Muscatine The Button Capitol of the World

Hawkeye Button Factory, circa 1910

Muscatine, Iowa — 1890. A German immigrant named John F. Boepple goes for a swim in the Mississippi River, slices his foot open on a clamshell, and somehow invents an empire. The man bleeds into the river, looks down at his injury, and sees the face of capitalism smiling back. He scoops up a few shells, limps home, and starts cutting buttons out of them in his kitchen. A local merchant gives him a dime. That dime turns into forty-three factories. The clams never stood a chance.

By 1910, Muscatine was the button capital of America — a riverfront fever dream of clattering presses, stinking shell heaps, and half the town choking on pearl dust. Fifteen percent of the nation’s buttons came out of this little Midwestern pressure cooker. Three thousand people lived and died by the rhythm of those machines. The Des Moines Register said the average worker made twelve dollars a week. The unions said that was a fairy tale.

Pauline Lang, a button worker with lungs full of mother-of-pearl powder, told the San Francisco Labor Council the truth: “The men were receiving but six to seven dollars a week… many of them toiling in water to their knees. The women and children received as low as three dollars… in rooms where the dust was so thick that many of them contracted blood poison and consumption.”

The air looked like snow, but it was killing them. The entire operation was a low-tech nightmare — boil the clams, scrape the meat, polish the shells, cut the buttons, thread them on cards, repeat until your hands go numb. Men got wages. Women got piece rates. Kids got nothing but a cough and a few cents.

And like every great industrial tragedy, there was sex, power, and blackmail hiding in the corners. One factory had a “resting room,” where the boss expected female workers to “rest” with him or find themselves unemployed. Other women told the same story. The button trade had its own rotten hierarchy — the men owned the factories, the women sold their dignity by the piece.

Then came the strike.

In November 1910, the workers formed the Muscatine Button Workers Protective Union — ten members that ballooned into 2,500 within months. February 25, 1911: the manufacturers panicked and shut down all forty-three plants at once. They called it “economic necessity.” The workers called it revenge.

For weeks the town was a picket-line carnival — shouts, fights, banners, and a righteous stink of sweat and fury. Rotten eggs flew at Mayor W.S. Hill when he stepped off the streetcar. Acid bombs exploded in the homes of scab workers. The smell lingered for days — sulfur and justice.

The mayor called in the National Guard. The absurd part? A quarter of the Guard were striking button workers. Men with rifles guarding men with buttons. The whole town turned inside out.

By fall, the police were importing muscle from Chicago and St. Louis — seventy-five hired men patrolling factory gates like mercenaries from a bad dime novel. Judge William Theophilus finally cut the cord, ruling that out-of-town deputies “were not entitled to pay for their services.” Translation: go home, boys, the circus is over.

But it wasn’t.

November turned violent. Two strikers, Ed Peterson and John Flynn, attacked the chief of police with an iron bar. Another striker got five years for tarring a non-union man’s house. Reverend John Hafer, a mild Lutheran pastor, received a letter threatening to dynamite his church unless the Ladies’ Aid Society stopped sewing buttons for the bosses. Even God couldn’t stay neutral in Muscatine.

December arrived like a hangover. Strikers broke into a scab’s house, smeared manure on the walls, and chopped the furniture to splinters. A few days later, a striker named John Richley mouthed off to a special officer and got beaten bloody in the street.

That was Muscatine in 1911 — a small-town war zone on the muddy edge of the Mississippi.

The button business would survive, and Boepple’s name would be polished clean by history. But for a few strange, wild years, this quiet Iowa river town went mad. The streets reeked of shell dust and dynamite. Workers fought bosses, guards fought conscience, and everybody lost something.

Today, tourists come to see the old Pearl Button Museum, where the story is told in pastel display cases. It’s all so neat and nostalgic. No mention of the eggs, the acid, the tarring, the fear. Just the legend of a man who cut his foot and built an empire out of shells.