Flashback Minis: McKinley Soap Baby
NILES, Ohio– Inside the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial Museum is a display case entitled “McKinley’s Cabinet of Curiousities.” It’s filled with strange artifacts from PEZ dispensers to pipes for smoking tobacco.
Another interesting item in this particular collection is called a soap baby. These bars of soap in the shape of infants were used as campaign tools in the 1896 election. However, it was the first and last election these soap babies would be passed out to voters.
Too many people thought the soap babies to be unsettling and creepy with the box they were housed in resembling a coffin.
Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
