Gilded Age farmers saw themselves as profit-seeking speculators as well as laborers.

Evidence

Sociologist Sarah Quinn (2019) notes that farmers of that period included “property owners, product sellers, and speculators” (51–52, my emphases) and thus they “generally identified as profit-seeking businessmen,” but, “in their indebtedness, [they] could also identify with laborers as fellow producers similarly subordinate to a more powerful class.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 131

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Gilded Age agrarian populists combined speculative imagination with nativism and racism — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 439