In the rhetoric of many farm spokesmen, farming as a business is disguised as farming as a way of life. . . . Alongside the small independent farmer, a new breed of men might come onto the land, men who never were owners and do not expect to be, men who, like factory employees, manage and work the big machines. Then farming would take its place, not as the center of a social world as formerly, but as one national industry among other intricate, rationalized departments of production  In the meantime, farming is less a morally ascendant way of life than an industry; appreciation of the family farm as a special virtue producing unit in a world of free men is today but a nostalgic mood among deluded metropolitan people. Moreover, it is an ideological veil for larger business layouts whose economic ally and ultimate victim the politically dependent farmer may well become (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 44).