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I found myself at a flea market in Sweetwater, Tennessee, staring excitedly into a glass case full of buttons. I was a young collector with only a small collection of political buttons, but there in the case was a Coolidge picture button at only $8. In retrospect the price was not so spectacular, but I had few items in my collection that dated back as far as Coolidge's administration. There was a hint of rust around the rim, but after all, I thought, you want a button to look old, don't you? I asked the man behind the counter to show me the button.
As I looked at the back of this lithographed button, along the "curl" or rim, I saw something that made my blood run cold. The back rim had been repainted, in a slightly different color of white, and extending about one-third of the way around the rim. Fortunately I had read enough to know that this was a prime giveaway that an item was likely to be counterfeit. The manufacturer of this item had put the word "reproduction" on the curl, and this dealer (or someone else, perhaps) had painted the word reproduction out.
Only a month ago, in Morgantown, West Virginia, I was at an antique mall where I was shown a counterfeit Stevenson button. I told the seller that the item was counterfeit, but at first she refused to believe me. "It's not counterfeit," she said. "It has a union bug on it." This is a common fallacy, cherished among flea marketeers because it is such a useful legend. But as I pointed out to this lady, "The union bug only means that the counterfeit was made in a unionized shop." Union shops are perfectly happy to make reproduction political buttons, as long as they comply with the law in so doing. Finally I convinced the woman the item was counterfeit and turned to go. "Wait," she said. "Given that it's a reproduction, how much should I charge for it?" I barely had the energy to explain that to a political collector, a counterfeit item is worth less than nothing. It should be destroyed, or maybe used to educate people about brummagem.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no more important issue in the hobby than brummagem. During and after each new campaign, careful catalogs were made of the "genuine" political items, while certain other items were branded as brummagem. I can't help but believe that the catalogers and brummagem committees sometimes went overboard. If a slight variation of a Humphrey button worth 25 cents was "discovered" a few months after the campaign, it was branded a fake. It's hard for me to believe that some evil entrepreneur would have gone to the expense of making up hundreds of reproduction buttons, given the very limited market and an extremely low price for these buttons. I suspect in some cases the campaigns ran out of a certain button, ordered more, and the second run differed slightly from the first. Still, it's nearly impossible to prove which scenario resulted in the appearance of these minor varieties.
We all agree, I suspect, that brummagem is bad. Where we may differ is in the definition of just what constitutes brummagem. We can agree on a dictionary definition of brummagem, perhaps. "A sham, a counterfeit, a showy but worthless thing." Yet in practice, it is not always easy to say "This button is brummagem, while that one is not."
Further, we may also differ on which years, and which campaigns, produced serious problems with brummagem. I collect mostly items from 1964 and earlier. I take great comfort in the fact that brummagem issues are less important for items from these earlier campaigns. Yet brummagem issues still are important for early campaigns, and we again come back to the difficulty of defining what brummagem is. In a moment we'll look at some particularly thorny examples, and try to figure out which cases constitute brummagem.
First, though, let's look at a character from the history of the political hobby. His name was Dick Bristow. He was very active in hobby organizations, and even authored two key reference works in the hobby. (These books have been largely superseded by later volumes, but were important early publications for political collectors.) Dick finally started producing his own political buttons, and offered them for sale through the mail. Ah! Brummagem, you say. That is what the leadership of APIC said, and Dick Bristow was unceremoniously booted out of the organization.
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Yet gradually many collectors began to argue that what Bristow had done had not really been so bad. After all, in 1972 Bristow made Nixon and McGovern buttons, but he did not make McKinley or Taft buttons. Further, he did sell thousands of these buttons during the campaigns themselves, and undoubtedly some were worn out in public, though it's hard to say how many. To make the issue even more complicated, hobbyists tend to like Bristow's designs. They constituted some of the most imaginative buttons issued in 1972. Here is McGovern as Superman, or a bare-breasted young woman pictured alongside the slogan "Liberated Ladies Like McGovern." (Ridiculous slogan, I know--I am certain few feminists cheered this design!)
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In short, in the years since Bristow was drummed out of the corps, his reputation has made a comeback. While almost no one will praise Dick Bristow out loud, his buttons are now regularly featured in the best political auctions, and both the McGovern Superman and the "Liberated Ladies" buttons bring prices in the triple digits. Has the hobby gone soft on brummagem? Some say yes. Others say that Bristow really did nothing wrong, since his buttons were actually made during the campaign in question, and since some were actually worn.
Marc Sigoloff is one of the most controversial people in the hobby today. A recent APIC roster listed his occupation as "iconoclast." Mark writes a column in the Political Collector focusing on the most recent campaigns. He delights in exposing the scenarios that run like this: A collector decides to make his own button. He has 500 copies printed up, and sends 200 copies as "donations" to the candidate's campaign headquarters. The candidate's staff wonders where the hell these buttons came from, but they go ahead and distribute them. The collector then sells the buttons on his own, capitalizing on the fact that the official campaign headquarters is distributing the button. The collector makes a good profit. Mark has exposed this kind of scam a number of times, yet some collectors say Mark overacts. They ask what real harm has been done in this kind of scenario. The buttons were made during the campaign, and were distributed by campaign headquarters. What's the harm?
Maybe the problem is that buttons should be originated by the campaign itself. What good will political buttons be to future historians if the slogans on them were made up by entrepreneurial collectors and not by the candidates themselves and their campaigns? Well, my aim in this article is not to tell you what you should think about such controversial figures as Dick Bristow, about long-forgotten APIC Ethics Committee chairmen, about Marc Sigoloff, or the saleslady at the Morgantown flea market. My aim instead is to illustrate how really complicated all of these issues are. If you not yet convinced, consider these ten cases.
I've provided ten mostly fictionalized cases below (some have a little fact mixed in). Which of these cases do you think constitute brummagem? Which of these ten political items would you want in your collection?
I don't know about you, but I found one case where I was certain the button was brummagem, and one case where I felt emphatically certain the button was overwhelmingly legitimate. The other cases left me feeling somewhere between 1% and 99% sure that I was dealing with a button less collectible than the Carter button pictured at the beginning of the list. I suspect I would be comfortable having about six of these buttons in my collection, but perhaps you would welcome nine--or five--or some other number.
The important thing is that collecting political items from the past is an exciting and educational hobby. No good thing is ever simple, and political collecting is no exception.
Newer collectors should not despair. If you obtain your buttons from conscientious dealers, especially those who are members of APIC, you will end up with a collection you can be proud of. During current campaigns, try to collect directly from party headquarters (local or national), or at actual political events. Also, keep your ear to the ground for information about the origin of various buttons.
Brummagem is an important topic for collectors because it is maddening when one does pay good money for an item that later turns out to be fake. On the other hand, during years of collecting I have very, very seldom been "burned." So be a reasonably careful consumer--and keep at the reading to learn more about buttons and their histories--but above all, enjoy the hobby!
Suggested reading: APIC Code of Ethics, and the Hobby Protection Act (both contained in the APIC handbook). Marc Sigoloff's monthly column in the Political Collector. If you are a beginning or intermediate collector who is beginning to specialize, check out the back issues of the Keynoter for the issues that contain articles on the specialty you are interested in. The APIC handbook has an index to the Keynoter, and back issues are sold by the national secretary.
Final reminder: The ten case studies in this article were all or mostly fictional. None of the ten descriptions should be regarded as the true history of any particular button.
| © 1997 by Stephen Cresswell |