Daisy Girl and Visions of Apocalypse

On the night of September 7, 1964, in a brief but unforgettable moment, American TV viewers saw a commercial that would forever change the landscape of political advertising. Titled Peace, Little Girl, but later popularly known as the Daisy Girl ad, it begins with a little girl in a peaceful meadow filled with the sound of chirping birds. As she counts the petals she plucks off a daisy, her tender voice wavers and stumbles over the numbers. Suddenly her count is replaced by an ominous mission-control countdown. She looks up as though acknowledging the interruption. Her image freezes, and as the camera zooms into the pupil of her eye, the countdown reaches zero and a nuclear bomb explodes. As its fire swallows the world, we hear a voice-over: “These are the stakes! To make a world where all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

In this essay, which appears in Comment Magazine, I examine the Daisy Girl ad not just as a landmark in political advertising, but as a work deeply rooted in the visual and thematic structures of apocalyptic religious art. My essay argues that political advertising has drifted from the shared cultural narratives that once encouraged collective moral reckoning, replacing them with a rhetoric of fear that isolates rather than unites. In contrast, apocalyptic art has long held the power to awaken a sense of moral responsibility that encompasses not just individual salvation, but care for all of creation.

"Daisy Girl" Ad

1964