Vintage 1960s-1970s MS Highway Patrol Toy Police Badge 🚔 NOS Card Japan For Sale

Size: Badge 1 1/2" ~ Card 4" x 2 1/4" ~ New Old Stock, still on its card.

It means "By Valor and Arms," and it's Mississippi's own state motto, lettered in gold around the bottom of a dime-store toy. This is a vintage tin litho toy badge naming the Mississippi Highway Patrol, made in Japan for the five-and-ten and still pinned to its yellow SPECIAL POLICE BADGE card under its original sleeve. It was made for a kid's shirt, not a trooper's, and whoever drew it took the job seriously: the state name, the patrol name, the eagle and shield and the motto are all right where the real insignia puts them. I don't see Mississippi ones come up for sale, carded or loose.

Virtute et Armis went on Mississippi's coat of arms when the state adopted it in 1894, and the Highway Patrol carried it into its own insignia. When the patrol redesigned its shoulder patch in 1956, it built it around that same shield, eagle and motto, and that's the design this little button copies: a gold eagle with its wings spread over a striped red, white and blue shield, olive branch and arrows below. A toy maker inventing a generic badge would never have bothered to letter a real Latin motto, spelled right, around the rim. This one did.

The Mississippi Highway Patrol is younger than its motto. The legislature created it with Senate Bill No. 161, signed into law on April 1, 1938, setting up a Highway Safety Patrol under a Commissioner of Public Safety to enforce traffic law on the state and federal highways. The founding act provided for 53 original patrolmen plus a small headquarters staff. Governor Hugh L. White signed the bill, Major Thomas Butler Birdsong was the first commissioner, and Captain Webb Burke was the first chief of patrol. Those first troopers came out of the training camp at Camp Shelby, paraded down Capitol Street in Jackson, Mississippi, past the governor, and were sworn in on June 16, 1938, and plenty of them rode out on motorcycles, a lot like the fellow on this card. The patrol still works today, under the Mississippi Department of Public Safety.

There's no date on the badge or the card, so it gets dated the way the rest of this series does. It can't be older than the patrol itself (1938), and the shield it copies is the one on the 1956 patch. Then the card settles it: this same yellow card was printed with a New York button copying the NYPD patch adopted on July 1, 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the patch the SFPD took up around 1970. That puts the whole run on the dime-store racks in the 1970s.

The only maker's mark is JAPAN, small in the corner of the card. Postwar Japan turned out small, cheap export novelties by the case for American five-and-dimes, tin toys and litho trinkets and carded pin badges like this, the master cases marked Made in Japan. Collectors like to tell how that whole trade grew out of Japan's rebuilding under General MacArthur's occupation, and the story goes that the toy designers often worked from tin cans the occupying troops left behind. The occupation ended in 1952, years before these cards hung on a rack, but this little badge comes out of that same trade.

• It names one state and one agency, with the state's own motto, instead of a generic "police."
• It's still on its card and in its sleeve. These were toys, and most of them got torn off and worn.
• The card is half the show, with its comic-strip motorcycle patrolman under the red SPECIAL POLICE BADGE banner.

• Anyone with Mississippi roots, or a retired trooper
• Highway patrol, state police and law-enforcement memorabilia collectors
• Made-in-Japan tin and dime-store toy collectors
• Pinback button and carded-display collectors

It's a toy, plain and simple, a little piece of 1970s dime-store history with a real state's motto on it. Nobody's printing these for the five-and-ten again, and once these last carded ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to come by.