The items are from the collections of two members of the American Political Items Collectors, Mark Gelke, a retired history teacher from Cincinnati’s Western Hills, and his brother, Kim, an Illinois physician.
Mark Gelke was a college freshman when he spotted a Benjamin Harrison banner he spotted at a Washington CH flea market.
“I was fascinated with it.”
Since then, “I’ve concentrated on 19th century material,” Gelke added. “That was the heyday of the political poster.”
“The colors are vibrant with (images of) eagles and flags and (lady) Liberty,” he said. As vibrant are the ribbons that were forerunners of the campaign button.
“William Henry Harrison (the first president claimed by Ohio and the only non-Republican) is one of my personal favorites,” Gelke said. His 1840 campaign was “the first … in which they used the kind of political ephemera.”
Not by coincidence, the exhibit notes, it was “the moment when presidential elections came of age.”
While earlier campaigns were aimed at elites, “in 1840 … two parties organized on a national scale and each united behind a candidate.”
That produced posters, ribbons and another campaign staple of the era: sheet music that provided the score for political campaigns.
Gelke also found a powder horn boosting Harrison’s “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, designed to appealed to the common voter.
Harrison himself made history as the first president and one of four Ohioans to die in office, succumbing to pneumonia a month after ill-advisedly delivering the longest inaugural speech in history in a snow storm.
Gelke sees Ulysses S. Grant, for whom there is separate display adjacent to the map room, as “kind of a sad fellow.”
An early problem drinker, the heroic Civil War general “wasn’t a particularly successful president,” Gelke said. “He trusted people he shouldn’t have trusted (and) wasn’t a very good judge of character.”
The first of the string of moderate Ohio Republicans to be elected, Grant narrowly won in 1868, then swept to victory in 1872 as voters blamed others for the corruption. The display reports that Grant’s platform “condemned racial and religious discrimination and advocated greater rights for women.”
Four years later, another Ohio president was involved in a historic national shift away from that position.
Trailing Democrat Samuel Tilden in both the popular and electoral vote on election night, Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes eventually was declared the victor after a bitter battle over electoral votes.
Says the exhibit: “Historians generally agree that … in return for Democrats’ acquiescence in the Hayes election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South.”
Gelke calls Ohio’s next president, Civil War Major Gen. James Garfield, “a fine man, family man, gentle man” who “didn’t want the nomination” in 1880 and even “went to the (convention) floor to object to it.”
Although he won popular vote by the slimmest margin in history (2,000), he beat fellow Civil War general and Gettysburg hero Gen. Winfield S. Hancock in the electoral college.
Shot July 2, 1881, by an attorney spurned for a political appointment, Garfield died Sept. 6, 1881, of what Gelke suspects was sepsis caused by his doctors’ germ-covered probing fingers.
In 1888, Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison, whom Gelke calls “an iffy Ohioan,” because he spent most of his political life in Indiana.
Harrison won his first election against incumbent Grover Cleveland, then lost four years later to the only man elected to non-consecutive presidential terms.
In 1896, William McKinley became the seventh Ohioan in eight elections to head the Republican ticket during “one of the most dramatic and complex” elections in American history — much more dramatic than the exhibit’s McKinley parasol.
With a coalition of “businessmen, professionals, skilled factory workers and prosperous farmers,” the exhibit says, McKinley beat Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan.
Four years later, boosted by prosperity and victory in the Spanish-American War, McKinley buried Bryan, this time with Theodore Roosevelt as his vice presidential.
Struck down in 1901 by an anarchist Gelke calls “a real nut case,” McKinley became the third Ohioan to die in office as president. After Roosevelt served out McKinley’s term and was elected to another, Cincinnati’s William Howard Taft took his turn at beating Bryan.
Following an election that sported rattles that Gelke said made “an irritating noise,” Taft spent what the official White House website describes as “four uncomfortable years in the White House.”
Unable to make peace between progressives and conservatives, when Taft was renominated, Theodore Roosevelt created the Bull Moose Party, splitting Republicans and making way for the two-term presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Although the 1920 election officially was a race between Warren G. Harding and James Cox, two Ohio newspaper publishers, the narrative tells us “Harding virtually ignored Cox and essentially campaigned against Wilson,” by then immensely unpopular, with a promise of “return to normalcy.”
The day before the election, Harding made a campaign stop at Springfield’s Memorial Hall.
What followed his landslide victory, however, was a plunge into political corruption that didn’t quite end when Harding died in office of heart attack.
Gelke said the Harding-Cox contest created “the Holy Grail for political collectors,” a button for James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt.
“The last one sold for $22,000,” Gelke.
And, no, it is not part of his collection.
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