Cimarron County, Oklahoma, USA, 1936. Public Domain.
In a famous passage of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, a tenant farmer and a man on a tractor debate the bank’s demand that the latter demolish the former’s house and drive him from the land his family had cultivated for generations:
“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’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
