A Piece of Our Time

By Richard Lacayo

Just like Madonna and Michelle Pfeiffer, the peace symbol is turning 50 this year. When an icon turns that age, you can start making some judgments about whether it has what it takes to endure. Madonna? Hanging in there. Pfeiffer? We'll see. But the peace symbol--it's 50 years young and going strong.

By now, the little sectioned circle has become so familiar, it feels as if it had no genesis, that it just emerged out of a collective folk culture, like the Star of David or a nursery rhyme. But in fact it can be traced to a single inventor, Gerald Holtom, whose story is woven into two new histories, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol by Ken Kolsbun with Michael S. Sweeney (National Geographic; 175 pages) and Peace: 50 Years of Protest by Barry Miles (Reader's Digest; 256 pages).

Holtom was a London textile designer who had been a conscientious objector during World War II. By 1958, as Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were well into the nuclear arms race, a grass-roots movement to "Ban the Bomb" was gathering force in the United Kingdom. Early that year, a fledgling disarmament group called the Direct Action Campaign (DAC) started to put together what would be Britain's first major demonstration against nuclear weapons. The plan was for a 52-mile (84 km) march from London to the town of Aldermaston, home to an A-bomb research center.

Enter Holtom, who brought to the DAC his design for a symbol that marchers could carry on banners and signs. He had arrived at the image by combining the semaphore signals for the letters N, for nuclear, and D, for disarmament. The first is a figure with arms held downward and out from both sides; the second, a figure holding one arm above its head while the other points to the ground.

The symbol was simple--a few straight lines inside a circle. But like a Chinese character, its form was suggestive. The straight lines hinted at the human body. The circle brought to mind Planet Earth. (It also looked a bit like the Mercedes-Benz logo, which has led to some confusion over the years.) Importantly, anybody could draw it.

Before long, millions of people did. It debuted on April 4 in London's Trafalgar Square, the assembly point for the four-day march. Over the next few days, it appeared in countless newspaper photos and TV reports. Bayard Rustin, an American protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who took part in the march, brought the symbol home to a growing civil rights movement dedicated to nonviolence. When the Vietnam War started getting out of hand, protesters discovered they had a ready-made icon to signal their feelings.

There were people who didn't like the symbol any better than they liked the movements it represented. They saw it as an inverted broken cross or "the footprint of the American chicken." But it kept spreading through the culture. Like the Christian cross, which has served the purposes of soup kitchens and Crusaders, the Sisters of Mercy and the Ku Klux Klan, it was adaptable. Over time, it evolved from its narrow association with nuclear disarmament into an insignia for countercultures of all kinds. Hippies made it a sort of all-purpose symbol of peacefulness. The environmental group Greenpeace, the militant wing of flower power, adopted it for its eco-defense campaigns.

And inevitably, the market found it. By the late 1960s, peace symbols were appearing on coffee mugs, miniskirts and ponchos and were dangling from chains around the necks of guys you would expect to see at the Playboy mansion. Duplicated endlessly as a hip fashion accessory, it threatened to devolve into a meaningless emblem of benign and groovy sentiment. It started looking corny, a kind of smiley face before there were smiley faces.

But events have conspired to keep giving the peace symbol fresh life. The arms race rumbles along, wars keep happening, and it continually comes back into circulation as, well, a peace symbol. The war in Iraq has created all kinds of opportunities for it at rallies and demonstrations. If it's true, as John McCain has suggested, that the U.S. may have to remain in Iraq for 100 years, then the peace symbol probably has a long life ahead of it.

Sign of the Times For a photographic history of the peace symbol, go to time.com/peace