Historic button collection on display at Baker Institute
A donation of 998 political buttons from collector Julius “Desey” Desenberg dating back to the 1900s is now on display in the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice, a project supported by the Fondren Fellows Program.
Buttons in the collection range from senatorial to presidential elections. The designs include a shifting image of Michael Dukakis, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration.
Fondren fellow Nathaniel Nokken worked with Baker Institute fellow Mark Jones on the display, which involved cataloging the buttons based on their time period, distinguishing features and other criteria such as size and color.
“What really attracted me initially to the project was … how the use of political imaging and political messaging has shifted over the last 100 years, 125 years, because that’s how far some of the buttons that we have go back,” Nokken, a Lovett College junior, said.
According to Nokken, a political science major, he noticed that buttons gradually grew larger over the years, incorporating political slogans instead of pictures and using brighter colors.
Nokken said he tangibly engaged with his classes’ topics while cataloging the buttons.
“This served as something supplemental to real-world experience,” Nokken said. “I took a history class last year on the U.S. presidents and one on American Politics, so getting to blend the two, and having a physical, tactile example of this, is probably the best way that [the buttons] connected back.”
A curated display of buttons is featured at the Baker Institute, along with information on every single button in the collection. The rest of the buttons are held at the Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library.
“What we finally unveiled last week was physically taking the buttons off of the original frames that they were on, rearranging them based on what we felt were the best buttons, impactful and most meaningful, and getting them ready for display at the Baker Institute,” Nokken said.
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