1888 Grover Cleveland Campaign Medal DeWitt GC 1888-10 Brass

An 1888 campaign medalet for Grover Cleveland, struck in brass and cataloged as DeWitt GC 1888-10. Brass was the metal of the wearable campaign piece. It survives a season in a pocket or on a coat far better than white metal, holds its detail, and tones warm instead of gray. Cleveland ran for reelection in 1888 on a low tariff platform, with Allen G. Thurman of Ohio, the Old Roman, beside him. He outpolled Benjamin Harrison by about ninety thousand votes nationally and lost anyway, 233 electoral votes to 168, when New York and Indiana went the other way. It is one of the handful of American elections in which the man with the most votes did not take the office. 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.