel drums from North Carolina to New Jersey and cotton yarn to mills in New England. By 1940, as preparations for war revived the economy, six-year-old McLean Trucking owned 30 trucks and grossed $230,000. McLean built his operations during the war, gaining additional routes. A massive merger among seven of his competitors, which he opposed unsuccessfully all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, barely affected the truck line. At the war’s end in 1945, Malcom McLean controlled a thriving business with 162 trucks, mainly hauling textiles and cigarettes from North Carolina to Philadelphia, New York, and southern New England. Revenues in 1946 were $2.2 million, nearly ten times the level of 1940. McLean, already wealthy at age thirty-four, viewed this as just a beginning. As he wrote a few years later, “I saw that my only opportunity was to build and build and build, make a big trucking company out of a relatively small one.”5

The economy of the late 1940s provided ample opportunity for a small trucking company to grow. As railway freight volumes languished, long-distance truck traffic more than doubled between 1946 and 1950. Getting a larger piece of the action, though, required the support of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The federal Motor Carrier Act of 1935 had brought interstate trucking under the authority of the ICC, which had regulated railroads since 1887. The ICC controlled almost every aspect of the business of common carriers—truckers whose services were on offer to the public. A common carrier could haul only commodities the ICC allowed it to haul, over ICC-approved routes, at ICC-approved rates. If a new firm wanted to begin service, or if an existing one wanted to serve a new route or carry a new commodity, it had to hire lawyers to plead its case at the commission. Any major change required hearings at which other truck lines and railroads had the opportunity to object. Regulation made trucking hugely inefficient; a trucker authorized to haul paper between Nashville and Philadelphia could not simply pick up a few tires or drums of chemicals to fill a half-empty truck, and might have to return home empty if authorized cargo were not available for the backhaul. The ICC’s concern was not efficiency but order. Regulation protected the interests of established truck lines by limiting competition, and it protected the railroads by forcing truck lines to charge much more than railroad companies. More than anything else, the ICC wanted to keep the transportation industry stable.6

Regulation damped competitive spirit in the trucking industry. Showing the sort of ingenuity that would characterize his career, McLean found ways around the regulators’ obstacles. If winning new route authority was too arduous, why not buy a carrier that already had attractive routes? And if buying another truck line was too expensive, why not lease one? The labor unrest that followed the war left many truck lines struggling, and McLean repeatedly seized opportunities. Between 1946 and 1954, McLean Trucking bought or leased routes in at least ten different transactions, expanding its network from Atlanta to Boston. The company added six hundred trucks between 1947 and 1949, using the U.S. government as the unwitting financier: veterans were eligible for cheap government loans to set themselves up as independent truckers, so McLean encouraged veterans to become owner-operators, brought them together to purchase equipment in a single large order, and signed them up to haul freight for McLean Trucking.7

An obsessive focus on cutting costs was the key to McLean Trucking’s success. The only way a truck line could attract much new business was by offering lower rates than competitors offered. A trucking company’s salesman would call on a prospective client, learn how much cargo it generated for various destinations, and then study the rates that its current carrier