Why read The Hardhat Riot?

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

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Hardhat Riot as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Timothy N. Thurber

Author

On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.

Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals.

Nixon successfully courted many…

From Timothy's list on Republicans and Democrats in the 1960s.