How Protest Pins Taught Me About My Family History

Five years ago, at my grandfather’s 98th birthday party, someone asked him to share the secret of longevity. He still had the energy of a man half his age. “The ultimate thing,” he said to the family and friends gathered around his cake, “is engaging in the social struggle of the moment. If you want to live a fulfilled life, you have to make sure the world survives.” Beside him, my grandmother nodded.

My grandparents had spent their entire lives organizing and agitating for a more equitable, peaceable, livable world. They expected their children and grandchildren to follow suit, to commit to the struggle: sustained political resistance to imperialism, the military-industrial complex, the valuing of profits over people, the degradation of the planet. If our family had a motto, it would have been “Engage in the Struggle!” If we’d had a coat of arms, it would have been the large corkboard on which my grandparents displayed their expansive collection of protest pins. For decades, the corkboard hung in their living room: part art object, part multigenerational collaboration.

Not all the buttons were explicitly political, but most were. The oldest ones dated back to the 1940s. There was a bronze badge from a 1946 student congress in Prague, where my grandfather, then a 25-year-old medical student, helped found the antifascist International Union of Students. There were campaign pins — “Work With Wallace”— from the Progressive Party founder Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential run.

As my uncle, aunt and mother grew up and into political consciousness in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they joined their parents as activists and, therefore, as pin collectors: “Dr. Spock Advises, Stay Out of Drafts,” “Psychedelicize Suburbia,” “Better Schools — Integrated Schools,” “Make Love, Not War.” The buttons rode on the jackets of my relatives to marches, on door-knocking campaigns and picket lines, to sit-ins, teach-ins and sometimes to jail. Most of my family’s demonstration memorabilia — posters, T-shirts, bumper stickers — has been discarded over time, but the pins were small and durable. Dozens were lost, but many more made it onto the board.

As a kid, I loved to stand in front of the corkboard, my eyes skipping across the riot of shapes and colors long before I could read what they said. When I got a little older, I’d practice sounding out the slogans on the pins: “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” “Smoking stinks,” “Listen to women for a change,” “Test peace, not nuclear weapons.”

Still, throughout my childhood, many of the pins remained cyphers to me, their acronyms and references obscure. I’d have to ask my relatives: What did “Nixon 49 | America 1” mean? (Richard Nixon had won the 1972 presidential election in a landslide, with only a single state — our own Massachusetts — going for George McGovern.) Why were we supposed to boycott General Electric? (The company produced nuclear weapons.) What did ABM stand for? (Antiballistic missiles; we wanted to ban them.)