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

Abstract

“Hey, hey, whaddya say? We support the U.S.A.!” (141). On May 8, 1970, following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four unarmed students at Kent State University, student protestors picketed the New York Stock Exchange, and John Lindsay, the dapper liberal, soon-to-be-ex-Republican mayor of New York, ordered flags to be flown at half-staff. Angered at the affronts to American patriotism, construction workers building the massive World Trade Center headed south to confront protestors. They then hoisted the American flag at Federal Hall, bloodied the hippies in the crowd, with only minimal police intervention, and turned northward to City Hall. After a tense standoff and more rioting in the streets, Lindsay’s staff eventually agreed to raise Old Glory. “Our flag, all the way up, the American flag at full-mast,” said one hardhat. “This is the Silent Majority, but they are not silent anymore. They can’t take those hippies anymore, because they don’t speak our language…. We built every building that they want to burn down” (181).In his narrative placing the day’s events in the arc of American politics, Kuhn, a seasoned reporter, brings to bear the advantages and disadvantages of his craft. He is at his best in the middle third of the book, taking snippets of evidence, whether videos, photos, police reports, or archival records, to construct a minute-by-minute account of Bloody Friday. Much of the evidence comes from New York Police Department intelligence files. Yet the rat-a-tat, you-were-there verisimilitude, consciously imitating the tabloids in their glory days, sheds less light on the milieus of the hardhats and the police. People come and go, without real context. Neighborhood, ethnic, church, and union ties, the bread-and-butter of social history, get short shrift. Hence, the forgotten working-class white men remain frustratingly out of reach. Kuhn shows how they were mocked, but we never really enter their worlds.Beyond Bloody Friday, Kuhn is hunting for bigger game. His goal is to frame the story of American liberalism. Blame for Democrats’ ongoing political travails, in his view, belongs squarely on the New Left. Democrats brought their misfortunes on themselves; they should have chosen otherwise. “The counterculture had won over American culture, liberalism, soon the Democratic Party” (275). The hardhat riot, indeed, presaged a contemporary politics in which well-paid white men without college educations, precisely the background of the hardhat rioters, form the backbone of the Republican Party. Yet Kuhn frames his story not in terms of education polarization but condescending elites—Lindsay being Exhibit A—who forced “FDR’s everyman” to abandon “the liberalism that had once championed him” (3). This scenario is an illusion, based more on hazy recollection than serious engagement with the limits of the New Deal order. The monochromatically white police forces and craft unions that sustained the political machines were more committed to civil rights in Washington than to sharing the goodies at home. When they collapsed, their more conservative elements turned right. As Rieder’s classic outer-boroughs ethnography showed decades ago, the commitments, especially of Italians in Canarsie, to liberalism, were always tenuous, ready to snap at the first serious strains.1Though Kuhn uses the Queens-born Donald Trump as the hook for his account, the basic story, implicating the New Left with all the travails of liberalism, was already emerging by May 1970 as the framework of hawkish Democrats. But to be convincing half a century later, that thesis needs to be compared with others, whether centered in polarization, movement conservatism, urban history, the Cold War, or political economy—and Kuhn resolutely refuses to do it. Though he dips into the scholarly literature, it is for facts, not frameworks. If Kuhn wants his gripping narrative of Bloody Friday to serve also as a parable for liberalism, argument by insinuation will not suffice.