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Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community
Worked Over is a book about large-scale social change seen at close range, through the lives of generations of working people in a small manufacturing center along New York State's old Erie Canal. Their compelling stories add a new dimension to current debates over corporate power and the public good. Dimitra Doukas draws on ten years of ethnographic and historical research on the Mohawk River Valley towns of Herkimer, Illion, Frankfort, and Mohawk, where the Remington company, maker of arms and typewriters among other things, was for many years the backbone of a thriving regional society. Corporate takeover of the varied Remington enterprises in 1886 sent shock waves through this society, ushering in a century of social distress and decreasing political autonomy. Since the 1970s, the area has suffered mightily from deindustrialization. Local experience, Doukas finds, has shaped an American culture of strongly egalitarian ideals. From this perspective, the region's present plight appears, to many in the region, as a betrayal of American values. Knitting together the ethnographic present, the remembered past, and the historical past, the author tracks today's discontent to the dawn of the modern corporate era for a revealing and intimate look at the rise of a new political and economic power structure.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2003
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March 8, 2026
In an era when “the economy” is invoked like weather – something that simply happens to us – Dimitra Doukas insists on a far more uncomfortable question: who, exactly, reengineered the American dream, and at whose expense? Her book “Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community” answers that question by burrowing into a single place – the Mohawk River Valley in central New York – and staying there long enough to hear how people themselves narrate the rise and reign of corporate power. What emerges is not a tale of apathetic nonvoters or mysteriously “conservative” workers, but a long, intricate struggle between two cultures: a producerist, egalitarian vision of the good life, and the corporate regime that methodically dismantles it.
At first glance, the story could be mistaken for local color. “The Valley,” as people call it, is a chain of small towns threaded along the Erie Canal, with Ilion – home of Remington – at its industrial heart. Doukas arrives with a bundle of clichés in her own head: that white working people have “turned to the right,” that they do not know what is good for them, that the politics of resentment and the refusal to vote are symptoms of ignorance. Her fieldwork quickly undoes that certainty. In village board meetings and in kitchens, in conversations about steep property taxes and “backdoor borrowing,” she hears something else: a coherent moral vocabulary in which work, neighborliness, and a stubborn idea of equality matter more than the prestige of wealth.
“Worked Over” is structured with a historian’s patience and an ethnographer’s ear. The early chapters introduce the Valley as a landscape where “old values” – suspicion of conspicuous consumption, pride in workmanship, a commitment to community survival – are still alive, though embattled. Doukas spends long hours with figures like Paul Kinney and the Concerned Citizens for Ilion’s Environment, a group whose name sounds tidy and local, almost quaint, until one hears them dissect industrial development authorities, tax abatements, and municipal debt with a precision that would be the envy of many policy analysts. Their purpose, their white-haired spokesman says when pressed, is “to fight injustice.” The room laughs at the grand language; the book does not.
From that contemporary vantage point Doukas dives backwards, reconstructing a history that the Valley itself half remembers and half performs. The heart of that history is the Remington family. Before they become a brand whose name sells typewriters and firearms worldwide, the Remingtons are village blacksmiths and ambitious mechanics. Doukas, leaning on local scrapbooks and company archives, carefully separates myth from record. The local legend has it that young Eliphalet Remington fashions one superb rifle for his own use; neighbors are so impressed that they insist he make more. Wealth, in this telling, is an uninvited and almost unwelcome visitor – success as a by-product of excellence. The documents show something more deliberate: early capital investment, raceways dug for water power, contracts won in Washington, a restless drive to diversify production from barrels to farm machinery to a new “writing machine.”
What Doukas calls the “gospel of work” resides in that tension. The Remingtons are not saints; they are serious industrialists, building a multi-product, technologically sophisticated operation long before modern corporate management arrives. Yet in the nineteenth-century Valley they are also embedded neighbors, Methodists, abolitionists, employers who extend credit and shoulder risk for and with the community. As productivity rises in the shops, so do wages; as contracts flow in, more mechanics are trained, more families set up viable households. For a time, the “harmony of interests” promised by optimists like Henry Carey looks almost plausible on the ground. Ilion’s “golden age” – its tree-lined streets, its mutual aid lodges, its benevolent societies funded out of workers’ contributions – is built not on philanthropy, but on a particular alignment of ownership, work, and place.
It is precisely that alignment that “Worked Over” follows to its breaking point. The book’s middle chapters, its most painstaking and devastating, track what local memory compresses into a single phrase: “the Remington failure.” Doukas sifts through the minutes, debt instruments, and newspaper coverage to show that the failure was not an inevitable business misstep, but a moment when a new order seized its opportunity. Pressed by European peace, patent suits, and the rise of competitors, the family firm seeks a substantial loan. Instead it finds itself in the hands of Marcellus Hartley and the emerging “gun trust,” whose delay and information advantage allow them to pick up the company’s assets at a discount when receivership comes. The Valley has been the Remingtons’ bank, holding company notes and scrip in lieu of wages, trusting their name. When the music stops, it is the community, not the financiers, left holding the paper.
In Doukas’s telling this is not simply a case of naïve local capitalists outfoxed by sharper men in New York. It is a hinge in American history, the moment when ownership sheds its obligations to place and workers and reappears as a mobile, abstract power. The new regime, consolidated in trusts and later in multi-plant corporations like Remington Rand, does not share the old scruples. It introduces scientific management, a layered hierarchy, and, most importantly, the weapon that will dominate the next century of local politics: the credible threat to close up shop and leave.
Here Doukas’s ethnography and history knit together most tightly. When the trust that owns the typewriter works announces that it has been offered land and tax breaks elsewhere, the people of Ilion respond with a subscription drive. The sums are small and painful – a few dollars here, a few hundred there – but in the aggregate they are sizable, an attempt to keep “their” factory in place by contributing directly to its physical expansion. They succeed in the short term. Yet the underlying relationship has flipped. What was once a shared venture in which capital and labor both staked their fortunes in the Valley has become a hostage situation: the company can credibly threaten to leave, and the town can only bargain over the price of its own continued employment.
Doukas refuses the temptation to stop at this familiar story of corporate blackmail. She is equally interested in the cultural campaign that accompanies it. The chapters on “The Gospel of Wealth” and “Learning to Expect Hard Times” follow the migration of elite ideas from Boston and New York into the discourse of small-town “men of push” – the Chamber of Commerce leaders and city planners who speak the language of efficiency, expertise, and “sound business practice.” The influence of Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie here is not merely theoretical. The conviction that great fortunes are the natural reward of fitness, and that their owners are best suited to steward resources, filters down into local fights over zoning, charters, and the reorganization of village government. When these initiatives are rejected by referendum – often by lopsided margins – their sponsors read the result as parochialism and ignorance, and set about finding ways to achieve their aims outside electoral politics.
The consequences are visible in the built environment. By the time Doukas is doing her fieldwork, Ilion’s old downtown has been largely replaced by a hulking concrete shopping complex with a derelict fountain, an Urban Renewal relic locals call “the monstrosity” or “the Berlin wall.” The public power agency that once delivered cheap electricity and funded parks and municipal buildings is now enmeshed in a statewide web of authorities and bond obligations that shift costs onto residents while delivering benefits to industrial customers. The village board still meets, but crucial decisions are made in spaces few ordinary citizens ever see.
Against this landscape, “Worked Over” insists on dwelling with those citizens. Doukas’s richest chapters return to the Concerned Citizens, to farmers and retired mechanics, to women remembering the Depression as a time of “good neighbors” even when money was scarce. She is particularly sharp when tracing how reciprocity and equality are bound together. Neighborliness, she suggests, cannot survive deep class fractures: it depends on the belief that one can both give and receive help without humiliation. That belief is strained in a world where some live entirely on public salaries and benefits while others cobble together temporary work and see their taxes rise to service debts incurred for corporate inducements or public projects that did not serve them.
The book’s great strength lies in its refusal to sneer at this moral economy. Doukas does not romanticize the Valley; she is clear-eyed about its overwhelming whiteness, its blind spots on race, and its own small-town cruelties. But she takes seriously the idea that the people she lives among possess a coherent, historically grounded critique of corporate power. Their suspicion of “people who think they’re better than us” is not anti-intellectualism; it is a judgment on elites who have repeatedly treated the community as a resource to be extracted rather than a commonwealth to be sustained.
Stylistically, “Worked Over” walks a careful line between academic argument and narrative. Doukas writes in long, patient sentences, building her case through accumulation rather than rhetorical flourishes, yet there are flashes of dry humor and quiet anger. Her portraits of meetings – the villagers laughing when “injustice” is declared as a goal, the board member haplessly explaining that the Power Authority insists on “100 percent” – feel precise, observed, and earned. The historical chapters, especially those reconstructing the Remington myth and the mechanics’ world of “the shops,” have the density of a good industrial novel, though they demand attentive reading.
The book is not without weaknesses. At times the causal line from a particular corporate maneuver to every subsequent misfortune in the Valley is drawn more confidently than the evidence quite supports. The argument that the Remington sale is the decisive blow in a long process of deindustrialization, for example, risks overshadowing other forces at work in upstate New York and the broader rust belt. In its final chapters the analysis can slip toward a dualism in which “the corporate regime” appears too monolithic and omnipotent, while the internal fractures, competing interests, and occasional failures of corporate strategy get less attention.
There are also moments when the integration of ethnography and history is imperfect. Some contemporary vignettes are so vivid that the reader wants more of them, only to be pulled back into an extended historical excursus. Conversely, certain intricate historical reconstructions would benefit from more immediate conversational anchors. These are, however, problems of proportion, not of conception. The project itself – to read a century of corporate restructuring through the eyes and voices of one community – is as ambitious as it is necessary.
What ultimately gives “Worked Over” its staying power is the way it refuses to abandon hope, even as it catalogs defeats. Doukas ends not in despair but in a small conversation on the library steps, where a handful of activists puzzle over why those in charge seem unable to see what they see. One suggests that the powerful have a “limited worldview”; another that they cannot see through their own “screen.” The remark is modest, almost offhand, yet it carries the book’s argument: that most people do not think like the powerful, that there remains in places like the Valley an “other American culture” in which democracy means more than markets and in which work, not capital, sits at the center of moral life.
Measured against its own ambitions, the book stumbles occasionally, but far more often it succeeds, offering a lucid, unsettling account of how corporate capitalism has “worked over” an American community while leaving its people still, stubbornly, thinking about justice in older, more demanding terms. On that scale, I would place “Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community” at about 88 out of 100.
At first glance, the story could be mistaken for local color. “The Valley,” as people call it, is a chain of small towns threaded along the Erie Canal, with Ilion – home of Remington – at its industrial heart. Doukas arrives with a bundle of clichés in her own head: that white working people have “turned to the right,” that they do not know what is good for them, that the politics of resentment and the refusal to vote are symptoms of ignorance. Her fieldwork quickly undoes that certainty. In village board meetings and in kitchens, in conversations about steep property taxes and “backdoor borrowing,” she hears something else: a coherent moral vocabulary in which work, neighborliness, and a stubborn idea of equality matter more than the prestige of wealth.
“Worked Over” is structured with a historian’s patience and an ethnographer’s ear. The early chapters introduce the Valley as a landscape where “old values” – suspicion of conspicuous consumption, pride in workmanship, a commitment to community survival – are still alive, though embattled. Doukas spends long hours with figures like Paul Kinney and the Concerned Citizens for Ilion’s Environment, a group whose name sounds tidy and local, almost quaint, until one hears them dissect industrial development authorities, tax abatements, and municipal debt with a precision that would be the envy of many policy analysts. Their purpose, their white-haired spokesman says when pressed, is “to fight injustice.” The room laughs at the grand language; the book does not.
From that contemporary vantage point Doukas dives backwards, reconstructing a history that the Valley itself half remembers and half performs. The heart of that history is the Remington family. Before they become a brand whose name sells typewriters and firearms worldwide, the Remingtons are village blacksmiths and ambitious mechanics. Doukas, leaning on local scrapbooks and company archives, carefully separates myth from record. The local legend has it that young Eliphalet Remington fashions one superb rifle for his own use; neighbors are so impressed that they insist he make more. Wealth, in this telling, is an uninvited and almost unwelcome visitor – success as a by-product of excellence. The documents show something more deliberate: early capital investment, raceways dug for water power, contracts won in Washington, a restless drive to diversify production from barrels to farm machinery to a new “writing machine.”
What Doukas calls the “gospel of work” resides in that tension. The Remingtons are not saints; they are serious industrialists, building a multi-product, technologically sophisticated operation long before modern corporate management arrives. Yet in the nineteenth-century Valley they are also embedded neighbors, Methodists, abolitionists, employers who extend credit and shoulder risk for and with the community. As productivity rises in the shops, so do wages; as contracts flow in, more mechanics are trained, more families set up viable households. For a time, the “harmony of interests” promised by optimists like Henry Carey looks almost plausible on the ground. Ilion’s “golden age” – its tree-lined streets, its mutual aid lodges, its benevolent societies funded out of workers’ contributions – is built not on philanthropy, but on a particular alignment of ownership, work, and place.
It is precisely that alignment that “Worked Over” follows to its breaking point. The book’s middle chapters, its most painstaking and devastating, track what local memory compresses into a single phrase: “the Remington failure.” Doukas sifts through the minutes, debt instruments, and newspaper coverage to show that the failure was not an inevitable business misstep, but a moment when a new order seized its opportunity. Pressed by European peace, patent suits, and the rise of competitors, the family firm seeks a substantial loan. Instead it finds itself in the hands of Marcellus Hartley and the emerging “gun trust,” whose delay and information advantage allow them to pick up the company’s assets at a discount when receivership comes. The Valley has been the Remingtons’ bank, holding company notes and scrip in lieu of wages, trusting their name. When the music stops, it is the community, not the financiers, left holding the paper.
In Doukas’s telling this is not simply a case of naïve local capitalists outfoxed by sharper men in New York. It is a hinge in American history, the moment when ownership sheds its obligations to place and workers and reappears as a mobile, abstract power. The new regime, consolidated in trusts and later in multi-plant corporations like Remington Rand, does not share the old scruples. It introduces scientific management, a layered hierarchy, and, most importantly, the weapon that will dominate the next century of local politics: the credible threat to close up shop and leave.
Here Doukas’s ethnography and history knit together most tightly. When the trust that owns the typewriter works announces that it has been offered land and tax breaks elsewhere, the people of Ilion respond with a subscription drive. The sums are small and painful – a few dollars here, a few hundred there – but in the aggregate they are sizable, an attempt to keep “their” factory in place by contributing directly to its physical expansion. They succeed in the short term. Yet the underlying relationship has flipped. What was once a shared venture in which capital and labor both staked their fortunes in the Valley has become a hostage situation: the company can credibly threaten to leave, and the town can only bargain over the price of its own continued employment.
Doukas refuses the temptation to stop at this familiar story of corporate blackmail. She is equally interested in the cultural campaign that accompanies it. The chapters on “The Gospel of Wealth” and “Learning to Expect Hard Times” follow the migration of elite ideas from Boston and New York into the discourse of small-town “men of push” – the Chamber of Commerce leaders and city planners who speak the language of efficiency, expertise, and “sound business practice.” The influence of Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie here is not merely theoretical. The conviction that great fortunes are the natural reward of fitness, and that their owners are best suited to steward resources, filters down into local fights over zoning, charters, and the reorganization of village government. When these initiatives are rejected by referendum – often by lopsided margins – their sponsors read the result as parochialism and ignorance, and set about finding ways to achieve their aims outside electoral politics.
The consequences are visible in the built environment. By the time Doukas is doing her fieldwork, Ilion’s old downtown has been largely replaced by a hulking concrete shopping complex with a derelict fountain, an Urban Renewal relic locals call “the monstrosity” or “the Berlin wall.” The public power agency that once delivered cheap electricity and funded parks and municipal buildings is now enmeshed in a statewide web of authorities and bond obligations that shift costs onto residents while delivering benefits to industrial customers. The village board still meets, but crucial decisions are made in spaces few ordinary citizens ever see.
Against this landscape, “Worked Over” insists on dwelling with those citizens. Doukas’s richest chapters return to the Concerned Citizens, to farmers and retired mechanics, to women remembering the Depression as a time of “good neighbors” even when money was scarce. She is particularly sharp when tracing how reciprocity and equality are bound together. Neighborliness, she suggests, cannot survive deep class fractures: it depends on the belief that one can both give and receive help without humiliation. That belief is strained in a world where some live entirely on public salaries and benefits while others cobble together temporary work and see their taxes rise to service debts incurred for corporate inducements or public projects that did not serve them.
The book’s great strength lies in its refusal to sneer at this moral economy. Doukas does not romanticize the Valley; she is clear-eyed about its overwhelming whiteness, its blind spots on race, and its own small-town cruelties. But she takes seriously the idea that the people she lives among possess a coherent, historically grounded critique of corporate power. Their suspicion of “people who think they’re better than us” is not anti-intellectualism; it is a judgment on elites who have repeatedly treated the community as a resource to be extracted rather than a commonwealth to be sustained.
Stylistically, “Worked Over” walks a careful line between academic argument and narrative. Doukas writes in long, patient sentences, building her case through accumulation rather than rhetorical flourishes, yet there are flashes of dry humor and quiet anger. Her portraits of meetings – the villagers laughing when “injustice” is declared as a goal, the board member haplessly explaining that the Power Authority insists on “100 percent” – feel precise, observed, and earned. The historical chapters, especially those reconstructing the Remington myth and the mechanics’ world of “the shops,” have the density of a good industrial novel, though they demand attentive reading.
The book is not without weaknesses. At times the causal line from a particular corporate maneuver to every subsequent misfortune in the Valley is drawn more confidently than the evidence quite supports. The argument that the Remington sale is the decisive blow in a long process of deindustrialization, for example, risks overshadowing other forces at work in upstate New York and the broader rust belt. In its final chapters the analysis can slip toward a dualism in which “the corporate regime” appears too monolithic and omnipotent, while the internal fractures, competing interests, and occasional failures of corporate strategy get less attention.
There are also moments when the integration of ethnography and history is imperfect. Some contemporary vignettes are so vivid that the reader wants more of them, only to be pulled back into an extended historical excursus. Conversely, certain intricate historical reconstructions would benefit from more immediate conversational anchors. These are, however, problems of proportion, not of conception. The project itself – to read a century of corporate restructuring through the eyes and voices of one community – is as ambitious as it is necessary.
What ultimately gives “Worked Over” its staying power is the way it refuses to abandon hope, even as it catalogs defeats. Doukas ends not in despair but in a small conversation on the library steps, where a handful of activists puzzle over why those in charge seem unable to see what they see. One suggests that the powerful have a “limited worldview”; another that they cannot see through their own “screen.” The remark is modest, almost offhand, yet it carries the book’s argument: that most people do not think like the powerful, that there remains in places like the Valley an “other American culture” in which democracy means more than markets and in which work, not capital, sits at the center of moral life.
Measured against its own ambitions, the book stumbles occasionally, but far more often it succeeds, offering a lucid, unsettling account of how corporate capitalism has “worked over” an American community while leaving its people still, stubbornly, thinking about justice in older, more demanding terms. On that scale, I would place “Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community” at about 88 out of 100.
February 27, 2008
Moving account of the methods by which corporations gained hegemony over community-based forms of capitalism in the US and the methods by which communities resist.
Read
January 1, 2009excellent study. Short too! about 150 pages
talks about scientific management and stuff
the part about INFINITE CREDIT WORKS was really cool.
there was probably a lot about class 'n Marx 'n shit, but I dont remember
talks about scientific management and stuff
the part about INFINITE CREDIT WORKS was really cool.
there was probably a lot about class 'n Marx 'n shit, but I dont remember
February 19, 2010
I really like what she has to say, but her writing style wasn't for me. I think it's a great read, but a little preachy if you already know that corporate America does bad things.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews