White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Images of small men usually arise and persist widely only because big men find good use for them. Businessmen had not been taken as exemplars of the small individual, as were farmers, until in the twentieth century the small businessman arose as a counter-image to the big businessman. Then big business began to promulgate and use the image of the small businessman. Such spokesmen have been gravely concerned about the fate of small business because, in their rhetoric, small business is the last urban representative of free competition and thus of the competitive virtues of the private enterprise system.

In any well-conducted Senate hearing on economic issues, someone always says that the small entrepreneur is the backbone of the American economy, that he maintains the thousands of smaller cities, and that, especially in these cities, he is the very flower of the American way. ‘It is the small businessman who has become so closely identified with the many hundreds of villages and cities of this land that he is the very foundation of the hometown's growth and development. ' Perhaps giant monopolies do exist, the image runs, but, after all, they are of the big city; it is in the small towns, the locus of real Americans, that the small businessman thrives.