From candidate buttons to soap babies: How Smithsonian curators scavenge political conventions

‘We scavenge. We trawl through the place and pick things up, from signs that are left to signs they’re handing out.’

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.