Vintage Peace Now Dove Pinback ✌️ 1960s Vietnam War Protest Button

Peace Now? ✌️ Vintage 1960s Vietnam War Protest Dove Pinback Button

Size: 2 1/4" ~ New Old Stock tin litho, bright cream on deep blue with the pin and catch intact. ~ little to no wear

Whoever laid out this design was economical about it: fold the peace symbol into the O in NOW and the button reads "Peace Now" in a single glance, no extra words needed. Two doves, each with an olive sprig in its beak, fly above and below the word, both headed the same direction. The peace symbol itself was never anybody's property - in 1970 the U.S. Patent Commissioner turned down two companies that tried to register it as a trademark - so anyone could print it, and plenty did.

☮️ A Symbol Born Out of Despair

The circle folded into that O started as one man's private grief. Gerald Holtom, a Royal College of Art graduate, designed it in 1958 for a specific march: the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War was walking from London to Aldermaston, Berkshire — the village where Britain built its nuclear warheads — over the Easter weekend. Aldermaston only got that job in 1950, when the old wartime RAF airfield there became the home of Britain's atomic weapons program, and the site covers about 750 acres today. The design is built from flag semaphore: the vertical line signals D, the two downward arms signal N, for Nuclear Disarmament, the whole thing boxed inside a circle standing for the earth. Years later, in a 1973 letter to Hugh Brock, who had been editing Peace News when that first march set off, Holtom described drawing himself in "deep despair," arms turned down and outward like a doomed figure in a Goya painting, before squaring the pose into the clean line we know now. Five hundred cardboard placards carried it on that first march instead, and because Holtom never trademarked it, nothing stopped it from crossing an ocean and becoming something much bigger than the march it was drawn for. The very first badges were pottery: Eric Austen of the Kensington branch of CND made them out of white clay with the symbol painted on in black, and handed them out with a note explaining why — if a nuclear war ever came, fired pottery would be among the very few things people had made that would survive it. Pretty grim reasoning for a lapel badge, but it tells you exactly what those marchers were afraid of.

🕊️ A Dove Older Than Any War

The two doves are drawing on something a lot older than Holtom's circle. The image goes back to Noah's Ark, where a dove returning with an olive leaf in its beak was the first sign the floodwaters were receding — a bird, a branch, a message that it's over now. Pablo Picasso gave the image a fresh jolt in 1949 with his lithograph "La Colombe" for the World Peace Congress in Paris, and from there it traveled the globe as shorthand for the peace movement, right through to buttons of this design, where the ancient dove and the newer circle-and-crossbar share the same two inches of tin.

🎓 How the Symbol Crossed the Ocean

The peace symbol got its first real American exposure in 1958, when pacifist Albert Bigelow sailed a small boat flying a CND banner toward a Pacific nuclear test site. But it was a University of Chicago student, Philip Altbach, who put it on buttons here — he traveled to England, saw CND's own buttons, brought a batch home, and by his own account he and his fellow students "started printing our own buttons and handing them out." The group he took it to was brand new itself. Its founder, Ken Calkins, had had his pelvis fractured when he sat down in front of a truck at a pacifist protest at the first Atlas missile site, 20 miles northwest of Cheyenne, Wyoming; back in Chicago he became educational director for the local American Friends Service Committee and ran peace seminars in the city's high schools, and by the spring of 1959 that network of students had become the Student Peace Union, the SPU. I love this part: the SPU's own national office files, now in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, still hold a folder on the "production of peace buttons." Altbach persuaded the Student Peace Union to adopt the symbol, and between 1960 and 1964 the SPU sold thousands of these buttons on college campuses nationwide, with membership peaking around 3,500 in 1962 before the group dissolved in the spring of 1964. Chicago already knew its way around a button, too — Parisian Novelty was founded there in 1898 and grew into a leading maker of button parts and button-making machinery, and Green Duck, founded there in 1906, spent some sixty years as one of the country's leading campaign-button makers. Buttons like this were produced fast, local and anonymous, by people who cared a lot more about getting a message onto a jacket than about signing their work.

📣 "Peace Now"

By the height of the Vietnam War, "Peace Now" was one of the most repeated phrases in the American protest vocabulary — blunt and impossible to misread from across a street. Folding the symbol into the word instead of printing it alongside was a small, sharp piece of design: the slogan and the symbol land on the eye in the same instant. It's part of a family of blunt Vietnam-era buttons traded hand to hand at the same marches and campus tables — moratorium calls, home-the-troops demands, and a lot less polite messages aimed at Hanoi and Washington alike.

✨ New Old Stock

It's New Old Stock: set aside at the time rather than pinned to a jacket, so the cream stays clean and the blue stays deep instead of fading the way decades on a coat collar would have done.