U.S. Caramel’s Rare 1932 President William McKinley Card

U.S. Presidents are no strangers when it comes to cards. Entire sets dedicated to those who have held the highest office in the land have been made for decades. Some of these cards can be found today very easily, while others are next to impossible.

On this Presidents’ Day I’d like to talk about the 1932 U.S. Caramel Presidents set, specifically the William McKinley card.

A total of (31) cards make up the 1932 U.S. Caramel Presidents set. Each card features a U.S. President. (1) card came packaged with a caramel candy. Upon completing the set, you could redeem your cards for a 1-pound box of chocolate.

Purposely printed in fewer quantities, only a handful of William McKinley’s cards are known to exist. U.S. Caramel did this so they wouldn’t be handing out free chocolate to everyone. Plus they knew people would hunt for the McKinley card therefore selling more candy.

Why the canceled stamp and hole punch? U.S. Caramel would do this to those sets people sent in to deter them from using the same cards again and again in order to obtain free chocolate. If you wanted another box of chocolate, you would need to put the set together again.

Tactics like this were very common at the time. The Charles (Lindy) Lindstrom card from U.S. Caramel’s Famous Athletes set was printed in very few quantities as well.

If you think its cruel to purposely print fewer copies of a card to intentionally make a promotion difficult, that’s nothing. At least U.S. Caramel included those cards. Goudey completely left out Napoleon Lajoie #106 from their 1933 set in order to sell more gum. They had customers looking for a card that didn’t exist until later on.