When the Silent Majority Rioted in New York City | National Review

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

If you spend time paying attention to political bumper stickers, you will probably notice a much greater likelihood of finding a "Trump for President" sticker on a pickup truck or the van of a blue-collar worker than on an Audi, a Lexus, or a Subaru. Since 2016, it has become obligatory to include a discussion of the so-called white working class when explaining the rise of Trumpism in the Republican Party.

Yet this trend has been decades in the making, as David Paul Kuhn explains in his outstanding new book, The Hardhat Riot. A political journalist, Kuhn takes the reader back to the streets of Lower Manhattan in May 1970, when construction workers faced off against anti-war protesters and college students. Through dogged research, Kuhn has uncovered thousands of pages of never-before-seen NYPD documents that allow him to tell the story of the riot in detail, combining eyewitness reports with his own gifted storytelling to craft a riveting narrative. In our current intellectual climate, which seems to prize tendentiousness, it is rare to find such a clear-eyed and non-polemical work of history.

The hardhat riot, Kuhn astutely explains, was one skirmish in a kind of civil war within the Democratic Party that led to the breakup of the New Deal coalition and eventually to the Reagan Revolution. On one side of this divide was the traditional worker, FDR's "everyman," who supported the New Deal, its labor protections, modest social-welfare policies, and overall concern for the common man and woman. On the other side were more-affluent liberals, especially young people who protested the Vietnam War and pushed for civil rights and women's rights. By the 1960s, the chasm between these two wings of the Democratic Party was proving unbridgeable.

The white lower middle class, notes historian Steve Fraser, had once "been regarded as cultural heroes standing up to the fat cat, applauded for their everyman insouciance." By the late 1960s, he continues, "they had become culturally disreputable, reactionary outlaws, decidedly unstylish in what they wore and drank and in how they played; they were looked on as lesser beings."

Under the mayoralty of John Lindsay, New York City had become a key battleground in this political clash. A liberal Republican who would switch parties after the hardhat riots, Lindsay was an early fashioner of the top-down political coalition that would replace the New Deal coalition. He fused together the business community, liberal reformers, the New Left, and the city's minority community into a left-liberal coalition. Outer-borough "white ethnics" — many of them middle- and lower-middle-class Democrats — now found themselves the villains in Lindsay's political play. A privileged WASP, he had little understanding of the lives of the working class and little patience for their complaints about crime, taxes, and welfare.

By 1970, Lindsay had moved steadily away from his silk-stocking Republicanism and had become aligned with the New Left. In late April 1970, he gave a speech at the University of Pennsylvania declaring anti-war protesters "the guys who are heroic." Lindsay was no pacifist or coward — he had seen combat in the Pacific during World War II as a Naval officer — but his words seemed to grate on those New Yorkers who reserved talk of heroism for military exploits.

The road to the hardhat riot began the day after Lindsay's speech, when President Nixon announced an expansion of the Vietnam War into neighboring Cambodia, setting off a new round of anti-war protests across the country. On May 4, a protest at Kent State University turned bloody when Ohio National Guard troops shot into the crowd and killed four protesters. In response, Lindsay ordered all city public schools closed for a "day of reflection" and the American flag at City Hall lowered to half-staff to commemorate the dead.

On Thursday, May 7, the funeral for one of the dead Kent State students was held in Manhattan, fueling more protests, including one at the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street, across from the New York Stock Exchange, the site of George Washington's first inauguration. The protests drew the attention of a number of construction workers who were building the World Trade Center complex a few blocks away. A brief fight broke out between them and the protesters, but it was quickly stopped by police. Something was certainly in the air.

Then came Friday, May 8 — "Bloody Friday." Protesters again took to the steps of Federal Hall for a rally. By late morning, hundreds of hardhat construction workers had made their way over to the corner of Wall and Broad looking for a fight, some armed with pipes and wrenches. Wall Street office workers joined the scrum or watched from their windows. Chaos ensued, and fights broke out throughout the crowd. At one point, the hardhats made it to the top of the steps of Federal Hall to plant an American flag. As many as 10,000 people were now in front of Federal Hall, with thousands more filling nearby streets.

Groups of hardhats then marched up Broadway to City Hall, carrying flags and chanting "U.S.A., all the way!" They focused their ire on Mayor Lindsay and the flag flying at half-staff. Police lost control over the crowd as the hardhats climbed the stairs, trying to get inside City Hall. Feeling desperate and besieged, Lindsay's deputy mayor reluctantly agreed to raise the flag to appease the crowd. At the sight of the flag being raised, the hardhats let out a roar and began singing "God Bless America" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The riot seemed to be over. But it wasn't.

Another Lindsay aide decided to go to the roof to lower the flag again, mockingly flashing a peace sign at the hard hats, which further angered the crowd. Across the street from City Hall was Pace University, where students began taunting the hardhats, raising an anti-war banner from the rooftop and hurling debris at them below. And so the street fighting began again, as hardhats now battled to get inside the Pace building to attack students.

The scene at City Hall Park was unbelievable. "Thousands of spectators moved like erratic waves, pulled with each gasp in the crowd, or the sight of men running, or shrieks of fear," writes Kuhn. "The center of the action often moved suddenly and mass brutality accumulated rapidly, as a leaking dam might swiftly flood, and the crowd soon followed, gawking at the violence."

By late afternoon, the fighting had mostly subsided, and the hardhats returned to their worksites. The message of the riots resonated across the country. In Washington, Nixon saw the hardhats as a vital expression of the "silent majority" and skillfully pivoted toward courting labor. Later in May, Nixon hosted union leaders in the Oval Office, where the president of the New York Steamfitters union gifted him a ceremonial hardhat. Republicans would come to rely on blue-collar workers — whether they were called the "silent majority" or "Reagan Democrats" — increasingly put off not just by the liberalism of the Democratic Party but also by the contempt that liberals seemed to have for them.

Kuhn is tough on the NYPD for not more forcefully opposing the hardhats and arresting those who had committed assaults, but he also realizes that the police sympathized with the hardhats and despised the young protesters for understandable reasons. As an older bystander yelled to the student protesters: "You call them 'pigs' and want them to help you." When it came to the hardhat riots, liberals had suddenly become champions of law and order. On the other side, the police and the hardhats were the loudest defenders of law and order, yet on May 8 they were cheering anarchy and violence in the streets. The world had turned topsy-turvy.

Kuhn clears up some misunderstandings about the riot. He found no evidence for the conspiracy theory that it was organized by outsiders, including the Nixon administration. The riot/counterprotest really was a spontaneous demonstration by working men angered not just by anti-war protesters but also by New York's mayor. Kuhn also dismisses the notion that the riots were really about race, as one of Lindsay's top aides stubbornly insisted decades later. Apart from one scuffle between hardhats and a couple of teenage African Americans, this was a fight between whites within the Democratic Party, separated by a class and cultural divide that grew wider by the day.

Unlike many commentators at the time who saw the hardhat riots as an expression of quasi-fascism, Kuhn gives the hardhats their due. The hardhat riot was not quite a "pro-war" demonstration, as it has often been described. Many of the working-class men were veterans themselves or had children who were in the service. They were ambivalent about the war, but not about America. "Most Americans soured on the war but not their nation or its flag," writes Kuhn. "They could not conceive of detaching those colors from the soldiers who died beneath the nation's banner." Throughout the book, Kuhn lets the hardhats speak for themselves, and one constant theme is their disgust at the way that the American flag was being treated. They saw anti-war protesters spitting on and tearing up the flag, as well as waving the Vietcong flag. They saw a mayor using the American flag to make an anti-war political statement. It was (and still is) hard for liberals to understand such a visceral and patriotic reaction. To the hardhats, the protesters were not just anti-war. They were anti-American. "A lot of good men died for that flag," said one of the hardhats. "We're not going to let a lot of long-haired kids and fast-talking politicians who make big money take it away from us."

In 1970, Donald Trump was working for his father's real-estate company in Brooklyn and Queens and would have had a close understanding of the lives and beliefs of outer-borough construction workers. Like a majority of Americans, Trump no doubt took the side of the hardhats. His recent arguments against professional athletes who kneel during the national anthem and his references to a new "silent majority" are echoes from the era of the hardhat riots. But this is not 1970. "The hardhats won the day but lost the long fight," concludes Kuhn. Surveying the wreckage of American society in 2020, it is hard to argue with that conclusion.

This article appears as "The Silent Majority's Riot" in the September 21, 2020, print edition of National Review.