Flower Make Love Not War

Green background with flower in the center with six white petals with yellow center. Yellow text curls around top and bottom, with smaller white flowers on left and right between the two lines of text on the center edge of the button.

The phrase “Make Love, Not War” was a popular protest chant in the 1960s as thousands of Americans marched against United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Origins of the phrase cannot be certain, but research has shown two possibilities: Penelope Rosemont or Diane Newell Meyer. Penelope Rosemont believes the origin lies with her and the buttons her bookshop made for the Chicago Mother’s Day Peace March in May 1965. But a full month earlier, Diane Newell Meyer was a student at the University of Oregon and remembers writing the phrase on an envelope and pinning it to her shirt before going to an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in April 1965. Her picture was taken and posted in a May 9th (1965) article written by Mitchell Levitas for the New York Times Magazine.