Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, Dave's hear and spirit. This means it's short stuff.
Yeah, we're talking about the peace sign today. This was put together by a guy named Josh Clark.
No, this is from Jesselyn 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 is try to play already, stop laughing.
But we're talking. 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 forty five 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 we 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 Holtom. 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 two. And it was a time in the nineteen fifties when he
was doodling around when people were worried. This is post World War two, and the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and the you know, sort of peace micks of the world where 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.
Yeah, specifically, there was a group called the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, a group of pacifists. At the time, this is the late fifties, 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 Campaigned 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 altogether.
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 organized in march in London from Trafalgar Square about fifty two miles or in this case eighty three clicks away to Aldermiston where they had a facility that was producing nuclear material, and Holtam 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.
Okay, that's very kind of you.
So he came up with this this peace 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 artists 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, in their palms facing out, and he says, like in the manner of a Spanish peasant being executed by a firing squad, and a Goya painting is 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 since he was creating this for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was actually also called the CND logo that it was Actually it's it's a semaphore. It's a combination of semaphores. That' SAM for N and D.
That's right, And a semaphore is a is basically an alphabet that you use flags. And this is before you could communicate via you know, short 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 over there. That's exactly right.
Uh yeah, but that's what they're doing. It's it's a it's a way of communicating over a long range where you can't hear somebody.
Yes, So the the N, which for nuclear is two lines that basically come apart at a forty five degree angle away from the guy holding or the person holding the semaphores right right, 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 flashdance just for a little extra touch, and you're spelling a D for disarmament. So if you put that in a circle, but you have friends, is the peace sign aka the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo.
And 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 Holt them 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 paint. 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 the 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 he 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 breakup.
So we said that these pacifists that were into nuclear disarmament in the late fifties 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 Wholsome 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 I kind of morphed and evolved from a symbol that everybody recognize meaning nuclear it's or meant to one that meant just peace in general, a whole catch all is what it became expanded. That's right.
And like we 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 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 part of South Africa tried to ban it in fact, yeah, 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 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 headstone. But he wanted an inverted peace symbol in the in the manner of Agoya peasant being executed exactly.
He was like, instead of hands down, it should be up, like symbolizing growth and like a you know, the tree of life where mankind lives. And I guess whoever was in charge of his funeral said.
Nah, right, I'm sick of that stupid symbol.
Very strange.
There's one other thing we got to throw in, and that's the Mercedes Ben's logo.
Yeah. I mean, you can't go to Atlanta Falk's football game without seeing that peace sign there on the stadium. Yeah, I'd 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 nineteen fifties, 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, see 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.
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