How Smithsonian curators scavenge political conventions to explain the present to the future and save everything from hats to buttons to umbrellas to soap
Thousands of Republicans, from a presidential candidate to grassroots party members, began assembling in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024, for that quadrennial political ritual, the party convention. Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History were there, too. They’re self-described “scavengers” of the physical objects that make up political campaign history, from candidate buttons to signs, banners and anything else that can enter the Smithsonian’s campaign collection – which dates back to George Washington – in order to “make sense of our moment to people wondering what we were all thinking,” as curator Jon Grinspan put it. Grinspan was joined by curators Claire Jerry and Lisa Kathleen Graddy in an interview with The Conversation’s politics editor, Naomi Schalit. They will report back to Conversation readers during the convention about their progress.
Schalit: What do political history curators do?
Lisa Kathleen Graddy: We try to document, through material culture, Americans’ relationship with their democracy, with their government, how they are affected by it, how they affect it, and how they interact with it. Material culture is all of the ephemera and the products that people make and use to express their opinions about politics.
Claire Jerry: We go into the field so we can watch people in real time working and interacting with these objects. But we also want to place that in a historical context. Obviously none of us were able to watch anyone do that in 1860 or 1896, but by watching how people do it today, we can go back and reinterpret the objects that we collected from the past.
Jon Grinspan: We try to explain the past to the present and the present to the future. We’re trying to draw from our really broad, deep history of democracy to make some sense of the present.
Schalit: What are some notable items in your collection?
Graddy: One of my favorite objects is a banner from Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration. It has a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, and an eagle is holding one of two ribbons above his head. And the ribbons say, “T. Jefferson, President of the United States, John Adams is no more.”
Thousands of Republicans, from a presidential candidate to grassroots party members, began assembling in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024, for that quadrennial political ritual, the party convention. Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History were there, too. They’re self-described “scavengers” of the physical objects that make up political campaign history, from candidate buttons to signs, banners and anything else that can enter the Smithsonian’s campaign collection – which dates back to George Washington – in order to “make sense of our moment to people wondering what we were all thinking,” as curator Jon Grinspan put it. Grinspan was joined by curators Claire Jerry and Lisa Kathleen Graddy in an interview with The Conversation’s politics editor, Naomi Schalit. They will report back to Conversation readers during the convention about their progress.
Schalit: What do political history curators do?
Lisa Kathleen Graddy: We try to document, through material culture, Americans’ relationship with their democracy, with their government, how they are affected by it, how they affect it, and how they interact with it. Material culture is all of the ephemera and the products that people make and use to express their opinions about politics.
Claire Jerry: We go into the field so we can watch people in real time working and interacting with these objects. But we also want to place that in a historical context. Obviously none of us were able to watch anyone do that in 1860 or 1896, but by watching how people do it today, we can go back and reinterpret the objects that we collected from the past.
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