On October 21, 1967, an estimated 100,000 Americans opposed to the war in Vietnam converged on Washington, D.C., for what organizers billed as the largest antiwar demonstration in the city’s history. The group first rallied at the Lincoln Memorial then a large contingent marched to the Pentagon in nearby Arlington, Virginia. In the sea of people that day were two men who—as photographer and subject—would create one of the most iconic photographs of the era, known today as “Flower Power.”
The man behind the camera was Bernie Boston, a 34-year-old photographer for the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper. His subject is generally believed to have been George Edgerly Harris III, a young New York theater actor who’d turned 18 a month earlier.
In the photo, Harris is seen inserting a carnation into the barrel of a gun held by one of the helmeted military policemen who formed a perimeter around the building. Boston, who had taken a position on a wall near an entrance to the area, captured the scene with what was most likely a 35mm Leica, his camera of choice.
7 Iconic Photos From the Vietnam War Era
Gifted photographers and reporters captured images that conveyed the agony and violence of the Vietnam war, and the deep divisions it drove in American society.
Gifted photographers and reporters captured images that conveyed the agony and violence of the Vietnam war, and the deep divisions it drove in American society.
The Making of an Iconic Photograph
The photo appeared the next day in the Star, with the caption, “A demonstrator gingerly inserts pink carnations into rifles of troops guarding the Pentagon.” It ran not on the front page but on page 10. “The editor didn’t see the importance of the picture,” Boston later told an interviewer. After he entered it in contests, however, it became an award winner, finishing as runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in photography, according to the White House News Photographers Association. The image came to symbolize the era’s clash between military force and nonviolent protest, becoming one of the defining photographs of the Vietnam War era.
The photograph eventually became known as “Flower Power,” a phrase popularized in the late '60s and usually credited to the poet Allen Ginsberg. In a 1965 essay, he suggested that peace marchers in Berkeley, California, bring flowers to protests “to present to Hell’s Angels, police, politicians and press and spectators whenever needed.” (The Hell’s Angels had vowed to beat up antiwar protesters.) Before long, the practice evolved to include placing flowers into soldiers’ guns.
The March on the Pentagon marked a watershed for the antiwar movement, drawing one of the largest demonstrations against the Vietnam War to date and producing some of the conflict’s most enduring images. Photographers that day captured any number of young men and women placing flowers in gun barrels. At least one other photographer even shot one of Harris. But it was Boston’s image that people remember today.
Although “Flower Power” captures just a moment in time, it has inspired generations of antiwar activists around the world, notes Phoebe Farris, professor emerita at Purdue University and curator of the recent exhibit “Bernard (Bernie) Boston Retrospective: A Photojournalist, Social Justice Advocate, and Family Man” at Virginia’s McLean Project for the Arts. “Pacifists admire the courage of an unarmed man to confront an armed soldier—and the soldiers’ decision not to shoot him—using this peaceful confrontation as proof that sometimes nonviolence can be politically effective,” she says.
