Vintage 1960s Vietnam War Peace Symbol Pinback Button ✌️ American Flag Design NOS Anti-War Protest Pin

Who Drew the Peace Symbol? ✌️ The man who drew this spent the rest of his life wishing he had drawn it upside down

Size: 1 1/4" across ~ right about a quarter and a bit. New old stock, never worn — these sat in a box instead, which is why the color still reads this strong.

That is my favorite thing about this button. Gerald Holtom drew the mark in the middle of it in February 1958. He was a professional designer, a Royal College of Art man, and a conscientious objector who had spent the war working a Norfolk farm, and he was asked to come up with something for the very first Aldermaston march - Britain's Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War walking out of Trafalgar Square in London on Good Friday 1958, bound for the weapons establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. He gave them this. Then he wished he hadn't — not the idea, the posture. He came to feel the figure with its arms down spoke only of despair when he had wanted to hand the movement hope, so he redrew it with the arms raised, which in semaphore is a U for unilateral disarmament. The story passed down is that he asked for that upside-down version on his own gravestone and never got it. The arms-down one is the one that went around the world, and it became the most recognized protest mark on earth — a strange legacy for a drawing its own author kept trying to take back.

And here is the part that lets this button exist at all: he never copyrighted it. Not once, and on purpose. CND puts it flatly — it has quite deliberately never been copyrighted, nobody has to pay or ask. That single decision is why a mark drawn for one march to one British weapons plant could end up pressed into the Stars and Stripes on a cheap little pin an ocean away inside of a decade. By 1968, with the war in Vietnam at full tilt, most Americans had stopped reading it as nuclear disarmament at all - it was simply the sign of everybody against the war.

📌 What You Get

A round tin pinback, a blue peace symbol laid straight over a red, white and blue flag ground, with a rolled metal rim, a plain gray back shell and one straight wire pin. There's no name on the face; the curl carries a soft printed line in blue. New old stock — these never went out on anybody's lapel.

Look close at the flag, too. There are four stars in that canton and the stripes do not count out to thirteen. Whoever drew it was not doing a flag, they were doing an argument, and they cut it down to the two or three marks your eye needs at ten feet. My pictures seriously don't do it justice — the blue is deeper in the hand than it photographs.

The button format is older than any of this, and it comes from Newark, New Jersey. George B. Adams patented the printed face under a clear cover in 1896 for the Whitehead & Hoag Company, which a printer named Benjamin S. Whitehead and a paper man named Chester R. Hoag had started in Newark in 1892, and William McKinley's campaign that same year put the new buttons on lapels from coast to coast. Old-timers in the novelty trade still talk about Newark's celluloid capital days. Whitehead & Hoag was gone by the time this one was pressed - Bastian Bros. of Rochester, New York bought the company in 1959 - but look at the little brown freckles in the white and you're seeing the paper face sealed under the clear cover, the same way they did it in 1896.

🏬 The same design, and the shop that sold it

This exact design — the four-star canton, the blue ring, the white rim — is known with a curl reading "(c)1967 A Big-Little Store, 1671 Washington St., San Francisco," and that shop wasn't a one-button operation. The same curl imprint shows up on a whole run of 1967 counterculture buttons: "Make Love Not War," "Smoke Grass," "Hippy Spoken Here," a peace dove, a smiley sun. This is one design out of a line a San Francisco novelty shop was cranking out the same year.

☮️ It is not a symbol. It is a man, spelling two letters.

Hold the face up and look at it as a figure rather than a shape. The vertical stroke down the middle is the flag-semaphore signal for the letter D. The two strokes angling down are the letter N. N and D. Nuclear Disarmament, spelled out in the old maritime alphabet sailors used to talk ship to ship without a word between them, and then ringed in a circle.

Holtom said the rest of it out loud himself. He described being in deep despair over the bomb, and drawing himself as a figure with the palms stretched out and down — in the manner, he said, of Goya's peasant standing in front of the firing squad in The Third of May 1808. So there is a Spanish painting from 1814 inside a British semaphore code inside an American flag on a button that cost pennies. That is a lot of freight for something you pin on with one hand.

🗽 Two color codes, arguing with each other

This little disc is carrying two completely separate color systems, and neither one is decoration.

The peace symbol's first colors were church colors. When it went out in public over the Easter weekend of 1958, CND ran five hundred cardboard lollipop signs on sticks — half of them black on white, half white on green — so the march would turn with the calendar, from mourning into Easter, winter into spring, death into life.

The flag's colors were spoken for a long time before that. Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, laid them out in 1782 when he handed over the Great Seal: white for purity and innocence, red for hardiness and valour, and blue — the color of the Chief — for vigilance, perseverance and justice. Written for the Seal, carried over to the flag later, and taught to every kid in the country since.

So sit with what somebody did here. They took a mark a man drew out of his own despair, colored in Easter's death-to-life scheme, and laid it directly across a field that officially stands for valour, vigilance and justice. No slogan. No caption. Just one set of colors put on top of another, which is the whole argument of those years in a circle you could pin on in two seconds.

🎓 How the symbol got here: a freshman with a stack of buttons in his luggage

The symbol has a real, named arrival in this country and it runs straight through a college campus. It first showed up in American news in 1958, when the pacifist Albert Bigelow sailed a small boat flying the CND banner toward a nuclear test in the Pacific. In 1960 a University of Chicago freshman named Philip Altbach traveled to England as a delegate of the Student Peace Union, saw British campaigners handing out buttons carrying the mark, and brought a stack home. He talked the SPU into adopting it. Between 1960 and 1964 that student group sold thousands of these buttons on campuses across the country. For most Americans, those buttons were the first peace sign they ever held in their hands. The story goes, too, that Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr.'s close adviser and the man who would organize the 1963 March on Washington, had marched at Aldermaston and carried the sign home into the civil rights movement.

The Student Peace Union deserves its own paragraph. It was started in the spring of 1959 in Chicago, Illinois, near the University of Chicago campus, by a young activist named Ken Calkins — a man who had already had his pelvis fractured sitting down in front of a truck at the first Atlas missile site twenty miles northwest of Cheyenne, Wyoming. He came back to Chicago as educational director for the local American Friends Service Committee and ran peace seminars in the high schools. His group had about a hundred members at the end of 1959. Fifteen hundred by December 1961. Thirty-five hundred by the end of 1962. The original outfit fell apart in the spring of 1964 in a factional fight, got refounded that fall, and in 1967 merged into the Independent Students' Union. By then the symbol had long since stopped belonging to them and belonged to everybody — exactly as Holtom refusing a copyright had guaranteed it would.

⚛️ A coincidence worth knowing

The Student Peace Union ran its operation out of Hyde Park, on the South Side, next to the University of Chicago. On 2 December 1942, in a squash court under the west stands of old Stagg Field on the northwest corner of that same campus, Enrico Fermi's team brought Chicago Pile-1 critical and got the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The atomic age started on that block.

It doesn't stop there either. Manhattan Project scientists at that same university founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945, and in 1947 the Bulletin gave the world the Doomsday Clock, first set at seven minutes to midnight. And the reactor site itself is marked today by Henry Moore's bronze Nuclear Energy, unveiled at 3:36 in the afternoon on 2 December 1967, twenty-five years to the minute — a rounded form people read as a mushroom cloud, a skull and a helmet all at once, depending where they stand. The Student Peace Union that carried this symbol onto American campuses worked its whole existence in the shadow of the block where the bomb it opposed had been born.

🕯️ The lore worth keeping

• Badges built to outlive the bomb. The very first wearable peace badges were made by Eric Austen of Kensington CND out of white clay with the symbol painted on in black, and they went out with a note explaining that in the event of a nuclear war these fired pottery badges would be among the few human-made things left to survive it. A badge designed to outlast the thing it was protesting. That is the whole movement in one object.
• The upside-down one. Holtom's own preferred version had the arms raised, the semaphore U for unilateral disarmament, and the arms-up sign is his, not a mistake.

Once these are gone, they're gone. I will get yours packed up and out to you quickly, and thank you for letting me keep this stuff from disappearing. ✌️