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Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by college students and elite intellectuals, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers largely supported the war effort. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, Penny Lewis challenges this collective memory of class polarization. Through close readings of archival documents, popular culture, and media accounts at the time, she offers a more accurate "counter-memory" of a diverse, cross-class opposition to the war in Southeast Asia that included the labor movement, working-class students, soldiers and veterans, and Black Power, civil rights, and Chicano activists.
Lewis investigates why the image of antiwar class division gained such traction at the time and has maintained such a hold on popular memory since. Identifying the primarily middle-class culture of the early antiwar movement, she traces how the class interests of its first organizers were reflected in its subsequent forms. The founding narratives of class-based political behavior, Lewis shows, were amplified in the late 1960s and early 1970s because the working class, in particular, lacked a voice in the public sphere, a problem that only increased in the subsequent period, even as working-class opposition to the war grew. By exposing as false the popular image of conservative workers and liberal elites separated by an unbridgeable gulf, Lewis suggests that shared political attitudes and actions are, in fact, possible between these two groups.
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Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by college students and elite intellectuals, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers largely supported the war effort. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, Penny Lewis challenges this collective memory of class polarization. Through close readings of archival documents, popular culture, and media accounts at the time, she offers a more accurate "counter-memory" of a diverse, cross-class opposition to the war in Southeast Asia that included the labor movement, working-class students, soldiers and veterans, and Black Power, civil rights, and Chicano activists.
Lewis investigates why the image of antiwar class division gained such traction at the time and has maintained such a hold on popular memory since. Identifying the primarily middle-class culture of the early antiwar movement, she traces how the class interests of its first organizers were reflected in its subsequent forms. The founding narratives of class-based political behavior, Lewis shows, were amplified in the late 1960s and early 1970s because the working class, in particular, lacked a voice in the public sphere, a problem that only increased in the subsequent period, even as working-class opposition to the war grew. By exposing as false the popular image of conservative workers and liberal elites separated by an unbridgeable gulf, Lewis suggests that shared political attitudes and actions are, in fact, possible between these two groups.
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Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by college students and elite intellectuals, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers largely supported the war effort. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, Penny Lewis challenges this collective memory of class polarization. Through close readings of archival documents, popular culture, and media accounts at the time, she offers a more accurate "counter-memory" of a diverse, cross-class opposition to the war in Southeast Asia that included the labor movement, working-class students, soldiers and veterans, and Black Power, civil rights, and Chicano activists.
Lewis investigates why the image of antiwar class division gained such traction at the time and has maintained such a hold on popular memory since. Identifying the primarily middle-class culture of the early antiwar movement, she traces how the class interests of its first organizers were reflected in its subsequent forms. The founding narratives of class-based political behavior, Lewis shows, were amplified in the late 1960s and early 1970s because the working class, in particular, lacked a voice in the public sphere, a problem that only increased in the subsequent period, even as working-class opposition to the war grew. By exposing as false the popular image of conservative workers and liberal elites separated by an unbridgeable gulf, Lewis suggests that shared political attitudes and actions are, in fact, possible between these two groups.
Penny Lewis is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Collective Memory of Vietnam Antiwar Sentiment and ProtestPart I. The Antiwar Movement: A Liberal Elite?2. Middle Class Cultures and the Movement's Early Years3. Countercurrents in the Movement: Complicating the Class Base4. Countermemory I: "A Rich Man's War and a Poor Man’s Fight"5. Countermemory II: GIs and Veterans Join the MovementPart II. Hardhat Hawks?: Working-Class Conservatism6. Anticipation of the Class Divide7. Hardhats versus Elite Doves: Consolidation of the ImageConclusionNotes Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Richard Flacks
This book compels us to fundamentally reexamine how we remember the Vietnam years and the movements of that period. In forcing such reexamination, Penny Lewis brilliantly challenges conventional theorizing about class, about collective identity, about protest and public opinion. It's one of those rare books that changes how both scholars and the public think about recent history—and what that history means for us now. What’s more—it's wonderfully well-written!
Adolph ReedJr.
Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks displays historical sociology at its best. It is historically subtle, nuanced and rich, as well as theoretically sophisticated while not at all arcane. Penny Lewis provides a fresh and important, deeply and carefully contextualized account of the ways that class, and narratives about class, emerged within and around, shaped, and were shaped by the movement against the Vietnam war in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Just as important, she examines the complex impact that history has had for subsequent American political understandings, including how dominant narratives—particularly the imagery of working-class conservatism—formed in that period have persisted in constraining even left politics in the United States. This book makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary scholarship and political debate. Lewis's account is full and true.
Todd Gitlin
Penny Lewis's thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and subtle book not only upends conventional wisdom about the sixties antiwar movement but does a good deal to help us rethink what class means in America.Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks is an indispensable reconsideration of a history we thought we knew.
Peter Rachleff
Penny Lewis's Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks will spur readers to think differently about our present and not just the past; the tropes of the top and the bottom and of a relationship between them that imperils the great 'middle' are at the heart of our current political and social debates. Lewis explains how the enduring and familiar images of white, conservative, blue-collar workers and liberal antiwarriors from privileged milieus were created, circulated, and consumed.
