School sells collection of historic American political memorabilia
The University of Hartford has quietly sold one of the most extraordinary collections of American political memorabilia ever assembled — a collection one of the city’s insurance titans spent a lifetime assembling and later donated to the school in the hope that it would be preserved and displayed to the public in perpetuity.
The school sold what was known as the J. Doyle Dewitt Americana & Political Collection to Heritage Auctions. Over March 19 and 20, the auctioneer collected $1.8 million for parts of it, mostly from private collectors, during the first of what is expected to be at least two auctions in Dallas.
Neither the school nor Heritage would disclose what the auction house paid for the 70,000-piece collection that included items such as the cufflinks George Washington wore at his inaugural. Intact, it was second only to that of the Smithsonian Institution in historical significance. The authoritative Antiques and the Arts Weekly reported that sales at the March auction were $1 million above expectations.
The auction appears to dash whatever hope remained among collectors and academics that Dewitt’s collection could remain in Connecticut, complete and as a center of political scholarship and tourism.
Dewitt, a former chairman and CEO of The Travelers Insurance
Cos. and director of a half dozen of the county’s leading banks, built his 70,000-piece collection by spending decades scouring backwater America for artifacts of the national political culture.
He is said by those who knew him to have become fascinated by Americana and an inveterate collector early in life. He was a World War I vet when The Travelers hired him in Des Moines in 1925 as a claims investigator. He was in Hartford two years later. By 1943, he ran the Travelers’ claims operation. He was a vice president in 1950, president in 1952 and chairman and CEO in 1964.
Dewitt competed for acquisitions against the Smithsonian, then building the national collection, and friends said that as he rose through the ranks at The Travelers, he enlisted his far-flung sales and claims teams in the hunt.
His collection included textiles, prints, pottery, glassware, mugs, medals, buttons, banners, ribbons, posters and cartoons. Dewitt found a pair of trousers worn by one of the sailors who rowed Gen. George Washington across the East River when the British chased the colonials off Long Island during the Revolutionary War. There was a whale oil torch carried by the Wide Awakes, a paramilitary, political marching club that began in Hartford, then a leading U.S. city, before spreading across America and helping to put Abraham Lincoln
in the White House.
The Dallas auction may have set at least one record, according to Curtis Lindner, Heritage Auctions director of Americana. A buyer paid $118,750 for a silk ribbon bearing Matthew Brady’s photographic images of Stephen A. Douglas and Herschel Vespasian Johnson, the Democratic candidates for president and vice president in the 1860 election.
He was a founding member of the University of Hartford Board of Regents, and eventually donated the collection to the school over a dozen years, beginning in 1959. Friends and fellow collectors said he wanted his collection to remain intact and available to the public and scholars.
The University of Hartford’s decision to auction-off the collection, effectively breaking it up and putting it in the hands of private collectors, has disappointed some history buffs and others who claim the school is not honoring at least the spirit of Dewitt’s gift and depriving the region of an important asset. Academics fear it will be lost to scholarship.
“I was born and raised in Hartford, and first viewed the collection when I was in first grade,” said Joe Anderson, who has since relocated to Singapore and read about the sale from the far side of the world. “The exhibition catalog’s coverage of the U.S. presidential campaigns sparked a life-long interest in history.”