Endless streams of people move out on the highways, like ants searching for food. These are agrarian folks, pushed off their land by great machines. As they flow toward the west’s fertile fields, hunger and desperation change them. The people who live in the towns the travelers pour into are frightened. These townspeople do not own the land, but they work and have debts, and they are frightened by the hunger-filled desperation of these nomads, wanderers who would work for any food to fill their families’ empty stomachs. The great owners of the fields buy the canneries as well and underbid the small farmer, forcing him to ruin until he, too, joins the rivers of the hungry. And the great owners think that they can take advantage of these desperate folks, but they don’t realize that it is “a thin line between hunger and anger.”
