In 1970, hundreds of. who noted on the morning of May 8 that the hard hats were "out for blood today." As Kuhn shows, Lindsay, a Republican who, two years later, "was the most liberal candidate in the Democratic race," failed to fully grasp the combustible nature of the conflicting actors. Oxford University Press. Because the mayors staff had lowered the American flag in honor of the Kent State dead. They presented Nixon with several hard hats and a flag pin. Mayor Lindsay declared Friday May 8th a day of remembrance and high school and college classes were canceled. They made no attempt to storm City Hall, The Times reported. Now he was expanding the war, leaving Vietnam through Cambodia as the comedian George Carlin put it. Further demonstrations in the days after May 8 proved that many in the city did genuinely support the war. The "Hard Hat Riot," as it came to be known, ushered in an era of cynical fear-mongering aimed at dividing the nation. The Hard Hat Riots On, 40 Years On. | We build the bridges and tunnels for them to get around in. NYPD Intelligence Records, series III, NYC Municipal Archives. The war has made us warlike." Kuhn argues persuasively that the riot sparked a vast national political shift driven by a widening divide between the working class and the educated elite that has. I spent much of my time in the Midwest and other parts of the country where blue-collar workers felt abandoned in an economy dominated by Wall Street. Construction workers breaking through police lines, May 8, 1970. The backlash began soon after. The working class was becoming more diverse than ever by the 1970s, as women and people of color filled new roles in the work force, and the service sector began to overshadow manufacturing. He has written fourteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." When a group of hardhats moved menacingly toward the action, a patrolman apparently shouted: Give em hell, boys. In the following days, a rather predictable back and forth occurred as Mayor Lindsay criticized the police for their lack of action, and police union leaders accused the mayor of undermining the police. Protesters were violently thrown off the steps, longhairs seemed to be singled out for the most brutal attacks, but even stock traders and lawyers from nearby firms who tried to shelter the teens reported that they were savagely attacked. Students on college and high school campuses around the country began walk outs and protests. "The Hard Hat Riot was the prelude to the divide we now live with in America." David Paul Kuhn. DISPATCHES FROM THE URBAN HEARTLAND, Part 6: Ive Often Wondered New York City and the Attica State Prison Riot, Living in the City: An Inside Look at Four Decades of Changing Housing in New York City, A Look into the Life and Death of the Opulent Loews Theaters in New York City, Stumbled Upon in the Archives: The Great Tulip Tree, Dispatches from the Urban Heartland, Part 5: Vibing in the Urban Heartland with Ms. Clara & Ms. Catherine, Tax Records and Time Machines: The Property Cards of the Municipal Archives, Dispatches from the Urban Heartland, Part 4: District Street, Brooklyn and the Route to Modernity, The History of NYC's History: Origins of the Municipal Archives, Dispatches from the Urban Heartland, Part 3: Nostrand Avenue, From Myrtle to Montgomery, Contributions and Controversies: The Complex History of Mayor Koch and the LGBT Community, Behold the Baby Artichoke, or, Power to the Punies, The Dutch & the English Part 5: The Return of the Dutch and What Became of the Wall. Four days later, on a chilly, drizzly, spring morning in New York, about a thousand protesters, including two of my friends, gathered in Lower Manhattan to protest both the war and the Kent State killings. New York City Mayor John Lindsay ordered the American flag topping City Hall to be flown at half-mast. Give em one for me!. Nixon invited union leaders, some of whom were involved in the riot, to the White House. NYPD Film Collection, NYC Municipal Archives. In 1972, Nixon ran for a second term against George McGovern, a Democratic Senator from South Dakota. They presented Nixon with a hard hat inscribed with Commander in Chiefand an American flag pin. One attendee said of the American flag: Outside of God, its the most important thing I know.. Dispatches from the Urban Heartland, Part 2: Rebooting Crow Hill, Brooklyn, Dispatches from the Urban Heartland, Part 1: Welcome, Doomed Guests: Faisal II, The Boy King Of Iraq, The Surprises Waiting in 40,000 Vacant Lots, The Dutch & the English, Part 3: Construction of the Wall (1653-1663), The Dutch & the English, Part 2: A Wall by Any Other Name, The Dutch & the English, Part 1: Good Fences, a History of Wall Street, Hall of Records: Where Brilliancy Is Necessary. Flyer for Wall Street protest on May 7, 1970. As Cooke put it, Protest is the only thing that works today.. Peter Brennan, the leader of the building-trades unions, summarized the us-versus-them logic of the march. After winning the battle for Federal Hall, the hard hats rampaged across Lower Manhattan. Back then, it looked like proof of something John Lindsay, New Yorks mayor, had said earlier that week: The country is virtually on the edge of a spiritual and perhaps even a physical breakdown.. Hard Hats demonstrate for Nixon and the Vietnam War, near City Hall Park, May 15, 1970. With the American flag raised at City Hall, and the Red Cross flag at Trinity torn down, the mollified mob eventually dispersed. Privacy Statement On Monday May 4th, the Guard ordered protesters to disperse, firing tear gas into the crowd. The economic needs of working Americans dont differ dramatically across racial lines. It is hard to make sense of the event without understanding the backdrop: On April 29, 1970, President Nixon ordered American troops into Cambodia to track Viet Cong forces. The 'Hard Hat Riot' Was a Preview of Today's Political Divisions Mayor Lindsay saw a country "virtually on the edge of a spiritual and perhaps even a physical breakdown." On May 8, 1970,. What happened next was unclear, but eye witnesses said a man spit on a flag, blew his nose on it, and taunted the workers. Whether he was the puppet master of the May 8th assault or not, he took full advantage of the aftermath. Many working-class Americans of all races looked at the Vietnam War differently than the protesters because it was them and their relatives who were fighting the war while college students were granted deferments. JFK says he should have it. Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1970. Some of the images on this site may be subject to third-party rights such as copyright and/or rights of privacy/publicity. Home Article "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" In 1970, Richard Nixon, inspired by a spontaneous construction workers' riot, settled on the political strategy that would win him the 1972 election by a landslide and dominate American politics to this day. Nixons new blue-collar strategy overlapped with his Southern strategy to play upon racial division to court White Southerners who had previously voted Democratic, but opposed Democrats embrace of the civil rights movement. Less a complete rightward transformation of the working class, the hard hat protests represented its political fragmentation into smaller and more resentful pieces. That was all before noon! The construction workers who attacked the demonstrators and the police who encouraged them were more likely to have family and friends in Vietnam than the college students who demonstrated. Brennan cannily used this paradigm to his own political advantage; he positioned the labor movement as anti-anti-war as a way to cleave its members away from other racially progressive platforms. Cookie Policy NYPD Film Collection, NYC Municipal Archives. Angela Serratore NYPD Intelligence Records, Photograph Files, NYC Municipal Archives. A small group of students from NYU and Hunter College staged a protest in front of Federal Hall. The Hard Hat Riots took place when 200 unionized construction workers violently broke up a Kent State shooting solidarity rally held by college and high school students in downtown Manhattan. Said one construction worker, Im doing this because my brother got wounded in Vietnam, and I think this will help our boys over there by pulling this country together.3. Many union officials, including Brennan, saw this as an overreach on Lindsays part, and rank-and-file union members, who were overwhelmingly white, resisted integration. Haldeman suggested to the president that construction workers, or hard hats, be used to create conflict. Several police officers were also hurt. Brennan, as one of New York Citys most prominent labor leaders, often clashed with Mayor Lindsays administration. As the ground of white working-class identity shifted from economics to culture, it appeared that the new class war would be waged not against the old corporate robber barons but . At home, there were racial uprisings in cities like Newark and Detroit, students occupied universities, women protested the Miss America pageant, and gay people fought with police at the Stonewall Inn. A group of workers stormed nearby Pace College, upset by an anti-war banner there, beating more students and smashing windows with crowbars and pipes. Many of the men carried American flags and demanded to plant them in front of Washingtons statue. In a way, Vietnam continues to cast its shadow. NYPD Intelligence Records, Photograph Files, NYC Municipal Archives. It started around noon when around 400 construction workers and around 800 office workers attacked around 1,000 demonstrators affiliated with the student strike of 1970. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. Were the fellas who build this country, he said. The Hard Hat Riot of 1970. Article Talk Read Edit View history Tools The Hard Hat Riot occurred on May 8, 1970, in New York City. "If people understand that what theyre using and washing down their drains are ending up at their local rivers, streams, lakes, they might think twice. Known as the Hard Hat Riots, it sparked two weeks of protests, counter protests and marches. Views from The Posts Editorial Board on current events, The 1970 riot that anticipated todays culture wars, Robert B. Reich is a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of "The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. The same has been true about the shameful hard-hat riot of 1970. The journalist Pete Hamill observed at the time that White working-class people felt trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored, and that the riot was an expression of rage in the face of feeling ignored. For all of its drama, however, the hard hat revolt was not a wholesale shift in working class identity. NYPD Intelligence Records, series III, NYC Municipal Archives. Around noon, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street, more than 400 construction workers steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the emerging World Trade Center attacked the student demonstrators. The sight of soldiers firing on unarmed college students shook the nation, but it also elicited sentiments that the students got what was coming to them. The galvanizing effect on the anti-war movement was immediate, and on Tuesday May 5th students across the nation staged more walk-outs and strikes. NYPD Film Collection, NYC Municipal Archives. The press struggled to make sense of this event. had felt abandoned and forgotten as the Civil Rights movement rightfully took hold, particularly drag queens and transgender people, Like tobacco and Big Oil, secret docs show chemical companies knew PFAS dangers, 70% of Californias beaches could disappear by 2100, study finds, The Titan and the Titanic: two tales of capitalist hubris, No wonder the MAGA misery cult is aggrieved, willfully out of sync with the past, present and future, Oxfam reveals how rich nations are helping for-profit health industry exploit poor patients, Medicine residue is everywhere in our rivers and lakesand fish are behaving strangely, The 2022 giving slump exposes the fragility of top-heavy charity, 10 years after Supreme Court gutted voting rights, advocates say Congress must reverse damage, 3M to pay $10.3 billion to settle water pollution suit over PFAS forever chemicals, Department of Agriculture approves first cultivated meat for sale in US, Montanas narrow defense in youth climate trial was devoid of climate science, 2024 presidential election poses new tests for guardians and guardrails of American Democracy, Oregon County sues fossil fuel entities and enablers for contributing to deadly 2021 heatwave.
Aau Girls' Volleyball Nationals 2023, Articles W