Most people are familiar with political campaign buttons although hardly anyone wears them these days. The most common customers for these pieces are collectors. The campaign button was invented in 1894 and started to appear in large quantities during the 1896 campaign between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. Before the buttons, one of the most popular media that was used to push candidates was the campaign medalet. These pieces often showed a picture of the candidate and some non-controversial statement like the “for president” or the date of his birth. A fair number of pieces mentioned the issues, and I find those pieces to be most interesting. Andrew Jackson was the first to issue large numbers of medalets in 1824, but the first candidate who issued them in really large numbers was William Henry Harrison in 1840. Harrison issued a lot of pieces that looked like this. The Democrats issued lots of medalets for their candidate, Martin Van Buren, also, but after they last the election, they were angry. In their next campaign, they included language that stated that campaign trinkets were insulting to dignity of the American people. They limited the issued of tokens for their next two candidates, James K. Polk in 1844 and Lewis Cass in 1848. Polk won his election over Henry Clay, but Cass lost to Zachary Taylor. After that loss the Democrats allowed many more pieces to be issued. The James K. Polk and Lewis Cass tokens have been recognized as rarities since the 19th century. Collectors back then judged the quality of the collection by the quantity of Polk and Cass items it contained. Here are two interesting pieces. This Polk piece called for the “Enlargement of the boundaries of American Freedom,” which was code language for the annexation of Texas and a war with Mexico that would increase U.S. territory. In 1848 this Lewis Cass token called for “freedom of seas.” This was code language to the slaveowners that he supported their position to expand the boundaries of slavery. Cass was an early advocate of “Squatters’ Rights” which Stephen Douglas would later more eloquently call, “Popular Sovereignty.” The concept was that the residents of the territories should be able to decide if they wanted slavery in their new states.
