Wealth & Money Quote by Walter Lord

Walter Lord refuses the comfort of a morality play. The line has the crisp, reportorial bite of someone who’s spent too long with testimony and timelines to tolerate the audience’s favorite casting choice: rich villains, poor saints. By calling both groups "bastards" and "poor slobs", he evenhandedly insults the stereotypes we reach for when we want history to behave. The vulgarity isn’t gratuitous; it’s a solvent, stripping away the sentimental varnish that turns catastrophe into a class fable.

The subtext is aimed less at the people in the story than at the reader watching from safety. Lord is warning that crisis doesn’t reliably reveal some hidden moral truth about society; it reveals people, unevenly. Privilege can produce cowardice, yes, but it can also produce training, access to information, a sense of duty, or simply the practical ability to help. Poverty can produce solidarity, but it can also produce panic, resentment, and the same self-preservation that animates everyone else. His refusal to flatter either side is a critique of our desire to reduce human behavior to socioeconomic allegory.

In context, Lord’s work often reconstructs high-stakes events with a democratic eye for detail, letting the record complicate our politics. The intent here is to pre-empt the tidy ending: no class gets a guaranteed halo, no one gets permanent damnation. That’s not cynicism; it’s an insistence that accountability has to be individual, even when the system is not.