At the new Obama Presidential Center museum — between the former first lady’s gowns and the exhibits about how the former president tackled the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis and healthcare reform — sits a display fit for some of the country’s most die-hard obsessives: political button collectors.
A political button preoccupation can start almost anywhere, from an initial interest in rare coins to a recognition of a familiar political name or a parent who is a history buff. Then a casual dig through an estate sale bin morphs into obsession, resulting in making bids at auctions, combing through the recesses of eBay or imploring friends in politics to snag you a piece. The most hardcore literally join the club — the American Political Items Collectors.
Few know the grip of that obsession like Ted Hake. His career started by accident. Hake’s mother liked antiques. When a friend opened up a barn full of furniture for her to peruse, he handed a young Ted a gray box of World War I-era home-front Liberty Loan and Community Chest buttons. He forgot about it until, after growing bored of tracking down uncirculated Lincoln pennies and Standing Liberty quarters, he found his interest reignited at a fellow coin collector’s kitchen table, where a display of William Jennings Bryan pinback buttons caught his eye.
Some had seemingly bizarre slogans — one of Bryan’s was “16 to 1,” a reference to his support for adding silver to the nation’s currency standard. Some had pretty colors. Some had cartoons.
“I kind of took a shine to them,” Hake recalled.
What distinguishes pinback fiends from the action figures or comic book types?
“They’re the people that like history,” Hake told the Tribune. “The nostalgia market was divided up into little tiny pieces; everybody had their own favorite, but the presidential campaign market was very unified and had its own group, APIC.”
Hake’s career took shape during college summers in the 1960s in New York City, where he toted buttons door to door in his “black James Bond-style attaché case” to stockbrokers and Mad Men. He eventually built up his mailing list and wholesale network, establishing the country’s first pop culture auction house in 1968. Along the way, he wrote multiple collecting and price guides, dealt to the likes of famed author Maurice Sendak and appeared on the PBS series “Antiques Roadshow.”
Visitors to former President Barack Obama’s presidential center museum, which is opening this week in Chicago, will find buttons scattered throughout the exhibits, including a set of four in a display about Mayor Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor. While Washington’s coalition of supporters inspired Obama’s approach to politics, Washington’s iconic sunrise beam motif — a common feature on political buttons — also influenced Obama’s iconic presidential campaign logo. Just across from the Washington piece is a massive semicircle, housing 440 tidily organized campaign buttons from Obama’s 2008 bid.
Some are clearly limited-issue or homemade: “Barack the Night Away with Obama”; “Obama Mama.” Others appear standard-issue — a smiling, waving Obama in shirtsleeves against the outline of a given state. Absent are any “NOBAMA” or “NOPE” parody buttons playing on the president’s “Hope” theme. Upstairs, visitors can design their own digital button as part of the “We The People” exhibit.
Buttons tell the street-level version of history and offer an easy way to own a piece of it, said Christen Carter, the president and owner of Busy Beaver Button Co., an Obama Presidential Center vendor and co-creator of the Busy Beaver Button Museum in Logan Square.
“They’re ephemeral in that way, though they’re built to last, and you can really gather a zeitgeist when you see a bunch from a similar era,” Carter said. “These are literally things that people put on their body; they stand behind them, literally. And it takes something intimate or something that someone really cares about to put it on their body, or they just collect them.”
“It’s so rare to own something from a time when the actual things were happening,” said Carter, who co-authored a book, “Button Power: 125 Years of Saying It with Buttons,” with Hake.
Obama’s 2008 campaign was lauded for its marketing and aesthetics, but it should also get credit for its customization, Carter said.
“On the design front, that was the first campaign that I ever saw that did ‘Fill in the blank’ for Obama. They did obscure, very niche things. ‘Bearded men for Obama’ … talk about self-identifying.”
Like pop culture collectors who seek nostalgia for their childhoods, Hake and his business partner, Scott Mussell, said political pinback fans are drawn to items that help them relive a bygone era or “where the fire began.”
“Obama’s such a good example of that because there are so many people, that was their political awakening,” Mussell said. “They’re tuned into politics because that happened to them at the right time, at the right place. That’s why I think going forward, his stuff has great potential.”
Mussell is a former photojournalist who covered part of Obama’s 2008 announcement tour. He said Obama’s place in history as the first African American president, combined with the extensive materials the campaign pumped out and grassroots supporters created, will likely make for valuable collections down the line. Hake is currently auctioning a collection of Civil Rights-era material, including a few Obama items.
Presidential campaign pinbacks rank among the most popular items for button collectors, who tend to have their own fixations. Hake favors the golden age, from the birth of campaign buttons in 1896 through 1916, when images were created by lithography, resulting in “the most gorgeous full-color buttons ever.” Mussell likes union-related material from the 1930s and 1940s and International Labor Defense items promoting communism. Carter prefers the 1960s and 1970s hippie era, including buttons from the campaigns of Jimmy Carter, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern.
The most valuable button Hake’s ever auctioned is a “jugate” — a button featuring two faces — from the 1920 campaign of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt. The 1¼-inch button sold at auction in 2022 for $185,850.
For Obama collectors, one of the most prominent and elusive buttons is from his first run for state senate in 1996, which could fetch upward of $1,500 at auction today. A friend of Carter’s who worked at the University of Chicago nabbed one from in front of a Walgreens, where Obama himself was passing out materials.
“Everyone just kind of knew him as Michelle’s husband,” Carter said, wondering aloud if one might be mixed in with the unsorted bits of the museum’s 65,000-item collection. “I secretly think about it every once in a while. I wonder if there’s one in there. There’s a chance.”
When Obama delivered his 2008 victory speech at Grant Park, Busy Beaver whipped up glow-in-the-dark buttons reading: “I was at the Obama Victory Rally.” Because only 300 were made, the “Glowbama” buttons have unexpectedly become collectibles themselves.
Mabel Orama, a longtime City Hall aide who worked her way up from the 35th Ward office under Vilma Colom, keeps an Obama Grant Park victory banner made by Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration hanging in her office. That display is dwarfed by the hulking frames containing hundreds of buttons accumulated over two decades.
It started with an “I (heart) Hector” button, which reminded her to call home to her young son.
“And then, little by little,” she said, recalling knocking on doors and meeting candidates, the collection quickly filled two bulletin boards. Politicos and hopefuls, seeing others’ pins on display, brought theirs in as a form of competition. Friends and colleagues still regularly drop off fresh finds. Each carries a memory of politicians she’s encountered along the way or a tidbit of Chicago history.
Now filling five large poster-sized frames, the display even caught the eye of a studio executive during a City Hall tour led by former Finance Chairman Ald. Ed Burke, 14th, then the City Council’s unofficial historian. The studio, ironically, later asked to borrow all the frames of buttons she had collected to decorate a corrupt South Side Irish alderman’s home for the 2018 heist film “Widows.”
Among Orama’s favorites: Hillary Clinton’s face with Dennis Rodman’s hair and earrings and the text “Hillary Rodman Clinton | As Bad As She Wants to Be.” Created in 1996, when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, it was a play on Rodman’s recent trade to the Chicago Bulls and the title of his autobiography. The most emotional: a Carol Moseley Braun button, which Orama asked the former senator and ambassador to sign during a City Council visit.
“I was so emotional, because I was such a young woman at the time, and she was ahead of the time” when she became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, Orama said. “To be a candidate for her office, and let alone a woman of color, that was something you didn’t see … knowing that she was coming here, oh, I was a hot mess, the only person that ever did that to me.”
Orama is aiming to get her Grant Park banners signed by the former president, if she can swing it. Regardless of how valuable the collection might be, she never plans to sell.
“A true collector,” Mussell observed.
Instead, Orama wants to pass the collection down to her great-granddaughters.
“I guess to me it’s more a work of art, of my life, a piece of it,” she said.
