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

by David Paul Kuhn

Overview

The nail-biting story of when the hardhats of downtown Manhattan beat scores of hippies bloody in May 1970, four days after Kent State, and how the nation reacted.

In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protestors bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was happening; Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story-how chaotic it was, when it began, when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed. It was unthinkable one generation before: FDR's "forgotten man" siding with the party of Big Business and, ultimately, paving the way for presidencies from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

In the shadow of the half-built Twin Towers, on the same day the Knicks rallied against the odds and won their first championship, we relive the schism that tore liberalism apart. We experience the tumult of Nixon's America and John Lindsay's New York City, as festering division explodes into violence. Nixon's advisors realize that this tragic turn is their chance, that the Democratic coalition has collapsed and that "these, quite candidly, are our people now."

In this nail-biting story, Kuhn delivers on meticulous research and reporting, drawing from thousands of pages of never-before-seen records. We go back to a harrowing day that explains the politics of today. We experience the battle between two tribes fighting different wars, soon to become different Americas, ultimately reliving a liberal war that maimed both sides. We come to see how it all was laid bare one brutal day, when the Democratic Party's future was bludgeoned by its past, as if it was a last gasp to say that we once mattered too.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190064716
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2020
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

David Paul Kuhn is an author, reporter, and political analyst. He has served as a senior and chief political writer across the political-media landscape, from Politico to RealClearPolitics to CBS News, as well as written for the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, National Review, New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and regularly appears on networks ranging from BBC to Fox News. He is the author of the political novel What Makes It Worthy.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: Backdrop
Chapter One: 'Out for Blood'
Chapter Two: The Revolutionaries of Grand Central and Columbia
Chapter Three: Chicago '68
Chapter Four: Two Moratorium Days
Chapter Five: 'Law and Order' and the Decline of Cities
Chapter Six: Consequences, 'Law and Order' and the Decline of Cities
Chapter Seven: Blue-Collar Whites Are 'Rediscovered' (in Middle American Gotham)
Chapter Eight: Those Who Did the Fighting and Dying
Chapter Nine: The New Left and the 'Great Test for Liberals'
Chapter Ten: Building the Twin Towers, Ethnic New York, and Race
Chapter Eleven: Cambodia and Kent State
Chapter Twelve: Kent State in New York

PART TWO: 'Bloody Friday'
Chapter Thirteen: 'U-S-A. All the way!'
Chapter Fourteen: Melee
Chapter Fifteen: 'About Time the Silent Majority Made Some Noise'
Chapter Sixteen: Violence Becomes 'Contagious'
Chapter Seventeen: 'We've Lost Control!'
Chapter Eighteen: The Riot Spreads
Chapter Nineteen: 'I'm Not Having City Hall Taken Over on My Watch'
Chapter Twenty: Full Circle to Federal Hall

PART THREE: AFTERWARD AND AFTERMATH
Chapter Twenty-One: The Days After: Knicks Utopia, a Fraught City, and Nixon at the Brink
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Riot Reverberates
Chapter Twenty- Three: 'Workers' Woodstock'
Chapter Twenty-Four: 'Our People Now,' Nixon Sees an Un-Silent Majority
Chapter Twenty-Five: Honor America day
Chapter Twenty-Six: 'Born with a Potmetal Spoon,' on Nixon's Blue-Collar Strategy
Chapter Twenty-Seven: How America(s) Saw It
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The End of the Beginning

Editorial Reviews

"David Paul Kuhn tells the story in marvellous detail." — Timothy D. Lusch, Chronicles

"Riveting." —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

"Engrossing, well-crafted, The Hardhat RiotEL 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 led to the era of the Trump presidency... Kuhn writes with empathy for both sides... Kuhn's accounts of the violence are vivid and raw... The author concludes with a sharp analysis of how the revolt of the White working class almost immediately reshaped American politics, beginning with Nixon's opportunistic claim of blue-collar Whites as "Silent Majority" supporters of his law-and-order presidency. Kuhn shows the reverberations over the decades, right up to the making of Donald Trump's political base... Kuhn argues that class divisions have driven people so far apart that it's as if Americans now live in 'entirely different places, even if they are still called by one name—America.'"
—The Washington Post Book Review

"Perhaps the best book ever on how Democrats lost the white working class. The Hardhat Riot is a great read, but also a must-read to understand the voters that Democrats neglected at their own peril."
—James Carville, former Chief Strategist for President Bill Clinton

"Over the past 15 years few writers have covered this realignment with the consistency of David Paul Kuhn, whose warnings about the reasons white working people were moving away from the Democrats were largely dismissed by the news media and party elites... Mr. Kuhn remained an unacknowledged prophet... Now he has synthesized his message with a lesson from history: The Hardhat Riot, a riveting account of... [a] clash on the streets of New York [that] came to symbolize the irreconcilable division taking shape in the rest of the country... Mr. Kuhn avoids polemics and judgment, yet leads the reader to understand the deeper questions implicit in so many of today's political debates... The Hardhat Riot insightfully explains why and how this happened. Perhaps the Democratic Party's leaders will finally understand what David Paul Kuhn has been trying to tell them."
—Jim Webb, The Wall Street Journal Book Review

"The Hardhat Riot, by David Paul Kuhn, vividly evokes... a blue-collar rampage whose effects still ripple, not the least of them being Donald Trump's improbable ascension to the presidency... this is a compelling narrative."
—The New York Times Book Review

"[An] outstanding new book... through dogged researchEL 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."
—National Review

"This is red-meat history with a hot splash of tabasco. David Paul Kuhn brings to life a period that is not only fascinating in itself but also illuminates the age of Donald Trump. If you want to understand how blue-collar Americans came to feel so disparaged and deplored, The Hardhat Riot is a great place to start. A truly captivating read."
—Robert Guest, Foreign Editor, The Economist

"David Paul Kuhn's Hardhat Riot captures a seminal but long-neglected turning point in the steady erosion of Democratic support among the core of the New Deal Coalition. The May 8, 1970, confrontation—AKA, 'Bloody Friday'—between anti-war protestors, mostly students, and tough, unionized construction workers determined to demonstrate their support of American troops in Vietnam, marked the start of the split between a well-educated elite and an increasingly discontented working class, a split that overtime produced the election of Donald Trump. This book is crucial for anyone seeking to understand the politics of 2020 and beyond."
—Thomas B. Edsall, Contributing Opinion Writer, The New York Times

"David Paul Kuhn's revealing new book... does two things remarkably well. It reconstructs a detailed, compelling, and coherent narrative of the riot, assembled from what must have seemed a morass of contradictory sources. The book also provides critical context for the riot, documenting the mounting alienation of the white working class from the ascendant New Left, and arguing convincingly for the Hardhat Riot not so much as the day that turned the tide, but as an unmistakable harbinger of political shifts in the offing, a moment when unlikely symbols of Nixon's Silent Majority roared back, giving voice to grievances that persist to this day."
—New York Journal of Books

"Vivid." —Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

"I picked up David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot with the intention of skimming and found myself engrossed, reading every page. Well-written, painstakingly researched, this is an important book that gives life to history and explains the divorce between working-class whites and the Democratic Party, and yet rarer still, is also a real pleasure to read."
—Charlie Cook, Editor and Publisher of The Cook Political Report

"President Trump's reelection bid rests as much as anything on the political loyalty and fealty of his blue-collar base. That they're such a factor in 2020 reflects one of the biggest shifts in American politics over the last half-century-plus. David Paul Kuhn explains why in his important new book . . . As an author, Kuhn was in many ways prescient about the rise of Trump's coalition nearly a decade before it happened . . . Kuhn's latest work explains in elegant and expert fashion how he won so much support among blue-collar white voters in the first place."
—Washington Examiner Book Review

"Hardhat Riot is an arresting and often chilling narrative of the events that drove a wedge between white working-class voters and the Democratic Party, setting America on the road to today's right-wing populism. I couldn't stop reading it. If you want to understand why cultural issues became central to our politics, read this book."
—William Galston, former policy advisor to President Clinton and Senior Fellow, the Brookings Institution

"Kuhn makes use of masterful, disturbing imagery to capture the clash... his narration is candid... the perspectives of both sides are shared without favoritism—only the facts. The text is fascinating as it traces the political breakdown that became the platform upon which Nixon built a new base... Hardhat Riot is a timely review of a historical event that contains a reminder that class divisions also create opportunities within politics."
—Foreword Reviews

"Trenchant... A welcome resurrection of a forgotten riot with relevance for our current fragmented political landscape."
—Kirkus

"A gripping history of a moment when two visions of America clashed—with fists flying—throughout the Wall Street district. The Hardhat Riot excavates conflicts over protest politics, American military power, and the party loyalties of the white working class that remain with us half a century later."
—Beverly Gage, Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University

"Sometimes events that are long forgotten have reverberations that dominate our times. In Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn skillfully shows how the split between traditionally Democratic constituencies—blue collar workers and militant students—eerily foreshadows the bitter political splits of our time."
—Michael Barone, author of The Almanac of American Politics and Emeritus Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

"David Paul Kuhn has breathed new life into an uproarious seminal event in modern political history, skillfully tracing fault lines running from the late 1960s up to the present. A timely, smart, adrenalin-fueled account conveyed with you-are-there immediacy."
—Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World

"David Paul Kuhn details, with much new research, the changing political conditions before and after the spring of 1970, when Nixon saw the opportunity after the May 8 Hardhat Riot. No previous book has so convincingly documented how important this single event was in changing the class base of both the Republican and Democratic parties."
—Joan Hoff, former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency

"It's about how elitist politicians left white, blue-collar workers feeling sold out. It's about how those lifelong Democrats—mostly Catholic, ethnic, union—began looking for a new home in the Republican Party. And it's about how that day changed American politics, perhaps forever. Kuhn has written a lot about the white working class, and he writes about the '60s here from its anguished perspective. Blue-collar workers saw liberal legislators as snobby, spoiled young radicals. The workers felt demeaned, even demonized. Finally, they demanded their own revolution."
—New York Daily News Book Review

"Largely through the microcosm of New York City, David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot delves deeply into the estrangement of the Democratic Party from America's blue-collar workers. For all of its fascinating detail of the travails of America's metropolis, The Hardhat Riot also offers a broad and rich panorama of American politics of the past 50 years and the most persuasive explanation for the rise of Donald Trump that has yet appeared."
—Ross K. Baker, Professor of American Government, Rutgers University

From the Publisher

2020-03-25
An account of a mostly forgotten 1970 altercation between New York City construction workers and citizens protesting the continuing war in Southeast Asia.

The majority of the violence occurred on May 8, 1970, four days after the Kent State tragedy. Kuhn, who has written for Politico, RealClearPolitics, and CBS News, among other outlets, explains how the tension had been building for several years—and on a variety of fronts. In addition to regular protests around the country, these included the campus of Columbia University, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the 1969 Moratorium To End the War in Vietnam, and, perhaps most significantly, within the rhetoric of Richard Nixon, both as a candidate and as president. For a few chapters, Kuhn foreshadows the violence committed by the construction workers while providing educated suppositions about why the NYPD seemed mostly unprepared to protect the protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. The graphic accounts of the violence occupy more than 80 pages, a section that ends chillingly: “The reporter asked Tallman, Would you hurt demonstrators again? ‘You bet. If they come back here Monday, we’ll give them the chase of their lives.’ ‘We’ll kill them,’ his friend added.” The author focuses not only on the construction workers, protesters, and police, but also NYC Mayor John Lindsay, 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. Throughout the narrative, the author wrestles with conflicting ideologies of patriotism, especially as symbolized by the American flag. In a trenchant epilogue, Kuhn connects dots from the events of that summer to the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

A welcome resurrection of a forgotten riot with relevance for our current fragmented political landscape. (b/w photos)

Kirkus Reviews