In the onslaught of this election year, it’s likely that you’ve come across a fair share of political buttons. But there’s no way you’ve seen as many as Christen Carter and Ted Hake, coauthors of Button Power: 125 Years of Saying It With Buttons.
But while the principles of design haven’t changed much, the buttons themselves are a window into the past. Advertisers and organizations made sure moments big and small—from the Apollo 11 landing to the first on-screen movie kiss—often included a take-home memento in the form of a button. Buttons are “little objects [that] can take you back in time and give you a surprisingly detailed view of the world at that particular moment,” says Hake, who began collecting buttons in 1960. Here are a few cultural milestones in bite-size form.
The OG button: In politics
Buttons were first used in the political sphere, when a brass sew-on button that read “Long Live the President” was created after George Washington’s inauguration. (While not a pin-back button, it served a similar purpose.) Buttons have flourished as a quippy way to take political sides ever since.
The buttons’ usefulness is exemplified with one of the most well-known political slogans of the last century, “I Like Ike,” which is said to have been coined long before his presidential run by a button maker in New York. In 1952, the Eisenhower campaign splashed the memorable motto across millions of buttons in varying sizes and designs.
Advertising
By the turn of the 20th century, advertisers caught onto the button’s success in politics, and began giving away commemorative buttons at major events that captured the “zeitgeist of invention and industry,” says Carter. Most people didn’t even have access to color materials aside from on trading cards, adds Hake, making it a total novelty at the time.
Buttons like these were mostly collectible items at the time, according to Carter. “It was really special to own a piece of printed material at that time, especially since they didn’t have as many advertising images around like we do today,” she says.
Capturing the cultural zeitgeist
By the 1960s, buttons were everywhere. They commemorated major scientific events, such as the first American to orbit the Earth; pop culture, like Tommy Smalls, a DJ known as Dr. Jive who ushered in early rock and roll; and the counterculture. Hake’s favorite is a button made by the 1964 Free Speech Movement after its first event in Berkeley, California, which he says “kicked off a decade of revolution.”
Today, button makers are looking for new ways to grab attention, such as matte finishes that won’t reflect on screens. But no matter what they say or sell, each button itself becomes an artifact representing a moment of change—as Carter describes them, “little celebrations in time.”