THREE SOCIALIST PINBACKS:
FOLLOWING THE PAPER TRAIL

 This article first appeared in the APIC Keynoter.

For more information about the APIC and the Keynoter, click here.

We’ve all overheard this familiar bit of dialogue at a button show. The dealer, standing behind his table, tells the customer "I don’t have any buttons of the candidate you collect, but I do have some paper items." Without bothering even to glance at the proffered items, the collector breezes on to the next table, saying "I don’t collect paper." The truth is, most of us have uttered these words early in our collecting career, and a majority of us still would rather find buttons for our collections than even graphic posters or rare postcards.

Buttons have a great many advantages over paper. They are small, compact, and easily displayed. They are shiny, and often colorful. They are the very symbol of political campaigns. In comparison, it is often hard to get worked up about an eight-page black and white pamphlet.

For most of us, the interest in paper comes as our specialized collections become more complete. The buttons we still want appear only occasionally and often bear a hefty price. To avoid complete disappointment on the bourse and at auctions we broaden our minds and begin to pick up candidates’ cards, handbills, and posters. The good news is that while paper items are sometimes harder to display, and often less graphically exciting, they can provide a wealth of information for the collector interested in the history of campaigns. They can even provide information about buttons, as in the three examples accompanying this article.

The two Socialist Party items ("Socialists for Congress" and "60 after 60") both have been persistent mysteries in the hobby. From when and where did they come? What was their purpose? The third pin, the Socialist Workers’ item, is a less-noticed button, but still is a bit mysterious. What year, whose campaign?

 

 

 

I spent a good many hours trying to figure out the "Socialists for Congress" button. With a beautiful graphic design by the Ohio Art Works Company, it has become one of the most desirable locals in the hobby. Most collectors noticed early on that the candidate on the left is Victor Berger—this is apparent by comparing his portrait with that on other items such as his "First Socialist Congressman" pin. But the identity of the second candidate has remained a mystery. One recent auction catalog identified the second candidate as Ellis Harris, but the auctioneer conceded that this was an educated guess. Most dealers identified this local jugate as a "Wisconsin item."

This bothered me. In the Socialist party’s heyday, there were always far more than two congressional candidates in Wisconsin. Why would the state’s Socialist party pick out just two of its congressional candidates to support with a button? I began to think this might even be a nationally-issued button, to be used for all Socialist candidates, with Berger and the other fellow there just as "examples." I compared the picture of Berger’s friend to photos of several dozen noted party leaders, but to no avail. Finally, I was reading a book about the Socialist party in various cities, and read about Victor Berger’s first victorious congressional race in Milwaukee. The book noted that from Milwaukee’s other congressional district, a second Socialist candidate nearly won election as well. Ha! If Milwaukee had exactly two congressional districts, perhaps this was the key. A quick check in the Historical Atlas of U.S. Congressional Districts confirmed that Milwaukee in the Socialists’ heyday had exactly two congressional districts. I made it my working hypothesis that this button was issued by the Milwaukee Socialists for their two congressional candidates.

After all this work, I happened to hear a fellow third-party collector refer to this as a Milwaukee item. So at least one other collector had gone through some of these same thought processes and reached the same conclusions. But even if we accepted that Milwaukee was the place of issue of this button, we still did not know just when the button was made, nor the identity of the mysterious would-be congressman on the right. The "when" was especially problematical because Victor Berger ran for congress in ten general elections between 1904 and 1928. As for the identity of the other person pictured on this jugate, the answer was muddied by the fact that Berger had five different "running mates" (from the other Milwaukee district) in his various races.

Going to Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, I found that Berger and a candidate named Winfield R. Gaylord ran from Milwaukee’s two districts in 1904, 1910, 1912, and 1914. Gaylord came within about 400 votes of victory in both 1910 and 1914. I was pleased at what I found in the reference books, and Gaylord’s strong races made me think he was the most likely person represented in the portrait on the right. Still, this was not certain identification, since in other years other Socialists took Gaylord’s place on the ballot. Could we be certain this button dated from 1904, 1910, 1912, or 1914? I made a note to myself to try to find a copy of Milwaukee’s Socialist newspapers on microfilm, and look for a photo of Gaylord. As it turned out, that wouldn’t be necessary.

At the APIC national in St. Louis, a dealer offered me a postcard issued by the Milwaukee Socialists. He had showed it to me twice before, over the last two or three years, but I had turned it down because it wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t a button. This time, though, I was quick to purchase it. The postcard pictured (with tiny portraits) sixty-five men and women elected as Socialists to various Milwaukee offices.

 

There on the postcard was Winfield R. Gaylord, who had once won election to the state Senate. I recognized him right away as the man on the button, having noticed previously that the mysterious candidate looked a little like George Bush, Sr.—as did Gaylord on this postcard! Later, careful comparison of the Socialists for Congress button and the Milwaukee postcard confirmed the identification. (In the detailed view of the postcard, below, Gaylord is second from right, and Berger is at right.)

 
  



Then there is the "60 after 60" button. I wish a had a dollar for every time I have seen this button identified as a 1960 item at shows and in catalogs. It would make no sense for this to be a 1960 item, since the Socialist Party was no longer active in running candidates in 1960. I did find a few dealers who had the same idea I did—that this must be some kind of pension slogan. Surely it meant sixty dollars per month, after age sixty. But from when and where did this button originate? Once again, it was a paper item that held the key. In this case, it was a series of Socialist newspapers from Reading, Pennsylvania, that I was able to purchase at auction. The party successfully elected a number of candidates in Reading in the 1930s.

The newspapers revealed that in 1938 the slogan used by the Reading candidates for the state Legislature was "Sixty After Sixty." The Socialists even had a special office set up in Reading as the Sixty After Sixty Headquarters. As suspected, the slogan was a old-age pension slogan. What surprised me was the late date—1938, after Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security system had started. But the Socialists criticized Social Security for being miserly in its payments, and for leaving out whole classes of people such as domestic help, house painters, and farm workers. The Socialist legislative candidates vowed to guarantee every Pennsylvanian an adequate pension. I still need to find out whether the "60 after 60" slogan was used in other Pennsylvania localities, but it is clear from these newspapers that the movement originated at Reading, and we can be certain the date was 1938. As an added bit of poetic justice, I should add that the 60 after 60 button was made in Reading by the Keystone Badge Company.

Interest in Socialist Workers’ party items has always been mild, perhaps because you need a magnifying glass to read their vote totals. Yet I’ve always been interested in the slogan button illustrated here, that says "Vote to Bring the G.I.’s Home from Viet Nam." The slogan strikes me as odd because it is so wordy. Most Vietnam protest buttons just say something like "Troops Home Now." It is almost as if this button had to explain—Our troops are in Vietnam. Also, the spelling of Vietnam with two words was unusual, almost as if this southeast Asian nation wasn’t yet a household word. Yet when I checked the button against my APIC library, I found it in "Project ’68" as an item for the Halstead presidential ticket. If it was a 1968 item, it was from the mainstream of antiwar protests, and my earlier hunches had been wrong. On the other hand, it was possible there was an error in the 1968 project.

Several years ago I invested a few dollars in an old copy of a world almanac. While buying books is not always as much fun as buying buttons, I was impressed by the almanac’s 928 pages of tiny print, including the votes of each state for all presidential candidates since 1936, and selected party platforms. At some point I noticed a "Perpetual Calendar" in this almanac. This is simply a collection of fourteen calendars, with a key telling which calendar goes with which year. I scanned the calendars to see which years had November 8 (the election day listed on the button) as a Tuesday. The only years of the 1960s or 1970s that matched the button’s election date were 1960, 1966, and 1977. In 1960 there were no U.S. combat soldiers in Vietnam, while by 1977 our troops were home. Thus this button dates from 1966, and is a congressional item for the SWP. The year 1966 was early in the antiwar protests, hence the unusally wordy slogan and the non-standard spelling of Vietnam as two words.

Collecting paper items can help us reconstruct the campaigns that we are interested in. Even those who are hopelessly addicted to buttons can use paper items to help identify the buttons. I’ve certainly learned my lesson. When the man at the table leans forward and says that he has some paper items I might be interested in, I invariably reply, "Bring them on!"

 © 1999 by Stephen Cresswell