What mattered was the firm's imagined harm to small businesses and small towns. However, while the campaign against Wal-Mart caught the attention of Americans, and while many sympathized with small retailers, relatively few took an active part in opposing Wal-Mart. Most Americans liked the company's low prices.

The Wal-Mart controversy laid bare the ambiguous attitudes Americans have long harboured toward small businesses. On the one hand, Americans have held a special place in their hearts for small - business people, their firms, and the individualistic way of life they have been thought to foster. Into the late-twentieth century, some Americans viewed small businesses as bulwarks against too great a concentration of power in the United States.

Yet, on the other hand, Americans have wanted to benefit from the outpouring of goods from large businesses--companies that they have, until the last decade or so, thought of as being more efficient and productive than small businesses. Most Americans have not tried to use public policies and governmental power in a concerted way to destroy large firms for the benefit of smaller ones.

This chapter examines the interactions between public attitudes, policymaking, and the development of small business in America. It begins by looking at public attitudes and federal government policies deriving from those attitudes. The chapter then turns to what actually occurred in terms of the development of small manufacturing firms. Finally, I suggest how historical themes connected to small business are influencing changes in the way big businesses are managed today and looks at the implications of these changes for job creation. No short chapter can encompass all of a field, and mine does not. It says little about small businesses in sales, services, or agriculture. Philip Scranton's chapter in this volume, looks at small business development in some of these areas.

This chapter looks mainly at manufacturing, because this is the field on which most historical research has focused and because my own work on small business has been mainly in this area. Throughout, I shall be taking an eclectic and functional approach in defining what is meant by 'small' I shall be defining small businesses less in terms of absolute size and more in terms of their sizes relative to other firms in the same industries and in terms of how they are managed and organized.

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