James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, James A. Garfield in 1880, Grover Cleveland in 1884 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Who can remember the names of the men they defeated?
Mark Shenkman can. Shenkman — a 1965 UConn graduate and chairman of the board of the UConn Foundation, who lives in Greenwich — is a political history buff and a collector of 19th- and early 20th-century presidential campaign flags. The banners took the aesthetic of the American flag and altered it to promote one presidential candidate or another.
About 600 varieties of these flags are known to exist. Shenkman has 155 of them. Dozens of his flags are on exhibit in an election-season show at the Benton Museum at UConn in Storrs, which opens Friday, Sept. 9.
By the way, the names of those also-rans are Whig Henry Clay (1844), Democrat Winfield S. Hancock (1880), Republican James G. Blaine (1884) and Democrat Alton B. Parker (1904). “These names are completely forgotten to us,” said Benton museum director Nancy Stula.
However, the issues they espoused are not forgotten — they are campaign concerns even today. “Protectionism, immigration, sound money, prosperity, these are common themes in many, many bitter campaigns,” Shenkman said in a phone interview from the New York City offices of his firm, Shenkman Capital Management, Inc. “Everyone assumes this is a difficult election. It’s no different than 1860 or 1800 or 1876.”
William Henry Harrison started the tradition of campaign flags in 1840. “This was right after Andrew Jackson, who was a populist, renegade, anti-establishment. Harrison was ultimate establishment. His father was one of the large plantation owners in Virginia and one of the people who attended Continental Congress,” Shenkman said. “So here was his son, a general, a big landowner, wealthy. He had to reposition himself if he was going to run in the era of populists. He put a log cabin on the flag. Outside the log cabin is a big barrel of hard cider. He wanted to show he was one of the ordinary people who drank hard cider and lived in a log cabin.”
Harrison ran against Martin Van Buren and won. But his success didn’t last long. He died of pneumonia one month after his inauguration.
Designers of the campaign flags took extraordinary liberties. The stars are arranged in circles or lined up in star shapes. The number of stripes varies from flag to flag. On some flags, the field of blue (the “canton”) is on the wrong side. Images and words are placed over the whole flag motif.
The quadrennial co-opting and redesigning of the Stars and Stripes became illegal in the early 20th century. “What really ruined it were companies at the turn of the century that put their advertising on the flag, trying to say they were a patriotic American company. They commercialized the flag and Congress got very upset,” Shenkman said. “From 1905, no advertising was allowed on the flag. In 1912 there as an executive order. You couldn’t put any political messages on the flag.”
Lincoln Memorabilia
Although the election winners are enshrined in the annals of history, also-rans’ flags are more valuable today because they are more rare. People tended to throw out flags boosting unsuccessful candidates. The one exception, Shenkman said, is Abraham Lincoln. “Anything with Lincoln on it is super-valuable and in high demand,” he said. One of the most prized flags, he said, is the 1872 flag promoting Horace Greeley over the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, who won re-election by a landslide. Only two of those are known to exist, and Shenkman has one of them.
The exhibit is dominated by flags promoting the barely-remembered hopefuls and their running mates. The George McClellan-George Pendleton ticket, which lost to Lincoln-Andrew Johnson in 1864, is remembered, as well as the Horatio Seymour-Francis Blair ticket, defeated by Grant and Schuyler Colfax in 1868. So is the John Fremont-William Dayton ticket, which came in second in a three-way race won by James Buchanan and John C. Breckinridge in 1856.
Some of the items in the exhibit are amusing. A flag-maker misspelled Lincoln’s first name (“Abram”) in one banner and a Roosevelt textile is dotted with his trademark slouch hats and little grinning Teddy-heads. A rather ghoulish artifact — not a flag but a kerchief — remembers presidents felled by assassins. Lincoln is shown being shot by John Wilkes Booth, Garfield by Charles Guiteau and William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz.
Shenkman said he was inspired to start collecting flags after a Jasper Johns American flag painting sold for $7 million at auction in 1997. He later discovered the campaign flags for a fraction of that amount and found that ironic. “I thought, who would pay 7 million for a flag painted on canvas? That stuck in my mind for years,” he said. “There was a total disconnect between a painted flag and a real textile flag that was used in a campaign.”
Alongside the flags, a broadside of the Declaration of Independence, also owned by Shenkman, will be on exhibit in the gallery.
“PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNING OVER THE DECADES: THE MARK AND ROSALIND SHENKMAN COLLECTION OF EARLY AMERICAN CAMPAIGN FLAGS” is at the William Benton Museum of Art, 245 Glenbrook Road, on the campus of University of Connecticut in Storrs, starting Friday, Sept. 9, when it will open with a reception from 6 to 8:30 p.m., which will include a panel discussion. The exhibit will run until Dec. 18. On Oct. 14, actor Ted Zalewski will depict Theodore Roosevelt in a one-hour presentation. Admission to that show is $5. benton.uconn.edu.
This story has been edited from a previous version to correct the opening date of the exhibit.
