Baby faces and farting elephants? Campaign buttons conjure up politics of the past
In 1990, political memorabilia collectors gathered in San Luis Obispo to sell and chat.
Emotions are often heated during election seasons but after the mud slinging has settled, there can be a nostalgia for earlier days.
Today’s political races can seem a lifeless combination of detailed market research and emotionally charged memes, sometimes generated by offshore election disruption agents.
The U.S. State Department just published a report outlining Russia’s active efforts to spread misinformation using a network of deceptive websites widely shared on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The Kremlin-funded effort is centered on amplifying Russian political views and disruption via distributing misinformation and conspiracy theories, the report found.
At least when someone wears a button supporting a political candidate, you know what side they are on.
David Wilcox wrote this Telegram-Tribune story on Feb. 13, 1990, about a hobby that doesn’t require a lot of storage space.
Campaign buttons recall bygone winners and losers
“100 million buttons can’t be wrong.”
Unfortunately for Wendell L. Willkie, they were.
For members of the American Political Items Collectors, however, that 1940 slogan boosting Wilkie’s candidacy is almost an article of faith.
There may not have been 100 million buttons inside the Embassy Suites meeting room Sunday, but collectors from throughout California brought thousands of their most beloved mini-campaign signs for display and sale.
Walking through the room was like entering a time machine that traveled — never in one direction — as rapidly as your eyes could scan row after row of buttons.
Almost two centuries worth of American political memorabilia led browsers on a trail of campaigns.
But Sunday’s gathering — the first time collectors from throughout the state got together — wasn’t just for the buttoned -down crowd.
Pennants adorned one wall — some successful (Kennedy-Johnson”), others failures (Wilkie, again.)
Boxes filled with political posters (called broadsides) sat on a table in the middle of the room, while elsewhere displays featured odds and ends such as a straight razor supporting the candidacy of bearded Ulysses S. Grant.
The collectors themselves were a mixed bag.
A bout with bicentennial fever in 1976 left Gil Gleason with a lingering case of “buttonitis.”
Since then, the Orinda musician has been collecting political campaign buttons and making occasional trips to conventions to buy, sell and trade the items.
Sales were going well Sunday, he said, before disaster struck.
Someone walked off with his second costliest button.
Bleason said the button featured a baby’s face under the phrase, “Eisenhower will guard my future.”
The dime-sized item was worth $135, he said.
“It’s very eye-catching to start with, and it’s rare.”
Gleason’s most expensive button remained on the table.
Worn by women calling themselves “Mothers for Mamie” during Ike’s re-election campaign, it also carried a message which might misconstrued these days: “Keep a mother in the White House.”
For $165 on Sunday, it was yours.
Art of all styles is getting more and more pricey these days, so why should political campaign buttons be any different?
Remember Eugene Debs?
One button featuring the Socialist Party’s perennial presidential candidate in the early 1900s carried a price tag of $650.
Prices ranged generally from a couple of bucks to a few hundred dollars.
Larry Elman, a Los Angeles collector, claimed to have sold a button from the William McKinley-Theodore Roosevelt campaign for $1,000.
“A lot of buttons changed hands today,” said the 26-year-old Adam Gottlieb.
Gottlieb, a spokesman for the collectors group, said about 125 browsers and buyers turned out for Sunday’s event.
Most of the collectors at Sunday’s show lamented the blasé buttons of modern-day campaigns.
Time was, they said, when buttons were marvels of graphic design.
John Tilley, owner of Tilley’s Time Machine in Merced, said the “golden age” of pins and buttons stretched from 1896 to 1915. That’s when the lithography was at its most imaginative.
“In 1920, they get boring,” said Tilley.
Another collector, Ken Smith, said a familiar culprit in politics — television — is also partially to blame for the weak buttons generated by modern-day campaigns.
TV’s glitz has rendered the button, at least as a purely political statement, nearly obsolete.’Now a campaign button is produced strictly for business.
“Buttons have gotten much more boring,” said Smith, who concentrates his own collection on pre-Civil War memorabilia.
“This was the media then,” he said, holding up a circa 1896 button.
Lest one believe that negative political campaigns are a recent phenomena, however, try this blunt slogan touting Willkie’s bid to outs FDR: “We don’t want Eleanor, either.”
And then there’s this less tasteful example — proudly pinned to Smith’s lapel — which cleverly seized the title of a recently released movie to make its point.
The 1940 button shows a flatulent elephant expelling a tiny donkey with the tagline, “Gone with the Wind.”
