Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Peace Sign

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

The peace sign is one of the most globally recognized symbols around today, but it’s only a few decades old. And it wasn’t the hippies who created it, it was a group of Brits dedicated to nuclear disarmament in the 50s.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit, this means it's short stuff. Let's go. Yeah, we're talking about the peace sign today. This was put together by a guy named Josh Clark. No, this is from Jessalyn Shields at How Stuff Works.

That's right. I was just kidding around. Oh, okay. Or actually, I was serious, but as I was saying it, I noticed I was wrong. Wow, this has gotten confusing already. I tried to play it off. Stop laughing. But we're talking, oh, that's right. We're talking about the peace sign, the very familiar circle with the one vertical line

straight down the center and then the two lines branching off at 45 degree angles. The peace sign, everybody, come on. You never know. I mean it's everywhere, it's been everywhere. And weirdly Chuck, it's not that old actually, which I guess isn't that weird. I think it's actually weird that it's older than I thought it was, how about that?

Okay. All right, let's get into it. Let's get into it because it didn't start out when the gentleman who created it, one Gerald Holtham, he didn't say, hey, this is a peace sign, everybody. He was a British artist. He wouldn't have said it like that anyway. He would have had an accent. And he was an activist and he was a conscientious objector of World War II. And it was a time in the 1950s when he was doodling around when people were worried. This is post-World War II and the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

And the, you know, sort of peaceniks of the world were like, hey, this cannot stand, man. We don't want anyone to do this ever again. And so some groups started forming to try and counter that. Yes, specifically there was a group called the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, a group of pacifists at the time. This is the late 50s. This is pre-hippie, but these people definitely

prefigured the hippies who were soon to come. But they were legitimately worried about a world where not just one, but two, and then now three at the time nations had nuclear weapons that they were stockpiling and they ended up co-founding with some other groups the campaign for nuclear disarmament that just basically said let's just get rid of these things it was you thought it was a good idea you tried it it turned out to be a horrific idea let's stop doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on this

and let's just get rid of them all together. That's right. That's a group that's still around today, which is pretty great. And one of the first big things they did was organize a march in London from Trafalgar Square about 52 miles, or in this case, 83 clicks away to Aldermaston where they had a facility that was producing nuclear material. And Holtem said, you know what, everybody, we need a logo. They did. I guess he probably sounded a little bit like that, like the sheriff of Nottingham.

That's very kind of you. So he came up with this piece sign for the event, for that march. And I've seen two different competing explanations of that design, and I don't know if it was just coincidence or what, but he said later on in a letter to somebody, the artist himself, David or Gerald Holton said that it was meant to be a kind of stylized minimalist version of a person in despair standing there with their arms out to their sides downward and their palms facing out.

And he says like in the manner of a Spanish peasant being executed by a firing squad in a Goya painting. There's a very famous Goya painting of a peasant being executed by a French firing squad, but he has his hands up in the air. He doesn't have them downward. So I don't know what Gerald Holton was talking about. The one that makes way more sense is since he was creating this for the campaign for nuclear disarmament, it was actually also called the CND logo. It's a semaphore. It's a combination of semaphores that stand for N and D.

That's right. A semaphore is basically an alphabet that you use flags, and this is before you could communicate via short distance know, short distance radio, like you see people out on the tarmac. They're waving those flags around and they're not just saying like, over here, over there. You can actually spell things out by using those. They're spelling out over here, over there. That's exactly right. Yeah, but that's what they're doing.

It's a way of communicating over a long range where you can't hear somebody. Yeah, so the N, which stood for nuclear, is two lines that basically come apart at a 45 degree angle away from the guy holding or the person holding the semaphores. So they're standing there straight as an arrow with their arms out to their sides,

downward, holding the flags. That's N. You're spelling an N if you do that. Right. If you want to do a D, you hold one flag straight up in the air, one flag down, maybe throw your head back, all a flash dance, just for a little extra touch. And you're spelling a D for disarmament. So if you put that in a circle, what you have friends is the peace sign aka the campaign for nuclear

disarmament logo. And that that could be coincidence is that what we're saying here? It's not possible it's coincidence. Okay so what are you saying then that Holtham was just... I don't know if he was misquoted, if he'd forgotten. I just don't understand the Goya thing, because it doesn't even show up in a Goya painting. Yeah. I just looked up the painting. He's definitely got his arms up. Yeah.

There's no mistaking it. I mean, maybe if you turned him upside down, but no. So they made these badges out of white clay that they had baked and the message was basically if there was a nuclear war these badges would be one of the few things left behind that would survive. You know, that's fine. But the symbol I think was enough. It was very simple. It was very easy to reproduce. And very key, before we take the break, we will mention that Holtam did not copyright this thing because he wanted it spread far and wide and that's exactly what happened.

Yeah. I was going to suggest we left it as a cliffhanger whether he copyrighted it or not, but I think you made the right decision. All right. Then let's say this. Did he copyright it? Let's find out after the break. ["Stuff You Should Know"] Hello, acclaimed comics writer

and notorious Scott Summers hater, Rosie Knight. Well, hello, Emmy-winning podcaster and totally unbiased Targaryen royal supporter Jason Concepcion. Rosie, somehow the X-Ray Vision podcast has returned. It feels so good. It does. And like always, we'll be here every week

covering the wide world of TV, movies, comics, and geek culture. That's right. We'll be talking about Batman, heroes of that stature, and of course, we'll be inviting our friends in the industry to come geek out with us and share stories. We'll hear from TV writers, actors, comics, creators, pop culture critics, and more. Nothing is off the table because geek culture is pop culture, and we can't wait to share our love of it all with you every single week.

Listen to X-Ray Vision on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Perez Hilton from the Perez Hilton podcast, keeping you in the know. Here's a bit of our show. Ellen DeGeneres was in Los Angeles doing standup and she addressed the controversy. She says that amidst the toxic workplace scandal that she became quote, the most hated person in America. All right, talk about exaggerating, please Ellen. Well, I've always been team Ellen. Me too.

Well, now you weren't. That's not true. You were like taking the side of those cry babies that worked for her because she told them they were terrible at their job because they probably were. Are Taylor and Travis's personalities too different to be compatible in the long term? And you said, oh, they've got similar families and this and that. I'm like, yeah, I get it. Opposites attract to a point. If you're too different, it's not going to work.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Listen to the Perez Hilton podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. So we said that these pacifists that were into nuclear disarmament in the late 50s prefigured the hippies and they definitely didn't. What's interesting is the peace symbol is a direct connection between those two groups because, oh we didn't say, Gerald Holtsam did not copyright his creation. It was free for anybody to use. And he did that on purpose.

That was a very deliberate thing for him to do. Because at first he was spreading this message for nuclear disarmament, but as the hippies kind of adopted it and took on more and more other stuff that they wanted to see changed for the better. The peace sign kind of morphed and evolved from a symbol that everybody recognized, meaning nuclear disarmament, to one that meant just peace in general. A whole catch-all is what it became. It expanded. That's right. And like we've said many times already, he didn't copyright this thing, so it was very easy to

distribute without having to worry about, you know, fear of legal repercussions or paying somebody for its use. So, all of a sudden it was, you know, it was all over the place. And just became ubiquitous and tied to this idea of peace, which, you know, peace and anti-nuclear war is not the biggest leap. But it was definitely not the peace sign until Vietnam came around. Yeah. It's also kind of expanded to be a symbol for the struggle to be recognized and treated equally like women's rights movements, environmental movements, the apartheid, anti-apartheid movement, all adopted the peace symbol.

The ruling party of South Africa tried to ban it, in fact. And that did not take. And Gerald Holton, for his part, he wanted the peace symbol on his headstone. And he didn't get it. I don't know why, I just spoiled spoiled that but it seems weird to me. Like if you say I want something on this on my headstone there are very few cases where I think people should be like no we're not going to put that on the headstone. But he wanted an inverted

peace symbol in the manner of a Goya peasant being executed. Exactly. He was like, instead of hands down, it should be up, like symbolizing growth and like the tree of life where mankind lives. And I guess whoever was in charge of his funeral said, hmm, nah. Right. I'm sick of that stupid symbol. Very strange. There's one other thing we've got to throw in,

and that's the Mercedes-Benz logo. Yeah, I mean, you can't go to an Atlanta Falcons football game without seeing that peace sign there on the stadium. Right? Yeah, I kind of wondered about this, but obviously I didn't put too much thought into it because I knew that the Mercedes-Benz company had been around long before the 1950s, and that

was the case. It was first. It was. It was actually the Daimler brothers adopted it as a logo. They adapted it from a postcard their father had sent them, and their home had been marked on the postcard with a three-pointed blue star. They're like, let's make that our logo, which is sweet and wholesome until you realize what the three points of the star stand for, the company's dominance of products for use on land, sea, and air, which is not exactly peace symbolish, so it's not at all

related. That's right. Chuck said that's right. I'm out of stuff to talk about, so short stuff's out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.