Apolitical Campaign for Buttons
Steve Mihaly is always cautiously polite when discussing politics, even when the matter at hand is 100 years old. It’s not issues he’s concerned about people becoming upset over, but, rather, political artifacts and their worth.
Mihaly collects campaign buttons and other items dating as far back as 1896, the election year when the modern campaign button made its debut. He advertises his wants in local classifieds, and people often bring their old keepsakes to him to sell to him.
“And a lot of times folks are kind of disappointed,” said Mihaly. “They’ve got an old Nixon button, and they feel they’re going to send their child to college on it. Yes, it may be 25 years old, but they made 5 million of them; 4 1/2-million are still around, and not many people want them.
“If I told them the true value, which is less then 25 cents, they’d think I was insulting them. So I always try to be extremely polite and tell people the best thing they can do is keep the piece for the sake of the memories or pass it on to a child that might like it.”
I can see the advantages of that soft approach, because it didn’t sit so easily when Mihaly informed me that the wall-size poster of Barry Goldwater’s head I’ve been hoarding for 30 years is worth so little I might as well have my friends over to play Twister on it.
On the other hand, there are items Mihaly has paid hundreds of dollars for, and others out there can be worth thousands. And, for those with a third hand, there is the value Mihaly sees in these items that goes far beyond money. To him, they are fascinating pieces of history and a mystery without end.
The 40-year-old has been collecting for nearly 30 years, with about 15,000 pieces now, “and all the time I’m still being surprised by things I’ve never seen before,” he said.
He had a representative sampling spread out in the living and dining rooms of his antique-filled home, and it’s easy to see his fascination with these little signs of their times.
Chronologically, his collection begins in 1896, with examples of the first political pins and the printed silk ribbons they replaced that year.
William McKinley was running against William Jennings Bryan, and the campaign’s divisive issue was the monetary standard, with Republicans holding out for the traditional gold standard and Democrats pushing for silver. Hence, most of McKinley’s pins have a gold background; one ornate piece is a gold bug brooch with pop-out wings revealing likenesses of McKinley and his running mate.
Mihaly has several buttons for Bryan, who ran for President three times. “You can pretty well date the buttons by his looks, since he keeps getting pudgier and balder,” Mihaly said.
Anyone remember McKinley’s original vice president, Garrett A. Hobart? He died in office, and Mihaly has several black-draped memorial buttons. His successor was Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was made President upon McKinley’s assassination a year after his election, and he had qualities well suited to the campaign button, which often depicted him in his Rough Rider hat, while one merely depicted his famed “big stick.” Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent in 1904, the long-forgotten Alton Parker, produced anti-T.R. buttons dubbing him the “Grand Old Tyrant.”
Negative campaigning is far from new. An antecedent to today’s Hillary-bashing can be found in Republican, anti-Franklin Roosevelt buttons of the ‘30s that go after his activist wife, reading, “We don’t want Eleanor either,” and “Eleanor? No Soap!”
A Republican button from 1960 shows the White House with a “not for sale” sign in front, a comment on allegations that Kennedy money was buying the presidency for John F. Kennedy. But that’s not much of a character attack compared with another of Mihaly’s buttons from 1964, which has Goldwater’s head superimposed on a nuclear mushroom cloud, declaring, “What, me worry?”
Mihaly said, “I’m bipartisan in my collecting, and quite frankly, I’m not very political. I’m not the type of person who’s out there campaigning, and, though I know a lot about politics, I think it’s boring to talk about. When I vote, it’s for the individual candidate, not a party.”
He began collecting when he was around 10, growing up in New Jersey. His father had encouraged him to have a hobby, and when he found some old political buttons at a garage sale, he said, he was hooked. During the 1968 presidential campaign, he got his parents to drive him to Nixon and Humphrey campaign headquarters every so often to see what new buttons might have come in.
“They would have bins of buttons, and I would try to get as many as I could, just stuffing them into my pockets. In many cases they’d just say, ‘Take ‘em.’ They’d be talking to my parents, trying to win their vote, so they weren’t going to yell at me,” he said.
He’d ask relatives and neighbors to go through their attics looking for old pins. “And my father kept encouraging me,” Mihaly recalled. “For most kids’ birthdays and Christmases they’d get toys and baseball bats. I would get some of that, but also political pins.
“I think the thrill of any hobby is to find new items you’ve never seen before. That’s really the case with this. It’s not like coins or stamps where there is a very definite book of knowledge as to how many of anything were produced or made by a mint.
“In political button collecting, you have no idea what was made or how many of a piece, because there were so many little groups that would go out and produce an item locally for their candidate,” he said.
A good three-volume guide exists--Ted Hake’s Encyclopedia of Political Buttons--but Mihaly says the guide makes no pretense of covering everything.
Mihaly has been in Orange County for eight years, working for the H.J. Heinz Co., with previous stints in the Bay Area and other places.
“Orange County is an interesting area. There are wonderful outdoor flea markets around here. But it is not a good place to collect 1800s material, because nobody much was here then. And Orange County tends to be heavily Republican, so it is way more common to find items for Goldwater, Eisenhower, Reagan and Nixon than for their Democratic opponents.”
One of his plain but rare buttons is from a Sept. 18, 1956, appearance in Whittier by Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
“That pin was only produced and distributed in a very limited area on that one specific date, as opposed to ones mass-produced in the hundreds of thousands, so it is very scarce. It goes for more than a couple of hundred dollars,” Mihaly said.
He says the value of items is determined by scarcity, condition, design and, to a degree, the popularity of the candidate. The rarest buttons on the whole, however, are those of Harry Truman, not a wildly popular candidate.
Mihaly said, “In this century, Truman pieces are the scarcest, the reason being that his own party didn’t think he was going to win, so they invested very little in his campaign.”
He has only been able to amass about 50 Truman buttons, compared with more than 200 for Truman’s opponent, Dewey, and more than 300 of the far-older McKinley pins.
The Grail of political items, he said, is for a candidate named James Cox, who ran and lost against Warren Harding in 1920. It is a very scarce button made desirable by the presence on it of his running mate, F.D.R. Fewer than 100 are known to exist, and they sell for thousands of dollars. Mihaly is still looking for his.
“A lot of my favorite finds have more to do with the people I got them from. I also collect pins about social issues, and many of my women’s suffrage ones I received several years ago from a woman who was an original suffragette, and she had amazing stories of her times.
“Then I received some wonderful F.D.R. and Al Smith pieces from a man who was a Western Union runner at the 1932 Democratic convention. I received some really nice John Kennedy pieces from delegates who were there at the 1960 convention. Those aren’t the rarest monetarily, but they’re the ones I prize the most,” he said.
He’s displayed his buttons a time or two, most notably at a San Francisco Macy’s department store during the 1984 Democratic convention. Ultimately, he’d like to see the collection go to his daughter, Katie. Now 6, she’s shown only a limited interest so far.
“She knows a little bit about candidates,” Mihaly said, “but mostly she likes identifying animals on the pins: donkeys, elephants, eagles and all that. We were just doing that this morning.”