The internationally recognized symbol for peace (
U+262E ☮ peace symbol in
Unicode) was originally designed for the British nuclear disarmament movement by
Gerald Holtom in 1958.
[49] Holtom, an artist and designer, made it for a march from
Trafalgar Square, London to the
Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at
Aldermaston in England, organised by the
Direct Action Committee to take place in April and supported by the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
[49][50][51][52] Holtom's design, the original of which is housed in the Peace Museum in
Bradford,
England, was adapted by Eric Austen (1922–1999) to ceramic lapel badges.
[53][54]
The symbol is a combination of the
semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D," standing for "nuclear disarmament".
[49] In
semaphore
the letter "N" is formed by a person holding two flags in an inverted
"V," and the letter "D" is formed by holding one flag pointed straight
up and the other pointed straight down.
Superimposing these two signs forms the shape of the centre of the peace symbol.
[49][55][56] Holtom later wrote to
Hugh Brock, editor of
Peace News,
explaining the genesis of his idea in greater depth: "I was in despair.
Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in
despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the
manner of
Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."
[56]
Ken Kolsbun, a correspondent of Holtom's, says that the designer came
to regret the symbolism of despair, as he felt that peace was something
to be celebrated and wanted the symbol to be inverted.
[57]
Eric Austen is said to have "discovered that the 'gesture of despair'
motif had long been associated with 'the death of man', and the circle
with 'the unborn child',"
[53] possibly referring to images in
Rudolf Koch's
The Book of Signs (
Das Zeichenbuch, 1923), an English edition of which had been published in 1955.
[58] Some time later,
Peggy Duff,
general secretary of CND between 1958 and 1967, repeated this
interpretation in an interview with a US newspaper, saying that the
inside of the symbol was a runic symbol for death of man and the circle
the symbol for the unborn child.
[59]
The symbol became the badge of CND and wearing it became a sign of support for the campaign for unilateral
nuclear disarmament
by Britain. An account of CND's early history described it as "a visual
adhesive to bind the [Aldermaston] March and later the whole Campaign
together ... probably the most powerful, memorable and adaptable image
ever designed for a secular cause."
[53]
Embodying the national debate over U.S. involvement in the
Vietnam War, a U.S. soldier in Vietnam wearing amulets, one depicting the peace symbol and another the Buddhist swastika.
Not patented or restricted, the symbol spread beyond CND and was adopted by the wider
anti-war movement. It became known in the United States in 1958 when
Albert Bigelow, a pacifist protester, sailed a small boat fitted with the CND banner into the vicinity of a nuclear test.
[60] Buttons with the symbol were imported into the United States in 1960 by Philip Altbach, a freshman at the
University of Chicago. Altbach had traveled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the
Student Peace Union
(SPU), and on his return he persuaded the SPU to adopt the symbol.
Between 1960 and 1964 they sold thousands of the buttons on college
campuses. By end of the decade it had become a generic peace sign,
[61] crossing national and cultural boundaries.
[62]
In 1970, two US private companies tried to register the peace symbol
as a trade mark: The Intercontinental Shoe Corporation of New York and
Luv, Inc. of Miami. Commissioner of Patents William E. Schuyler Jr, said
that the symbol "could not properly function as a trade mark subject to
registration by the Patent Office".
[63]
Ken Kolsbun in his "biography" of the peace symbol wrote that, "In an
attempt to discredit the burgeoning anti-war movement, the
John Birch Society published an attack on the peace symbol in its June 1970 issue of
American Opinion", calling the symbol "a manifestation of a witch's foot or crow's foot", supposedly icons of the devil in the Middle Ages.
[61]
A national Republican newsletter was reported to have "noted an ominous
similarity to a symbol used by the Nazis in World War II".
[61][64]
taken from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_symbols
