This panel examines how individuals, institutions, and communities in the twentieth-century Midwest confronted—and reshaped—structures of power during moments of political, economic, and social constraint. The four papers in this panel show how Midwestern actors navigated national and global forces that limited opportunity, intensified inequality, and demanded strategic adaptation.

Julie Mujic’s paper explores how interwar tariff regimes and economic nationalism reshaped the global strategy of the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company, a family-owned industrial firm headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Once a leader in export-driven growth within the global coal mining industry, the firm responded to rising tariff barriers by pivoting toward multinational manufacturing. Drawing on private family archives, Mujic argues that these interwar adjustments—while initially effective—had long-term consequences that contributed to postwar stagnation and eventual corporate decline. Her paper situates Midwestern industrial firms within a broader Atlantic political economy shaped by protectionism, war, and shifting state-business relations.

Megan Wade’s paper examines race relations in Coffeyville, Kansas. Using local newspapers, census data, school records, and oral histories, Wade traces how national systems of racial hierarchy shaped everyday life in a small Midwestern community throughout the twentieth century. While Coffeyville did not always experience overt racial violence, racial boundaries were enforced through social custom, economic exclusion, and unequal access to education and employment. At the same time, African American residents built churches, schools, and civic institutions that fostered resilience and gradual change.

Renatto V. Carr’s paper analyzes the 1942 lynching of James Edward Person in Edgar County, Illinois, one of the earliest twentieth-century lynchings outside the South to result in federal indictments and convictions. Centering the life and humanity of the victim, Carr challenges scholarship that has reduced lynching victims to anonymous data points. Drawing on FBI records, military files, and local sources, the paper examines how racialized violence intersected with gender, class, and regional identity in the rural Midwest. Carr also traces the aftermath of the lynching, revealing patterns of silence, denial, and erasure within white communities and the limits of federal accountability.

Caitlin E. McMahon’s paper shifts attention to grassroots political organizing in the late twentieth century, examining Citizen Action, a national organization founded in 1979 that sought to build a populist movement for national health insurance. Focusing on state and local chapters in Wisconsin and Illinois, McMahon shows how activists cultivated trust, coalition-building, and direct engagement through practices such as door-to-door canvassing. Her paper highlights tensions between local organizers and national leadership amid conservative political realignments during the Reagan era, offering a ground-level view of consumer and health rights activism often absent from institutional histories of health reform.

Together, these papers argue that the Midwest was not a passive backdrop to twentieth-century transformations but a dynamic site where power was contested, constrained, and reimagined. By foregrounding local responses to economic nationalism, racial inequality, violence, and political retrenchment, this panel reveals how Midwestern actors shaped—and were shaped by—structures of power operating at national and global scales.