Sentence:  They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American <WSD>peasantry</WSD>, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.