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Chapter 5

The tractors take the land

Summary

An intercalary chapter, staged as a composite dialogue between owner men and tenant men. The owners explain that the tenant system is finished: the land is worn out and one man on a tractor can replace twelve or fourteen families. Responsibility is deflected onto the bank, "the monster" that must eat profit the way a man eats air, made by men but beyond their control. The tenants argue that ownership comes from being born on the land, working it and dying on it, not from a paper with numbers. Asked where they should go, they are told to try California. Then the tractors come, driven by goggled, masked men who feel nothing for the ground they cut. One driver, Joe Davis's boy, takes three dollars a day, admits he has orders to knock the houses down, warns the tenant to get out, and drives the iron guard through the corner of the house while the family watches.

Plates

Illustration style

The closed cars come onto the land
00 The closed cars come onto the land
Talking out of the car window
01 Talking out of the car window
The women and the children in the open door
02 The women and the children in the open door
Soft fingers on the sill, hard fingers on the stick
03 Soft fingers on the sill, hard fingers on the stick
Being born on it makes it ours
04 Being born on it makes it ours
What did he want?
05 What did he want?
The pump, the chopping block, the plough in the shed
06 The pump, the chopping block, the plough in the shed
The tractors came over the roads and into the fields
07 The tractors came over the roads and into the fields
Three dollars a day
08 Three dollars a day
Crushed like a bug
09 Crushed like a bug
The closed cars come onto the land
00 The closed cars come onto the land
Talking out of the car window
01 Talking out of the car window
The women and the children in the open door
02 The women and the children in the open door
Soft fingers on the sill, hard fingers on the stick
03 Soft fingers on the sill, hard fingers on the stick
Being born on it makes it ours
04 Being born on it makes it ours
What did he want?
05 What did he want?
The pump, the chopping block, the plough in the shed
06 The pump, the chopping block, the plough in the shed
The tractors came over the roads and into the fields
07 The tractors came over the roads and into the fields
Three dollars a day
08 Three dollars a day
Crushed like a bug
09 Crushed like a bug

Composition

Written: 4 June 1938 to 7 June 1938 Journal entries: #6, #7, #8 Dating: from DeMott's editorial markers in Working Days

From the journal

4 June 1938, Saturday, 2:40 — Entry #6

Going to do a little work today—perhaps a page to finish the chapter of Casy and Joad. If it doesn’t get done, it doesn’t matter. But since the next chapter [Ed.—Chapter 5] tells of the coming of the tractors and must have a symphonic overtone, and, moreover, may not be more than four or five pages long, it would be […]

6 June 1938, Monday, 11:30 — Entry #7

[…] at all. Well—to work and if it doesn’t go well, I’ll wait until the washing machine stops and then do it. Try now though. Now the two pages are done and I think well done. But there is one more day of work on the inter-chapter 3 [Ed.— Chapter 5]. Have to make the sound of the tractors and the […]

7 June 1938, Tuesday, 11:00 — Entry #8

[…] to do it. I am not frightened of this any more. Too much a part of it finally. Letter from Rodman* this morning. My traffic fine was $2.50. Thought it might be twenty-five. But now to work. Well that is finished and I hope it is good [Ed.—second half of Chapter 5]. I think it is. Now back to the […]

Source: Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938–1941, ed. Robert DeMott (Viking, 1989).