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.