The Trump cap, the Obama stuffed animal and other objects that tell the history of the United States. –

Washington, Nov 4 (EFE).- Buttons with George Washington’s initials, George W. Bush’s ketchup bottles, Barack Obama’s cell phone covers or Donald Trump’s red caps are some objects used in US presidential campaigns. United and that have immortalized the country’s electoral history.

The National Museum of American History, of the Smithsonian Institution, houses a collection of nearly 100,000 objects used in political events and electoral campaigns from the metal buttons commemorating the inauguration of the first president, George Washington, in 1789.

To open a new chapter in the collection, a team from the museum has traveled the country over the last year in search of the most representative artifacts from the campaign for this Tuesday’s elections between Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump (2017-2021).

“It is very important to document, especially the things that often end up thrown in the trash, so that people say: Wow, something happened in this campaign,” Claire Jerry, historian and curator of the collection, tells EFE.

This team has traveled to primary events, electoral rallies and party conventions collecting t-shirts, posters, stickers and all kinds of objects that allow us to immortalize what has been an unprecedented electoral process.

The president, Joe Biden, resigned from running for re-election in July and passed the baton to Harris, who had to build a campaign in record time.

For this reason, historians have collected material from both Biden and Harris: “The current Democratic campaign did not have much time to generate slogans and images, and that will be reflected in our collection,” says Jerry.

Furthermore, at his Republican rival’s events, t-shirts and objects are seen everywhere that recall another historical event: when Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania in July.

Iconic and recognizable objects

The museum does not yet have anything from the current campaign on display to the public, but the exhibition does include, for example, the red cap with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ that Trump has used since the elections he won in 2016.

Next to the cap, a stuffed animal of former President Barack Obama (2009-2017) remembers the campaign of the first African-American president in the country’s history.

“We try to find things that are very iconic and recognizable,” Jerry notes.

But electoral propaganda does not always serve to praise a candidate, but sometimes to attack the rival, as demonstrated by some flip-flops that mocked the indecisions of Democrat John Kerry in 2004.

In those same elections, Republicans handed out bottles of ketchup in support of George W. Bush since Kerry’s family was related to the Heinz.

Social and technological changes

The evolution of electoral objects also reflects social, technological and consumer changes, as demonstrated by the first mobile phone cases released by the Obama campaign.

To find the first political t-shirt you have to go much further back, to Republican Thomas Dewey’s 1948 campaign.

Cigarette packs with candidates’ faces became very popular, but fell out of use in the 1980s.

In the middle of the last century, as women’s suffrage spread, parties began to appeal to women and that is why Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign (1953-1961) produced makeup boxes. Eisenhower was also the first to use Spanish in a campaign with a pin that said “I like Ike” (his nickname).

The Smithsonian’s collection includes a 1912 nutcracker with the face of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and a bottle stopper with the head of John F. Kennedy (1961-1963).

Although the most eccentric objects, and therefore Jerry’s favorites, are the bars of soap in the shape of naked babies that were distributed in 1896 by the campaigns of both the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan and his Republican opponent William McKinley.

Those soaps generated rejection because they looked like children in a coffin and they stopped being distributed. And, as the historian emphasizes, for electoral objects to succeed it is essential that the people make them their own. EFE