1884 Grover Cleveland Campaign Medal DeWitt GC 1884-8 White Metal

An 1884 campaign medalet for Grover Cleveland, struck in white metal and cataloged as DeWitt GC 1884-8. Most campaign medalets of the 1880s were struck in white metal because it was cheap and because it looked like silver when new. The alloy is soft, brittle at the rim, and it dulls with handling, so the pieces that come down to us with mirror surfaces are generally the ones that went into a drawer in November and stayed there. Cleveland was not a famous man in 1882 and was president by 1885. What carried him was a reputation for plain refusal. He vetoed freely as mayor of Buffalo and again as governor of New York, and in a decade sick of machine politics that was the whole platform. 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.