1880 – The country’s largest railroad supply manufacturer branches out to produce torches for political parades

Item Details

Chicago, Adams and Westlake Manufacturing Company, 1880, Advertising Trade Card

Very Good

This colorful advertising trade card for the Adams & Westlake Manufacturing Company of Chicago measures approximately 5.5” x 3.5”. In nice shape.

It displays illustrations of five different torch heads that were used to illuminate evening political and fraternal parades. One, the "Pure Ballot Box" torch, “the most popular Torch made” was modeled after transparent glass ballot boxes first championed by anti-political machine forces in the 1850s.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, political parties rallied their supporters by holding torchlight parades. In the evening, marchers lit up the streets carrying torches, lamps, and lanterns. Many of the torches were inexpensive paper lanterns that might glow with the image or name of the party's candidate or other patriotic designs. More substantial and longer-lasting oil lamp heads were made of metal. All of the lanterns were carried on long wooden poles. Fraternal and vocational organizations (like firefighters) often held torchlight marches as well.

The glass glovbe ‘fishbowl’ ballot box lantern symbolized opposition to corrupt political machines. In the early 1850s, prominent San Franciscans formed a Committee of Vigilance, which pledged to observe, oversee, and investigate “threats to democracy,” especially vote-fixing. Members discovered concrete evidence of widespread election fraud; “stuffer’s ballot boxes” with false bottoms and side panels that were used to conceal pre-marked ballots for the political machine’s candidates were often employed. The solution, a transparent glass globe ‘fish bowl’ ballot box patented in 1856, soon became the national symbol of reformist political parties wherever corrupt political organizations controlled the local or state government.

The Adams & Westlake company began with a series of Chicago partnerships and mergers in the 1860s, and after creating a “removable globe lantern” for railroad trains, branched out to become the country’s leading provider of heating stove components and railway supplies of all kinds including small fittings for the famous Pullman railcars: seats as well as water tanks, letter boxes, pull cords, sleeper car curtain rods, door locks, mirror frames, and metal signs.

As attested to by this advertising trade card, it ventured into providing torchlight parade lanterns as well.

(For more information see, “Political Lantern, 1860-1880” at the Henry Ford website, Foutch’s “The Glass Ballot Box and Political Transparency” at the Common Place website, “Adams & Westlake Company, est. 1857” at the Made In Chicago website, and “Adams and Westlake Manufacturing Company” at the Chicagology website.)

#10514