Tractor: Icon of Predatory Development
This is a report on a surprising convergence in my reading. Three authors, from different times and in very different contexts, all regard “the tractor” as a symbol of the destructive power of industrial development that endangers traditional, viable forms of common human life.
1. I remembered that John Steinbeck, long ago in The Grapes of Wrath, had featured the “tractor” as a symbol of such menace to the vulnerable Okies in his narrative. Tractors are the implement whereby a farmer can cultivate and manage larger acreage, which in turn caused the displacement of many of Steinbeck’s Okies:
And the men looked up for a second, and the smolder of pain was in their eyes. We got to get off. A tractor and a superintendent. Like factories…The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed 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…A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, 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. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth…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…The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses (44-47).
The tractor evoked the futile violent resistance of the Okies:
Well, they was gonna stick her out when the bank came to tractorin’ off the place. Your grampa stood out here with a rifle, an’ he blowed the headlights off that cat’, but she came on just the same. Your grampa didn’t wanta kill the guy drivin’ that cat’, an’ that was Willy Feeley, an’ Willy knowed it, so he jus’ come on, an’ bumped the hell outa the house, an’ give her a shake like a dog shakes a rat. Well, it took somepin outa Tom. Kinda got into ‘im. He ain’t been the same ever since (58-59).
But Steinbeck’s narrator knows that there are limits to what a tractor can accomplish. There is costly pushback against its aggressive gains:
And the great owners who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact; when property accumulates into too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history; repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history….
The tractors which throw men out of work, the belt lines which carry loads, the machines which produce, all were increased; and more and more families scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads. The great owners formed associations for protection and they met to discuss ways to intimidate, to kill, to gas. And always they were in fear of a principal—three hundred thousand—if they ever move under a leader—the end. Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them. And the great owners, who had become through their holdings both more and less than men, ran to their destruction, and used every means that in the long run would destroy them. Every little means, every violence, every raid on a Hooverville, every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp put off the day a little and cemented the inevitability of the day (306-307).
The three cries of history will weep to retaliation and to restoration. The narrator judges that the reversal will be “inevitable.”
When we read these lines, we are made aware that Steinbeck wrote in the midst of the depression. His reference to Hooverville locates him rather precisely. It was a time of desperation and despair; but it was also a time of possibility with the organizing power of labor. At our distance from Steinbeck, this belated hope of reversal strikes one as optimistic, because such possibilities do not so clearly appear on the horizon now. But Steinbeck could anticipate that in their desperation, the 300,000 displaced could make claims and succeed in them. Thus he asserts that the “tractor,” as icon of destructive development, could not be the ultimate arbiter of human destiny. Even then, however, Steinbeck sees clearly that the tractor was indeed a destroyer of human community, human possibility, and human destiny. The famous ending of his tale is an insistence that human mercy, care, and solidarity constitute the ultimate truth of the human condition (580-81).
2. The long-running passionate testimony of Wendell Berry comes powerfully in the wake of Steinbeck. In his best known novel, Jayber Crow A Novel: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself, Berry (surely with a tacit nod to Steinbeck) presents Athey a/k/a “Mr. Keith,” and his wife Della, as an embodiment of an agrarian way of life that lives from the land and back to the land. In what I think are Berry’s best lines he writes of Della and Athey:
They were a sight to see, Della and Athey were, in their vigorous years. They had about them a sort of intimation of abundance, as though, like magicians, they might suddenly fill the room with potatoes, onions, turnips, summer squashes, and ears of corn drawn from their pockets. Their place had about it that quality of bottomless fecundity, its richness both in evidence and in reserve (181).
Their life is marked by the abundance of a small farm that has been properly cared for. Athey can say, “Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.” (181).
Athey is contrasted to his son-in-law Troy. This is how Athey’s farm looks to Troy:
In coming to the Keith place, he [Troy] had come into an order that perhaps he did not even recognize. Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work—its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm’s own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish (182).
Athey is insistent on the matter:
Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a “landowner.” He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter (182).
That war of flourishing concerned “the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors” (183).
Athey’s farming practice was balanced, and willingness to settle for modest but adequate productivity:
The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock. The farm would have no more livestock than it could carry without strain. No more land would be plowed for grain crops than could be fertilized with manure from the animals. No more grain would be grown than the animals could eat. Except in cases of unexpected surpluses or deficiencies, the farm did not sell or buy livestock feed. “I mean my grain and hay to leave my place on foot,” Athey liked to say. This was a conserving principle; it strictly limited both the amount of land that would be plowed and the amount of supplies that would have to be bought. Athey did not save money at the expense of his farm or his family, but he looked upon spending it as a last resort; he spent no more than was necessary, and he hated debt (185).
But Troy fully intended otherwise. He was impatient with the old ways of his father-in-law. He does not at all understand that he belongs to the farm. He understands only that the farm belongs to him, and he can work to make it maximally productive. He intends, by plowing up more land, using commercial fertilizer, and in general exploiting the land he will produce more.
The potent symbol of Troy’s perception is the tractor:
The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans. Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before. And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because people were already leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both I think (183).
For Troy, his life seemed dominated by the tractor that gave him an awesome sense of power:
Troy liked to climb on the tractor, open the throttle, and just go, whatever the time of day, his mind invested with the machine’s indifference to weariness and to features of the landscape….and Troy felt also that he had a lot to prove. As it turned out, he would have more reason every year to feel so. Year by year, he increased his rented acreage elsewhere, thereby increasing the pressure on Athey to give him more say-so over the Keith place. For Troy would one day farm that farm, and Athey wanted his interest there. Little by little, he began giving way to Troy’s wants and ideas, and the old pattern of the farm began to give way (186).
Berry sees that the dispute between father-in-law and son-in-law is defining and elementary:
And so the farm came under the influence of a new pattern, and this was the pattern of a fundamental disagreement such as it had never seen before. It was a disagreement about time and money and the use of the world…The conflicts were inescapable, were just there as part and parcel of the farm and what was happening on it. The work of the farm now went on at two different rates of speed and power and endurance. It became hard to cooperate, not because cooperation was impossible, but because the tractor and the teams embodied two different kinds of will, almost two different intentions. It was a difference of character and history 186).
This shift of perception and practice from one generation to the next has been a major theme for Berry’s work. His more recent work, as in A World Lost, has taken the tone of an elegy for a world lost and a struggle for the old agrarian way as defeated. One can notice that there is not, for Berry as for Steinbeck, the prospect of a reversal. We may hope—and wish—that Steinbeck’s hope can prevail. But for Berry the struggle for the old pattern of farming has been lost. In the process of the victory of the tractor, the land has changed in its character. It is no longer a habitat for intergenerational wellbeing. Now it is a commodity designed to produce greater commodities. The old notion of farmers belonging to the land has been forfeited. Industrialization wins!
3. A third articulation of the same crisis comes, for me, from a surprising source, an author not yet so well known. Abdelraham Munif has written a series of books that reflect on the coming of American business interests to the Arabian Peninsula in search of oil. Munif writes from the perspective of his own people, namely, the vulnerable Arab population that is the victim of the Western incursion into their land, often with the collusion of their own governments.
Through the course of his novel, Cities of Salt, Munif describes the aggressive way in which Western seekers of oil assaulted Arab culture, devastated their oasis that is the locus of the narrative, and settled into air-conditioned quarters while local workers had none. He portrays the sad scene in which his lead character, Miteb al-Hathal, grieves the loss of his oasis and his way of life: “I’m sorry, Wadi al-Uyoun…I’m sorry.”
And then he writes:
This was the final, insane, accursed proclamation that everything had come to an end. For anyone who remembers those long-ago days, when a place called Wadi al-Uyoun used to exist, and a man name Miteb al-Hathal, and a brook, and trees, and a community of people used to exist, the three things that still break his heart in recalling those days are the tractors which attacked the orchards like ravenous wolves, tearing up the trees and throwing them to the earth one after another, and leveled all orchards between the brook and the fields. After destroying the first grove of trees, the tractors turned to the next with the same bestial voracity and uprooted them. The trees shook violently and groaned before falling, cried for help, wailed, panicked, called out in helpless pain and then fell entreatingly to the ground, as if trying to snuggle into the earth to grow and spring forth alive again (107).
It is like a refrain that hums to the sound of the tractor:
Tractor-orchards attached by ravenous wolves;
Tractor-trees torn up and thrown to the ground;
Tractor-orchards leveled between brook and fields.
And as the landscape goes, so goes human habitation as well.
It is no wonder that these pages end with a glance at the “maddened machines,” and then grief. Munif reports on the response of Miteb al-Hathal to the ruin:
They said it was the first time in their lives they had ever seen a man like Miteb al- Hathal cry. He could not stop crying, but he did so silently. He was perfectly silent. He did not say one word. He did not curse. Not a single sound or word escaped his lips; he shed his tears, unashamed and unafraid, but not proud either. He looked quietly through his tears at the whole wadi and shook his head (106-107).
Then he made his silent preparations:
He worked calmly, readying everything he needed, without looking at anyone, without hearing a single word they said. He still had tearstains on his face but he did not cry, and when he had finished preparing everything he gathered up is rifle and waterskin and mounted his Omani camel. He looked at them all, at each of their faces in turn as if memorizing them, and when he had scrutinized them all he kicked the camel’s side, and she trembled as she reared up and stood. Miteb al-Hathal rose on her back like a huge tent, and he looked like a cloud, and when he sped off he looked like a white bird. He faded from sight and grew smaller, dwindled and then disappeared (107).
He left! There was nothing there for him anymore. His world had been lost, taken away by the tractor. The departure of Miteb al-Hathal resonates with the elegy of Berry for a life—and a way of life—that has been negated by the machine.
Full disclosure: I have “seen both sides.” In high school in Blackburn, Missouri, I cultivated corn with a team of horses. In college I cultivated corn with a tractor in Beaver Crossing, Nebraska. Both tasks for me produced great anxiety.
It is far too late to object to the tractor as a farm implement. But for Steinbeck, Berry, and Munif the tractor is other than a farm implement. It is an icon and metaphor for the greedy rush of development, for the urge to expansive power and wealth. The tractor represents all of the violent urges to obliterate long-running cultures that violate neighborhoods, and deny neighbors the slow, daily practice of generosity and compassion. It may be that we end in grief alongside Berry and Munif. Or it may be that we make fresh resolve for practice and policy that will not yield to such anti-neighborly urges, and so perform Steinbeck’s hope.
We are, perhaps, watching the final rundown of the Industrial Revolution. We are reaping what we have unwittingly sown in terms of environmental crisis and the exhaustion of the growth economy. As we remember what we have lost, we watch as the violent urge continues to advance. That violent urge will only be contained by a recovery, restoration, and rehabilitation of a neighborly economy. That of course is what our faith tradition has been at since the initial effort of Moses. The Torah—and Jesus as child of the Torah—understood that neighborliness counts decisively. Thus we stand, as we always do—before the great either/or of prophetic imagination:
Thus says the Lord: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord (Jeremiah 9:23-24).
The accumulation of wisdom, power, and wealth works its ruinous way. But then, we may be grateful, in turn to Steinbeck, Berry, and Munif, for their bold exhibit of the unimaginable costs of industrial “progress.” The tractor is king. For that reason lament is in order; but then, this is our time for a way more excellent than wisdom, wealth, and power. The more excellent way, as always, concerns steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.
Walter Brueggemann
May 4, 2023
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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