Advanced – The Grapes of Wrath By John Steinbeck

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in.  And such was their hunger for land that they took the land–stole Sutter’s land, Guerrero’s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen.  They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops.  And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.

The Mexicans were weak and fled.  They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.

Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land.  And the hunger was gone from them, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting grass, for the swelling roots.  They had these things so completely that they did not know about them any more. They had no more the stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a shining blade to plow it, for seed and a windmill beating its wings in the air.  They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres.  These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted.  Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money.  And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make.  Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers.  No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper.  And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.

Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it.  They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos.  They ice on rice and beans, the business men said.  They don’t need much.  They couldn’t know what to do with good wages.  Why, look how they live.  Why, look what they eat.  And if they get funny–deport them.

And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners fewer.  And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more.  And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country.  And farms grew larger and the owners fewer.

And the crops changed.  Fruit trees took the place of grain fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the bottoms:  lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes–stoop crops.  A man may stand to use a scythe, a plow, a pitchfork; but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of lettuce, he must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton rows, he must go on his knees like a penitent across a cauliflower patch.