Pem Davidson Buck's book is intended to offer readers a view from under the sink (1). Initially rejecting a career for which her middle-class upbringing had prepared her, Buck moved from Pennsylvania to central Kentucky, where she and her husband became back-to-the-landers, growing and canning food and raising goats and calves, sometimes supplementing the family income by working as part-time day laborers on tobacco farms, as hod-carriers, and as plumbers. But it's not so easy to leave a middle-class liberal upbringing behind, especially down on the farm living below the poverty level. Working as a helper in the small plumbing and heating business she operated with her husband, Buck spent time lying on her back on the floors of the wealthy fixing leaks; from that perspective under the sink she looked up and saw fine furniture and other manifestations of wealth she could not afford. One thing led to another: seeing the world as if for the first time, “it appeared oppressive” (2). People, working people, that is, work extremely hard, and what do they get for their efforts? Boney fingers.

Viewing the world from under the sink and perceiving a life of involuntary poverty (2) stretching out before her, it was time for Buck to reclaim her white middle-class privilege and take up that birthright (1) by returning to graduate school in anthropology. Armed with academic theories about inequality, she began again to see things through new eyes as she studied the “creation of poverty for individuals and regions” (3). Our society “pits us against them, the big guys against the little guys.” Corporate capitalism, which was supposed to be “nice”, (3) only wanted profits and pursued them at all costs. Out went her liberal illusions about a beneficent economic order. Buck became a politically committed academic for whom scholarship would illuminate inequitable social relations and would constitute a blunt weapon in the broader struggle for justice.

“I am angry”, she writes, “at what I think the exercise of power has done to most people in the United States: angry at the way race, gender, and ethnicity have been used to divide and rule us, angry at the horrors that groups of people with slightly more power have inflicted on those with less power, and doubly angry at the horrors groups of elites have inflicted on us” (4). Her book, not surprisingly, has an “overt agenda” (4): to help “circumvent” the harsh future “that may be coming.” No “objective” social science (4) here! Passion in scholarship is neither inherently good nor bad; it can enliven and animate or it can run toward the clichéd and grate on the nerves. Worked to the Bone is, unfortunately, more the latter than the former: it is, in its way, history as morality tale, a tendentious and often misleading rendering of the American past-with Kentucky sometimes as its example built on selective secondary sources and dubious political theories that reads more like a rough political pamphlet than a piece of scholarship.

The ostensible focus of the study is a contrast between the pseudonymous North County and South County, although these receive less attention than her broader indictments of inequality and power in American history. The book's conceptual metaphor is that of a drainage system, an insight derived from her plumbing days: The history of central Kentucky, as well as that of the United States, Buck suggests, can be best understood as the operation of a system of drainage that organizes the “flow of value produced by work the flow of sweat out of the hands of workers and through the hands of successive layers of elites.” Sweat “is made to trickle up” (12) by the efforts of elites and the system they control. With such a focus, the book quickly covers considerable chronological ground, tracing the development of exploitative drainage systems from the era of white settlement of Kentucky in the colonial period to the present. Like the excavation of any plumbing job, the picture painted in these pages is not a pretty one.

The Kentucky and the United States she portrays are one of almost unrelenting suffering, exploitation, poverty, pain, and hardship. Neither social mobility, even the intergenerational kind, nor rising standards of living play much of a role in her story. Instead, whites exploited Native Americans, colonial elites exploited poor whites, and slaveholders exploited African Americans. Elites engaged in a calculated divide-and-conquer strategy over non-elites and male patriarchs ruled over women; voting, she contends, has been a largely meaningless exercise except in that it fostered lower-class white consent; citizenship “in and of itself in the antebellum United States provided little” (60) save the right of a worker to “sell himself piecemeal,” vote, or riot (60).

To explain poorer whites' acquiescence to domination by elites, Buck habitually and mechanically invokes whiteness. The elite's solution to an unruly white population in the 1760s was to create the “first of what would be many versions of an evolving white privilege” (23). To break the assumed solidarity among the interracial and downtrodden masses, Buck believes, elites taught “Whites the value of whiteness” (24) and encouraged them to identify with the big slaveholding planters (26). Relying upon an overused notion first posited by Du Bois and promiscuously adopted by many leftist academics, she argues that the “psychological wage” substituted the right to claim racial superiority for the cash wages withheld from poorer Whites by the capitalist class. (87)

Poorer whites may have been hoodwinked by rapacious elites, “but not all bought into this system” (33) and many kept reverting to unruly behavior, requiring those elites to reconfigure whiteness, and the drainage system, on a periodic basis to keep the wool pulled over their eyes. Whiteness was the “smokescreen behind which the elite reorganized the drainage system as necessary to maintain their own control” (33). Indeed, she insists, whiteness “has been a continuously evolving smokescreen, adjusted and readjusted to the changing needs of elites as the drainage system has been reorganized, disguising from many of the oppressed the nature of their oppression” (225).

Buck's study shares many of the problems of the larger whiteness genre. Antebellum Irish immigrants, she asserts while invoking Noel Ignatiev's problematic study How the Irish Became White, were themselves “unaccustomed to being white” (47) and were treated as “not quite white,” (47) as apparently were later southern and European immigrants David Roediger and James Barrett's In Between People. Unlike some whiteness scholars who treat so-called working-class whiteness as something of a choice made largely by white workers themselves (David Roediger and Bruce Nelson immediately come to mind), Buck grafts an old-fashioned- one might call it crude—Marxism onto whiteness, treating whiteness as something resembling a false consciousness produced and imposed by a self-aware ruling class out to divide and rule.

Beyond the heavy-handed theoretical framework are equally dubious historical interpretations and facts. Here Buck's history takes considerable liberty with established scholarly understandings, and what kernels of truth there are in her narrative are often distorted or exaggerated. She believes, for example, that slave rebels Gabriel and Denmark Vesey, had their revolts “been successful”, could have “overthrown local government and ended slavery” (52). In her view, the Civil War was fought “between capitalists over the control of black and white labor, North and South, and over the distribution of the fruits of that labor,” ending only when those who provided that labor stopped it by saying “no,” deserting, rioting, or killing (64). The war was, to a large extent, “a fight between Northern and Southern elites over control of the drainage system,” over which set of elites would benefit the most from Southern sweat, (90) an argument not heard credibly in many, many decades. She wrongly posits that the federal government “seriously considered confiscating land from the conquered Confederate elite for redistribution to former slaves” (66) and that freed slaves resisted in the immediate post-Reconstruction era by withdrawing their labor and “joining the flood of freed slaves going North” (70). The Freedman's Bureau, she again mistakenly contends, had a mandate to “redistribute land” (89).

In Buck's treatment, the rise of Jim Crow becomes wholly functional: elites imposed it to solve the problem of the unruly masses in revolt (i.e. the Populist party), creating a caste system and divided the working class (it wasn't divided before?). Elites worked to “perfect Jim Crow” to “guarantee that bony-fingered people would never again mount as powerful a threat as had been posed by the [Farmers'] Alliance” (117). What's more, in establishing Jim Crow, she argues, the elite were also reneging on their contract with Blacks (what contract?) “who as freedmen had also been promised the vote instead of land” (98). By 1909, Louisville was not, as Buck would have it, the second largest city in the South (123). It's a bit of an exaggeration to claim that questions about capitalism itself became widespread during the 1920s (127) and downright silly to refer to the “fascism of the 1920s in America” (225). Buck implies that union conflict with elites in the early twentieth century won “more concessions for their members” true but uses Henry Ford's five-dollar day as an example, despite the fact that Ford was hardly responding to a powerful union movement at the time (136). The newly reincarnated Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and 1920s is reduced, in Buck's hands, to “a tool of national American elites who used the nativist response to their own ends, choosing to institute fascist processes to enhance their own power in their quest for international control” (139). Indeed, according to Buck, national elites struck a bargain with the Klan, enacting severe immigration restrictions in the early 1920s in exchange for its support (146). And so on.

Fast forward to the recent past, where the New World Order of the first President Bush heralded “yet another reorganization of the United States drainage system to include far more people who are not living in the United States” (201). Buck's discussion of contemporary developments in Kentucky's economy, and especially the physical and psychological impact of the new low-wage service economy on Kentucky's working people, is the most valuable—but too brief—part of the book. Even here, though, her political exaggerations mar her portraits. It's hard to take seriously her conclusion that “fascist processes” are “raising their heads in the United States today” (226). Apparently, American elites have decided to “move toward fascist policies” to lower wages yet further, risking revolt or serious questions about their right to rule (216). Elites have devoted considerable resources to “making sure people don't realize that change is possible, that the misery they are experiencing is not part of nature” (216). I confess that after watching late-night “fair and balanced” cable news on Fox that that notion might occasionally pop into my head. But in the morning, things look a bit different.

Buck offers her Worked to the Bone as an example of the “alternative histories and anthropologies” (226) she believes necessary to “avert fascism and nativism, to keep from being bought off by a new psychological wage, to keep from being derailed by whiteness” (226). Armed with her book and like-minded studies, “we” (226) can “derail the present strategies” of the elite. The time, she suggests, may be close at hand. Like many overly hopeful leftists, she believes her working class is finally coming to see the light: the “sugar-coated contract” is definitely falling apart as far as these central Kentucky white people are concerned (204) and the possibility of an “inclusivist revolt remains real”, as poorer people are apparently coming to see the conspiracy “on the part of the big guys” out to “get the little guys” (217). Perhaps, she hopes, the “voices of black radicals, communists, Wobblies, and socialists might again be heard” (219). “If they keep this [welfare reform] up”, one of her white Kentucky respondents tells her, “there's going to be a revolution” (203). Uh huh.

Passion that drives an historical narrative and analysis, in some instances, contributes to a genuinely moving, provocative, and inspiring history. At other times, it lamentably transforms history into propaganda. The kind of passionate history that flattens the nuances and richness of the past, denies inconvenient facts, and reduces complex phenomena to straightforward lessons serves its politically sympathetic audiences poorly. Whether in or out of the academy (and many readers of Monthly Review Press books are not academics), the Left, such as it is, should not settle for an analysis, either historical or anthropological, that subordinates its subject to its slogans and mechanistic frameworks, however ardently the author subscribes to them.