1884 Grover Cleveland Campaign Medal DeWitt GC 1884-12 Brass

An 1884 campaign medalet for Grover Cleveland, struck in brass at 28 mm, cataloged as DeWitt GC 1884-12. Brass held up in a coat pocket far better than white metal, and it is the metal most often seen on pieces pierced to hang from a ribbon or a lapel loop. It strikes crisply and tones to a warm gold rather than going dull. The 1884 election put a Democrat in the White House for the first time since before the Civil War. Cleveland won it on a margin of about a thousand votes in New York, and the campaign metal both sides put out that fall is among the most plentiful and most collected of the nineteenth century. Ex J. Doyle DeWitt. DeWitt built the reference collection of American political material, some seventy thousand pieces, while rising from claims investigator to president of the Travelers Insurance Company, and his 1959 catalog A Century of Campaign Buttons is the source of the numbering used here. Edmund B. Sullivan revised and enlarged it in 1981. Graded Mint State in hand. Offered raw, without certification.