CHICAGO — “Excuse me, can I ask you a question? What are these?”
Onstage, Patti LaBelle belts through the B-flats and G-minors of “You Are My Friend.”
Near the Illinois and District of Columbia delegations, the Rev. Jesse Jackson went by in his wheelchair.
Back onstage, John F. Kennedy’s grandson waxed poetic about that time America put a man on the moon.
Jon Grinspan doesn’t care about the people they’ll write about in the textbooks. He cares about the stuff. Because stuff is, really, what gets America going. Even things that seem banal, like a cyan sleeve with white text on it covering the back of the folding chairs from the Minnesota delegation.
“They’re name tags,” says Jules Goldstein, a 77-year-old delegate.
“Would you consider donating yours to the museum?”
Grinspan, 40, is one of three historians that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History dispatched to Chicago, assigning them to find items that could tell the story, a century from today, of the 2024 election. That means pacing around the convention floor — he has 30 minutes today, owing to a late bus — and pulling off a kind of reverse salesmanship: persuading people to part with stuff that might matter a lot to them.
To Grinspan, the story of 2024 goes a little like this: The parties have become really effective at getting people hooked on their supply of adrenaline. Everyone is glued to their seats. We’re this divided, in part, because “those material things do connect some synapse in our head, in a way” — like a rotary phone behind a glass case reminds you of Grandma — and binds us to a candidate or a party. “It’s almost like a ritual,” he says.
There’s another wrinkle at this convention, where Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the nomination Thursday. Unlike in 2016, when Democratic officials had been all-in on Hillary, Harris has been the standard-bearer for a month and a day. The items are motley and self-conceived, not like the red sea of standard-issue hats he saw at Milwaukee’s Republican convention. People here have had to make their own curio. “With a coordinated campaign, you really make an icon. You really make an image. Like, everybody knows what a MAGA hat is,” he says.
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He already has a kaffiyeh from an uncommitted delegate from Hawaii, and a bracelet that lights up. “I often think politics is sometimes more superficial than we want it to be,” he says later. “We think it’s about policy and abstract ideas, and often it’s really about convincing a lot of people to do something.”
And right now he’s being really nice, but not very convincing.
“You know, I was looking at it to be a souvenir …” Goldstein says.
“I knooowww, I knooowww,” Grinspan says.
“This is my first real convention as a delegate after 60 years. I want to keep it,” Goldstein says.
He moves on to another person down the row of chairs, a young guy with golden curls wearing a burgundy suit and a rainbow-flag sash. Would he give up his seat cover?
“You can say no!” he tells Charlie Schmit, 18.
He turns it over in his head, pauses. They strike a bargain: Grinspan will send a picture of it next to other artifacts from the LGBTQ rights movement. They walk up the aisle to talk to a man in a suit, who seems to be in charge, and he says Schmit can’t give out the seat cover until the convention is over. Crestfallen, they swap emails. Schmit will be in touch.
“If I’m dead in 80 years, like 60 to 80 years, who cares?” Schmit says. “I have enough s--- to be honest. It’s better to donate it to the people than keep it selfishly for myself.”
A question for Grinspan: Why did a crumpled-up piece of blue cloth hold so much historical value, anyway?
He gets into museum tour-guide mode, talking as if he’s opening the minds of some impressionable middle-schoolers a century into the future.
“There was a convention in 2024. It was made up of delegations. This is a way to connect to the delegations. It said the name of the people on it.”
“So, if and when Charlie donates, it’ll say his name on it. That connects us back to a human being — 18-year-old, lived in this moment, was engaged in politics in this way, had his causes.”
He won’t fly back empty-handed. The museum is also getting a kaffiyeh from an uncommitted delegate from Hawaii, a baseball hat that reads “White Dudes for Harris” that he got from a guy at a bar in the arena, and a Kelly green sequined bucket hat from an Ohio delegate, Helen Sheehan. It was festooned all over with pins from different political campaigns, bequeathed to her by a friend who was a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and collected them in his travels. “Re-elect Stokes.” “Dukakis/Bentsen.” She added some of her own, from campaigns she’d worked on. “I AM ROE,” read a white one.
“I thought a lot about what you said with, you know, it tells a story,” she told Grinspan. “And I really love that.”
What kind of a story is the country writing about itself right now?
The most interesting gem came from the Republican convention, he says.
“They were handing out those signs that everyone was waving, that said ‘Mass Deportations Now.’ Sometimes you get an object that you feel like articulates a view that in 100 years you might have really to prove existed. That one —” he widened his eyes “— that’s like, it’s almost like a line in the sand to preserve.”
Or maybe it’s not all about the abstract, high-minded preservation of our national memory. Some plastic will outlive us all.
Consider this also.
“If it doesn’t go in a museum,” he tells people, “it goes in a dumpster.”
