Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires

often attributed to John Steinbeck, but this attribution is not entirely accurate.

The quote as commonly cited is actually a paraphrase by Ronald Wright in his 2004 book "A Short History of Progress". The original source is likely Steinbeck's 1960 Esquire article "A Primer on the '30s," where he wrote something similar but not identical.
In the original article, Steinbeck stated:
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."