As Republican candidates swarm South Carolina this weekend, their supporters likely will be sporting one of the oldest tools in the political campaign trade: the campaign button.
While the origins of the buttons may be lost in history, most sources agree that the first presidential campaign button appeared with America’s first president — and really was a button, designed for use on a man’s coat. It was cast in metal and embossed with a statement of support for a man who, in fact, already was president: “G W Long Live the President.” Intriguingly, the phrase mimics “Long Live the King,” a saying that the American revolutionaries had fought in part to banish as they waged war in support of an elected leader, not a hereditary, lifelong ruler.
But it wasn’t until the election of 1824 that campaign buttons — and all kinds of other political swag — really began to be used as a way to brand a candidate during an election. In the run-up to that vote, Andrew Jackson’s supporters put his likeness on buttons that could be hung from stickpins or lapels, according to Steven Heller, a professor at the School of Visual Arts writing in the New York Times. Makes sense: He was facing off against four other candidates (not so unlike modern primaries).
After losing his 1824 bid for the presidency to John Quincy Adams through a vote in the House of Representatives, Jackson spent the next three years building up his national reputation in order to take on Adams again. When the 1828 election season opened, he was prepared for a battle — in keeping with his status as a hero of the War of 1812. Along with campaign buttons, the candidates’ organizers passed out posters, thread boxes, snuffboxes and matchboxes with his likeness on them. Jackson also took advantage of his nickname, “Old Hickory,” coined during the War of 1812. His supporters put up hickory poles around the country, handed out hickory toothpicks and even served barbecue “fired with hickory wood.”
Jackson won in a landslide. And while it’s debatable whether the use of swag helped him, 1828 became a watershed year for political branding. By the elections of 1860 and 1864, new technologies — such as photographic processes like tintypes and daguerreotypes — had arrived. For the first time, voters around the country could actually see what their presidential candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, looked like.
By the 1890s, campaign buttons and other political souvenirs had become so commonplace that businesses were built on making the products. In 1894, Whitehead & Hoag, a New Jersey-based advertising company that created ads for the likes of Guinness and Bass Ale, patented the process to make the political campaign button as we know it today — a metal button with a pin on the back, the front covered with paper and sealed with celluloid. The machine age had come to campaign buttons. Whitehead & Hoag manufactured millions of them over the years. Some of their buttons were produced in large numbers — including buttons for both William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan from 1896. These can be bought today for around $10. Others are far rarer, like the 1908 button showing an elephant’s head set against a red background, with the likenesses of William Howard Taft and his veep, James Sherman, decorating its widespread ears. This specimen sold to a collector in 2003 for $9,000.
Throughout the first part of the 20th century, most campaign buttons followed that formula, with greater and lesser degrees of panache: a photograph of the candidate and, on occasion, a thematic political or personal statement. A button for Woodrow Wilson claimed — oddly, considering the vast numbers of American soldiers who died after the U.S. entered World War I — that he had “proved the pen mightier than the sword.” The pen refers to Wilson’s profession prior to politics as an academic and university president — and his involvement with international organizations and treaties.
In 1928, supporters of Herbert Hoover used buttons to insinuate that Herbert Hoover’s opponent, Alfred E. Smith — the first Catholic nominee for president — was somehow not a Christian. Hence the bigoted slogan: “A Christian in the White House.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign buttons tended toward the patriotic, with red, white and blue stripes and stars along with a photograph of the candidate. One, however, takes on the state of the country’s economy, showing a donkey kicking an elephant with the words “Kick out depression with a Democratic vote.” His opponents expressed anger over Roosevelt’s third term with buttons declaring “Out! Stealing Third!” and “No Man Is Good Three Times.”
In the election of 1952, supporters of Dwight Eisenhower began using buttons in a far more modern way, with strong visuals and simple declarative statements such as “I Like Ike,” a foundational element of his successful campaign. This tactic, which borrowed a great deal from commercial advertising, would be adopted by presidential candidates throughout the next six decades.
Of course, sometimes candidates had to struggle to match the pithiness of a statement like “I Like Ike.” In 1960, Nixon’s team came up with “I’m Afixin’ to Vote for Nixon.” Kennedy countered with “Let’s Back Jack.” Kennedy’s successor, too, went with a flowing rhyme: “All the Way with LBJ.” (By 1972, Nixon had gone groovy, using the female gender symbol and Hebrew-style writing to showcase his support for women and Jews.)
In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman — other than candidates’ wives — to be featured on a presidential campaign button. And in 1992, Bill Clinton became the first presidential candidate with a button showing him playing a musical instrument. The button was also visually different. Instead of a photograph, Clinton is drawn in blue lines against a black background. Not until the 2008 election would buttons again take on such dramatic graphics, when the Obama campaign’s “O” buttons transfigured the letter into the sun rising over a field of red stripes.
So far in this election year, no button has really seemed to take off, but there’s always the possibility that “I Root for Newt” will catch on.
Fara Warner is freelance writer and author of the book “The Power of the Purse: How Smart Companies Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers — Women.”
Click here to see examples of campaign buttons throughout history.