The Grapes of Wrath Hunger and Starvation Quotes

"Well, what you doing this kind of work for – against your own people?"
"Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner – and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tenant farmer accuses the tractor driver of betraying his own class. The bank is paying the son of a local farmer to plough up the tenant farmer’s repossessed land. But the tractor driver explains that he has no choice, he must earn money to feed his wife and children.

"But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can’t eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?"
And the driver said, "Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tenant farmer excoriates the tractor driver for driving a hundred people to homelessness and hunger just to earn three dollars a day. He feels that what the driver is doing is a betrayal of his own class. But the tractor man asserts that his priority is his family’s welfare which takes precedence over the dispossessed tenant.

"Times are changed, don’t you know? Thinking about stuff like that don’t feed the kids. Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody’s kids but your own. You get a reputation for talking like that, and you’ll never get three dollars a day if you worry about anything but your three dollars a day."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The important themes of betrayal, money and hunger are illustrated in this speech from the tractor driver. He defends taking a three dollar a day job to tractor out tenant farms that have been repossessed in his neighborhood. The tenant farmer should go and do the same job and feed his own children, the tractor man advises him.

"I got orders wherever there’s a family not moved out – if I have an accident – you know, get too close and cave the house in a little – well, I might get a couple of dollars. And my youngest kid never had no shoes yet."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tractor driver demonstrates his greed for a few extra bucks and his betrayal of his own people here. For a few dollars he is willing to do the dirty work of his bank employers and "accidentally" cave in a local tenant farmer’s house with the tractor. This shows how much he has been corrupted by the system, showing no humanity and thinking only of his own self-interest.

"It’s mine. I built it. You bump it down – I’ll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I’ll pot you like a rabbit."
"It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look – suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung there’ll be another guy on the tractor, and he’ll bump the house down. You’re not killing the right guy."
"That’s so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill."
"You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, ‘Clear those people out or it’s your job.’"
"Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
The driver said, "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.’"
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me."
"I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This passage is a conversation between an evicted tenant farmer and tractor driver, hired to bulldoze the tenant’s land. It’s revealing and shows the destructive power of capitalism. It also portrays the hopelessness and powerlessness of the tenant farmer in fighting the capitalist banking system. In desperation, the tenant says that before he starves to death, he wants to kill the man who is starving him. Ironically many tenants will die trying to achieve this goal. The tenant want to fight the bank. But the bank is a giant faceless corporation that is too big to fight, as the tractor driver points out.

"I ain’t got no choice…if a fella’s got somepin to eat an’ another fella’s hungry – why, the first fella ain’t got no choice."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 6. Muley Graves decides that he must share his meal with Tom Joad and Jim Casy. Muley is a subscriber to Casy’s theory that we are all part of one great community of love. Muley offering to share his food with others stands in stark contract to the tractor driver, who feeds his family at the expense of others going hungry.

Joe, did you know you was talkin’ to pikers?
I ain’t a piker. I got to get a car. We’re goin’ to California. I got to get a car.
Well, I’m a sucker. Joe says I’m a sucker. Says if I don’t quit givin’ my shirt away I’ll starve to death.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 7. There are many important themes in play here: the American Dream, California, money and starvation. Steinbeck also makes great use of irony. The used car lot owner is having a go at one of his customers, labeling him stingy and tight-fisted – a piker! He is trying hard to manipulate him into buying one of his defective, over-priced used cars. The customer wants to get to California which he believes to be an earthly paradise – the American Dream! The salesman engages in a bit of oversell, saying that he is a sucker who is loving his shirt. The irony is that it is the customers he is trying to sucker and steal their shirts.

"I knowed a fella from California. He didn’t talk like us. You’d of knowed he come from some far-off place jus’ the way he talked. But he says they’s too many folks lookin’ for work right there now. An’ he says the folks that pick the fruit live in dirty ol’ camps an’ don’t hardly get enough to eat. He says wages is low an’ hard to get any."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 10. Tom Joad tells his mother what he heard about the migrant situation in California. It turns out not to be good news for the huge numbers crowding into the state in search of work. There isn’t enough work to go round, pay is poor, camp living conditions are bad and people are huntry. This foreshadows that the California dream will not be what it’s cracked up to be for families like the Joads.

"It don’t make no sense. This fella wants eight hundred men. So he prints up five thousand of them things an’ maybe twenty thousan’ people sees ’em. An’ maybe two-three thousan’ folks gets movin’ account a this here han’bill. Folks that’s crazy with worry…The more fellas he can get, an’ the hungrier, less he’s gonna pay."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 16. A ragged man coming back from California provides the first evidence that California may not be the promised land migrant families like the Joads hope for. He explains to Pa Joad that the handbills promising work in California are designed to attract too many workers, so that employers can exploit those who show up and pay them as little as possible. Steinbeck is hitting at the corrupt system whereby greedy employers can take advantage of workers’ starvation to add to their own wealth.

And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more. And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country. And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. Steinbeck laments the demise of the family farm, as farmers turn to a more capitalistic model of farming. This change leads to bigger farms, fewer farmers, and imported foreign workers being starved and treated as little better than slaves.

And then the dispossessed were drawn west – from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless – restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do – to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut – anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. Nobody has chronicled and exposed the hardships and social injustice inflicted on Dust Bowl tenant farmers quite like John Steinbeck in <em>The Grapes of Wrath</em>. He is uncompromising and unsparing in his expose of the damage corporate farming inflicted on the small farmer, leading to mass migration, homelessness, unemployment and hunger. In this passage he uses two apt similes to compare the desperate migrant farmers to frantic ants.

Californians wanted many things, accumulation, social success, amusement, luxury, and a curious banking security, the new barbarians wanted only two things – land and food.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. The "new barbarians" are the hundreds of thousands of dispossessed migrants flowing into California. There is a message and warning in this passage for landowners in California. The barbarian tribes of Europe were involved in multiple wars and clashes with the Roman Empire. The Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome in 410, signaling the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire. Much of the conflict between the barbarians and Romans was driven by the hunger for land. Now the migrants who have invaded California have that same hunger.

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. There is growing fear of migrant workers among the landowners in the West. Their position is at risk from deperate people who cannot afford to buy food for themselves and their families. The owners realize that a man whose children are hungry cannot be frightened. The growing gap between the rich and poor, haves and have-nots, landowning and dispossessed classes, is highlighted here.

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. This is one of the great passages in the novel, where Steinbeck sounds a timeless warning about the destructiveness of complacent and unbridled capitalism. He suggests that the great landowners are blind to the lessons of history. With too much land owned by too few, the resulting dispossessions and inhumanity will inevitably lead to revolution. Cold and hungry people left without dignity and honor will take what they need by force and the owners will lose their land, he warns.

Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor. Pray God some day a kid can eat.
And the association of owners knew that some day the praying would stop.
And there’s the end.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. Steinbeck believes that when disspossessed migrant families stop praying to God for sufficient food for their children, they will rise up against the landowners. He thinks that revolution is inevitable. He also criticizes the lack of kindness among the rich class, as a migrant expresses hope that one day "kind people won’t all be poor." The author also seems to take a swipe at organized religion, when he suggests that justice for the dispossessed will only happen after the praying stops.

"S’pose you got a job a work, an’ there’s jus’ one fella wants the job. You got to pay ‘im what he asts. But s’pose they’s a hunderd men…S’pose they’s a hunderd men wants that job. S’pose them men got kids, an’ them kids is hungry. S’pose a lousy dime’ll buy a box a mush for them kids. S’pose a nickel’ll buy at – leas’ somepin for them kids. An’ you got a hunderd men. Jus’ offer ’em a nickel – why, they’ll kill each other fightin’ for that nickel."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 20. Floyd Knowles explains the corrupt and inhuman system employed by exploitative California landowners to recruit workers and pay them low wages. He tells Tom why they print so many handbills advertising for labor. The promise of so many jobs is a deception to attract a surplus of laborers and pay them as little as possible. If a hundred turn up for a job, you can offer them a nickel and they’ll kill each other for the chance to earn it to feed hungry children.

"They’s a army of us without no harness…Ever’ place we stopped I seen it. Folks hungry for side-meat, an’ when they get it, they ain’t fed. An’ when they’d get so hungry they couldn’ stan’ it no more, why, they’d ast me to pray for ’em, an’ sometimes I done it…Use’ ta rip off a prayer an’ all the troubles’d stick to that prayer like flies on flypaper, an’ the prayer’d go a-sailin’ off, a-takin’ them troubles along. But don’ work no more."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 20. Jim Casy speaks about the army of migrants hungry for food and for justice. Once he was able to pray for them and prayer would take away their troubles. But now that no longer works, says Casy, highlighting how conventional prayers and religion are not effective against mass starvation and injustice.

"I can’t send ’em away," she said. "I don’t know what to do. Take your plates an’ go inside. I’ll let ’em have what’s lef’. Here, take a plate in to Rosasharn." She smiled up at the children.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 20. Ma Joad shows that she is generous to a fault, when she learns that some children in the migrant camp have had no breakfast. After serving her family with small portions of stew on tin plates, she saves the rest for the hungry children. In sharing the Joads’ meagre resources, Ma acts as mother to all the children. This is in keeping with the idea of community responsibility and Emerson’s "Over-Soul."

"S’pose you was cookin’ a stew an’ a bunch of little fellas stood aroun’ moonin’, what’d you do? We didn’t have enough, but you can’t keep it when they look at ya like that."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 20. Ma Joad says this to a woman who berates her for feeding stew to her children. The woman’s little boy came into her smelling of stew and asking why they didn’t have stew. But Ma believes that we have a responsibility to the wider community, where those who have food share with those who don’t.

The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them – hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 21. Themes of survival, hunger and the unity of the dispossessed who face the same struggles and hostility are covered here. Once tenant farmers, they are now hungry migrants. Regarded as invaders, townspeople take up arms to exclude them from their communities. But this only serves to weld the migrants into one global family of the dispossessed.

In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. Those goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 21. The mass exodus of hungry migrants from Oklahoma into California puts Californians in fear for themselves, their property and their own jobs. This fear triggers a deep hostility and prejudice towards the "Okies," who not welcome and seen as subhuman by the residents of the Golden State.

And now the great owners and the companies invented a new method. A great owner bought a cannery. And when the peaches and the pears were ripe he cut the price of fruit below the cost of raising it. And as cannery owner he paid himself a low price for the fruit and kept the price of canned goods up and took his profit. And the little farmers who owned no canneries lost their farms, and they were taken by the great owners, the banks, and the companies who also owned the canneries. As time went on, there were fewer farms. The little farmers moved into town for a while and exhausted their credit, exhausted their friends, their relatives. And then they too went on the highways. And the roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work.
And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 21. Steinbeck continues his blistering attack on large-scale commercial agriculture, which not only drives Oklahoma sharecroppers into poverty, but small California farmers too. Big companies buy the canneries, underbid the small farmer for his produce and put him out of business. So the small California farmer joins the Dust Bowl migrants in the desperate search to find work and survive. But there is a warning for greedy business owners and banks, who invest profits in putting down rebellion by workers instead of paying them decent wages. By ignoring the growing "murderous" anger of hungry workers, the companies and banks are ensuring their own doom. There is foreshadowing here of a fightback against their inhuman methods.
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