The Grapes of Wrath Inhumanity and Dehumanization Quotes

A grasshopper flipped through the window and lighted on top of the instrument panel, where it sat and began to scrape its wings with its angled jumping legs. Joad reached forward and crushed its hard skull-like head with his fingers, and he let it into the wind stream out the window.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 2. When a grasshopper flies into the cab of the truck, Tom Joad has a different response than the driver, who pushed a bee back out the window after it flew in. Tom’s violent nature springs into action as he crushes the grasshopper’s head. The grasshopper is symbolic of just how unjustly and inhumanely migrants are treated when they move west to California – they are crushed by the landowners and banks.

And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 3. While the woman driver goes out of her way to avoid striking the turtle, the truck driver doesn’t. We learn in a simile how the animal is flipped "like a tiddly-wink" as the driver cruelly and deliberately hits it. The truck incident is a metaphor for the people who want to hurt the Joads and other migrant workers and is foreshadowing of the inhumanity that they will meet on their journey west.

The owners of the land came onto the land, or more often a spokesman for the owners came. They came in closed cars, and they felt the dry earth with their fingers, and sometimes they drove big earth augers into the ground for soil tests. The tenants, from their sun-beaten dooryards, watched uneasily when the closed cars drove along the fields. And at last the owner men drove into the dooryards and sat in their cars to talk out of the windows. The tenant men stood beside the cars for a while, and then squatted on their hams and found sticks with which to mark the dust.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. The banks that own the land are portrayed as unsympathetic, disconnected and lacking in humanity for the tenant farmers they have come to evict. The theme of social class is also evident here. The powerful landowners talk out their car windows to the tenants. The tenant men who "squatted on their hams" clearly occupy the lower rung of the social hierarchy.

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Steinbeck criticizes the capitalist trap which landowners are caught in, compelling them to evict tenants from uneconomical farms. Some owners are said to be kind and even angry at having to do this, making them appear human. But others learn to be cold, making them appear inhumane. But all have one thing in common: they have to evict people from their homes because of the capitalist economic system.

If a bank or finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank – or the Company – needs – wants – insists – must have – as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. Steinbeck uses a metaphor to compare the banks to monsters in their relentless drive for wealth. He sees them as evil and inhuman entities feeding on the labor, misery and misfortunes of tenant farmers. The bank is also personified here, as it is given human attributes – "needs – wants – insists."

Well, it’s too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. A Man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that. Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank. But – you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air don’t eat side-meat.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. When farmers offer to rotate crops to make the land more profitable, the bank representatives are not interested. They characterize the bank as a monster that needs to continue making profits. In using the monster metaphor, the bank representatives absolve themselves of the personal responsibility for repossessing someone’s home.

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.

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.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 5. No longer a human being, the bank has become a Frankenstein monster that humans created but now cannot control. The bank representatives conveniently evade personal responsibility for the inhuman actions of their employer.

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.

"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.

"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.

Those sons-of-bitches over there ain’t buying. Every yard gets ’em. They’re lookers. Spend all their time looking. Don’t want to buy no cars; take up your time. Don’t give a damn for your time. Over there, them two people – no, with the kids. Get ’em in a car. Start ’em at two hundred and work down. They look good for one and a quarter. Get ’em rolling. Get ’em out in a jalopy. Sock it to ’em! They took our time.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 7. Dehumanized by his runaway greed, the used car dealer lectures his employees on how to exploit customers. Seeing vulnerable migrants as easy money, he motivates his sales team to suck as much money as possible out of them. There is irony in the fact that even those not interested in buying a car are targets for his cynical sales pitch.

Watch the woman’s face. If the woman likes it we can screw the old man. Start ’em on that Cad’. Then you can work ’em down to that ’26 Buick. ‘F you start on the Buick, they’ll go for a Ford. Roll up your sleeves an’ get to work. This ain’t gonna last forever.

– John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 7. A ruthless used car dealer takes advantage of the dispossessed migrants fleeing to California. This quote shows how devoid of humanity and profit-hungry he is, his goal being to cheat the unsuspecting customer. Steinbeck uses dramatic irony here, with the reader being able to see the dealer’s dishonesty, but the customer unaware. In this passage the owner advises a salesman to zone in on a female customer who likes a car, so that she will pressure her husband to buy. Deception is a major theme running through this chapter.
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