The pearl button industry in Muscatine, Iowa was a manufacturing industry that converted freshwater mussel shells from the Mississippi River watershed into mother-of-pearl buttons. Established in 1891 by the German button maker John F. Boepple, it was the first commercially successful American button industry based on freshwater shells. Muscatine became the principal American manufacturing and trading center for the product.
As the American ready-made clothing industry grew, the need for large numbers of inexpensive fasteners like pearl buttons increased. By 1898, Muscatine had five complete button factories and 28 shops dedicated purely to cutting blanks, and by 1911, there were at least 43 button-related facilities in the city, with more than half of Muscatine's 3,500 wage earners involved in the button industry. Production was typically divided by sex: men and boys sawed blanks, while women and girls operated finishing machines and sewed finished buttons to cards. Working conditions were poor, with long hours, unsafe machinery, contaminated workplaces, and frequent disputes over pay.
In February 1911, manufacturers closed almost every plant, citing overproduction and a lack of demand. As a result, members of the recently organized Button Workers Protective Union called the closure a lockout. The ensuing fifteen-month boycott and strike drew support from the American Federation of Labor and the Women's Trade Union League, divided the city, and brought strikebreakers and the Iowa National Guard to Muscatine. It ended in 1912 without a settlement or a clear victor.
Intensive harvesting fueled by button manufacturing depleted mussel beds near Muscatine within the industry's first decade and pushed shell buyers into more distant rivers, increasing costs. Manufacturers helped secure the establishment of the federal Fairport Biological Station near Muscatine in 1908 to study mussels and artificial propagation, but attempts to rebuild the commercial stock generally failed. During World War I, the industry experienced a mild resurgence, continuing through the 1920s. The Great Depression then marked the beginning of a prolonged decline, compounded by foreign competition, changing clothing fashions, resource scarcity, and the growing use of plastic buttons. Several Muscatine companies eventually converted to plastics, although limited shell-button production continued into the 1960s. In 1966, the Ronda Button Company, which was the last firm in Muscatine to produce pearl buttons, closed its doors.
Background American factories made mother-of-pearl buttons before the Muscatine industry, but they traditionally used imported ocean shells. From the mid-1850s to 1890, plants in cities including New York and Newark processed shells brought from Asia and the western Pacific. A short-lived plant at Knoxville, Tennessee, reportedly made buttons and novelties from native Tennessee River shells around 1883, but it closed after a few years. According to the federal biologist Robert E. Coker, the commercial development of the American freshwater-shell industry was primarily a result of John F. Boepple's work at Muscatine in 1891. Demand expanded with mass-produced shirts, women's blouses and washable dresses, children's clothing, underwear, and motoring coats. Tariffs enacted in 1890 and 1897 increased the use of domestically made buttons. By 1905 freshwater shells supplied two-thirds of the pearl buttons made in the United States, and pearl of all kinds accounted for almost half the country's domestic button production.
Muscatine was a Mississippi River city of 11,454 people in 1890. Lumber processing generally dominated its commerce, but the exhaustion of white-pine forests in Minnesota and Wisconsin threatened the future livelihoods of local sawmills. With an established industrial base, Muscatine already had an industrial workforce and river and rail connections, while the city's older lumber economy was contracting.
Boepple had trained as a button maker in Ottensen, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1887 and searched for freshwater shell suitable for button manufacturing before settling in Muscatine. He found that the river mussels there were thick enough to withstand cutting. With local financial backing, he opened a small factory in the city in 1891. The enterprise was initially unprofitable because the hard, irregular shells were difficult to form into buttons, but Boepple adapted the foot-powered lathes and tools he had used in Europe and continued production.
The simplicity of early button-manufacturing machinery allowed competitors to imitate Boepple's methods. As a result, Boepple did not retain control of the industry he founded; local entrepreneurs in Muscatine opened their own factories, and the industry developed specialized branches in mussel fishing, shell buying, blank cutting, button finishing, and machine manufacturing.
Expansion The early industry included complete factories, which took shells through all stages to finished buttons for market, and small saw works that only cut circular blanks. In July 1898, a federal investigation found 33 facilities active in Muscatine, five complete factories and 28 blank-cutting shops. The same investigation recorded rapid new investment elsewhere in Iowa and Illinois and found that Muscatine blank makers also tended to supply blanks to established ocean-shell factories in the eastern United States. By 1908 Muscatine had twelve complete plants and ten blank works; the number of blank firms rose again to 25 in 1910. Counts during this period vary because some sources distinguish complete factories from blank works while others combine button-related establishments. Generally, it is accepted that there were 43 plants at the beginning of the 1911 labor conflict.
An 1899 local industry account described the Boepple Button Company as the largest manufacturer and the Peerless Button Company, founded by James McKee and William Bliven, as the second; the New York Button Company and Leo H. Hirsch & Co. represented eastern interests that operated facilities in Muscatine. Fewer than half of the other firms profiled in that account survived into the next decade. John Weber and Henry Umlandt formed Automatic Pearl Works in 1898; after Weber left in 1903, Umlandt reorganized it as the Automatic Button Company.
The federal census covering 1909 found 43 of Iowa's 70 button facilities in Muscatine. Statewide, 3,376 people were engaged in the industry, including an average 3,172 wage earners; the census valued its output at $4.035 million and its wage bill at $1.412 million. In Muscatine, button workers made up more than half of its 3,500 wage earners. Rural young people boarded in town to work, and many residents spent most of their working lives in one plant.
Coker recorded national freshwater-button production in millions of gross: 4.3 million gross in 1899, 11.4 million in 1904, and an estimated 30 million in 1909. Muscatine's piece-rate system used a separate counting convention under which some workers were required to produce 168 pieces for a paid gross rather than the usual 144.
At first factories drew directly on beds near the city. As nearby catches declined due to overfishing, shells and blanks began to be imported from other states. Shells were already arriving from Missouri and Illinois by 1898, and by about 1910 sources reached as far as Alabama and eastern Kentucky. Cutting shops near the beds often removed blanks before shipment, avoiding the cost of carrying the large part of each shell that could not become a button. Finished or unfinished material then moved by river and rail to Muscatine.
Muscatine machine shops built and repaired saws, drills, finishing machines, and harvesting equipment for the button and mussel trades. The Barry Manufacturing Company abandoned its earlier plumbing and heating products to specialize in button machinery. A federal investigator reported in 1898 that some large shops devoted almost all their work to the button and mussel trades, which could yield substantially higher margins than the cost of constructing the equipment.
Labor
Factory work was sharply divided by sex. Men and adolescent boys generally cut blanks and ground, polished, or dyed buttons, while women and adolescent girls faced and drilled blanks, sorted finished buttons, packed them, and sewed them onto cards. The industry ranked fourth among Iowa manufacturing industries in its number of women employees.
Except for shell sorters, most workers were paid by the piece. In Muscatine's piece-rate system, a factory "gross" could be counted as 14 dozen, or 168 pieces, instead of the traditional 12 dozen (144 pieces) per gross. The additional 24 were intended to cover defective pieces. Workers argued that this made them supply the expected rejects without pay, and suspicions that managers manipulated weights and counts were common. Carders, many of whom worked at home, were paid by the gross for sewing buttons onto cards.
The historian Rebecca Meints found that in 1898 blank cutters generally received 5 to 10 cents per gross and could complete about 100 to 150 gross in a week. Facers and drillers earned approximately $4 to $7 a week, and carders $4 to $5. By 1909 the reported average for cutters was about $9, with skilled cutters making $15 to $18, while women's factory earnings generally remained between $3 and $6.
Census figures cited by Jane Farrel-Beck and Meints placed 2,868 of 3,172 industry workers on schedules of 54 to 60 hours a week in 1910, with some working as many as 72 hours. Shell dust from sawing and grinding irritated the respiratory tracts of workers, and exhaust systems and wet cutting intended to eliminate exposure only mildly improved conditions. The historians reported that occupational mortality tables for 1900–06 classified about 38 percent of deaths among male button workers as "consumption", compared with about 15 percent among men in the general population. Cutters also reached into vats in which shell remnants decomposed, risking infected wounds, while unguarded drilling and pressing machinery caused frequent hand injuries.
A 1902 Iowa statute required guards on specified machinery, prohibited workers under sixteen and girls under eighteen from cleaning machinery in motion, and required exhaust equipment for some dust-producing processes. A separate 1906 child-labor law established a general minimum age of fourteen for employment in factories and workshops. Still, enforcement remained uneven, and Iowa had no general wage or hours law for women in 1911. During the 1911 labor conflict, workers also complained of being required to clean moving machinery and alleged sexual coercion by managers.
Button workers' conflict of 1911–12 Earlier attempts to organize button workers in 1897 and 1903 had dissolved without any lasting change. A new Button Workers Protective Union began in November 1910 with nine men and 29 women. Its membership exceeded 1,000 by late January 1911 and eventually approached 2,500, leaving only a few hundred button workers outside of the union. No citywide bargaining agreement existed. Manufacturers feared the union's growth and possible wage demands.
On February 25, 1911, the large factories and all but one of the small plants announced an indefinite shutdown, laying off roughly 2,500 people. Manufacturers said an eastern depression and overproduction had made a closure necessary. The union disagreed, calling the action a premeditated lockout intended to make workers surrender their membership cards, pointing to continued work outside of Muscatine and offers from manufacturers to rehire non-union labor. Production resumed on a reduced basis within a month, but the union maintained a boycott.