The Grapes of Wrath Technology and Tractors Quotes

"A forty-acre cropper and he ain’t been dusted out and he ain’t been tractored out?"…"Croppers going fast now," he said. "One cat’ takes and shoves ten families out. Cat’s all over hell now. Tear in and shove the croppers out. How’s your old man hold on?"

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 2. The truck driver’s comments on Tom Joad’s father are foreshadowing of the shock discovery Tom will make in Chapter 6 – the abandonment of his family farm house. A "cat’" is a Caterpiller tractor, which is being used by the landowners and banks to force poor tenant farmers off the land.

And at last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won’t work anymore. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop. We have to do it. We don’t like to do it. But the monster’s sick. Something’s happened to the monster.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Here we see the rise of the machines as the landowners decide to kick the sharecropper families off their farms and replace them with tractors. The tenant system is not working anymore, they say. One man on a tractor can do the work of many families, as efficiency and maximizing profits become the priority. The extended monster metaphor is used for the banks throughout Chapter 5. This enables the men who evict the tenants to blame the lack of humanity, not on themselves personally, but on some faceless inhuman bank monster that they have no control over.

Snubnosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Steinbeck uses an effective metaphor to compare the powerful tractors that rip through the tenants’ farms to "snubnosed monsters." Stopping for nothing and no one, they destroy all before them. This passage speaks to the inhumanity of the banks, which sent in the tractors.

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The man driving the tractor across the evicted tenant family’s farm is dehumanized. A metaphor compares him to a robot. He neither looks nor acts like a man, and is an agent of the monster bank. This demonstrates the loss of humanity of those involved in the repossession of the tenants farms and home.

The monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him – goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This passage conveys the loss of humanity of the tractor driver hired to bulldoze an evicted tenant farmer’s land. Rendered speechless and blind, his mind is unable to resist the harm he is doing to the tenant family. His capacity for moral outrage has been corrupted. It is as if he has been possessed by the tractor and the bank monster that sent it out. He has been corrupted by the system.

He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor – its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The tractor driver is remarkably detached from the job of cutting up the repossessed farmland, performing it in a robotic way. He can admire the power of the great machine, but it’s not his tractor. And he feels no more love for the land than the banks, who are only interested in profit margins.

Behind the harrows, the long seeders – twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Technology and modernization have swept tenant farmers off lands that they have occupied for generations. Steinbeck presents the displacement of these families by tractors sent in by the banks as something unnatural, a violent assault, a metaphorical rape by a beast. He accuses the banks of raping the families’ way of life, the earth and their romantic association with the land.

And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumpled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. This quote is about the rise of the machines. To Steinbeck, land responds differently to the machine than to the farmer who farms by hand, because with the machine the bond between humans and the land has been broken. To Steinbeck the machine farmer is dehumanized.

"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.

"An’ then I’d want to go in town an’ kill folks. ‘Cause what’d they take when they tractored the folks off the lan’? What’d they get so their ‘margin a profit’ was safe? They got Pa dyin’ on the groun’, an’ Joe yellin his first breath, an’ me jerkin’ like a billy goat under a bush in the night. What’d they get? God knows the land’ ain’t no good. Nobody been able to make a crop for years. But thems sons-a-bitches at their desks, they jus’ chopped folks in tow for their margin a profit. They jus’ cut ’em in two. Place were folks live is them folks. They ain’t whole, out lonely on the road in a piled-up car. They ain’t alive no more. Them sons-a-bitches killed ’em."

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 6. This quote demonstrates Muley Graves’ total attachment to his home, refusing to leave it even after his family is evicted. They headed off to California without him. The land holds too many old family memories for Muley: his father dying there, Joe being born, and fourteen-year-old Muley laying with his first girl. He angrily indicts the greedy and inhuman banks for killing his family for profit by tractoring them off their land. He now would like to kill them.

Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 11. As the dispossessed stream out of the drought-stricken Dust Bowl states, the tenant farmers’ houses are vacant and lifeless. The only life remaining in the area is the gleaming metal sheds that house the tractors. Steinbeck personifies the tractor, with machines now controlling the land instead of people. Instead of blood coursing through veins, gasoline and oil bring life to the tractor.

That man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 11. Steinbeck believes that the introduction of tractors and machines to the farms in Oklahoma has dehumanized farming. He refers to the "machine man" who drives a "dead tractor" and has no love for or connection to the land he works. He praises the farmers that they have replaced, men close to the land, who walk and kneel on the earth, and guide the plow with their hands.

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 12. The famous highway Route 66 is the main thoroughfare from Oklahoma to California. It becomes the path of hope for desperate refugees fleeing from the Dust Bowl states and the invading tractors.

Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours, it would be good – not mine, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things – it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people were driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 14. The tractor sent in by the banks to bulldoze the tenant farmers’ land is not bad, Steinbeck says. But it doesn’t belong to the farmer. Instead it is used like a tank to intimidate, hurt and drive him off the land.

And the dispossessed, the migrants, flowed into California, two hundred and fifty thousand, and three hundred thousand. Behind them new tractors were going on the land and the tenants were being forced off. And new waves were on the way, new waves of the dispossessed and the homeless, hardened, intent, and dangerous.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19. Steinbeck uses a metaphor to compare the flood of migrants to a huge, untoppable, dangerous wave flowing over California. Driving that wave are the tractors that force the tenants from their farms. There is an undercurrent of anger suggested here, with Steinbeck using words like "hardened, intent and dangerous."
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