By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist
It’s election season and political bumper stickers are out in force. They’re taking over my office too. We were recently donated 20+ bumper stickers for local, state, and federal elections from the 1960s through the 2000s. Kennedy for President! No, vote Bob Dole! Either way, there’s nothing quite like advertising your politics on your vehicle.
Bumper sticker from our recent donation
Americans have been using their vehicles to display signs and other advertisements for longer than those vehicles have been cars. Business would hang ads off the back of their wagons. When cars first came along, they didn’t even have bumpers! The first car to have bumpers was the 1927 Ford Model A. During the 1930s and 40s, car owners experimented with hanging wooden, metal, or cardboard signs with wires and twine off of their back bumpers, much as they had with wagons.
The bumper sticker as we know it today developed shortly after World War II thanks to the confluence of several new innovations. In 1935, Ray Stanton Avery invented the first pressure-sensitive self-adhesive labels, a.k.a., stickers. During the early 1940s, Bob and Joseph Switzer, owners of Day-Glo Color Corp. began working on daylight fluorescent pigments for use in signage and high-visibility safety gear. It all came together in 1946 when Forrest P. Gill, a screen printer in Kansas City, Missouri, combined Avery’s stickers with the Switzer brothers’ fluorescent paint to create the first bumper sticker, then called a bumper strip.
The first group to latch on to the new “bumper strips” was the tourism industry. Hotels and tourist sites would print bumper stickers with their logos and stick them to their guests’ cars. While a lot of car owners wouldn’t be cool with that today, it was a great way to make sure that folks all over the country knew their name. These early stickers were primarily printed on paper which tended to wear off pretty quickly. By the 1950s, most bumper sticker manufacturers were printing on vinyl, which was way more durable.
The first political bumper stickers were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1952 campaign against Adlai Stevenson. Cars throughout the country featuring his iconic “I Like Ike” helped drive him all the way to the White House. From then on, bumper stickers became a mainstay of American political campaigns. While today there are bumper stickers advertising everything from babies on board to religious affiliations, political advertising is the most prominent use of the medium.
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| More of our new bumper stickers |
Growing up, my family never used political bumper stickers because my mother was a Federal employee and they are strongly discouraged against advertising their political affiliations. In 1964, authorities at the Elmira Reformatory barred the display of political bumper stickers in the prison parking lot. At the time, William Ciuros Jr., a Reformatory guard, was running for state senate on the Democratic ticket and many of his fellow guards supported him. The New York State Department of Corrections threatened to bring disciplinary action against any employee who parked a vehicle sporting a sticker for Ciuros or anyone else on State property.
Car in Reformatory parking lot from Elmira Star-Gazette, July 10, 1964
Whatever your political affiliation and however you choose to
display it, your vote counts! Make sure you vote this election!
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