That’s not exactly what Steinbeck wrote. He wrote: "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians…Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” But he wasn’t necessarily talking about the American people as a whole, he was talking about the socialist movement of the time. He was saying that few socialists were actually working class, and many were, and are today, members of the upper middle class who could be seen as “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.”