Fault Lines - A peace of history turns 50 years old

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POSTED May 1, 10:25 PM

It is so ubiquitous and synonymous with San Francisco that you’d think the hippies harvested it here, but the peace symbol was actually born in a land far, far away. Yet there should be joy here in the epicenter of political correctness, for the universal sign of making love — not that other thing — is 50 years old this year.

Shouldn’t we throw it a party somewhere in Golden Gate Park?

For peace-history buffs, the inventor of the international peace sign was Gerald Holtom, a London textile designer who was a conscientious objector during World War II. He became part of a group called the Direct Action Campaign opposed to the nuclear-arms buildup in the late 1950s.

Holtom decided on an image that combined the semaphore symbols for the letters N and D (nuclear and disarmament). It wasn’t an immediate hit — some people thought it looked like something of an inverted cross. But it gained popularity in the ’60s antiwar movement and became synonymous with Flower Children and other counterculture contributions from our very backyard.

So ends our peace fact-gathering mission for the day. But it also serves as a reminder of how crass commercialism — the kind most Starbucks-hating San Franciscans stridently object to — has become an inextricable partner of the peace symbol, as anyone who visits Haight Street could readily observe.

George Bush-bashers take note — he’s guaranteed the symbol a long shelf life.