This country is awash in revered institutions with four-letter abbreviations. NASA. NCAA. AARP. The list goes on.
Here’s a new one for you: APIC.
Never heard of it? It’s short for the American Political Items Collectors—and “new” is perhaps misleading, since the organization has been around since the end of World War II. According to its website, http://apic.us, through the years the APIC has counted among its ranks “educators; students; archivists; historians; elected officials, including members of Congress; political junkies; political animals; campaign staffers; journalists from print, broadcast, and cable; museum curators; and even a couple of past presidents.”
That’s a distinguished crowd.
At present the APIC has several thousand members, and chatting with a sampling of its current-day faithful—a few of whom have themselves been around since the end of World War II—made for an entertaining afternoon at the Chelsea Jewish Community Center in Manhattan on Sunday, February 3rd.
The occasion was the APIC’s New York City Political Collectors Show, an annual affair where vendors buy, sell, and swap political memorabilia from all eras: from the days of the original George W (the Founding Father, that is) to that of our present-day, unpompadoured George.
Tony Lee, president of the Big Apple chapter of the APIC and the ringleader of the event, said it has been held annually for the last twenty-seven years. He noted that although this NYC gathering is “probably the smallest show of the hobby” in terms of the amount of paraphernalia on display, it’s also one of the most popular, since it’s within striking distance for so many aficionados.
Those who came from near or far found a treasure trove of lovingly preserved political artifacts. A cigar box promoting James G. Blaine, the Republican presidential nominee who lost to Grover Cleveland in 1884, was stickered at $45. A ballot used to elect James Buchanan in 1856, which APIC old-timer Charles McSorley bought for the bargain rate of forty cents two years ago, was now more properly selling for $100. McSorley was also peddling a well-preserved photo of a youthful Abraham Lincoln, his hero, for $750 (“Nobody ever lost money with Lincoln,” he asserted). An autographed copy of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller Living History was going for $129. A pair of license plates, one reading “I’m for Dewey” and its twin proclaiming “I’m for Truman,” were among the higher priced items of the show; the asking price for the two: $2250.
And, last but not least, scattered across tabletops throughout the room was a spectacular assortment of political buttons.
Ah, the buttons. Every year they’re the centerpiece of the show, and rightfully so: the APIC website explains that the campaign button is “the most recognized and widely collected of all campaign objects.” APIC member Mark Evans, whose business card says that he specializes in “The Stuff Your Mother Made You Throw Out,” provided a quickie tutorial on the storied history of the campaign button—which, as it turns out, is as old as the Union itself.
“Washington didn’t have any opposition, so there wasn’t really a race,” Evans explained—Hillary and Barack, eat your hearts out—“but they had commemorative metal buttons that you would sew onto your vest or coat.” In the mid-1800s, Evans said, with the advent of photography, the campaign button of choice was a little metal badge sporting a photo of, say, John Fremont, or Stephen Douglas, or Charlie McSorley’s beloved Lincoln. Then came 1896, the year that blew the roof off the button business: that’s when the celluloid button was invented, using pretty much the same technique that’s used today, and clearing the way for the barrage of buttons touting—or taunting—every candidate worth his or her salt in the century-plus since.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these buttons were on display at Sunday’s event: buttons the size of your hand and buttons the size of your thumb; garish buttons and more tasteful ones; buttons designed to buoy a favorite candidate, knock down a competitor, or merely entertain the politically savvy or the public at large.
Evans’ wares included a caseful of George McGovern buttons—none of which could prevent McGovern from being steamrolled by Nixon in ‘72. Others spotted around the room: a Bush button—the future Bush 43, that is—from the 1998 Republican State convention in Forth Worth,
Texas; a button reading “The Country Needs Fixin’, Elect Nixon;” another urging you to “Soar to New Heights with Barack Obama” and picturing a buff, cartoonish Obama dressed like the superhero; and an oversized button that gloated, inexplicably, “I Told You So.”
But no discussion of the political-button universe is complete without a mention of the king of the mass-produced political zinger, Mort Berkowitz. With a clipped mustache, an accent that screams New Yorker, and a sense of humor drier than the Sahara Desert, Berkowitz is one character you can’t miss—and wouldn’t want to.
The buttons he and his company, Bold Concepts, have churned out are legion and
legendary. Consider that he is the brains behind such classics as “Hillary Rodman Clinton: As Bad As She Wants to Be,” which pictured the then-First Lady with a wildly colorful hairdo akin to that of the Pistons’ former free spirit Dennis Rodman; a button that tweaked Ronald Reagan as “The Flaw in the Theory of Evolution;” a ’70s button celebrating the fact that “Nixon Has a Staff Infection;” and the modern-day classic “Obama, You Barack My World.” Berkowitz claims to have created eighty buttons on the subject of Watergate alone, and to have produced five hundred so far for the current presidential contest.
Which party does he skewer more? Berkowitz calls himself “an equal opportunity offender.” When asked about his own political leanings, he would only say, his expression deadpan except for the twinkle in his eye, “I lean. I lean.” It wasn’t so much deliberate secrecy as the active enjoyment he so obviously derived from not providing a satisfactory answer. He was droll, a charming curmudgeon, a “piece o’ work,” as they say. Another question posed to him was, If there were a button promoting you, what would it say? Alas, he sidestepped the query.
