Tell It to Hanoi is a 1969 poster by Young Americans for Freedom of Washington, D.C. It prints four words over a large peace symbol and turns the antiwar movement's emblem toward the North Vietnamese government.
What the sheet prints
A yellow ground, a brush-lettered headline, the familiar circle-and-trident peace symbol drawn large in the middle, and the sponsor's name at the bottom. That is the whole poster. The FRAME record notes that the peace symbol is a drawing and not text, so the transcription is two lines.
TELL IT TO HANOI
Young Americans for Freedom
Who made it
The credit printed on the sheet is Young Americans for Freedom; the record places the group in Washington, D.C. FRAME classes the source as openly identified, meaning the speaker is who the poster says it is. This was private political speech in the first year of the Nixon administration, not a government product, and nothing in the record ties it to federal money.
How to read it
The method is borrowing. By 1969 the peace symbol stood for the movement against the Vietnam War. The poster keeps the symbol and changes the address on the envelope. If you want peace, it says, the people to ask are in Hanoi, not Washington. The archive tags it as semantic hijacking and name-calling: an opponent's emblem is taken over and pointed back at the opponent's cause.
That is a real argument compressed into four words, and it can be weighed. A war has two governments in it, and a demand for peace made only to one of them is a choice about who is to blame. The poster makes that point and offers no more. It does not say what Hanoi should be told, what the United States should do, or what peace would cost.
Read it beside the other side's sheet from the same year, the New Mobilization Committee's "How many more must die?" poster for the November 1969 march. Each group reached for a ready-made symbol, a peace sign in one case and a memorial in the other, to do work that argument would otherwise have to do. Both were free to print, and both were answered in public. That is the part worth keeping.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Tell it to Hanoi, 1969. Issuer: Young Americans for Freedom (Washington, D.C.).
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, item 2015648097, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: U.S. publication without copyright notice; no known restrictions on publication.
