Who are small businesspeople? What motivates them to create and innovate? What exactly are the sources of their ingenuity? What makes this role so crucial for American communities? Can such dauntingly broad questions be answered cogently?

Perhaps not, but my summer internship position at the (NJ) Hunterdon County Chamber of Commerce presented me with an ideal and unique opportunity to confront these questions. As an Economic Development and Destination Marketing researcher, I approached my position as if I were conducting a case study, of sorts. After all, there seemed to be no better way to learn about average businesspeople and their concerns than to interact with an entire tapestry of them in this central setting, this hub of energetic activity (Flemington, being the county seat of Hunterdon, is one of the principal and few areas where official county business, public and private, takes place).

Before I began, in my mind, Chambers of Commerce served narrowly and merely as greedy local organizations—self-serving commercial networks of self-centered business leaders whose sole and express purpose was to advocate for the shared financial interests of a select few private enterprises in their community, and little else. I never imagined that they aimed to serve the public interest as explicitly as they actually do.

There is now little difficulty in identifying the origin of what was, at that time, my limited conception and unfair assumptions. After months of being bombarded with the screeds of (1) Occupy Wall Street demonstrators on the CU campus (protesting the excesses of the financial industry and corporations), (2) of observing the passionate campaigns of labor sympathizers (crusading against sweat shops), and (3) of reading about the “heroic” acts of civil disobedience carried out by green activists (objecting to the installation of an oil pipeline through the Great Plains), I had unknowingly been moved to a state of quiet resentment against job creators in the private sector. (But I was not alone, and the programming of my negative attitude toward business was anything but accidental, as we shall see...)

Even I couldn’t help but fall prey to the carefully designed trap of prejudice against those engaged in commercial pursuits (businesspeople). Even on the first day of volunteering at the chamber, I was deceived: “Why should any commercial operations, small or large, escape citizen suspicion?” After all, aren’t all businesses purely money making operations, devoid of respect for civic duty and public interest? The OWS activist might very well ask, “What makes members of a medium-sized chamber of commerce any less greedy, unsympathetic and self-centered than the mega-industries we make a habit out of scrutinizing?” The answer arrived with the furry of a freight train.

Within the first week of my time at the Chamber I had been enlightened. The ideologically framed attitude toward business on the CU campus is so radically different from the attitudes I encountered this summer—a real world of private enterprises intimately embedded in the work of improving the quality of life in their communities. Through numerous conversations of great length, it became obvious to me that these community real estate agents, bank presidents, accountants, and attorneys were indeed facilitators of social progress, collective advancement and economic empowerment for the local citizenry as a whole. The entrepreneurs, freeholders, and CEOs I met fervently believed that they were engaging in service to the community and acted like it. They cared deeply and seriously about the financial struggles of their employees and consumers. This much was evident from the manner in which they identified priorities at board meetings for economic revitalization, community outreach, and coordinated improvements of community services.

For these small business people, their work with the chamber served as a vehicle of job creation and development on behalf of the citizenry. The chamber was not an instrument of self-enrichment for them, but a nerve center for desperately needed access, resources, advocacy and networking. These people were fueled by a motivation to ensure that shared objectives were met formally. And they were exceedingly sensitive to community needs (since they were, after all, just regular people who were aware of local problems), and were mindful of their obligation to contribute to community efforts to secure them. The activities of public service and business were concurrent for chamber participants.

My experience at both a Chamber Mayoral Breakfast and a Chamber Card Club festival brought me in direct contact with an entire assortment of passionate pioneers and visionaries. From legal services to medical services, and from IT to financial planning, they exhibited a sort of sustained dynamism which serves as the defining ingredient of the town’s uniqueness and success. For a few of them, the ingenuity never seemed to end, and the innovative offerings and service initiatives imagined took on so many different forms. I was nearly brought to tears.

Everyone knew that their work was interwoven with the very fabric of the community. This point was repeatedly stressed. Everyone had a project oriented toward creative outreach. What is more, everyone was eager to share it with me. Everyone was genuinely interested in my input. For me, it was staggering and emboldening to behold a spirit of growing optimism among a group, even in this time of economic malaise.

I couldn't have imagined how incredibly versatile chambers actually are. I once thought of them as mere political lobbies, but this characterization fails to capture their multifaceted role as a community-based partnerships. It is clear to me now that they serve as nerve centers for common-sense advocacy, networking and resources for literally hundreds of burgeoning small businesses, nonprofits, and community outreach programs. Strikingly diverse in their community function, they serve as forums for informational exchange, community development, strategy formulation, candid advice, and informed dialogue aimed at grappling with community challenges within the realms of local policy and economics.

But many of them expressed worry to me privately. They feared that they were under-appreciated by the powers that be, that they were being maligned for simply securing the best for their communities, their families, and their own senses of self-worth. They suspected that they were being unfairly scapegoated for the national problems created by lawmakers and bureaucrats in DC. To a person, they stood in horror when the SCOTUS Health Care opinion was announced on a sunny June day, and it appeared as if their future would tumble into darkness. They didn’t know why they were being punished with over-regulation and burdensome taxation even by some local authorities, and they were particularly unnerved when it was proclaimed on national television that they hadn’t really built what they sacrificed so much to create: their very own businesses.

So why had I been so wrong?!

Indeed, on an ideologically skewed campus like Cornell, it is all too easy to be tainted by such a spirit of resentment toward job creators in general. Smearing the reputation of business entities is a hallowed preoccupation on this campus. The ongoing outcry in condemnation of Adidas for alleged mistreatment of workers, the administration’s capitulation to demands that a campus contract with said company be cut, and the subsequent elation over this outcome, comes to mind. Last year’s manufactured outrage over the Technion controversy also rings a bell. And on campuses across the map, many find it decidedly convenient to come to expect the worst of all decision makers in the entirety of the private sector, whether Goldman Sachs mega-broker or locally-operating real estate agency. Those intent on lambasting the tycoons of the financial industry and big corporations (Wall Street) in the fall of 2011 surely couldn’t keep their bitterness from quietly spilling over into general suspicion of all things business (Main Street).

And herein lies the bait of the trap. The act of demonizing hedge fund managers, speculators, and stock brokers seems—if not meaningless—very attractive for the restful and jealous. But the act also presents a dangerous avenue which descends into a spiritually compromising place: a more subtly expressed culture of suspicion of, prejudice against, and resentment toward middle class business folks like local attorneys, accountant managers and community bankers. So the festering spirit of hostility toward the corporate world is unavoidably accompanied by a subtext of contempt for the more humble lot of small entrepreneurs: those agents that spear head the underlying current of economic growth for thousands of communities nationwide. Regrettably, this festering spirit of anti-business hostility is nurtured by our professors, especially in the ILR and A&S colleges, who relentlessly fuel the flames of the dangerous sentiment.

Why so dangerous? Because an anti-business attitude is fundamentally out-of-step with the fundamentally entrepreneurial character which defines the cultural fabric of American life. For professors to send off graduates into the real world of business with skewed assumptions about commercial enterprise is harmful for those graduates and suicidal for the spiritual health of the country. Belief that business necessarily equates to greed and selfishness entirely misunderstands the bedrock of the American ethos: private initiative as an instrument which secures the best interests of the broader community in which that initiative serves.

Roberto Matos is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at rlm387@cornell.edu.