White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Nevertheless, as a broad American stratum, the small entrepreneurs are still mainly people on farms. Men entering the city seldom have acquired business properties and become free producers and traders; on the contrary, as members or potential members of the old middle class, they have been destroyed. The small urban entrepreneur has never formed a broad stratum which, like the rural, could enact a key role in the shaping of a free society. The city never matched the countryside: neat rows of independent shops never grew up to become the equivalents of sections of land. Industrial plants and retail stores were not given to smaller men as were farms, and the capital required to start new businesses became greater in rough proportion to technological progress. There was never any Homestead Act for the would-be urban entrepreneur, although for manufacturers the tariff was something of a Homestead Act. Industrialization does not necessarily develop a private centralization of enterprises, with resultant difficulties for small entrepreneurs, but that is the way it has worked out in America.

Even before the Civil War, as the new transportation network began to knit localities into a national market, local artisans began to work for merchant capitalists. The need for raw materials and capital and for outlets, to the national market soon caused the independent producer to become dependent upon bigger men. The businessman of the city, who was tied to the technologist, considered it his role to organize technology and labor and become their profitable link with the protected market. And as the nation grew up, so did its heroes: not big farmers, but big businessmen, though often called by other names, rose to national eminence. By the ‘nineties, William Dean How-ells' Man Who Had Risen was supplementing Walt Whitman's Man in the Open Air.