Political Roses: Whigs & Democrats

 

1840 campaign-related quilt block with

Harrison's log cabin and the possum,

a Whig symbol

It's always a cliche at the four-year election cycle to write that women who could not vote expressed their political opinions in their quilt patterns. Cannot argue with that, particularly in the 1840-1860 years when the Whigs made good use of campaign imagery including quilt designs to elect their candidates William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848.

Whig Rose dated 1856 from the late, lamented Darwin Brearley's inventory

These were also the decades of a creative increase in applique designs with quiltmakers adopting the red and green aesthetics and symmetries of Germanic traditional arts (something we've been discussing this month on our KIA page 6KnowItAlls.ShowUsYourQuilts  Click here and ask to join.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1413180019082731  )

A Whig Rose quilt.

Whig Roses tend to be simple red and green florals based on mirroring symmetries.

The design features eight rotating elements around a central 8-lobed floral with perhaps the earliest published reference to that name about 1912 in The Household magazine.

From the Minnesota project and the Quilt Index

Who is the "Old Whig Rose" mentioned in this 1855

newspaper article? By then the Whigs were being replaced by the

 Republicans. Perhaps it's Millard Fillmore, a Whig turned anti-immigrant Know-Nothing. 

Florence Peto in the 1940s told her readers that a Whig Rose pattern differed from the rose of their chief political rival in that a Democrat Rose had cockscombs around the central flower---roosters being the 19th-c symbol of the party before the donkey.

Democrat Rose from Beardstown, Illinois

Peto speculated that the comb shape represented the Democratic rooster.

Oklahoma ballot, 1907

Party pictorials assisted illiterate voters in their choices

"Hark!"

Volkening Collection

A Democratic symbol or just a colorful rooster on a quilt?

Detail from the Rebecca Diggs quilt at the 

National Museum of American History

Possums not quite so easy to translate into bedding patterns.

You may be in the mood for some quilt therapy so here is a pattern for a Democrat Rose with combs.

There are literally hundreds of variations on the pattern with

a central floral and four images to fit a circular pattern into a square block.

Here's one I made up.

Print the sheets out 8-1/2" x 11". It's a tight fit in an 18" finished square. Add seams.

Couldn't find a pattern for a Republican Rose; seem to have dropped the ball on that one too.