|
TIME.com/time/magazine
A Piece of Our Time
By Richard Lacayo,
from the Web March 30, 2008
 |
|
HENRY DILTZ/CORBIS |
Just like Madonna and Michelle
Pfeiffer, the peace symbol is turning 50 this year. When an icon turns
that age, you can start making some judgments about whether it has what it takes
to endure. Madonna? Hanging in there. Pfeiffer? We'll
see. But the peace symbol -- it's 50 years young and going strong.
By now, the little sectioned circle has become so familiar, it feels as if it
had no genesis, that it just emerged out of a collective folk culture, like the
Star of David or a nursery rhyme. But in fact it can be traced to a single
inventor, Gerald Holtom, whose story is woven into two new histories, Peace:
The Biography of a Symbol by Ken Kolsbun with Michael S. Sweeney (National
Geographic; 175 pages) and Peace: 50 Years of Protest by Barry Miles
(Reader's Digest; 256 pages).
Holtom was a London textile designer who had been a conscientious objector
during World War II. By 1958, as Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union
were well into the nuclear arms race, a grass-roots movement to "Ban the Bomb"
was gathering force in the United Kingdom. Early that year, a fledgling
disarmament group called the Direct Action Campaign (DAC) started to put
together what would be Britain's first major demonstration against nuclear
weapons. The plan was for a 52-mile (84 km) march from London to the town
of Aldermaston, home to an A-bomb research center.
Enter Holtom, who brought to the DAC his design for a symbol that marchers could
carry on banners and signs. He had arrived at the image by combining the
semaphore signals for the letters N, for nuclear, and D, for disarmament.
The first is a figure with arms held downward and out from both sides; the
second, a figure holding one arm above its head while the other points to the
ground.
The symbol was simple -- a few straight lines inside a circle. But like a
Chinese character, its form was suggestive. The straight lines hinted at
the human body. The circle brought to mind Planet Earth. (It also
looked a bit like the Mercedes-Benz logo, which has led to some confusion over
the years.) Importantly, anybody could draw it.
Before long, millions of people did. It debuted on April 4 in London's
Trafalgar Square, the assembly point for the four-day march. Over the next
few days, it appeared in countless newspaper photos and TV reports.
Bayard Rustin, an American protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who took
part in the march, brought the symbol home to a growing civil rights movement
dedicated to nonviolence. When the Vietnam War started getting out of
hand, protesters discovered they had a ready-made icon to signal their feelings.
There were people who didn't like the symbol any better than they liked the
movements it represented. They saw it as an inverted broken cross or "the
footprint of the American chicken." But it kept spreading through the
culture. Like the Christian cross, which has served the purposes of soup
kitchens and Crusaders, the Sisters of Mercy and the Ku Klux Klan, it was
adaptable. Over time, it evolved from its narrow association with nuclear
disarmament into an insignia for countercultures of all kinds. Hippies
made it a sort of all-purpose symbol of peacefulness. The environmental
group Greenpeace, the militant wing of flower power, adopted it for its
eco-defense campaigns.
And inevitably, the market found it. By the late 1960s, peace symbols were
appearing on coffee mugs, miniskirts and ponchos and were dangling from chains
around the necks of guys you would expect to see at the Playboy mansion.
Duplicated endlessly as a hip fashion accessory, it threatened to devolve into a
meaningless emblem of benign and groovy sentiment. It started looking
corny, a kind of smiley face before there were smiley faces.
But events have conspired to keep giving the peace symbol fresh life. The
arms race rumbles along, wars keep happening, and it continually comes back into
circulation as, well, a peace symbol. The war in Iraq has created all
kinds of opportunities for it at rallies and demonstrations. If it's true,
as John McCain has suggested, that the U.S. may have to remain in Iraq for 100
years, then the peace symbol probably has a long life ahead of it.
Sign of the Times For a photographic history of the peace symbol, go to
time.com/peace.
Printed in the April 7, 2008 issue to TIME.
(Emphasis added.)
|
