Grapes of Wrath

I just finished reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

It's the story of depression era farmworkers forced off the land by drought and industrial revolution in Oklahoma, and how they struggle to find a better life in California.

It made me mad.

This is Steinbeck's description of the landowners explaining to the tenant farmers that they're kicking them off the land they've worked all their lives because more profits can be made using tractors instead of human labor.

The drought was already a problem, so yields were down in the fields.

The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.

Because the bank needs larger profits, the tenant system won't work any more, the owners say. One man on a tractor can take the place of 12 or 14 families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop.

It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster.

The tenant farmers say they were born and died and worked on the land which makes it theirs.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there - quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

Some things never change.