Vintage AuH2O Barry Goldwater Campaign Pin 🗳️ NOS Factory Sealed 1964 Lapel Pin

What Do Gold, Water and a Landslide Have in Common? 🗳️ A Vintage 1964 AuH2O Barry Goldwater Lapel Pin, Sealed on the Card

Size: 1/2"

Ask anybody old enough to remember 1964 what a campaign looked like, and they won't describe a TV ad - they'll describe buttons, on lapels and hatbands and the volunteers handing out flyers on the courthouse steps. Somebody looked at the periodic table and the candidate's last name and came up with one of the best puns in American politics: Au, gold, plus H2O, water, equals Goldwater.

Here it is as a little lapel pin: a gold-tone rectangle with a black enamel field and AuH2O standing up off it in raised gold letters. It has a post and a round clutch on the back, tie-tack style, not a pinback button, and it's sealed in a small stapled clear plastic packet on a cream card. Every one I have is still sealed and unworn.

🗳️ Barry Goldwater of Arizona

Barry Goldwater was the Republican senator from Arizona, and his family name was known in the territory long before politics - his grandfather, born Michel Goldwasser in Konin, Poland, in 1821, became Michael Goldwater in London and opened a small store in the Arizona Territory that his sons built into Goldwater's, the smart department store in Phoenix. Barry flew in World War II with the Army Air Forces' Ferry Command, mostly between the United States and India, including the Hump over the Himalayas, and went to the Senate in 1953. Barry laid out his small-government conservatism in The Conscience of a Conservative in 1960 and went after the nomination in 1964 promising a choice, not an echo. At the Cow Palace in San Francisco that July he told the convention that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. His slogan was In Your Heart You Know He's Right, and the Johnson campaign flipped it into In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts. Then came the Daisy ad - a little girl pulling petals off a flower until the screen fills with a mushroom cloud.

Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes to 52 and 61 percent of the popular vote to 38. Goldwater carried his own Arizona and five states of the Deep South - Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina - which had been Democratic country for generations. And on October 27, 1964, a week before the vote, an actor named Ronald Reagan went on television for Goldwater with a speech called A Time for Choosing. It launched Reagan's own political career; two years later he was governor of California, and sixteen years later he was president. Few losing campaigns ever cast a longer shadow. Goldwater went back to the Senate in 1969, and on August 7, 1974, he led the Republican delegation that told Richard Nixon he had fewer than ten votes left in the Senate - Nixon announced his resignation the next evening.

⚗️ A pun on everything

AuH2O went on just about everything the campaign could get it on - portrait buttons on gold backgrounds, bright orange periodic-table pins, big celluloid buttons for the booth wall, cufflinks, tie tacks, even bolo ties, which is about as Arizona as it gets. Collectors tell of a novelty panic button pin too, with a little Goldwater sign that popped up when you pressed it - a wink at the Johnson campaign's pitch that Goldwater was the reckless choice for the nuclear age. A pin this small was meant to be worn close, almost like a private joke you carried in public.

🗳️ About these

Each pin is about 1/2 inch tall. Keep it sealed for a political collection beside your 1964 buttons, frame it with an AuH2O bumper sticker, or give it to the chemistry teacher or the Arizona history buff who'll get the joke in a second. The supply is finite - nobody's making this 1964 AuH2O pin again, and once these last sealed ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.