Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

The leader, "Not a matter of herism.  matter of endurance.  Your Middlewest is double-Puritan - praire Puritan on top of New England Puritan: bluff frontirersman on the surface, but in its hear it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock  in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way.  If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilised in mere twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow.. Easy,pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know."