Campaign button

Campaign Button

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Campaign button

Campaign buttons are used in an election

Election

An election is a decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold formal office. This is the usual mechanism by which modern Representative democracy fills offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional government and local government....
as political advertising for (or against) a candidate or political party

Political party

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Encyclopedia

Campaign buttons are used in an election

Election

Political party

A political party is a political organization that seeks to attain and maintain politics power within government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns....
, or to proclaim the issues that are part of the political platform. Political buttons, date as far back as President George Washington. They have taken many forms as the technology to create an image and mass production has allowed. In the late 18th and first half of the 19th century they were real buttons sewn onto coats, whereas the modern forms typically have pins on the back and are therefore also called pinback buttons.

The first photographic image on pins dates to 1860. Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States. He successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery....
and his various opponents used the tintype or ferrotype photo process.

The first mass production of metal buttons dates to the 1896 William McKinley

William McKinley

William McKinley, Jr. was the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States, and the last veteran of the American Civil War to be elected....
campaign for president with "celluloid" buttons with one side of a metal disk covered with paper (printed with the message) and protected by a layer of clear plastic.

Since 1916, buttons have also been produced by lithographing

Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface. By contrast, in intaglio a plate is engraving, etching or mezzotint to make cavities to contain the printing ink, and in woodblock printing and letterpress ink is applied to the raised surfaces of letters or images....
the image directly onto the metal disk. Thousands of buttons are produced and distributed to the public. A celluloid-type button is fastened to a garment using a pin on the back side of the button (in recently-produced buttons, the pin generally fits into a safety-pin

Safety pin

A safety pin is a simple fastening device, a variation of the regular Pin which includes a simple Spring mechanism and a clasp. The clasp serves two purposes: to form a closed loop thereby properly fastening the pin to whatever it is applied to, and to cover the end of the pin to protect the user from the sharp point....
-style catch). A lithographed button may fasten with a pinback or with a metal tab which folds over a lapel or pocket.

One of the most famous uses of campaign buttons occurred during the 1940 U.S. presidential election, when Wendell Willkie

Wendell Willkie

Wendell Lewis Willkie was a corporate lawyer in the United States and the United States Republican Party nominee for the United States presidential election, 1940, despite having never held a prior elected political office....
's campaign produced millions of lithographed slogan

Slogan

A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commerce, religious and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose....
buttons in rapid response to news items about President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt , often referred to by his initials FDR, was the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States....
.

Campaign buttons bear some similarity to bumper sticker

Bumper sticker

A bumper sticker is an adhesive label or sticker with a message, intended to be attached to the Bumper of an automobile and to be read by the occupants of other vehicles - although they are often stuck onto other objects....
s, which are also used for political and other promotional messages. As a novelty item, campaign buttons are part of the hobby of collecting

Collecting

The hobby of collecting includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual collector....
.

Recently, increasing advertising expenses and legal limits on expenditures have led many U.S. campaigns to abandon buttons in favor of disposable lapel stickers, which are much less expensive. Another recent trend is the use of graphical campaign buttons, or "web buttons", that internet users can place on their personal websites. Graphical campaign buttons are useful because they can be widely distributed for little cost.

However, wider availability of machines for producing celluloid-type buttons (as well as inkjet and laser printers and design software) now permit even small campaigns to produce or acquire buttons relatively inexpensively, even in small quantities.

Campaign button

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