Flower Power
On October 21, 1967, 75,000 anti-war protesters surrounded the Pentagon in Washington D.C.. On that day, Bowen organized 200 lbs. of daisies, purchased by his New York friend Peggy Hitchcock, (the wife of Walter Bowart), to be dropped from a light aircraft onto the Pentagon, but the FBI heard of the plan and seized the aircraft, so the flowers were distributed to the protesters as the Military Police protected the Pentagon from the massive anti Vietnam War demonstration. The daisies, brought to the front lines of the tense confrontation by Bowen and others, were taken by the demonstrators and put into the nearest holder that symbolically communicated their anti-war sentiment. The iconic photograph "Flower Power", taken by photojournalist Bernie Boston, of the daisies being put into the bayoneted gun barrels of the soldiers by the unarmed anti-war demonstrators, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. The photograph "flower power" is listed as #30 amongst the top 100 wartime photographs and the idealism of flower power remains as an anti-war symbol.
Read more about this topic: Michael Bowen (artist)
Famous quotes containing the words flower and/or power:
“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The British are a self-distrustful, diffident people, agreeing with alacrity that they are neither successful nor clever, and only modestly claiming that they have a keener sense of humour, more robust common sense, and greater staying power as a nation than all the rest of the world put together.”
—Quoted in Fourth Leaders from the Times (1950)