If you happen to have a Cox-Roosevelt jugate, you`d have been much sought-after here at the annual get-together of the Mason-Dixon Chapter of the American Political Items Collectors, people dedicated to, if not downright obsessed by, collecting American political memorabilia.
A jugate is a political button bearing the portraits of two candidates-in this instance, Democrats James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1920 presidential and vice presidential nominees who were overwhelmed by the Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Only five 1 1/4-inch Cox-Roosevelt jugates are known to exist. They`re so sought after that in 1981 an avid collector from Chicago, a labor lawyer named Joseph Jacobs, outbid publisher Malcolm Forbes Jr. in a public auction for one of them.
In 1976 the item had sold for $5,800. Jacobs paid $33,000 for it, the highest price known to have been paid for a political button that probably had once been given away.
This year`s recent annual Mason-Dixon meeting drew more than 300 people from about 30 states to the Embers Quality Inn on U.S. Hwy. 11 near Carlisle. They came to buy and sell and trade and talk about their collections of buttons, badges, ribbons, posters and other artifacts of political campaigns past.
One day recently, the button junkies prowled around 114 tables set up in the cavernous Embers ballroom here.
Presiding over their own tables were such people as James Charlifue, 27, a government-program evaluator who drove up from his home in Arlington, Va., with about 150 items to sell or trade. Charlifue displayed such items as a 1- inch Henry Buchtel (he was a turn-of-the-century Colorado governor) for which he was asking $15, an Eisenhower inaugural, asking $7, and some ”I like Ikes,” Nixon-Agnews and Carter-Mondales, none of which was worth much.
Not on display, but Charlifue brought it out and proudly showed it, was a 1-inch celluloid Cox-Roosevelt. It`s not a jugate-it`s a slogan button, crossed sabers above the candidates` names, and below, the words ”Never again,” referring to World War I.
Charlifue picked it up in Bismarck, N.D., from an antiques dealer who had gotten it from a retired schoolteacher. He speculates that the button is worth $1,000 to $2,000. It`s a guess, he said, ”since the button has never been on auction or sold publicly.” How much did he pay for it? He`d rather not say.
”I paid what I thought was a good price,” he said, adding, ”It wasn`t until after I had it that I found out it was a very valuable piece.”
At a nearby table was Jack Starr, who, accompanied by his 8-year-old daughter, Tracy, drove 970 miles to Carlisle from their home in Wisconsin, where Starr, 55, is a debate coach at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Pinned to his gray sport shirt was a 1 3/4-inch McKinley-Roosevelt jugate
(from the 1900 election) that Starr acquired that morning in a trade.
Like Charlifue and most of the other people behind the tables, Starr is primarily a collector, secondarily a dealer. He collects mainly Teddy Roosevelt items. By midafternoon Friday he had sold enough items to buy about $270 worth of other items from other collector-dealers.
”I think the vacation will pay for itself,” he said. ”That`s all I intended to do-and upgrade my Teddy collection.”
The Carlisle gathering was organized by Rob Payne, president of the Mason-Dixon chapter, whose members come from Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia.
A collector for 16 of his 32 years, Payne, who lives in Ranson, W.Va., said that ”if you know what you`re doing,” collectibles are a very good investment. There are, he added, ”horror stories” of people who threw away
”entire chests of drawers full of political buttons, not realizing their value.”
But, he added, the fascination in political memorabilia isn`t the money-it`s the sense of being involved in history and in preserving the past for the future.
”It brings history to life,” said Drew Hecht, a urologist who lives in Philadelphia and who was bitten by the button-collecting bug in the Johnson-Goldwater campaign of 1964, when he was 10.
Robert Fratkin, a Washington stockbroker and past president of the American Political Items Collectors, agreed.
”I`ve always liked politics and American history,” he said, adding,
”but if you ask my wife, she`ll tell you that deep down inside I`m a pack rat.”
His wife, Susan, who was sitting behind one of the tables, said, ”We live in Fibber McGee`s closet,” referring to a once-popular radio program.
In their house in Washington, they also have collections of early 1900s game boards, Big Little books, etched-glass globes that used to top gas pumps, Victorian memorabilia, Charles Lindbergh memorabilia, dinner pails from the McKinley campaigns, Franklin D. Roosevelt clocks and celluloid advertising items. She herself collects antique tin windup toys, which she started collecting many years ago ”in self-defense.”
Fratkin started collecting political items in 1961. He guesses he has about 20,000. ”What`s fascinating about this hobby,” he said, ”is that unlike stamps or coins, where there are books that will tell you exactly how many were made and every single item that has been made in that field, there are no records to tell us what (political) items were made or how many were made, which is why we can still turn up items that were never seen before.”
Fratkin has a John W. Davis-Charles Bryan jugate of the 1924 presidential campaign (in which the two Democrats lost to Calvin Coolidge and Charles G. Dawes). It`s worth considerably more than $5,000, he said, and ”nobody knew that it existed until it turned up about four years ago in a flea market in Salt Lake City.”
Fratkin is managing editor of the Keynoter, the collector organization`s three-times-a-year historical journal. Two other publications, both monthlies, are addressed to political-items collectors: the Political Bandwagon and the Political Collector. Both are chock-full of ads offering buttons for sale or trade.
The American Political Items Collectors started out in 1945 with a dozen collectors who got together by mail. Now it has about 3,000 members in 23 chapters and 12 ”specialty” chapters. The specialty chapters are composed of people who concentrate in particular areas-labor history, third parties and local candidates-or on particular individuals. The largest in the latter category is the Kennedy chapter, whose members collect items of all the Kennedys.
Like other collectors, Fratkin is eager to make the public understand the importance of protecting political memorabilia, which he calls ”artifacts of American history.”
He`s also troubled at the declining use of political buttons in recent years, a drop that he relates to the decline in voter participation and the rise of television campaigning.
”TV may give people a pretty picture of America, but it doesn`t give them an impetus to vote,” he declared. ”It`s sandwiched between products. It has no direct impact on an individual the way a campaign button does.”
