In 2016, the American electorate polarized to an ancient degree, but not through race or gender. The Democratic nominee has fared worse with working-class whites than any other candidate, any of the parties, since World War II. Years later, elites remain baffled by the way Donald Trump has arrived, whether he can knock out and what his presidency has revealed about American life. Sometimes the cool can be better understood through hitale classes, adding a story that replaced hitale.
May 1970, a tumultuous month in a tumultuous era. After Cambodia and Kent, the anti-war movement has been radicalized like never before. Even after Watergate, Richard Nixon called those days “among the darkest in my presidency,” until, as his speechwriter William Safire put it, the helmets helped “change course.”
The Hardhat Riot is an e-book about a city, a mayor, a president, and others who diverge by living in other cultures, other wars, other economies, until Americans become so fragmented that the singular has become an anachronism. That’s when the “silent majority” took to the streets for the first time. When Gotham, of all places, has become a microcosm of “Average American compression” and shock of elegance. When FDR’s “forgotten man” opposed liberalism and the new left captured popular culture and then the Democratic Party, yet lost the hard-working elegance of whites along the way. And this confrontation has never burned harder and more brutally than Hardhat’s mutiny, when two archetypes of liberalism collided, foreshadowing the long democratic civil war that looms.
Nixon took advantage of the breach, moving the Blue-blooded Republicans to blue collar. Half a century later, Trump fought for Nixon’s good fortune, echoing Nixon’s rhetoric about “law and order,” hoping to speak for a new “silent majority.” He campaigned in the United States, and yet his political good fortune has long followed the path Nixon has charted.
At the time, the cases compressed a cultural and elegant clash in the narrow territory of Lower Manhattan. Those who protested daily on Wall Street, who opposed the war and more, tended to be rich children, the knowledgeable young people who opened the counterculture and believed in Gene McCarthy, John Lindsay and George McGovern. They were an elegance apart from the blue collar staff there. Meanwhile, thousands of employees, a circle of family members and kindness veterans in Vietnam, watched protests from their metal hangers above. New York lived its “second era of skyscrapers,” adding the structure of the world’s tallest towers.
At the time, few influential people were concerned about conflicts of elegance; Less still expected it to overflow in the fray. Then, where George Washington opened, in the shadow of the Twin Towers, and the same day the Knicks won their first championship, the “silent majority” moved. Construction personnel chased academics through the canyons of the city of Manhattan, beating bloody scores. Soon the city corridor besied. And as the helmets collided with the hippies, it became clear that the Democrats were at war with themselves.
A few days later, Nixon staff leader H. R. Haldeman noted that “we are reaching a milestone” because of “the increase in the group of workers” and that Nixon “can mobilize them.” “This only encouraged Nixon to have the masses of the American public on his side,” wrote Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser. The insurrection encouraged daily protests by the workers, culminating in 150,000 employees who flooded the City Council with a sea of American flags. Time mag invented it as “Workers’ Woodstock”. The next day, Pat Buchanan suggested Nixon reunite this “New Roosevelt Distributor.” “There’s a wonderful buzz in American politics,” Buchanan said, “these are, frankly, our other people now.”
Extract from:
May 8, 1970
A slate-grey mist remained over the bay and the wind rose and reached the rotten docks and blew the fine rain in the opposite aspect of the half-built skyscrapers that emerge towards the southern end of the city. At the base of a tower, while iron workers smoked under scaffolding and spoke, a police car stopped on the sidewalk. “Comrades,” said one policeman, “there is some other protest in the Subtreasury Building,” which is also called Federal Hall. Iron worker Eugene Schafer, still uncomfortable facing the nonviolent and being “mutilated,” grabbed one of the American flags on the spot, and ironworkers spoke of a punishment.
At City Hall, an appellant reported that staff were making plans to “hit the head” with young people protesting the “Nixon-Kent trick.” Shortly after nine and a quarter, NYPD learned that a “disordered group” would burn 40 Wall Street. A minute later, someone called the police and said the structure’s staff “could cause problems” for the protesters at the center. Another caller announced the attack at noon and warned: “The Twin Towers structure staff will be behind the protesters on Wall Street.
New York Police transferred a mass team from Queens to the financial district.
On Wall Street, as the rain dissipated, a thousand scholars shouted under the smoldering sky: “One, two, three, four. We don’t need your fucking war! The song is strong enough to be heard in the workplace of runner Robert Parker on the 53rd floor of Wall Street 40. Half a block away, on the seventh floor, executive Walter Hendrickson discovered the repeated “disgusting” prophets. A woman of the same construction called the police about vulgarity.
The demonstration, however, was relatively civil, compared to the chaos of Kent state. Speakers presented the familiar: “Outside Cambodia!” He’s knocked down one president and overthrown another! “Close the videos and readings”. One speaker said, “Out of the pigs!”
About 20 occupied the marble stairs of the Federal Hall. Most of them were in their twenties. Blue helmets with suspenders, gloves, narrow ties, long coats with buttons. In the streets below, they also observed scattered knots of police officers.
Deputy Chief Inspector Valentine Pfaffmann was on the periphery. “Prevent attacks on protesters,” Pfaffmann told a sergeant and kept the sidewalk “fluid.” Yesterday, he warned, helmets and hippies had been fighting at lunchtime.
The crowd grew up on Wall Street. The NYPD diverted traffic. A white boy brandished a red sign for the Black Panthers: FREE ALL POLICY PRISONERS. HUEY AND BOBBY FOR FREE. Next to him, a signal show that said: STOP THE STEPS IN CAMBOYA AND IN KENT. Another handwritten signal: KENT-BODIA.
Students were waiting for leader Yippie Abbie Hoffman. NYPD issued a radio alert, warned Hoffman. But the organizers weren’t sure it was noticed. Bloodless morning rain had lowered expectations, otherwise it also eased the anger of academics across the city for the first time since Kent State four days earlier. Only a thousand of the expected 10,000 had arrived so far. Activists still intended to close Wall Street. As one protester said: “We want to close the monetary centers in this country because they are contributing to
war.”
With the arrival of Abbie Hoffguy uncertain, headliner Paul O’Dwyer, an old left-wing with rare success in the New. The son of troublesome Irish school teachers and one of 11 children, O’Dwyer came to the United States when he was young. Run down the docks. Packed clothes. Eventually, he made a call for himself as a champion of the diminishing class. His older brother became mayor of New York. But the militant was also searching inside. Paul O’Dwyer, one more cop looking for Bobby Kennedy’s Senate seat.
O’Dwyer put his most productive political bonhomie and a cheerful audience on his hands and jumped into a puddle. He was a little boy with a messy white boy and wild gray eyebrows and wore a loose suit reminiscent of old masters in a bag. On the periphery, watching businessmen in brokered jackets, knotted ties, narrow-shouldered jackets, putty raincoats, caps and felt hats, holding square briefcases, leaning on rolled umbrellas.
The inner crowd sat and stood along Wall Street. Students wore scarves, tartan trousers, torn flared jeans, mackinaws, serapes, corduroy jackets, fringed suede, thick knit sweaters, the same old buttons on large lapels, the same old faded jackets of the army country. Half a dozen scholars made origami hats from the newspapers and used them for rain.
A young woman read the Times with a bunch of broad leaves on her head. A cigarette was burning between his fingers. Next to her sat a bearded boy in a green army coat. With public schools closed to honor Kent State, some teenagers and teachers also arrived. Among them were seven staff members from a progressive school of choice in the city center, adding a long-term Democratic city leader, the young administrative assistant Ruth Messinger. There were young black men here and there. Some with big afros. Some Puerto Ricans too. But more commonly they are the same old pale high school students. Lots of smart glasses and listeners. Girls with long tufts in the middle and reddish lips. Boys with teenage beards and severe eyes.
Paul O’Dwyer, whose voice still referred to the Irishman, separated his bangs from his crumpled frown and spoke of “working-class children,” “tax-laden” families. He spoke of a “message that we can convey to you, which I will bring to this organization by our side.” That’s how to “end the war, ” he said. “We can finish it now. We can finish it right away. And we can finish it before those protests stop.”
“End the war opposed to the Panthers!” shouted in the crowd. “Power for the Panthers!”
O’Dwyer persisted. “That’s the thing…”
“End the racist war in South Vietnam!” The protester came up here. He’s chubby, college, a white boy with an afro of curls. He threw his left fist into the air. “End the racist war in South Vietnam!”
“We will communicate with everyone who listens to us,” O’Dwyer said. “The overall total is in shock.” O’Dwyer now tolerates those interruptions. It’s not your left anymore.
Few activists think they can simply pacify peace. But the new left has been invested in the free speech movement. Even critics were invited to speak. A student, with glasses and a bearded man, holding the “great Elvis microphone” in silver. He prepared the audience for outrage. “No matter what he says, no matter how serious it is,” the hesitant speaker warned, “please shut up and pay attention to your point of view.”
The new speaker exuded the Establishment. The jacket and the tie. A wasp face with a Roman nose. Hair swept to one side, directly and trimmed with a sensitive stripe, a neat moustache, pink skin. A cigarette hit him in his left hand when he said gently, “It’s to prove it and everything, but when you start burning buildings…”
The crowd was screaming and screaming. The heads trembled dismissively. The organizer raised his palm to soothe them.
The speaker waved his left hand inward, gesticulating as if to say, Bring him. “You can scream, I can’t, can you?”
The mau-mauing of the noisy crowd.
He took it off. “I’m for America! I love America!”
Once again, the organizer raised his palm. Other scholars shouted and booed.
“I love America!” The microphone soon passed.
“We all love America, ” said one boy in the comfortable wool hat. “It’s the other people who run it that we can’t stand.”
Scattered applause. One woman shouted, “That’s what I’m saying.”
Someone sang “Hey Jude” in the audience in front of the system. Hundreds of other people came together. The last Beatles album officially released today.
At eleven at least five o’clock, the fine rain returned. The scores opened their newspapers and held them on their heads like sloping roofs. Few protesters are gone. Most don’t know the warnings.
Just in case, Chief Pfaffmann radioed: “Construction workers would appear from [the] Twin Towers site.” The chief also dispatched two patrolmen to the World Trade Center site to “interview foremen, ascertain facts, and dissuade.” He insisted, “Prevail upon the workers.” The chief presumed the workers, and his own men, would heed him.
In a bedroom downtown, next to the filthy East River, a student organizer nervously spun a spiral telephone cable. The room was filled with first aid kits, duplicate machines based on bulky ink, crumpled frills and soda cans. Bruce Biller, a 23-year-old medical student, coordinated a new volunteer ambulance corps at Hunter College and NYU Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. Biller over the phone with a doctor deployed near Wall Street. One employee had warned a nurse that helmets would “hit the protesters” by noon. The fountain “apparently” was an employee of the Bronx structure who worked on the Twin Towers site. Biller hung up and called 911. Fifteen minutes later, he called 911 again.
At 11:26 a.m., a sergeant issued an alert about sending the NYPD: “Two hundred structures are expected to enter the crowd at Wall and Broad to wreak havoc. In addition, there are rumors that a few thousand scholars come from Queens to Wall and broad.
Rumors are spreading in the crowd. One speaker announced that if the safety helmets “approach” them, “don’t take a look to fight them.” After all, he added, “The police are there for us.”
On the most sensible step, in front of the police line, a young woman with a white motorcycle helmet stood next to the activist. They waved a Vietcong flag.
Some protesters began to walk away. They were asked to stay, to the ranks, to take a stand. “No one’s going to move us, ” shouted a loudspeaker to the microphone. “Let them come! We’re going to show them off! We may not be expelled.”
From a distance, the trimmed metal hull resembled a rusty car grille, and although the south tower was still small and skeletal, the north tower was approaching the height of the Chrysler building. His red bones were exposed only near his summit, which vanished into the sky on days like this, when the fog fell on the city.
Two patrol boats circulated around the muddy gravel below. They spoke to the concentrations and said on the radio that “the Twin Towers staff is involved.”
Forty-two floors up, Joe Kelly learned of his involvement. The metal was elegant and the wind strong, but the smog decreased to those heights. The staff spoke of yesterday’s commotion, of some other demonstration today.
Kelly, 1.80 meters tall, shaped, blue-eyed, with a circular nose and very cut red hair. After being fired from the army, he worked for a few years as a sailor in oil tankers. He returned to the United States, enrolled in night school and spent seven years as an apprentice. Now 31, Kelly, the world’s largest elevator builder.
On the mornings of paintings, like his neighbors: a bus driver, a policeman, a steamman, a color television processor, Kelly left his wife, Karen, his baby and two little strawberry blondes in his modest brick and shingle space on Staten Island. He was hit on his triumph 500cc turquoise motorcycle, parked it in the metal abdomen of the ferry, climbed the metal stairs, sat on a wooden bench and walked through the Daily News. When the ferry screamed at the wooden pier and docked, it drove a mile to the Twin Towers. He parked near the rusty road of the west slope and, along with thousands of painters, walked in the shade of partially built double towers, entered the gray-wood neighborhood and put on his plastic helmet, which was yellow and had flag and word stickers for God and the country.
Kelly’s 30-minute lunch break is coming. I’ve never stepped on anything before. But he had reached his “boiling point.” Kelly came here and joined about 50 shopkeepers to “see what this peace show means.”
Along Wall Street, dozens of new protesters have arrived from the east. One said, “What do we want?”
“Peace!” he said. Protesters responded. “When do we do it?”
“Now!” he said.
In front of the Federal Hall, thousands of protesters stood up and turned to the newcomers and roared, throwing their fists into the cold gray sky.
The leaders of the march were dressed in more army coats, more bracelets. But the two hundred fans were children with cherub faces and oversized jackets, women with headbands and ribbons in their hair: the big collars, the big glasses, the great hair of the time. Near the front, a curly-haired boy was holding a red sign that said STOP NI 卍 ON’S WAR. Making a song has become frantic.
“What do you want? When?”
Peace now! Peace now! Peace now!
Twenty minutes at noon. Bruce Biller, the medical coordinator, scored 911 for the third time. He connected to the Transitional Police Headquarters on Wall Street. Inspector Harold Schryver trusted Biller that “they had a sufficient number of patrolmen on the scene.” In addition, they “learned that the staff of the structure would not come.”
The helmets hadn’t been shown. The occasion ended gradually. Some scholars walked through the city for some other rally. A thousand protesters remained. Some witnesses have sue this twice. The scholars chatted casually. A man from The Times noted that the crowd of “good humour.”
At first, few saw the dozen wading through the mass. In the foreground, a man wince,ranked back and his hands on his painting coat purse. Another guy with a broad nose and fleshy legs and a helmet adorned with flags. An older man with blond hair and a brown suit. Behind him, a little man pinched a freshly lit cigarette. Near him, a giant hull with the frame of a lineguy. They went in slowly, single file. A senior New York police officer looked at the helmets and turned around.
Another of the helmets approached Wall Street Square.
“Give them hell, boys, ” shouted a patrolman. “Give them one for me!”
The crowd at lunchtime increased to thousands and the structure staff continued to infiltrate the square, until plenty of staff were noticed marching down the narrow Broad Street corridor. They were several men looking by appearance, moving in a loose phalanx with heavy steps, dressed in colorful helmets, flannel, tattered trousers in boiled steel boots, with giant American flags, shouting “U – S – A. All! States. All of them! “
New York police leaders now had four hundred helmets.
The cops were forming a line. They contained the safety helmets where Broad Street fed Wall Street. Staff moved 4 American flags to the front row of their ranks. Some protective helmets supported a thin employee. The employee raised a flag over the fray.
The streets were overflowing now. A businessman was standing on a lamppost holding a folder. Police created a type of demilitarized zone, separating the security helmets and scholars across twenty to 40 feet, faction making a song in bursts.
The scholars threw their arms over their heads and shouted louder.
The helmets answered with their finger and shouted, “We are number one! We’re number one!”
Another staff wandered in the dough and accumulated at the back, adding about thirty iron poles from the west. “I carried the flag on Broadway and Wall Street and I can see three or four blocks of faces: a whole sea of other people’s faces doing a song opposed to the war in Vietnam,” iron worker Eugene Schafer said.
Another contingent of protective helmets applauded: “Hey, hey, what are you saying? We the United States!”
Patrolmen Michael Stokes, a 26-year-old boy living near the declining industry on queens’ west coast, saw a separate contingent of workers, about two dozen, marching north on Broad Street. They shouted, “Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!
As noon approached, the sun was burning through the clouds and the day warmed up and the air filled with moisture. Thousands heard the cry in their workplaces. The typewriters stopped and the telephone receivers were placed in cots and swivel chairs. Legions of workplace personnel took to the streets. Now it’s hard to enter the square. Spectators straightened and stretched their necks. Strangers asked the user before they did, what’s going on? Within adjacent work buildings, many employees, bankers, secretaries and lawyers worked. However, land after ground, turn by turn, thousands of people accumulated in front of giant windows, opened them or erected wooden frames and looked down. The crowd fed on the cavernous urban landscape, making it difficult to discern where the sidewalk ended and the road began.
“Peace now! Peace now!” Whether I love it or not! “
The uncompromising helmets gestured with their hand, challenging the nonviolent to come.
Some now held white pamphlets with American flags and the words RALLY FOR AMERICA.
At the bottom of the pack, a staff organization propelled “anyone who crossed their path,” said Arlene Gross, a PC programmer in her early twenties, who was watching from the sixth floor of 20 Broad Street, located next door to Exchange Stock. Above, above it, senior executive Walter Hendrickson watched the helmets meet as “spectators on the street and building staff cheered them.”
For a few minutes, it was nothing more, each tribe shouting hymns and insults, demarcated. Some cops were comfortable talking to helmets now.
There were well-appointed staff north of six feet and intimidating from front to foot. However, many of the helmets were no bigger than the students. But the younger guys had a lot of support. The thin staff had venous forearms, thick, cracked hands and calluses day by day. At the forefront, a few dozen men, adding a tall guy, a black Irishman with a spotted yellow helmet, his flannel sleeves rolled up, as he shouted at the students, his hands around his mouth, looking to be heard. Next to him, a nostalgically cool young boy, like a handsome Buddy Holly, with a modest cup and black horn-mounted glasses and a pencil behind his ear. To his left is a little squirrel boy with a blue helmet, a muscular face and protruding ears. On his shoulder, another tall guy with pale skin and black and looking hair. His mustard yellow helmet was adorned with an iron cross. Many tanned after opening the metal top. They wore boots, white cotton socks and loose pants, and some shirts with their names on their chests. They were well-shaven men, aged between 20 and 50. Some of the older boys were fleshy, with shirts sticking out of the belly. Most men, however, were thin enough to throw.
The scholars came forward, led through those valiant men who were now the representatives of the warmongers. The young ranks were, at the time, emboldened. It was only a few days after the collapse of civil order in Kent state. However, these revolutionaries remained confident enough in the formula for the police to maintain order, for confrontation regulations, to keep helmets behind enemy lines, for the fighting media to be the words.
“Fuck you and Nixon too!” Take a bath!”
“Commies!”
The helmets threw aluminum boxes. The men drove forward. No more screaming. No more swollen hands in your mouth.
The cops tied their arms and formed a human chain that stretched across Broad Street. It’s hard to hear from the user next to you. The police vaguely gathered a moment line parallel to the first.
Next to the sidewalk, an organization of Wall Street men—thin twenty-five years old, broad-haired, ties, blouse sleeves—smiled and waved his arms and joined the hull anthems. At least a thousand local staff members have applauded the helmets. The scholars felt a replacement at the tide. Hundreds of them retreated to a mass forged at the base of the steps and the statue of Washington. The statue was large and bronze, and someone had scratched the loose bobby on his stone pedestal.
The crowd piled up around the students. The construction on the back.
The scholars were surrounded.
About 20,000 other people are now overcrowded by several blocks, Deputy Chief Inspector Arthur Morgan said. Morgan, a tumult veteran, added the Harlem insurrection in 1967. Although in 1970, each and every one of the leaders of the NYPD reveled in the turmoil.
Spectators tiptoed. A guy in a jacket raised a warning sign. A helmet jammed a lamppost. The police asked on the radio. Other squadrons have been deployed. On the street, the helmets led opposite to the police line.
“Calm down!” cried. “Hold on.”
Police have rejected some workers. The helmets said the Federal Hall belonged to everyone who still lacked its American flag. The flag had not risen because of the rain, but no one knew it. Hulls blamed Mayor Lindsay’s order for lowering Kent state flags.
“All we have to do is put our flag in those steps,” said one worker. “If you try, there will be blood to pay, ” Inspector Schryver reportedly replied.
Chief Morgan, also in parliament, said they had to apply for permission to demonstrate here, like everyone else.
“The structure staff at the time gave all indications that they were not organized and did not have an express action plan, and that the sudden interest and displayed through local Wall Street staff seemed to surprise them,” Chief Pfaffmann later told Internal Affairs.
The helmets are back in their ranks. The singing and the crowd with them. Every aspect had instigators throwing insults across the police line. The cacophony drowned the sirens.
“There were screams, nudges and nudes between the structure staff and the pacifist groups,” said a young patrolman in the square, Wilton Sekzer. “The structure staff searched for part of the Treasury building.”
His thrust has “stronger.”
Other protective helmets came waving a flag.
“I love it or that!” Peace now! “
Inspector Schryver saw the police line “wobbling and bending.” Now, “it seemed like it was only a matter of minutes before the police were invaded.”
The bottles were navigating the air. Chief Morgan almost hit. Chief Pfaffmann reported that “the missiles were introduced from the ranks of the protesters.” A camera caught a shot from the ranks.
In front of the students, the young men stirred angry symptoms of peace and cursed the war, the president, the workers.
you and Nixon too! the scholars continued to sing, fists and middle finger in the air. Some shouted, “Fascist pigs!”
The helmets responded with their hands and their assholes and a barrage of insults: “Bums! Array… Bundle! Array… Commie!”
Electric materials salesman Bob Barber endors in the ancient Trinity Church. But he saw the flags, he heard the chants. He thought it was patriotic to him. He joined impulsively.
Some pesky entrepreneurs covered the hell in front of the helmets. More white-collar staff piled up at the back and exploded. New York police commanders estimated that eight hundred staff members were strengthening the ranks of helmets. Chief Pfaffmann reported more “pressure” on the police.
More structure has arrived. Men in red helmets and plating shirts came from the west, crossing the crowd along Wall Street.
Inspector Schryver encouraged academics to leave the area. The helmets unfurled a massive flag. They were applauded.
The Peaceniks to sing aggressively.
The scholars had the speaker. They tried to overcome the protective helmets as if it were a rally of American joy. This only made the staff worse. No more helmets driven opposite to the cops. No more whores. No more older. Other men had their hands through their side, wrapping them in fists. The staff exploded. The first line of police exploded. “You can’t go through there!” shouted a police guard. The moment the cordaon arrested the men. Some patrolmen pushed back the helmets. The helmets are lifted. In the ranks of the protective helmets, a few men had lead pipes wrapped in burlap and kept them low. The cops were subsidized.
A waved a Vietcong flag from the steps.
The helmets screamed and booed, and the woman in the white motorcycle helmet surrendered.
The police line broke.