The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution

The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, by David Paul Kuhn (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020)

“Give em hell boys!” exclaimed one patrolman. “We’ll kill them!” warned a construction worker. “Don’t kill him” pleaded a bystander. These are just a few of the more memorable quotes that capture the violence featured in David Paul Kuhn’s extensively researched account of the events of May 8, 1970, otherwise known as the Hardhat Riot. As the nation erupted in antiwar protests that spring, hundreds of construction workers attacked mostly young protestors  in Lower Manhattan. More than a hundred people were injured on “Bloody Friday,” a day that many have concluded was a turning point for the American working class. Kuhn notes that the workers were also joined by white-collar workers on Wall Street. “It was a sudden new alliance, throughout downtown, workingmen and businessmen, cheering, U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Even in the wake of Donald Trump’s recent defeat, the story is a dramatic reminder of the cultural divisions that led to the downfall of the New Deal coalition, and Democrats’ subsequent struggles to fully recapture the white working class. “Two liberalisms collided that day, presaging the long Democratic civil war ahead, and revealing a rupture expanding across the American landscape.” 

The Hardhat Riot provides a valuable reminder of how class contributed to the nation’s culture wars during the Vietnam era, but it also explicitly pushes back against what Kuhn identifies as the “mental gymnastics” of scholars who have dismissed the anxieties of the white working-class of the era as being driven by racism. The author is not afraid to link the past to the present, as it makes a strong case that these anxieties had a profound impact on American politics. The book’s excavation of the New York Police Department’s archives is first-rate, offering up a narrative of the Hardhat Riot that does not gloss over the grotesque worker-led violence nor the NYPD’s inexcusable inaction. Still, Kuhn’s framing of the legacy of the Hardhat Riot oversimplifies the culture wars of the Vietnam era and does little to address the issue of race during the Nixon era. 

The first section examines the politics of 1960s New York, with a particular focus on how the New Left intersected with the city’s rising crime rate and its deindustrialization. Kuhn also presents establishment leaders like Mayor John Lindsay as out of touch with the concerns of blue-collar New Yorkers. Celebrated throughout the mainstream media as an heir to Kennedy’s throne, Lindsay courted segments of the antiwar movement and was despised by blue-collar workers. Kuhn believes that Lindsay represented everything that was wrong with the Ivy League establishment, especially when it comes to its inability to wrestle with what he views as the legitimate concerns that were at the core of law-and-order politics. Lindsay is repeatedly shown to dismiss residents’ concerns about crimes, violent protest, and the city’s shift towards white-collar jobs. “This is becoming a city with white-collar jobs and blue-collar people,” said a dress manufacturer. Kuhn’s social history of New York pits the people who supported liberal Republicanism and the New Left versus blue-collar workers, many of which were patriotic veterans. Relying on a coalition of the white upper-class liberals and non-white voters, and not organized labor, Lindsay chose to publicly support the civil rights and antiwar movements. Pro-war workers often framed Lindsay’s positions in class terms, heightening tensions between labor and left social movements. 

Summaries of the student protests at Columbia, Chicago, the Vietnam Moratorium, and the 1969 mayoral election complements Kuhn’s overview of the social history of 1960s New York, providing the necessary context to understand the spring of 1970. There is no shortage of negative depictions of antiwar activists, but Kuhn saves most of his ire for Lindsay for his unwillingness to accept arguments that were coming from outside of Manhattan. “Lindsay was a Manhattanite who became Hollywood, dreamed of leading Washington, but first he had to get past Queens.”

 

Lindsay’s decision to lower the flag at City Hall to honor the four students who were killed at Kent State was a modest gesture, but it provoked a fiery backlash that shaped the events of May 8, 1970. Using the NYPD’s internal report on the Hardhat Riot, a report that was only recently processed after Kuhn conducted his research, the second section offers up the most detailed description of “Bloody Friday.” Kuhn devotes 81 pages to the riot, covering the speeches that were made at the relatively small and chaotic antiwar protest to the moment when the hard hats streamed in and took over the steps of Federal Hall from the young demonstrators. “It was just like John Wayne taking Iwo Jima,” said one witness. 

Although Kuhn concludes that the riot was not organized by union leadership, he does not shy away from showing the sheer brutality of the attacks. Using dozens of witness statements, Kuhn documents just how the hard hats terrorized lower Manhattan, as the construction workers punched, kicked, and stomped on demonstrators before marching to City Hall to hoist the flag that had been lowered earlier that week. There are also numerous instances of police officers either reacting slowly to the violence or even cheering on the hard hats in the middle of the riot. “If I had my way, I’d let the hardhats have an hour with these kids,” said one officer.” In another instance, a recent Yale Law graduate was punched by a construction worker and had his front teeth caved in. As one witness pleaded with nearby police to help, one officer replied, “We’re with them.” 

Throughout the account of the riot, Kuhn makes sure to point out some of the more violent protestors, but still concludes that the hard hats had violated their moral codes. In the end, they brought “more lawlessness” as “many kicked men when they were down. Provocateurs were attacked, but so were innocents. Several hardhats had struck or harassed women.” 

The last section examines both the immediate aftermath of the riot, along with the decades long impact of the class and cultural divisions that were at the core of the confrontation between blue-collar workers and the New Left. Hardhat rallies spread throughout the nation that spring, and President Nixon even invited President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York Peter J. Brennan and several other hard hats to the White House later that month. He would later appoint Brennan to be Secretary of Labor in early 1973, shortly after white working-class voters helped win him a landslide victory over George McGovern. While celebrating his triumphant reelection, Nixon specifically praised his aide Charles Colson for his work to reach out to labor and other blue-collar institutions that were aligned with the President’s Vietnam policies. Nixon’s victory would lay the groundwork for future gains with the white working class, as Kuhn argues that presidents that the media have underestimated are usually the same who rallied the “plain people,” Reagan, George W. Bush, and most recently, Trump.

As someone who has previously written about the white working class, Kuhn is clearly interested in crafting a counterargument to liberal and left scholars who have worked to uncover the role that race played in shaping our present-day political divisions. Scholars should absorb Kuhn’s narrative and its impressive research, but still question its conclusions when it comes to class, race and the Vietnam era. While race might not have been the only contributing factor to the divisions of the era, it was undeniably at the forefront of American politics, at both the local and national level. The story of blue-collar New Yorkers is a crucial one to understanding the last fifty years of American politics, but that does not erase the fact that working-class opposition to the Vietnam War was widespread.  Kuhn leaves readers with an indispensable account of the Hardhat Riot, but one that does not fully capture the totality of the cultural and social earthquakes of the Vietnam era. 

Reviewed by Michael Koncewicz, the Michael Nash Research Scholar and Ewen Center Coordinator at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. He is the author of They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood up to the President’s Abuses of Power (University of California Press, 2018). He previously worked for the National Archives at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.