The early chapters cover “The Revolutionaries of Grand Central and Columbia” and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, painting a picture of an upper-middle-class counterculture and student revolt that seemed designed both to attract media attention and alienate much of the public. If the Democratic Party has lost blue-collar whites as a substantial part of its electoral base, a group that he describes as “on the losing side of the postindustrial age,” Kuhn wants to explain why.įor anyone familiar with the broad outlines of late-1960s anti-war activism, Kuhn’s portrait, at least of the infantile and more provocative part of the movement, will be familiar. In his exhaustive account of the so-called “Hardhat Riot”-the backdrop, the events of that day, and the political and symbolic aftermath-David Paul Kuhn outlines how the cultural, political, and economic fissures of that time have reverberated to the present. Faces were smashed, bones were broken, and several students were knocked unconscious. According to a later NYPD report of events of that day-no objective independent review was ever conducted-more than 100 people were wounded. On May 8, 1970, hundreds of construction workers from throughout Manhattan converged on Federal Hall near Wall Street and bloodied anti–Vietnam War activists who had gathered to protest President Nixon’s recent expansion of the war into Cambodia and the killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution University of Wisconsin students stage a protest against campus job recruiting and against the war in Vietnam, October 1967.
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