Description
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.
Table of Contents
PART ONE: BackdropChapter One: 'Out for Blood'Chapter Two: The Revolutionaries of Grand Central and ColumbiaChapter Three: Chicago '68Chapter Four: Two Moratorium DaysChapter Five: 'Law and Order' and the Decline of CitiesChapter Six: Consequences, 'Law and Order' and the Decline of CitiesChapter Seven: Blue-Collar Whites Are 'Rediscovered' (in Middle American Gotham)Chapter Eight: Those Who Did the Fighting and DyingChapter Nine: The New Left and the 'Great Test for Liberals'Chapter Ten: Building the Twin Towers, Ethnic New York, and RaceChapter Eleven: Cambodia and Kent StateChapter Twelve: Kent State in New YorkPART TWO: 'Bloody Friday'Chapter Thirteen: 'U-S-A. All the way!'Chapter Fourteen: MeleeChapter Fifteen: 'About Time the Silent Majority Made Some Noise'Chapter Sixteen: Violence Becomes 'Contagious'Chapter Seventeen: 'We've Lost Control!'Chapter Eighteen: The Riot SpreadsChapter Nineteen: 'I'm Not Having City Hall Taken Over on My Watch'Chapter Twenty: Full Circle to Federal HallPART THREE: AFTERWARD AND AFTERMATHChapter Twenty-One: The Days After: Knicks Utopia, a Fraught City, and Nixon at the BrinkChapter Twenty-Two: The Riot ReverberatesChapter Twenty- Three: 'Workers' Woodstock'Chapter Twenty-Four: 'Our People Now,' Nixon Sees an Un-Silent MajorityChapter Twenty-Five: Honor America dayChapter Twenty-Six: 'Born with a Potmetal Spoon,' on Nixon's Blue-Collar StrategyChapter Twenty-Seven: How America(s) Saw ItChapter Twenty-Eight: The End of the Beginning
