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

Readers interested in the evolution of Seventies Hardhats into today’s MAGA Caps will find this well-written book of great interest. If I had to choose just one depressing data point out of many covered in the book, it would be this: “Construction workers never earned again what they did in 1973…” and “when adjusted for inflation, the median American man still earned roughly the same {today} as he did in 1973.” (pages 290, 377) The hardhats of 1970 could still buy houses and pay for their kids in college. Today, the working class (and much of the middle class) can only keep its head above water by working two jobs (when they can find two), working longer hours, finding jobs for women, renting rather than buying houses, borrowing money to send kids to college, and maxing out credit cards. To add insult to injury, our Treasury Secretary wants to eliminate the temporary $ 600. monthly unemployment add on because he thinks it’s preventing lazy workers from going back to their stagnant take home paying jobs. In 1973, Steve Mnuchin was the eleven year old son of a Goldman Sachs banker, where Steve himself would one day be on the payroll. Today he is worth more than half a billion dollars. Being born on third base is a good place to start life. What kind of hats are around the corner? Stay tuned.

A truly awful book written by a man who is so consumed with hatred for the student leftists of the 60s that it poisons every page of this wretched book. Striving to understand the hardhat thugs, he refuses to grant any validity to anything said, done, or thought by student radicals. He’s unable to grant the possibility that Vietnam War was a horrible, criminal affair and that fighting it was something many saw as a duty, not as a form of shirking. This is history of the worst kind, written to spill bile rather than aid in the understanding of an event.

Over the last 20 years, many historians have tried to explain the rise of Conservatism and how we went from a very liberal president (FDR) to a president that many consider to be the antithesis of liberalism (Trump). This book, the Hardhat Riot, really helps to explain what happened and why.

The premise of the book is simple enough; a group of construction workers take offense with a group of liberal students protesting, and we end up with a physical conflagration. But that’s not the key here, although the author does a fantastic job of chronicling the events of the riot. The real key here is to understand how Richard Nixon took this event and catapulted it into a new focus within the Republican party – labor.

Kuhn persuasively argues that class was a huge issue in this rise, and that this is characterized by the riot – look at how the cops “looked the other way” when the “hardhats” were pummeling students. Why? Because the workers & the police were both of the same socioeconomic class.

As others have said, the Democratic party should analyze the contents of this book to better understand how they lost the working class, and take that knowledge to figure out how to become more relevant in today’s society.

Great read. Very detailed and well researched. Sometimes you think its too much detail, but then you realize that the writer is backing up everything hes saying. The point being that little of this was reported on the news back then, so few people knew the real extent of the riots in the 60s. Youre not brow-beaten with the similarities with todays civil unrest- it is up to the reader to decide how relevant you feel it is. I wish more young people would read this book. My own 4 children are now in their twenties. I see them and their friends experiencing different levels of confusion, stress, and fear with todays demonstrations and riots. I keep telling them to relax, they should have seen the sixties!

The book was a somewhat boring blow-by-blow description of the event but it lacked real analysis of the fact that we have essentially two societies that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. Apart from showing that this was as true in the 1960’s and 70’s as it is today, it added little of real context and background. As such, it could’ve been much, much shorter. I’d really anticipated getting this book, but after a few days, I couldn’t wait to finish it (I did) hoping it would get interesting towards the end. It didn’t.

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