Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Contingency of Economic and Technological Change in Agriculture
Some of the best and most vivid descriptions of the role of economics and
technology in agriculture come from novelists who sought to understand
the extensive changes to U.S. agriculture in the early twentieth century,
such as Frank Norris and John Steinbeck. Norris (1901) describes the Union
Pacifi c Railroad monopoly as a giant “octopus,” and Steinbeck (1939) por-
trays banking interests as a “monster.” Each depicts a profound dilemma
in the economics of farming: although the economy is a human creation,
it has somehow taken on a life of its own. For example, in this scene from
Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
, bank representatives have come to fore-
close on the land of a group of tenant farmers, and the conversation
between these two groups reveals the monster logic of economics:
The tenant men looked up alarmed. But what'll happen to us? How'll we eat?
You'll have to get off the land. The plows'll go through the dooryard.
And now the squatting men stood up angrily. Grampa took up the land, and he
had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here, and he killed
weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An'
we was born here. There in the door—our children born here. And Pa had to borrow
money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and got a little bit of what
we raised.
We know that—all that. It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. . . . That's
the monster.
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We
were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still
ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That
makes ownership, not papers with numbers on it.
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. (43)
The economic monster is unstoppable in this example, making it hard to
consider or even conceive of alternative visions of farming and land tenure
despite the apparent failure of the then-current system. In addition, these
narratives of economics out of control are typically tied to technologies
and technological change. In Steinbeck's story the monster is represented
