Walk through presidential history, then watch Democratic candidates debate, July 31

The National Press Club Events Team invites Club members to stroll down the historical road to the White House at an event showcasing presidential campaign memorabilia at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 31.

The talk by collector Jerry Higgins will take place in the Truman Lounge just before the fourth Democratic Party debate, which will be aired on the lounge’s televisions.

Higgins has spent decades meticulously collecting campaign artifacts and will escort you on a tour of two centuries of U.S. history, explaining how candidates and their supporters wielded memorabilia to win over voters.

The first presidential campaign buttons, Higgins says, were sewn onto supporters' coats and simply displayed the candidate’s initials, for example, "GW" for George Washington The oldest “button” in Higgins’s collection was madei n 1841 for the inauguration of William Henry Harrison.

“Back then the ‘button’ was a coin that they drilled a hole in at the top that they put a string or ribbon through so they could wear it like a necklace,” Higgins explains. “Buttons as we know them started really showing up in 1896 for the race between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. They would sometimes be given out with cigarettes and other things.”

Higgins would know; he has those in his collection, too -- a cache of such items in the country, much of which he will bring along with his not-so-trivial knowledge of all things presidential history.

A senior executive with Sage/CQ Press Publishing, which publishes among other things political science textbooks -- Higgins has been collecting presidential memorabilia since 1972. (Coincidentally, he works out of his company’s DC headquarters in a building well entrenched in presidential history: the Watergate.)

Only a first grader in 1963, he remembers the impact John F. Kennedy’s assassination had on the nation, a moment that likely influenced his decision to study politics and U.S. history at the University of Maryland. Collecting started between those events: In 1972, he was babysitting for a woman who would bring back Nixon/Agnew buttons she picked up while volunteering.

“Ice had to get McGovern/Eagleton - and then McGovern/Shriver - buttons as well, to balance things out,” Higgins says. “And so it began.”(Senator Thomas Eagleton (D-MO) was George McGovern’s first VP pick but was later dropped when news broke that he suffered from mental illness. McGovern then chose Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy.

Now Higgins's collection is a walk back through time and includes dolls, license plates, toys, and other campaign-related fun, icons of when elections were very different… but also so much the same. However, it’s the buttons that offer so much history with their changing motifs. For example, his recent acquisition of a collection of 60 buttons from 1896 to 1948 were smaller than the larger buttons of more recent years.

“Back then they were really beautiful with the colors and the photographs and the development of slogans,” Higgins notes.

Some of the buttons in the collection are now worth thousands of dollars but most, he notes, can be found online for a few dollars each. It mostly depends on how rare they are -- and whether the candidate won their election.

For example, “Most Mondale or Romney buttons are almost worthless,” Higgins says. Meanwhile, many “Kennedy and Truman are a lot more valuable since they were very popular and only ran once.”