The Campaign Button, the Smallest Billboard in American Politics

On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall in New York City, then the nation's capital. Some of the people in the crowd had sewn commemorative buttons onto their coats. One of them survives in the collection of The Henry Ford, a brass disk 1.375 inches across, stamped with the letters GW, the words LONG LIVE THE PRESIDENT and the initials of the thirteen original states. It was a working button, made to close a coat. It was also a way of telling strangers where you stood.

Americans cast ballots on Tuesday in the 2026 midterm elections, and plenty of them will do it with a descendant of that object on a lapel, a tote or a backpack strap. The campaign button is the one piece of political design that nearly everyone has held in a hand. Its form was settled more than a century ago, in a single season, by a badge maker in Newark, New Jersey.

Buttons that closed a coat

For a century after Washington, a political button was a solid little object. The online exhibit Buttons to Ballots at the Dole Archives points to the 1824 race between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson as an early use of buttons in a campaign, and notes that before 1896 most were made of metal or porcelain. They were slow and costly to make. That kept them in the souvenir business, something a loyal supporter bought, rather than something a campaign could hand out by the thousand.

A face on the coat

Photography changed what a badge could carry. According to the history in the campaign button entry on Wikipedia, the first photographic images on pins date to 1860, when Abraham Lincoln and his opponents used tintypes and ferrotypes, small photographs made on thin metal plates.

The Henry Ford holds a Lincoln badge from that year, an ambrotype portrait made from a photograph that Mathew Brady took on February 27, 1860. That was the day Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union in New York, an address the museum describes as the start of his successful presidential campaign. The museum says the portrait was first set in an oval brass frame and pinned to the wearer's clothing. For voters who had never seen the candidate, it put a face to a name, and the face is beardless, a Lincoln from before the look most people now picture.

Newark, 1896

The modern button arrived almost overnight. Whitehead & Hoag, a Newark firm that made ribbon badges, had already been using celluloid, an early plastic, as one part of those badges, according to the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections. In 1896 it began to sell a badge that stood on its own, built on two ideas. A clear celluloid cover protected the picture, and a metal pin on the back held it to the coat.

The patent explains the construction. U.S. Patent 564,356, filed in March 1896 by George Adams of Irvington, New Jersey, and assigned to Whitehead & Hoag, describes a thin metal shell with an inward rim. A printed cover is drawn over the face, its edge is tucked under the rim and held taut by a ring, and a single bent wire forms the pin, so no solder or screws are needed. In practice the picture was printed on paper and sealed under the celluloid. The whole thing was cheap, quick to assemble and able to carry any image or slogan a printer could set.

The timing could not have been better. The patent was issued on July 21, 1896, in the middle of the presidential race between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. A small Bryan and Watson button at The Henry Ford, just 0.875 inches across, carries a paper slip in the back naming Whitehead & Hoag of Newark and three patent dates, the last of them July 21, 1896. Bryan won both the Democratic and the Populist nominations that year, with a different running mate on each ticket, and this button pairs him with the Populist choice, Thomas E. Watson.

The Iowa librarians, citing a collectors' history, put the firm's output at more than two thousand distinct designs for the two candidates. Rivals soon licensed the patent or worked around it with small changes, and the pinback quickly overtook the ribbon badge as the company's main product.

Printed straight onto the tin

The next change cut the cost again. Since 1916, buttons have also been made by printing the image directly onto the metal disk by lithography, with no paper and no celluloid, and a lithographed button can be fixed with either a pin or a folded metal tab. Printed by the sheet and stamped out, these buttons could be made in enormous numbers and at speed. In 1940, Wendell Willkie's campaign turned out millions of lithographed slogan buttons, many of them in quick reply to the news of the week. The button had stopped being a keepsake and become a medium, closer to a headline than a medal.

Collectors followed. The American Political Items Collectors is a nonprofit membership group devoted to collecting, preserving and studying campaign material. The most valuable button of all is believed to be a rare one from 1920 pairing the Democratic nominee James M. Cox with his running mate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Our timeline of the button

We put the objects above side by side, using the museum records, the patent and the histories we read. The timeline and the arithmetic are ours.

The 1896 pinback is about 64 percent as wide as Washington's button, which works out to roughly 40 percent of the face area. It was smaller, lighter and far cheaper, and it had shed the job of fastening anything. It existed only to be read. That is the real design change of 1896. The button stopped being part of the coat and became a message attached to it.

How to read one

Turn a button over before you judge it. On an early celluloid button the maker can name itself on a paper slip in the back, as Whitehead & Hoag did on the Bryan and Watson badge, along with patent dates that help place the button in time. A lithographed button has no celluloid face at all, because the picture is printed on the metal itself.

The best ones work on the same rules as any badge worth wearing, from Massimo Osti's Stone Island compass to the copper rivets that Levi Strauss patented for the Levi's 501. Small, legible from across a room, and honest about what it stands for. The machine many Americans once used to cast their vote has its own story, told in our history of the lever voting machine. For more on how everyday objects get their shape, see the Design section.