Five decade old ‘hardhat riots’ could draw modern parallels
New York was under siege.
Rioters took over Wall St., assaulting innocent bystanders. They marched on City Hall, and demanded the mayor resign. They destroyed property, harassed women, sent bloodied victims stumbling into a nearby church for sanctuary.
It was May 8, 1970.
The police did nothing to stop it. This was a day when the right-wing went after the left and the NYPD knew which side it was on.
“The Hardhat Riot” by David Paul Kuhn is the story of that day. But as the rest of its title, “Nixon, New York and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution,” explains, it’s about much more.
It’s about how elitist politicians left white, blue-collar workers feeling sold out. It’s about how those lifelong Democrats – mostly Catholic, ethnic, union – began looking for a new home in the Republican Party.
And it’s about how that day changed American politics, perhaps forever.
Kuhn has written a lot about the white working class, and he writes about the ’60s here from its anguished perspective. Blue-collar workers saw liberal legislators as snobby, spoiled young radicals.
The workers felt demeaned, even demonized. Finally, they demanded their own revolution.
In New York, the fuse was lit long before this fateful day. Between 1950 and 1970, roughly 2 million people moved to the suburbs, taking jobs and a big chunk of the tax base with them. By 1970, 1 million New Yorkers were on public assistance.
Elected as a liberal Republican in 1965, Mayor John Lindsay met the challenges with a checkbook. He expanded the city’s healthcare system, eliminated tuition at its public universities, and subsidized the fine arts. He doubled payments on social services and welfare.
The only problem was, he didn’t have the money.
“Each year, the budget would come up short,” notes journalist Ken Auletta. “Each year officials would devise a temporary solution by taking a little here, borrowing a little here, fudging everywhere they could.”
Taxes kept going up as Lindsay tried to fund his ambitious agenda. Manual laborers, waitresses, cab drivers were stuck with the bill. But who received the benefits? The blue-collar class began to seethe.
Then they turned on the TV and saw young Americans burning the flag they fought for and occupying Ivy League campuses their kids couldn’t afford to attend.
It first came to a head at Columbia on April 30, 1968, when protesters occupied university buildings. Police arrived to evict them, and the radicals met them with rocks. It escalated as cops responded with tear gas. Rage ruled. When one girl accused a cop’s mother of incest, in pornographic detail, he punched her in the face.
“It’s some joke, ain’t it, a rich kid calling a police officer ‘pig,” he mused to a reporter. “Everything I got, I worked for. It gets me sore when I see these kids, who been handed everything, pissing it away, talking like bums.”
The city’s liberal elite didn’t agree.
Leonard Bernstein hosted an expensive cocktail party for black radicals. The New York Times praised Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice,” which called raping white women “an insurrectionary act.” Lindsay urged college students to “join resistance movements.”
But anti-war demonstrators were already meeting their own resistance.
That summer, violent protests outside the Democratic Presidential Convention in Chicago were answered with more violence, and what a later investigation deemed “a police riot.” Yet polls afterward showed frightened Americans were on the cops’ side.
In November, they cast their votes for the “law and order” candidate, Richard Nixon.
Then, on May 4, 1970, came Kent State.
After four student protesters, including a Long Islander, were shot dead by the National Guard, Lindsay declared May 8 “a day of reflection.” He ordered city schools closed, flags flown at half-mast. That morning, protesters filed into the Financial District for another anti-war rally.
Just as their demonstration was breaking up, around 11:30, hundreds of hardhats moved in.
They came from nearby construction projects, including the still-in-progress World Trade Center. Some had American flag details on their helmets. Others carried wrenches or iron pipes. “U-S-A!” they shouted. “U-S-A, all the way!”
“Give ‘em hell, boys,” one patrolman shouted. “Give ‘em one for me.”
A young woman, standing at the top of Federal Hall, waved a Vietcong flag. The hardhats charged. They cleared the steps with clenched fists and hard kicks, supplemented with steel-toed boots. Some workers waved an American flag. Others charged into the crowd, looking for more hippies to hit.
“Why aren’t any arrests being made?” one lawyer asked a senior officer.
“On what grounds?” the man snapped. “This is only harassment.”
A few, badly outnumbered cops tried to stop the violence. Many more stood by or yelled encouragement. Some businessmen tried to break up fights. Others took the chance to punch a few longhairs. The wounded, almost all students, sough refuge in Trinity Church.
The street began to quiet. Then, “Get Lindsay!” someone yelled. “We want Lindsay!”
The hardhats roared their approval and marched on City Hall. By now, their numbers had grown to more than 500. When they reached the building and saw the American flag fluttering at half-mast, their rage grew. They demanded it be raised again.
“This is the Silent Majority,” one steamfitter told a cop. “But they are not silent anymore.”
Angry hardhats reached the steps of City Hall. Inside, officials dithered. They raised the flag, then lowered it. Chief Fred Kowsky, head of the NYPD’s Safety Emergency Division, threatened to start arresting city officials if the flag wasn’t raised again.
The flag went up. The hardhats cheered, then sang "God Bless America."
Then they moved on, heading home or back to work. Some paused to throw punches at Pace students, or random hippies. Some sat on the hoods of police cars, waving tiny American flags. When a reporter started asking questions, cops beat him up and stole his watch.
Afterward, the numbers were totaled up: More than 100 wounded, 40 with head injuries, half-a-dozen beaten into unconsciousness. The typical victim was a 22-year-old college student; a quarter of the victims were women.
The NYPD — asked to investigate itself — admitted failure, but said it was unprepared for the hardhats’ “ebullience.” The American Civil Liberties Union called for an FBI investigation and a federal probe. Neither happened, and there were no repercussions.
And yet, there was some change. Lindsay, once popular presidential timber, now looked like a weakling. New York was now considered broken, dangerous, ungovernable.
Meanwhile, at the White House, Nixon studied the hardhat riot and devised a new political game plan.
For the 1972 campaign, “we should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers and at working-class white ethnics,” he advised. Republicans could win votes by playing to people’s fears and trumpeting strict, traditional values – “anti-crime, anti-demonstrations, anti-drugs, anti-obscenity.”
Nixon won re-election handily, with 61% of the vote.
More surprisingly, he did it by winning 70% of the white working-class vote, including former Democrats and current union members. The scope of his national approval was “a victory equal to FDR’s,” Kuhn writes. “And he did it with FDR’s base.”
The bitter, polarizing conditions that allowed Nixon to do it may enable Donald Trump to get re-elected as well.
