A Hinterland Cauldron

Abstract

Historians interested in labor politics in the nineteenth-century Middle West often focus on Chicago, St. Louis, and other large metropolises in the region. This article, however, explores the political career of David Frank Powell, an eccentric physician from La Crosse, Wisconsin, to demonstrate that smaller, hinterland cities could also be dynamic centers of class politics in the region. In 1885 and again in 1886, Powell cast himself as a champion of organized labor and won the mayor’s office in this thriving Mississippi River city. He was never able to mobilize the machinery of municipal government to regulate wages or working conditions. But his efforts to do so forced local Democrats and Republicans to recalibrate their core political ideas and boosted the labor movement in ways that remade the community. Ultimately, Powell’s story, and that of La Crosse more broadly, suggests that historians need to pay greater attention to small, hinterland communities to understand more fully the impact of labor activism across the Midwest before 1900.