How can I explain the bank as being a symbol in the book?I know in Chapter 5 The Grapes of Wrath that the bank is a symbol, but I can't figure...

Symbolic of capitalism, the banks represent both a cold
force that drives families into poverty as well as the cruel self-interest of the
businessmen who reclaim property from those who have given their life-blood to
it.

When some of the owners of the land come to tell the
tenant men, they drive into "the dooryards" and merely sit in their cars, talking out
the windows rather than standing man-to-man with the
tenants,

Some
of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were
angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long
ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.  And all of them were
caught in something larger than
themselves.

This force larger
than themselves is capitalism, but "some of the owner men were a little proud to be
slaves to such cold and powerful masters."  The tenant men squat and draw figures in the
dust, and they know that this capitalism is too big for them to fight.  It is a
"monster." For, when the tenants argue that the land belongs to them in the respect that
they have worked it and been born on it and died on it, the owners apologize and state
that the bank is something more than men.

Steinbeck's
criticism of laissez-faire capitalism in this intercalary Chapter
Five portrays the monster of a sytem exploiting the freedoms granted to it; as a result,
the tenants are thrown aside and a tractor does their work.  Cotton will be planted
"before the land dies."  Then the land will be sold when it is worthless to unsuspecting
buyers in the East "who would like to own a piece of
land." 

As the tractors come to knock down the tenants'
houses, the men stare after them and think,

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There's some way to stop this.  It's not like
lightning or earthquakes.  We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's
something we can
change.

Clearly, Chapter Five
of the Grapes of Wrath portrays capitalism as the enemy of the
poor.  It is a force which only the "wrath" of the tenants can begin to
fight.