Neal Ulevich/AP Photo
University of Wisconsin students stage a protest against campus job recruiting and against the war in Vietnam, October 1967.
The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution
By David Paul Kuhn
Oxford University Press
On May 8, 1970, hundreds of construction workers from throughout Manhattan converged on Federal Hall near Wall Street and bloodied anti–Vietnam War activists who had gathered to protest President Nixon’s recent expansion of the war into Cambodia and the killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. According to a later NYPD report of events of that day—no objective independent review was ever conducted—more than 100 people were wounded. Faces were smashed, bones were broken, and several students were knocked unconscious.
In his exhaustive account of the so-called “Hardhat Riot”—the backdrop, the events of that day, and the political and symbolic aftermath—David Paul Kuhn outlines how the cultural, political, and economic fissures of that time have reverberated to the present. If the Democratic Party has lost blue-collar whites as a substantial part of its electoral base, a group that he describes as “on the losing side of the postindustrial age,” Kuhn wants to explain why.
For anyone familiar with the broad outlines of late-1960s anti-war activism, Kuhn’s portrait, at least of the infantile and more provocative part of the movement, will be familiar. The early chapters cover “The Revolutionaries of Grand Central and Columbia” and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, painting a picture of an upper-middle-class counterculture and student revolt that seemed designed both to attract media attention and alienate much of the public.
In the spring of 1968, Students for a Democratic Society activists stormed the barricades of Columbia University, “liberating” the president’s office as well as several other buildings. In one of the occupied halls, students wrote, “Lenin Won, Fidel Won, We Will Win,” thereby increasing the likelihood that Nixon would win. Students, Kuhn writes, shouted that the cops were “pigs,” and “heightened the contradictions” by hurling obscenities at the policemen about the sexual proclivities of their mothers and daughters. When the police eventually hauled the students from the buildings, they gave as good as they got, and then some—injuring many of the student occupiers.
Since Nixon’s day, Republicans, with the Democrats’ help or indifference, have managed to both destroy unions and pick up many of their former members’ votes as well, one of the most consequential and calamitous political developments of the past 50 years.
At the Democratic Convention in August of 1968 in Chicago, SDS leader Tom Hayden wanted to “arouse the sleeping dogs on the Right,” and by doing so, to polarize the country sharply enough to bring an end to the war. While the official report on the violence that was broadcast into TV viewers’ homes each night of the convention was that a “police riot” (which included cops’ attacks on passersby and journalists who had nothing to do with the demonstrations) had taken place, polling shortly thereafter indicated that a majority of Americans blamed the demonstrators, not the police. In Kuhn’s words, many Americans “saw privileged kids venting rage on working-class guys trying to maintain order.”
The Hardhat Riot is not just about an event but about the evolution of New York as well. Kuhn points out that in the ’60s, one million whites left New York, and in the two decades after 1950, New York’s nonwhite population increased from 13 percent to 37 percent. As middle-class New Yorkers left, they were replaced by the poor. According to Kuhn, the white middle class “grumbled” as “government policy focused down and cultural politics focused up.”
Kuhn also traces the fortunes of John Lindsay, the Republican blue blood first elected as mayor in 1965, initially a darling of the media who, Kuhn writes, were “suckers for his flair,” his Kennedyesque good looks, and his “bravery” on civil rights. Lindsay had driven to Harlem on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and, according to the Boston Globe, his actions that night were a “key factor in preventing disturbances,” a narrative that “veered into the white savior fairy tale,” by Kuhn’s estimation.
After harboring Republican vice-presidential ambitions in 1968, by 1969 Lindsay had embraced the anti-war movement, which by then had won the backing of most mainstream Democrats. New York was beset by a series of municipal strikes and the perception that the city was crime-ridden and in decline. Lindsay lost the Republican nomination for mayor and had to run as the New York Liberal Party candidate. He eventually bested City Comptroller Mario Procaccino, who coined the term “limousine liberal” to describe Lindsay and his supporters’ political ethos. The only predominantly white district Lindsay won outside of Manhattan was upscale Brooklyn Heights.
Channeling the sentiments of the white blue-collar ethnics who saw Lindsay as out of touch, Kuhn writes that “the ‘little guy’ was told [by the “new liberal culture”] he was now a ‘big man’ because he was male, doubly so because he was white. Thus, the disempowered were told they really had power.”
The backdrop of so much of the turmoil during the period was, of course, the war. Kuhn reminds readers that Vietnam was a working-class war, fought by poor and blue-collar boys. White graduates from college made up only 7 percent of those who fought in Vietnam.
While those from wealthier or professional backgrounds received college or job deferments, working-class parents realized that their children were dying in their place, a situation that writer James Fallows described as the “most brutal form of class discrimination.” Kuhn lists the future political leaders who avoided combat by “working the system”: Dick Cheney (student deferment), Bill Clinton (student and enrollment in but never joining ROTC), Newt Gingrich (student), Joe Biden (student), Donald Trump (medical, bone spurs), Pat Buchanan (medical for arthritis), Bernie Sanders (conscientious objector status), Rudy Giuliani (student and occupation), Mitt Romney (student and missionary), Michael Bloomberg (student and flat feet). George W. Bush joined an Air National Guard unit, though whether he ever showed up remains in dispute.
The upshot is that by the time of the anti-war demonstrations after Kent State, the hardhats were ready to release their pent-up rage against the “brats,” “hippies,” “commies,” and “privileged” kids who were closing down colleges that they never had a chance to attend and who regarded them as racist, reactionary, and stupid. The fact that Lindsay had ordered City Hall to lower the flag to half-staff and closed the public schools to honor the Kent State victims fueled their anger.
Kuhn goes into great detail about what happened on “Bloody Friday,” as it came to be called, following the turmoil from Federal Hall, where the main conflict took place, to the invasion of Pace College by workers looking to attack its (largely working-class) students, to the successful attempt by hardhats to have the flag at City Hall raised to full-staff. Joe Kelly, an elevator constructor at the Twin Towers who was at City Hall, remarked with pride, “If I live to be one hundred, I don’t think I’ll ever see anything quite like that again.” Thomas Owens, a steamfitter, added, “This is the silent majority, but they are not silent anymore.”
Despite numerous later assertions that the hardhat attacks were planned or orchestrated by third parties, Kuhn concludes that “the preponderance of evidence, by a large length, undercut the idea of larger conspiracies.” He describes the events at Federal Hall as a “spontaneous outbreak” of “authentic rage” against the protesters for lowering and desecrating the flag.
Kuhn quotes Susan Harmon, a child care worker who had witnessed the riots and clashed with hardhats, who concluded that central to the conflict was a “class thing.” “They [hardhats] believe passionately that the students are destroying the country.”
But what was this “class thing”? Richard Nixon thought he knew.
The blue-collar riots made national news. While left-wing magazines and mainstream newspapers portrayed hardhats as fascistic thugs—The New York Times ran a cartoon picturing a fat hardhat with a tiny head—Nixon aide Chuck Colson encouraged Nixon to meet with blue-collar leaders. Within two weeks, Nixon hosted two dozen labor leaders at the White House, including Peter Brennan, head of the New York Building Trades. Nixon, never ideologically supportive of labor unions, flattered them as “people from middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.” Nixon later appointed Brennan as his secretary of labor.
According to historian Jefferson Cowie, whose book Stayin’ Alive covers some of the same time period as The Hardhat Riot, Nixon, who had thought a lot about a potential political realignment, not only sought to cement his hold on the white South but also saw an opening for Republicans to permanently poach Northern blue-collar whites from Democrats—Catholics, Poles, Italians, Irish—by appealing to patriotism and cultural, racial, and social issues. Richard Nixon “may have been one of the most class aware presidents of the postwar era,” Cowie writes, pointing out, however, that Nixon saw the economic interests of working-class voters as secondary to their values, which he regarded as the key to their political alliances. It was the “cultural formation” of workers’ interests that Nixon and his vice president and attack dog Spiro Agnew exploited politically by knitting together fears of racial and political disorder, and a desire to return to a more “orderly” world.
But in the early 1970s, millions of workers also took their material interests seriously, engaging in the biggest strike wave since the massive strike stoppages of 1946. Over two million workers went on strike in 1970 alone.
By the 1972 election, Nixon’s racial, cultural, and law-and-order strategy had worked. He received 60 percent of the white union-member vote; one of his commercials had shown a hardhat atop a steel girder with the tagline “Democrats For Nixon.” Kuhn points out that between his loss to John Kennedy in 1960 and his 1972 landslide defeat of McGovern, nearly all of Nixon’s electoral gains came from blue-collar whites. Lindsay, who by 1972 had become a Democrat, ran in the presidential primary but dropped out after miserable early results.
One of the strengths of The Hardhat Riot is that Kuhn is aware that the blue-collar attitude to the war during these years was complex. Despite their depiction as “warmongers,” working-class whites as a whole were not hawks on the war and were not more pro-war than more-affluent whites. Kuhn cites polling that indicated that poor and blue-collar whites were more strongly in favor of congressionally mandated troop withdrawal in 1971 than upper-class whites.
And as sociologist Penny Lewis points out in her book Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, while the anti-war movement grew out of middle-class milieus, as the war dragged on, opposition from the blue-collar segments—those actually fighting the war—increased. In Los Angeles, the working-class Chicano Moratorium (the working class was obviously not exclusively white and male, even though the imagery and discourse of the time often made it seem so), Lewis writes, “framed their opposition to the war in class-based experiences of the draft and the fighting itself.”
Kuhn has an irritating tendency toward caricature and condescension when describing student anti-war protesters. Describing the students at Federal Hall, he writes they were “the usual pale college kids. A lot of glasses and good listeners. Girls with center-parted long locks and tawny lips. Boys with adolescent beards and severe stares.” Kuhn portrays young people protesting in front of the White House as “pretty boys with their hair near their small shoulders. The psychedelic hirsute boys, incensey, a blend of Rasputin and Jesus … The disparate black kids, the natural hair, the tapered Panther cool. The fastidious suburban white kids imitating Hindu mystics.”
Indeed, he tends to see the New Left and college agitators as the hardhats saw them: spoiled, self-serving, and politically clueless. It’s New York’s “regular” white working guys who generally have his sympathy, burdened by economic challenges and crime but loyal to country and flag.
While Kuhn touches on the more mainstream anti-war activism of the October 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which mobilized millions of people throughout the country in both red and blue states, he focuses his attention—as the contemporary media did—on the anti-war provocateurs. If 5,000 people are protesting peacefully and three are burning a flag, you can guess where the cameras will turn.
If you want a more rounded appreciation of how the thousands of New Left activists contributed to ending the war and carried their political commitments into serious and productive careers in the labor movement, community organizing, or academia, you won’t find it here.
But while Kuhn’s disdain toward many of the protesters is apparent, his summary of how the hardhats betrayed their own codes of honor is harsh but fair.
“It was lawlessness from those who sought law and order,” he concludes. “Many kicked men when they were down. Scores did not ‘pick a fair fight.’ They sought to demonstrate patriotism by beating their countrymen bloody.”
TODAY, IF YOU walk past a construction site in New York, you will immediately notice that the stereotype of the white male construction worker is a thing of the past. A 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that minorities account for over 55 percent of the union construction workers in New York. The same transformation is occurring across the country. The building trades in California are increasingly Latino.
The smartest construction unions realized long ago that exploited immigrants make good union members. If there is violence occurring in the construction industry today, it would not be union workers attacking “left-wing” protesters, but more likely conflict with the non-union contractors who threaten their jobs and livelihood.
Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 1989 book Fear of Falling that after the Hardhat Riot, “hard-hat replaced redneck as the epithet for a lower-class bigot” in the lexicon of the mainstream media. If the stereotype of the “white male hardhat” survives today, it’s a result of lazy reporting or the inability to see what is obvious.
Toward the end of The Hardhat Riot, Kuhn quotes current AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer about how the Democratic Party shifted away from unions as critical political partners and embraced other sectors of society. “As fewer workers were in unions to mediate all of this, the Republicans discovered and became more skilled at exploiting cultural issues,” Podhorzer observes.
One of the ironies that emerges out of The Hardhat Riot is that it was Republicans—Nixon and his top aides—who realized what “mediation” of “all this” meant. Republicans knew that unions generally held blue-collar workers in alliance with the Democratic Party to the extent that Democrats delivered on economic issues that were crucial to them—raising wages, improving health care, protecting pensions, building infrastructure, and being tough on trade. At some point, the Democrats stopped delivering. At the end of the 20th century, Kuhn writes, “elites on all sides” applauded China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which effectively ended “the livelihoods of several million.” Those millions were blue-collar workers.
Since Nixon’s day, Republicans, with the Democrats’ help or indifference, have managed to both destroy unions and pick up many of their former members’ votes as well, one of the most consequential and calamitous political developments of the past 50 years.
Like Nixon before him, Donald Trump understands that rage and anger can be both a source of pleasure and a political wedge. Kuhn has shown how potent it was in the period he covers. As Trump doubles down on law and order and racial fear, we need the “mediating” and economic power of unions more than ever.
