Vintage 1960s-1970s Special Police Toy Badge 🚔 Commonwealth of Massachusetts Tin Litho New Old Stock on Original Card

Size: 4 x 2.25 inches ~ New Old Stock, still on its card. They vary a little one to the next.

A Massachusetts police badge that never went near a police station.

This is a dime-store toy, and that is the whole charm of it. A Special Police badge in bright tin lithography, COMM. OF MASSACHUSETTS ringed around its centre and POLICE across a gold ribbon, still on the illustrated card it was sold on, with JAPAN printed in the corner. A kid could own one for pocket change, and sheriffs gave badges like it away to children as prizes. It borrows the look of a real Massachusetts shield, an eagle on top and the Commonwealth at the heart, and it came out of Japan's toy export trade in the 1960s-1970s, near the end of the years when Japan made the world's toys. Tin litho badges carrying a town or state name are rare today.

The Badge and Its Card

The badge is a round button with a deep red face and a blue rim. A spread eagle in orange and brown perches across the top, wings wide, over a spray of blue-and-silver oak leaves and scrollwork. In the middle sits a navy medallion lettered COMM. OF MASSACHUSETTS in white around a small blue shield. A gold ribbon lettered POLICE in black crosses the lower half, with laurel sprays and a pair of small stars beneath. The front is printed tin; the back is thick plastic. They are very well made and they look amazing in hand.

The card is a small piece of commercial art on its own. A red header reads SPECIAL POLICE BADGE in white capitals. Below, on a bright yellow ground, a motorcycle officer rides out of the frame in a white peaked cap, dark riding goggles, a navy uniform with a tie and olive gloves on the handlebars, a big chrome headlamp in front of him and a pale city skyline behind. JAPAN is printed at the lower right, under the badge. The whole card still sits in its clear sleeve.

• Type: toy Special Police badge on its original display card
• Printed on the badge: COMM. OF MASSACHUSETTS, POLICE
• Printed on the card: SPECIAL POLICE BADGE, JAPAN
• Construction: tin lithography front, thick plastic back
• Badge: 1 1/2" ~
• Card: 4" x 2 1/4" ~
• Age: 1960s-1970s
• Condition: New Old Stock, still on the original card in its clear sleeve

Made in Japan: The Tin Toy Trade

Japan's postwar toy business has a founding story that collectors love to tell, and it is true. In 1945, just after the surrender, the toolmaker Matsuzo Kosuge took empty food cans scavenged from American military bases and hammered the tin over wooden forms into a little U.S. Army jeep, a few inches long, painted by hand and driven by a rubber band. It was one of the first manufactured goods of any kind on sale in Japan that year, and it sold. Within a few years tinplate toys were one of the country's best exports, and sales abroad helped put the Japanese economy back on its feet. Japan's postwar tin toys sold mostly through five-and-dime chains such as F. W. Woolworth, Ben Franklin, McCrory's, J. J. Newberry and G. C. Murphy.

Under the Allied occupation run by General Douglas MacArthur, headquarters ordered in February 1947 that goods made for export be marked "Occupied Japan" or "Made in Occupied Japan". A 1949 directive allowed "Made in Japan" or simply "Japan" where space was short. The occupation ended in April 1952, and the decade that followed was the golden age: by one count Japan made 95 percent of the world's battery-operated toys.

Then the ground shifted. Plastics, rising wages and new safety rules pushed toy making toward Taiwan, Hong Kong and later China. In August 1971 President Richard Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold and put a 10 percent surcharge on imports, and the Smithsonian Agreement at the end of that year raised the yen 16.88 percent, to 308 to the dollar. By 1972 Hong Kong had overtaken Japan as the world's biggest toy exporter. A badge on a card printed JAPAN is a small piece of that closing chapter.

The Commonwealth on a Toy

COMM. is short for Commonwealth. Massachusetts is one of four American states that call themselves a commonwealth, along with Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Real Massachusetts police shields carry the state seal at the centre, and this toy copies that arrangement: eagle above, Commonwealth in the middle, the word POLICE on a ribbon below.

The seal behind that layout is one of the oldest emblems in the country. The Massachusetts Bay Colony's seal of 1629 showed a Native man with the words "Come over and help us". In 1775 the revolutionary government replaced him with a minuteman holding a sword and Magna Carta. On December 13, 1780, the new Commonwealth adopted the design of Nathan Cushing under Governor John Hancock: a Native figure holding his arrow pointed down in peace, a silver star for Massachusetts as one of the United States, and a crest of an arm raising a broadsword. The motto, Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem, "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty", is drawn from the writing of the English soldier and politician Algernon Sidney around 1659. In 1898 the artist Edmund H. Garrett drew the version still in use.

That seal has been argued over ever since it was made, and in 2021 Governor Charlie Baker signed a law creating a commission to redesign the state's seal and flag.

Special Police, the Real Ones

"Special police officer" is a working title in Massachusetts, not a toy-maker's invention. Municipal chiefs can appoint retired officers with long service as special police officers to work police details, some towns use the title for reserve and part-time officers, and Boston has special officers working for city departments and private security companies. The card borrows the phrase for play. The badge carries no department, no number and no authority.

Lore: When Kids Really Did Get Badges

The childhood this badge comes from was full of badges handed to kids by real officers. Sheriffs used tin litho badges like this one as prizes in their youth programs. Junior deputy programs let sheriffs swear in schoolchildren as honorary deputies, school safety patrols, organized since the 1920s, put badges and belts on millions of children, and police departments handed out badges at parades, fairs and classroom visits as a matter of civic routine. A Massachusetts Special Police badge on a dime-store card was the one a kid could buy for himself.