Vintage 1960s Vietnam War Pinback Button 🎖️ "Tell It to Hanoi" Pro-War Political Slogan Pin

Who Said Tell It to Hanoi? 🎖️ Tell It to Hanoi: The Button From the Other Side of the Vietnam Argument

Size: 1 3/4"

On 7 December 1969, a few weeks after the biggest antiwar marches the country had ever seen, Young Americans for Freedom and the Veterans of Foreign Wars gathered on Boston Common for a demonstration of their own. They called it a "Tell it to Hanoi" demonstration, and they burned a North Vietnamese flag. The photographs survive in a university archive. The memory mostly does not: the Vietnam years are remembered through the peace sign, and the Americans who answered the marchers with four words of their own have largely dropped out of the story. This cream tin button carries those four words — TELL IT TO HANOI. New old stock.

📌 The Button

The face is a cream ground printed in navy: TELL arched across the top, a small IT TO stacked in the center, and HANOI in big letters arched across the bottom. There is no picture, no flag and no maker's name on the front. On the back, the cream printing wraps over the rolled rim, edged with a thin dark ring, around a bare metal back with a long straight pin across it. One photograph shows it together with a blue TO HELL WITH HANOI button and a large white peace-symbol button; this listing is the TELL IT TO HANOI button.

🗣️ What the Slogan Meant

"Tell it to Hanoi" was the answer supporters of the American war effort gave to the protesters. The antiwar movement aimed its anger at Washington; the slogan said that anger belonged in Hanoi, the capital of communist North Vietnam, whose government the United States was fighting. It was a rebuttal, not a protest, and it turns the protesters' own complaint back on them in four words. Back then everybody had names for the two camps: hawks and doves. "War hawk" is an old one, it goes back to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote James Madison in 1798, but the doves only showed up beside the hawks in 1962, when the Saturday Evening Post, writing about the Cuban missile crisis, called the side that wanted an air strike the hawks and the side that wanted a blockade the doves. By the Vietnam years the two words were everywhere. It was two Americas sharing the same sidewalks, and this button is pure hawk.

🍂 The Autumn of 1969

The Boston Common rally came at the end of the most intense stretch of the whole argument. On 15 October 1969 the first Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam brought marches against the war in cities and towns across the United States. On 3 November President Richard Nixon went on television to answer it, appealing to "the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" for support. By his own account the White House received more than 50,000 telegrams and 30,000 letters, the biggest response to any presidential speech, and his approval rating jumped from about 50 percent to 81. On 15 November more than 500,000 demonstrators marched against the war in Washington, D.C. Three weeks later, on Boston Common, the other side said its piece: tell it to Hanoi.

🦅 Young Americans for Freedom

The group behind that rally was barely nine years old. In September 1960 about ninety young conservatives met at William F. Buckley Jr.'s childhood home in Sharon, Connecticut, founded Young Americans for Freedom and adopted a statement of principles, the Sharon Statement. YAF grew fast on college campuses, became a major force in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, and had its most successful years, in numbers and influence, in the 1960s. It backed an American victory in Vietnam and took on the antiwar movement directly, challenging groups like Students for a Democratic Society, running "Project Appreciation" for hospitalized veterans, and later campaigning for prisoners of war and the missing.

YAF also put the slogan on a poster, turning the peace symbol into part of its pro-war message. The Library of Congress holds two prints of that "Tell it to Hanoi" poster, a gift from the political poster collector Gary Yanker.

🔘 A Tin Button, Not a Celluloid One

The political button as Americans know it goes back to the 1890s, when Whitehead & Hoag patented a badge with a metal pin anchored in its back in 1896, the year buttons became a fixture of William McKinley's presidential campaign. In 1920 a simpler kind of button reached the campaign trail: the design lithographed straight onto the metal, with no celluloid cover at all. This button is that kind, printed on tin with the color rolled over its edge, the cheap and quick format that let anyone with a slogan put it on a lapel.

📦 Condition

New old stock, shown front and back in the photographs.

🎁 Good For

A Vietnam War collection that wants both sides of the home-front argument; a political button collector filling in the pro-war slogans; a veteran or a veteran's family; a Boston or New England history collection; a teacher's primary-source box on 1969.

🎖️ About these

The supply is finite - nobody's stamping Tell It to Hanoi buttons again, and once these last unworn ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.