President Trump’s reelection bid rests as much as anything on the political loyalty and fealty of his blue-collar base. That they’re such a factor in 2020 reflects one of the biggest shifts in American politics over the last half-century-plus.
David Paul Kuhn explains why in his important new book, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. Kuhn details a series of wrenching national events in the late 1960s through the early 1970s that scrambled longtime national political coalitions, which, more than a half-century later, manifested in Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and surprise White House win over Hillary Clinton.
In the 2016 race, Kuhn, a political journalist, writes, “the votes of blue-collar whites differed from the votes of college-educated whites more than at any other time since 1964. Back then Lyndon Johnson’s landslide depended most on his blue-collar base. The electorate reversed by 2016. Trump owed the presidency to whites not of the information economy, not of the professions or coastal culture, but to those on the losing side of the preindustrial age.”
Kuhn tells the story through surprising lenses. That includes construction and opening of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, felled in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.
The Twin Towers were a major source of national pride for the son and grandsons of immigrants who helped construct them high above the New York skyline. Particularly amid a backdrop, on the ground, of tumult over the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and the waves of urban riots that followed, among other searing events of the era.
“The Twin Towers were Everest, the ‘big job’ for thousands of tradesman and laborers who built a city of steel in the sky,” Kuhn writes.
The gleaming 110-story structures, part of a large complex of seven buildings in New York City’s Financial District, represented the best of America rather than the turmoil portrayed daily on the evening news.
“As the Trade Center hardhats would, when a skyscraper was completed, workmen often staked a large flag to the final column,” Kuhn writes. “They watched the crane lift the last steel, as it steadily ascended countless floors and the wind picked up and the flag waved and whipped in the thin air, at times violently.”
The construction workers were foot soldiers of an army of Richard Nixon’s vaunted “silent majority” of Americans, primarily blue-collar middle-class white people in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas who did not normally actively participate in politics. They helped propel him to the presidency in 1968 after the former vice president’s achingly close loss to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier.
Their disgust with the excesses of left-wing protesters and agitators boiled over in New York City in the Hard Hat Riot, on May 8, 1970. As Kuhn recounts in vivid detail, around 12 p.m., hundreds of construction workers attacked college- and high school-aged protesters, 1,000 or so strong, who were protesting the war in Vietnam.
The episode came after Nixon’s April 30 announcement about the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, a neutral country, and the May 4 shootings by Ohio National Guardsman at Kent State University in Ohio, which claimed four lives and left nine others injured. The Hard Hat Riot, which began near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, spilled over into New York City Hall, lasting about two hours. At least 100 people, including four police officers, were injured on “Bloody Friday,” with one hard hat arrested.
Backlash against the New Left took place not only in the bleeding streets of Manhattan but in Washington’s corridors of power. Nixon as president sought to cement support from blue-collar workers that in the 1950s had begun to shift the GOP’s way under his old boss, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was vice president.
“On Labor Day 1970, the White Houses feted seventy union chiefs at a formal dinner,” Kuhn writes. “The AFL-CIO’s spokesman said, ‘No president had ever done anything like this before.’”
Fifty-five years after the Hard Hat Riot, it’s an event particularly relevant to the 2020 presidential race. Trump frequently tweets about his own “silent majority,” which will be put to the electoral test on Nov. 3. And there’s never been subtlety in his message.
“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said in a February 2016 Nevada campaign stop.
As an author, Kuhn was in many ways prescient about the rise of Trump’s coalition nearly a decade before it happened, in his 2007 book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma. Whether Trump takes the oath of office for a second term on Jan. 20, 2021 or leaves Washington after an ignominious defeat at the hands of Democratic rival Joe Biden, Kuhn’s latest work explains in elegant and expert fashion how he won so much support among blue-collar white voters in the first place.
