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.