Make love, not war

Make love, not war is an anti-war slogan commonly associated with the American counterculture of the 1960s. It was used primarily by those who were opposed to the Vietnam War, but has been invoked in other anti-war contexts since. The "make love" part of the slogan often referred to the practice of free love that was growing among the American youth who denounced marriage as a tool for those who supported war and favored the traditional capitalist culture.

The phrase's origins are unclear; Gershon Legman claimed to be the inventor of the phrase, so did American singer Rod McKuen, and some credit artist, social activist, folk figure, and sometime United States Presidential candidate under the Nudist Party on the Hippie 'Love Ticket' Louis Abolafia. Radical activists Penelope and Franklin Rosemont and Tor Faegre helped to popularize the phrase by printing thousands of "Make Love, Not War" buttons at the Solidarity Bookshop in Chicago, Illinois and distributing them at the Mother's Day Peace March in 1965. They were the first to print the slogan. In April 1965, at a Vietnam demonstration in Eugene, Oregon, Diane Newell Meyer, then a senior at the University of Oregon, pinned a handwritten note on her sweater reading "Let's make love, not war", thus marking the beginning of the popularity of this phrase. A picture of Meyer wearing the slogan was printed in the Eugene Register-Guard and then a related article turned up in the New York Times on May 9, 1965.

When the slogan was used in California in 1967, then Governor Ronald Reagan joked to protesters "Those guys [the protesters] look like they can't make either of both".