The more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past.

From The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. by Richard Hofstadter.

While early American society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. The more commercial society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers' sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.

Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen.

I have no end of respect for Thomas Jefferson (another advocate of the yeoman farmer ideal) but I also have clear recollections of my grandmother's stories to me as a child of her own childhood, telling of farm life, its joys and its heartbreaks. She made that remarkable journey in a single lifetime from a log cabin in her youth to telling stories to her grandchildren gathered around her in a comfortable apartment with clean water, indoor plumbing, heating and air-conditioning and no end of conveniences that had not existed even in the imagination in her youth. She had fond recollections of her people and experiences but no misplaced sentimentality about the meaning of being a yeoman farmer. It was a hard, unremitting and unforgiving life. Romance is a nice emotional frill but it should not blind us to reality. It is easy to romanticize that which we have left behind. We left it for a reason.