https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... out-485107
In particular the opposition to canals and railroads in the 1800's.
"It was a position echoed by Monroe, who vetoed plans to erect tolls on a national highway, and Andrew Jackson, who famously vetoed funding for the Maysville Road in 1830. All three presidents professed support for internal improvements, but only if they were principally financed by state and local governments, or by chartered corporations.
But opponents of federal funding for internal improvements feared more than just an empowered federal state. They understood that internal improvements would usher in a new reality—one in which a cherished agrarian republic gave way to a mixed economy of farms and small towns, factories and cities, agriculture and commerce. In a short story published in 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a steadfast Jacksonian Democrat in politics, likened the railroad to “a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions.”
In North Carolina, opponents of state funding for internal improvements popularized an election ballad that framed canals and roads as the ruin of their agrarian paradise:
So therefore let it be our care,
To keep these men away from there,
Who build their castles in the air,
Who dream they can vast things perform,
Aid in a breadth God’s works reform,
[But to] us send such men as will
Cut no canals through vale nor hill.
In the eyes of opponents, where canals and railroads cut a swath through the countryside, they seemed to decimate local communities and turn once healthy, independent farmers into washed-out wage laborers. A New York editor invited readers to gaze on the “sallow complexions, emaciated forms, and stooping shoulders” of mill workers and consider what a “crime against society” it was to “divert human industry from the fields and the forests to the iron forges and cotton factories.”
