In the days after May 4, 1970, the date the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War, anti-war activists were galvanized. In demonstrations held across the country, the protesters mourned the deaths of their compatriots but also felt emboldened to continue the fight to end a war that had no end in sight. They sought to show the rest of the world (and themselves) that they weren’t alone—that millions of people agreed the war must end, and that the administration of President Richard Nixon be held accountable.
The next day, college students in New York City gathered with nearly 1,000 demonstrators to protest at the United Nations. In the wake of the massacre rapidly becoming a national flashpoint, Mayor John Lindsay, who had spoken against the war at the 1968 Republican National Convention, ordered the flag at City Hall flown at half-mast in the Kent State students’ memory. The backlash began soon after.
On May 6, protesting students at City College met resistance from a small group of construction workers, some of whom self-identified themselves as Vietnam veterans, a preview of what would come later that week. Two days later, hundreds of local students gathered in the morning for a memorial demonstration in Lower Manhattan, eventually moving towards Federal Hall, the historic site where George Washington first took the oath of office as President. At this spot, in front of a statue of Washington, the protesters reiterated their commitment to ending the war. Then, chaos descended on the peaceful scene, as nearly 200 construction workers arrived at the protest bearing patriotic signs and, according to a New York Times report on the incident, chants of “All The Way, U.S.A.” and “Love It or Leave It.”
The workers quickly pushed through a line of mostly indifferent police officers to get to the protesters, charging at, according to the Times, students who closely resembled the stereotypical longhaired hippie that had come to symbolize opposition to the war. About 70 people were injured in the scuffle. The construction workers marched on through the narrow streets of the Financial District towards City Hall, where they sang the Star-Spangled Banner and demanded that Mayor Lindsay raise the flags to full-mast; they eventually got their way.
Penny Lewis, professor of sociology at the City University of New York, argues that the event that would come to be known as the Hard Hat riot came to symbolize the ‘hippie versus longhair’ debate in popular culture. “Seared into our collective memory,” she writes in Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, “the image of hardhats assaulting antiwar protestors in May 1970 crystallized long-standing popular narratives about class, race, and protest in this country.” But to leave it there, Lewis writes, is to miss that the Hard Hat Riot was more than just the straightforward narrative of ‘construction worker versus longhair.’ It was a convergence of genuine pro-Nixon sentiment, an administration eager to capitalize on a nation in crisis, and the dawn of a political realignment that would shape the nation's direction for generations.