November 8, 2019
Hello {!firstname_fi
I had difficulty writing this week.
Whittling down the information to give you the important points, arranging the facts into an interesting story and hopefully drawing out some aspect for you to think further about. Those are the challenges that keep me writing week after week.
But this time, doubt assailed me.
It feels like I've told this same story over and over again. A young woman shows extraordinary courage, claiming self-determination denied to her by culture and circumstance, and standing up for the marginalized.
Momentarily, history blinks. Justice gets a fleeting chance before it's snuffed out once again.
I have to dig deep to remember why I'm committed to telling these stories. Mostly, it's for selfish reasons, an antidote for my doubt and disillusionment.
Writing about another woman, in another time, perhaps hanging on by her fingertips, finding the strength to hang on a little longer, the hope that the way history repeats itself means we not only repeat our mistakes, but also our shining moments, this is what inspires me to seek the strength to hang on a little longer, and to hope a little stronger.
Thank you for being here.
Iowa farm country in the 1890's, promised a girl hard work, likely marriage, more hard work, likely children and more hard work.
Ora Pearl McGill wasn't opposed to hard work, marriage or children, but she yearned for something more.
As she grew up, a unique industry boomed along the Mississippi River not far from her father's farm in Louisa County.
As a teenager, Ora, who went by her middle name, Pearl, left the farm for a factory job in nearby Muscatine, Iowa. They paid girls up to $12 a week there, and with that wage, she could save up for school and become a teacher.
Coincidence, or not, Pearl joined the business of making pearl buttons, stamped by the tens of thousands from opalescent mussel shells harvested from the Mississippi.
For most of western history, most people were lucky to have buttons. People tied on their clothes or fashioned rough wooden or bone buttons. (Hopefully, animal bone.)
But the wealthy had buttons of precious metal, gemstones and pearl to make their clothes both functional and attractive. Then in the 1890s, a German button maker immigrated to America looking for mussel shells to revive his business.
Bear with me here, this is a long story with a tragic ending, but its shimmering moments should be remembered. Plus, great photos!
John Boepple discovered vast beds of thick-shelled freshwater mussels flourishing in Mississippi mud, particularly at a bend in the river where the small town of Muscatine nestled awaiting its destiny as the Pearl Button Capital of the
World.
With more shells than he could ever use, John Boepple set up his foot-pedaled machine and commenced punching out buttons, sparking what came to be called the Gold Rush of the Mississippi.
In all honesty, Boepple did not discover the shimmery shells. They had been prized for centuries by natives who've been labeled the "Shell Mound People". One of their cities, Cohokia, located across the river from where St. Louis now stands, was built around the 12th Century. Its size rivaled medieval London.
Archaeologists surmise the Mound People used the shells with reverence in rituals marking life and death. Probably they used pearls from the mussels as ornaments, possibly pearl necklaces and bracelets.
(Below: Mussel shell disks discovered at archaeological digs at the site of ancient Cohokia. Photo courtesy Michael Fuller of St. Louis Community College)
Muscatine resident Nicholas Barry and his two sons observed Boepple's buttons, and invented new and button-making better machines. By 1904, they perfected the Barry Double Automatic, a machine that took blanks, buttons-shaped shell plugs, and uniformly
both drilled thread holes and carved a design on the face of the button.
This economical machine industrialized button-making like the Whitney cotton gin and McCormick reaper revolutionized aspects of agriculture.
One Double Automatic could shell out nearly 22-thousand buttons a day. When Pearl McGill arrived in town, button factories contained rows and rows of these machines.
The making of a pearl button started with the fishermen, or clammers. Clammers and their families subsisted in camps along riverbanks, often gathered in small tent communities.
Thousands of little boats floated the river snagging up mussels easier than digging potatoes. Clammers used a long rod hung with of lines and hooks, which they dropped into the water and dragged across the mussel beds. In response to this stimuli, the mussels clamped onto the hooks and were pulled from the water.
Usually the men fished the shell beds, while women and children covered domestic chores, steamed or pryed the shells open, separated them by size and species, and scooped out the white flesh. The meat wasn't considered edible and was thrown back into the river or fed to hogs.
Man on a johnboat on the Rock River outside Beloit, Wisconsin, circa 1911. (Photo courtesy of Lloyd Ballard, Beloit College Archives)
Barges, wagons and railroad cars loaded with shells arrived at the factories where men shoveled them into tanks of acidic water to soak. It took as long as a week to soften them so the shells wouldn't splinter under the drills.
Below a man in a Muscatine shell-soaking room, circa 1915. (Photo courtesy of the National Pearl Button Museum)
But children worked in the industry, too. Not just on the riverbanks with their families, but also in the factories. As young as age eight, kids carried buckets of shells to and from the soaking tanks, often loading them by hand.
Most industry of the time was risky for workers, but those in button factories suffered higher rates of pneumonia, typhus and gangrene than other types of worker. Those operating the stamping machines might lose a finger or an eye in the process.
Men, women and children worked ten-hour days, six-days a week. To stay afloat financially, whole families took jobs in the labor-intensive button business.
Women working in button making factory circa 1908. (Photo courtesy the Library of Congress)
Soon button factories lined the
length of the Mississippi, and when Pearl McGill arrived in Muscatine to work, the city was producing 1.5 billion buttons year.
There had been occasional isolated labor disputes, but by 1911 button workers had united and organized, forming the Button Workers Protective Union #12854, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.
Shortly after, most of the forty-three
manufacturers in Muscatine closed down operations, claiming over-
production and decreased demand.
They laid off twenty-five hundred people. Workers took this as a threat, a lockout against their burgeoning union labor.
Pearl McGill, just sixteen years old, became one of the labor leaders who set up picket lines outside the factories. Initially, the union counted 800 members, but as negotiations failed and frustrations grew, union membership mushroomed to 23-thousand workers.
The factories hired strikebreakers and armed guards to protect them. Muscatine police brought in deputies from Chicago and St. Louis to help maintain order. A striking worker shot and killed a policeman; the police attacked and beat a number of the strikers. The governor declared martial law and sent in three companies of state militia. Violence continued.
Women played a major role in the strike, serving on the union executive committee, leading pickets and marches and founding the Juvenile Button Sewers' and Carriers' Union representing some seven hundred children who had worked sewing buttons to cards before the shutdown.
The Muscatine Juvenile Button and Carriers' Union. (Photo Courtesy www.PeoplesRiverHistory.us.)
National news took notice of the strike, drawing labor organizers from around the country to Muscatine. Pearl saw the potential of labor unions to better conditions for women and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), saw the potential in Pearl.
She agreed to go to Chicago, where the WTUL trained her to publicize the strike and raise funds for union workers. Then like Fannie Sellins, Pearl traveled city to city giving rousing speeches to raise money for striking
workers.
Pearl spoke in Chicago, Boston and New York City, at labor rallies, church groups and fancy dinners, writing her family back in Iowa “I am right at home here lately with
tramps, beggars, millionaires, and common folks...[I] shot the truth straight to them . . they even clapped their hands ’til the walls rang.”
Pearl gained the notice of the forward thinkers of the time including Helen Keller, who wrote to her. “It is splendid to think what you can do with your fine mind and fearless heart to lessen the terrible ignorance of men on the most vital questions of our daily life—the questions of bread, of right thinking and right living.”
Below Pearl McGill is shown with William Ernst Trautman, founding general-secretary of the U.S. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) .
Back in Muscatine, strikers experienced familiar pattern. Industrial companies backed by the power of government guns eventually forced union members back to work. After 15-months on strike, a negotiated deal gave them their jobs back with no retribution from button manufacturers.
But Pearl remained in the east, working for the WTUL and then the International Workers if the World known as the Wobblies, buying life insurance due to the violence nature of labor strikes.
'In her two and a half years as a labor activist," writes historian Kate Rousmaniere, "[Pearl McGill], this Iowa farmer’s daughter...who was not yet twenty years old, spoke regularly before hundreds of strangers on incendiary political topics that many people considered treasonable...at times engaging in such radical activism that she feared for her
life."
In 1912, Pearl stood with textile workers in Lawrence, helping support one of the most famous strike in U.S. history, known as the Bread and Roses Strike. (Photo below)
"I would die for the Just Cause of starving out of work people of my Nation, the Working Class, if necessary,” Pearl wrote to her family during the Lawrence strike.
She wanted them to consider the questions for which she believed she had found an answer. "Why have her younger siblings missed so much school? Why was her father in such poor health?Why did her family live in a little shack of a house, and why did her sister and brother-in-law have to move to Arkansas to work?
“Why does my poor mother, after suffering to raise such a big family of boys and girls, have to dig out in the morning, no matter how bad she feels, and work like an old slave for only her food and not enough decent clothes to wear?....It is the Rockefeller-Morgan-Carnegie kind of Laws that make us live the lives we do. The Government which has headquarters in Wall Street and the hindquarters all over the country.
“Maybe you think I am losing my mind, but I have just lately come to my senses,” Pearl wrote.
Here's where I wish the story grew to an exciting crescendo and if not a glorious ending, as least a good one. Unfortunately, it ends in tragedy for Pearl and for the mussels of the Mississippi.
The Bread and Roses strike became a shining moment, workers uniting across ethnic and gender lines to win a 15% pay raise, double pay for overtime, and amnesty for strikers.
But afterward, the IWW lost ground to less radical unions and when the Wobblies collapsed, so did Pearl's source of income and inspiration.
She returned home to Iowa and became a teacher, got married and settled into a role more typical of American women of the time. Photo shows Pearl in her teaching days, circa 1915, courtesy of William Dickerson.
The button industry depleted mussel beds in the Muscatine area and clammers moved to rivers throughout the Midwest.
After several years, Pearl divorced her husband and he was confined to a hospital for mental illness. Several years later, he was released and came after Pearl gunning her down in the street. She was 29-years-old.
In the following decades the pearl button gold rush wasted away due to depleted shell beds, foreign competition and the advent of cheaper plastic buttons.
When Europeans arrived in North America, the Mississippi and a network of
midwestern rivers hosted the most diverse number of freshwater mussels in the world.
Due to the explosion of the pearl button industry, seventy-percent of the mussels species in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio went
extinct, endangered or in need of protection, making freshwater mussels the most endangered of all animal life on the continent.
I wish I could wind up here with a pithy ending comment. Frankly, I'm at a complete loss, but I'd love to hear yours. If you've got one, do hit reply and send it to me.
Sources:
How many scientists does it take to convince the world to take climate change seriously?
No joke. In case you haven't seen the latest news on our current course of self-destruction, read the details here...
Last week I mentioned the mystery mounds of the midwest. Here's a photo.
The native city of Cahokia, built around 1050 A.D. and occupied through 1400 A.D., had a peak population of between 25,000 and 50,000 people. You can read more about it here...
Finally, a huge shout out and many thanks to Sarah Wendell for featuring Fannie Never Flinched on her blog Kickass Women in History If you have a minute,
pop over there and thank you for spreading the love.
Until next week...
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