Chapter 5

"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." This provides a historical segment in John Steinbeck's book. After giving a detailed chapter with specific characters, Steinbeck writes of a general scene. The scene dates back to many farmers and tenants of the Great Depression, but it also provides a flashback of an event of the Joad family.

Chapter five talks about when the banks actually took over the farms and kicked the families out. It also provides the responses of many of the poor families forced out of their homes. The Joads were upset and angered by the announcement and ready to fight for what they had so desperately lived for. They were upset that a bank, knowing nothing of how that specific piece of property opperated, was taking over their job, not thinking about them, only the profit, and taking away their home.

The banks were downsizing the amount of people who worked the land; they used newer machines that were usually only powered by one person. This brought an idea of violence to the tenants. They wanted to attack whoever was taking away their livlihood. "We'll get our guns, like Grampa when the Indians came. What then?" Yet the threat was not enough; the begging was not enough. They were still kicked out of their homes, left to fend for themselves. The people who told them of the news did offer them some advice, but not much, and not all true. "Why don't you go on west to California? There's work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there's always some kind of crop to work in. Why don't you go there?"

All of this led up to the historical move out west, where the travelers were called "oakies." The nation was not prepared for the Great Depression or what followed it. The idea of just moving away from it was a terrible idea, and it does not work in the book, and historically, it did not work either. As it was for many people in the United States during the Great Depression, it was also the first hard step in the Joad family's journey.