The "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" phrase was used by John Steinbeck to describe not the poor, but what we might call today "champagne socialists":

"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." (source: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck)

Ronald Wright somehow turned this into a quip about Gramscian false consciousness, in the great global game of telephone we're all playing with each others' words.