In the days following May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War, anti-war activists were galvanized. Demonstrations erupted nationwide. Protesters mourned their fallen peers but simultaneously felt empowered to continue the fight to end a seemingly endless war. They aimed to show the world—and themselves—that they weren’t alone, that millions agreed the war had to stop, and that President Richard Nixon’s administration needed to be held accountable. Read on for more details from manhattanyes.
Clashes Between Construction Workers and Students
The next day, college students in New York City joined nearly 1,000 demonstrators in a protest outside the United Nations. With the massacre quickly becoming a national flashpoint, Mayor John Lindsay, who had opposed the war at the 1968 Republican National Convention, ordered the flag at City Hall lowered to half-staff in memory of the Kent State students. This decision escalated tensions and provoked a negative reaction.
On May 6, protesting City College students met resistance from a small group of construction workers, some identifying as Vietnam veterans, foreshadowing what would unfold later that week. Two days later, hundreds of local students gathered that morning for a memorial demonstration in Lower Manhattan, eventually marching to Federal Hall, the historic site where George Washington first took the oath of office as president. At this location, before a statue of Washington, the protestors reaffirmed their commitment to ending the war. Chaos then erupted among the peaceful demonstrators when around 200 construction workers arrived at the protest with patriotic signs and, according to a New York Times account of the incident, chanted “All the Way, U.S.A.” and “Love It or Leave It.”
The workers quickly pushed through a line of largely indifferent police officers to reach the protestors, pouncing on students who, the Times reported, strongly resembled the stereotypical long-haired hippie symbolizing opposition to the war. Approximately 70 people were injured in the skirmish. The construction workers marched through the narrow streets of the Financial District to City Hall, where they sang the national anthem and demanded Mayor Lindsay raise the flags to full mast. Ultimately, they got their way.
The Protest That Became Known as the “Hard Hat Riot”
Penny Lewis, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, argues that the event, which became known as the “Hard Hat Riot,” came to symbolize the “hippie versus longhair” debate in popular culture. In her book, Hard Hats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, Lewis described the “image of hard hats attacking antiwar protestors in May 1970 as the event that crystallized long-standing popular narratives about class, race, and protest in this country.”
But to leave it at that, Lewis writes, is to miss that the “Hard Hat Riot” was more than just a straightforward “construction worker versus longhair” narrative. It was a convergence of genuine pro-Nixon sentiment by an administration that sought to benefit from the country’s crisis, and the dawn of a political realignment that would define the nation for generations.
Who Was Peter Brennan, Who Organized the Melee?
Born in 1918, Peter Brennan spent most of his life in New York. Raised by a single mother after his father, a locksmith, died from influenza, Brennan attended City College and trained as a painter. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he was elected to a leadership position in a local painters’ union and quickly rose through the ranks of organized labor. By the late 1950s, he was president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and vice-president of the New York State AFL-CIO.
As one of New York City’s most prominent union leaders, Brennan often clashed with Mayor Lindsay’s administration. Lindsay, a liberal Republican, ran on a platform of progressive change in New York and pushed for New York unions to adopt affirmative action and nondiscrimination policies. Many union officials, including Brennan, viewed this as overreach by Lindsay, and the rank-and-file union members, who were overwhelmingly white, resisted integration. Brennan skillfully leveraged this paradigm for his own political gain: he positioned the labor movement as anti-anti-war to detach its members from other racially progressive platforms.
Days after the riot, Brennan maintained that the construction workers acted of their own accord, driven solely by love for country and president.
“The unions had nothing to do with it,” he said in an interview. “The men acted on their own. They did it because they were sick and tired of the violence by anti-war demonstrators, those who spit on and desecrate the American flag.”
The Nixon administration also portrayed the counter-protest as a genuine and organic expression of support for the war. But in reality, the administration, in concert with New York union leaders, helped coordinate this counter-protest and several others that would take place throughout May. Both presidential advisors and many union leaders saw promise in traditionally Democratic-leaning unions becoming a force to counteract the rapidly growing number of anti-war protestors.
Days before the violence erupted in New York, Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman suggested to the president that he use construction workers, or “hard hats,” to create conflict. Local union leaders, according to sources who spoke out years later, specifically encouraged workers to counter-protest the May 8 demonstration, in some cases even offering them monetary bonuses to do so.
At the time of Brennan’s death in 1996, obituaries presented it as a given that he personally helped organize the melee.
Subsequent demonstrations after May 8 proved that many in the city genuinely supported the war. Historian Vincent Cannato, in The Ungovernable City, a book on Lindsay’s mayoral tenure, notes that some veterans and relatives of veterans found Lindsay’s personal opposition to the military offensive upsetting, while others felt anger at what they considered disrespect from anti-war protestors.
The riot led to Brennan and other Nixon-friendly labor leaders being invited to the White House, as Rick Perlstein later wrote, the president himself delighted by the riot, even exclaiming, “Thank God for the hard hats!”
Brennan, clearly aware of the moment’s significance, presented Nixon himself with a white hard hat, calling it “a symbol, alongside our great flag, of freedom and patriotism to our beloved country.” In that same moment, writes University of Massachusetts Amherst historian Christian G. Appy, Brennan also affixed a small enamel American flag pin to Nixon’s lapel, making him the first president to adopt the flag as part of his uniform.
“The flag lapel pin,” Appy writes, “was not an emblem of national unity, but a political badge, as deliberately confrontational as the peace symbol.”
The “Hard Hat Riot” in Nixon’s Campaign
After the “Hard Hat Riot,” pro-war demonstrations continued in New York City. On Saturday, May 11, over 150,000 Nixon supporters marched, though many signs and chants indicated the event was less a demonstration of support for the Vietnam War and more a direct indictment of Mayor Lindsay’s administration—“Lindsay for Mayor of Hanoi” and “Lindsay for President of North Vietnam,” some signs read.
The riot eventually became a launching pad for Peter Brennan’s national career—he worked to secure labor support for Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign and was rewarded with an appointment as Secretary of Labor. Brennan contributed significantly to the creation of the social-conservative political bloc that later became known collectively as the “Reagan Democrats.”
Today, the hard hat Brennan gave to Nixon resides at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. In presenting it to the president, Brennan predicted what it would signify:
“The hard hat will be a symbol,” he declared, “alongside our great flag, of freedom and patriotism to our beloved country.”