Peace sign turned fifty

.: CREDIT: Keystone, Hulton Archive, Getty Images
The peace symbol appeared in a 1958 demonstration against nuclear weapons and missile bases in Britain. The symbol was created by pacifist designer Gerald Holtom, who said that the symbol also represented a figure in despair, and was inspired by the Miseries of War painting series of Goya, which included Desastre de la Guerra.

Three lines and a circle 'still radiates emotion'
While the decades-old peace symbol speaks to hundreds of millions around the world, its message is not as simple as first envisioned, writes Tony Atherton.

Tony Atherton
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, February 20, 2008

That is, until a triumphant comeback gig at the venue where the magic first began.

The biography of a rock star? Not exactly. It's the life history of three lines and circle, the most famous postwar logo without commercial purpose. Or at least intended commercial purpose.

The peace symbol -- as antique as a grizzled hippie, as modern as the latest Iraq war protest -- turns 50 tomorrow.

Half a century ago, a fledgling British disarmament movement succumbed to the passion of a Twickenham textile designer and approved the production of protest signs the size and shape of an extra-large pizza bearing nothing more than a upside-down V with line through the middle.

Rendered white on black, mounted on wood laths, these "lollypops," as the designer called them, would be lightweight and look great on TV, he said. Seen often enough, they would trumpet the message of nuclear disarmament without the need for cumbersome words.

Disarmament activists were skeptical, but since this enthusiastic middle-aged man was willing to produce the signs in his small textile factory, they decided they had nothing to lose.

To everyone's surprise, the logo caught on just as the designer had foreseen -- except for one small thing. While the symbol now speaks to hundreds of millions the world over, its message is not as simple as first envisioned. Adopted with stunning speed by dozens of counterculture movements in the 1960s, its message expanded and became diffuse; now, most people see it as a generic symbol of peace, adaptable to almost any pacifist cause, and yet, this overly familiar logo still has the power to stir up a fuss under the right conditions.

Just ask the Colorado couple fined by their homeowners' association for displaying a Christmas wreath shaped like a peace symbol in 2006. The story was carried in papers around North America and the fine was rescinded only after the homeowners threatened to consult the Civil Liberties Union.

"The peace symbol still radiates emotion, even if that emotion is detached from the original intent," says Isabel Pedersen, a professor of professional communication at Ryerson University.

Peace symbol returns to its roots.: CREDIT: Salvatore Laporta, Getty Images Next month, the peace symbol returns to its roots. On Easter Monday, Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament hopes to have thousands of protesters -- most sporting peace signs, such as the painted one above -- e
It's a familiar tale: a good-looking up-and-comer, full of high ideals and out to save the world, has an impressive debut in England in the 1950s, takes the U.S. by storm, but is seduced by the psychedelic '60s, suffers from overexposure, becomes the subject of malicious gossip, and slips into middle age still famous, but with a muddled sense of identity.

Next month, however, the peace symbol returns to its roots.

On Easter Monday, March 24, Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament hopes to have at least 5,000 protesters -- most sporting peace signs -- encircle the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, west of London.

The site, which manufactures nuclear warheads for British missiles, was the target of Britain's first mass nuclear disarmament march on Easter Monday in 1958, the very protest for which the sign that has come to symbolize peace was created.

"The peace symbol continues to exert almost hypnotic appeal," writes Ken Kolsbun in Peace: The Biography of a Symbol, a heavily illustrated quick-march through the modern peace movement that will be released by National Geographic's publishing arm in April. "It has become the rallying cry for almost any group working for social change."

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The symbol is the enduring legacy of Gerald Holtom, an intense, funny, sometimes irascible pacifist who would segue from designing textiles to designing high-speed sailboats before his death in 1985.

According to his nephew, Arizona school teacher Tim Holtom, Gerald had been a pacifist well before there were nuclear arms to protest. Born at the outset of the First World War, he had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. That made him odd man out in his family; both brothers served in the British armed forces, Tim Holtom says. Gerald, like many of Britain's nearly 60,000 conscientious objectors, served out the war performing what his country deemed "useful work" as a farm labourer.

Given his frame of mind, it was not surprising to see Gerald Holtom turn up in the ranks of the dozens of grassroots anti-nuclear organizations that sprang up in Britain in the 1950s after the country joined the arms race.

Mr. Kolsbun's forthcoming book says that Mr. Holtom was not at first connected with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, launched in February 1958 as a relatively polite umbrella lobby group under the auspices of such grandfatherly figures as Bertrand Russell and J.B. Priestly, but with the rather more pugnacious Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC).

Created the previous year, the DAC had planned, Greenpeace-style, to interfere with Britain's 1957 nuclear testing at Christmas Island, but its boat didn't make it to the test site in time. By early 1958, the group's sights were set on a new attention-grabber: a mass march from London to the nuclear weapons facility in Aldermaston. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament thought the march a little unseemly, but eventually gave its blessing.

Gerald Holtom approached the Direct Action Committee with a well-conceived plan to produce protest signs that would not only be distinctive, but easy to carry during what was to be a four-day, 84-kilometre march. His symbol, he told the DAC organizers, was a stylized version of two figures from the semaphore flag signalling system: flags held downward and diagonally away from the body (the semaphore signal for "N" ) and flags pointing directly up and directly down ( the semaphore signal for "D"). N and D for Nuclear Disarmament, Mr. Holtom explained.

Mr. Holtom would later write Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News -- and one of the DAC officials to whom Mr. Holtom pitched his idea -- that the symbol also represented a figure in despair "with hands stretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."

This explanation is problematic, in that Goya's painting of peasants before a firing squad during Napoleon's invasion of Spain shows a man with his arms upraised in surrender. Mr. Holtom was more likely referring to the etching Tristes Presentimientos (Sorrowful Presentiments) from a series called Miseries of War, created by Goya in the same period.

According to Mr. Holtom's nephew, Tim, the designer would come to regret the symbol's attitude of despair. During the Aldermaston march, Mr. Holtom went to a newsstand to see how his "lollypops" were being played in the press. He asked a shop girl what she thought of the symbol. She liked it, Tim Holtom remembers his uncle saying, but wondered whether its drooping arms weren't "a bit depressing. Shouldn't peace be something to celebrate?"

"He sort of altered his view in that moment," his nephew recalls. "He said, 'Yes, it should be a figure with the hands upwards outstretched like (the mythic Nordic ) Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life.'"

An inverted peace symbol would become Mr. Holtom's personal talisman. Tim Holtom remembers getting Christmas cards from his uncle upon which he'd drawn "doves and upside-down peace symbols."

In his will, Mr. Holtom had left specific instructions that his headstone be marked with inverted peace symbols, a move that would no doubt have caused endless speculation among students of the peace movement. However, somewhere between the lawyer's office and the monument company, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. The two peace symbols on Mr. Holtom's grave in Kent are right-side up.

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There are various theories about how the peace symbol migrated across the pond to North America. In the forthcoming Peace: The Biography of a Symbol, Ken Kolsbun suggests that the first appearance of the symbol in the U.S. may have been on a 1960s leaflet from the Committee for Non-Violent Action protesting Polaris submarines berthed in Connecticut.

Some say the symbol was brought to the U.S. by seminal civil rights figure Bayard Rustin, a Quaker-raised black pacifist who had studied Gandhian techniques of non-violence and, by the 1950s, been involved in a number of struggles in the U.S., India and Africa.

The U.S. Library of Congress has a copy of the speech Rustin made during the Aldermaston protest in 1958. Certainly Mr. Holtom's symbol was in evidence in 1963 when an integrated march from Quebec to Guantanamo, Cuba, combined the goals of peace and racial justice.

University of Toronto semiotician Marcel Danesi suggests the symbol may also have been introduced to a wider audience by a 1961 British film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a speculative thriller abut nuclear testing disrupting the Earth's orbit around the sun. Notable now as an early star vehicle for Leo McKern (TV's Rumpole) and for a brief appearance of a young Michael Caine, the film included footage of British anti-nuclear protests in which the peace sign was prominently portrayed.

But while the film may have made the symbol accessible to a broader audience, Mr. Danesi says, there is something inherent in the design that explains its instant and broad popularity.

Ryerson's Isabel Pedersen thinks what attracts us to the symbol is its circularity and its simplicity. "Ultimately, visual symbols become more emotionally persuasive when they are basic, unembellished, and abstract," she says. "The peace symbol's utter simplicity is its most powerful feature."

Mr. Danesi suggests our response to the symbol has to do with subconscious cultural memories that even its creator wasn't likely aware of when he first drew it. He figures we are being seduced by the inverted "V" at the centre of the symbol.

In a book to be released next fall (X-rated: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture), Mr. Danesi devotes an entire chapter to the mythic power of the V, "the most ancient of feminine symbols." "I'm pretty sure the use of the upside-down V (in the peace symbol) has an ancient history behind it dealing with feminine peace and feminine nature," he says.

There was a time in the dim recesses of human history when the V sign would have been less abstract, Mr. Danesi says, when it was perhaps a pictogram of female genitalia. Over millenniums, the pictogram's meaning became subconscious. It is not for nothing, he suggests, that the names of mythic female figures like Venus and Virgo begin with V, as do the names of certain female body parts.

"It is what Carl Jung called an archetype; it is deeply buried in the recesses of our mind, that symbol," Mr. Danesi says. "I don't think it's a discovery of the modern world. I think it's an unconscious recycling of the ancient idea of being female: peace, the Mother, the Goddess, the one who looks after us. And we warring boys should pay attention."

Archetype or merely a pleasing shape, Mr. Holtom's nuclear disarmament symbol caught on like a house afire, and became more prominent in the U.S. as protests began to mount over the ongoing and escalating Vietnam War. It was co-opted as a symbol of resistance to the war and, to this day, some believe the symbol is a stylized B-52 bomber, like that used in Vietnam, contained in a circle.

It wasn't long before it became a badge of the burgeoning hippie movement, and moved from anti-nuclear logo to cultural icon. Such counter-culture notoriety engendered suspicion in certain circles. Some Christian groups denounced the symbol as pagan, calling it a "broken cross," It also made right-wing groups uneasy. Even today you can find an essay on the website of the John Birch Society linking the symbol to communism and the Nordic runes for death.

While the peace symbol has weathered such charges without losing much respect, long familiarity has worn away some of its edge. University of Houston sociology professor Joseph Kotarba recently told the Houston Chronicle that "now when you see the peace symbol, it's a fashion statement first."

Because it was never successfully copyrighted (there were a couple of attempts in the U.S. in the 1970s) anyone can use it, as Camel cigarettes did briefly three decades ago, and as Donald J. Pliner handbags, Moschino jeans and Zales diamond pendants do today.

So maybe it's a good thing that the peace symbol is going back to Aldermaston to celebrate its 50th birthday.

It may be time to reconsider the life-affirming passion that moved its creator, Gerald Holtom.

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