Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Kuhn, David Paul
Titre(s) : The Hardhat Riot [Texte imprimé] : Nixon, New York City, and the dawn of the white working-class revolution / David Paul Kuhn
Publication : New York : Oxford University Press, copyright [2020]
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (vi, 404 pages) : illustrations ; 25 cm
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (pages [307]-379) and index
"In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through
downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with
hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway- Democrats were at
war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story
of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon
seized the breach, and America was forever changed. It was unthinkable one generation
before: FDR's "forgotten man" siding with the party of Big Business and, ultimately,
paving the way for presidencies from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. This is the story
of the schism that tore liberalism apart. In this riveting story- rooted in meticulous
research, including thousands of pages of never-before-seen records- we go back to
a harrowing day that explains the politics of today. We experience an emerging class
conflict between two newly polarized Americas, and how it all boiled over on one brutal
day, when the Democratic Party's future was bludgeoned by its past." ; "I am seeking
to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver,
the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded . . . from the enormous condescension
of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to
the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may
have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But
they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their
aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience. - E. P. Thompson, The Making
of the English Working Class They arrived in waves, in colored hard hats and worn
steel-toed boots, shouldering American flags, thundering, "U-S-A. All the way," intent
on confronting antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street. Police rushed to form a human
chain and separate the two factions. Hippies chanted, "Peace now!" Hardhats shot back,
"Love it or leave it!" The student protestors pushed forward and shouted their opposition
to the "fucking war." They expected it to be a matter of words. They had been told
"the police are here to protect us." Then, in the same place where George Washington
was inaugurated, the construction workers charged and the police did not protect them.
The hardhats plowed through thousands, swinging their fists wildly, fighting to raise
American flags. Students tripped and screamed and flailed for escape. For hours, they
ran for their lives "like a cattle stampede." Young people were pulled from melees
by their hair. Others were found unconscious and prone in the dirty streets. By the
time the police realized the scope of the riot, the mob was too large and the cops
were too few. City Hall was now under siege. Two liberalisms collided that day, presaging
the long Democratic civil war ahead, and revealing a rupture expanding across the
American landscape, a divide that had grown so vast it seemed unbridgeable by the
time elites noticed, unless one looked back and understood how it all began. An earthquake
only feels like an aberration. We know otherwise, of course. It's the consequence
of vast plates that move with glacial time, mere millimeters a year, yet build mountains
and carve oceans. Normally, these plates pass one another with friction so minimal
it doesn't register in our lives. But sometimes too much sub-terrain stress amasses
and the plates get stuck, frequently where the strain has long collected-that is,
a fault-line. Then the new pressure rises. The force exceeds what bonds the plates
together. Blocks of crust collide and some fall. The fault-line ruptures and the land
shakes. In 2016, the Democratic nominee performed worse with working-class whites
than any other nominee, of either party, since the Second World War. Yet before that
fateful campaign, we had arrived at a place where the party of the workingman relied
most on the allegiance of educated whites, and the party of big business depended
on working-class whites. Years later, even well-informed Americans still struggled
to consider all he exposed-the fragility of our norms, that American culture and politics
rest upon corroded depths. What revealed that corrosion, and shook American life afterward,
was not detached from history. It was the consequence of a tectonic break a half-century
ago. May 1970 was a tumultuous month in a tumultuous era. After Cambodia and Kent
State, the antiwar movement revived and radicalized as never before. Even after impeachment,
Richard Nixon recalled these weeks as some of the most traumatic of his presidency.
His expansion of the war into Cambodia caused a cascade of events that brought much
of the nation to the brink, and Nixon with it-until, as William Safire put it, the
hardhats helped "turn the tide." Those raging most against the war were not only college
students, they tended to also hale from suburban affluence. They were the educated
youth who ushered in the counterculture, who believed in men by the name of Gene McCarthy,
John Lindsay, and George McGovern. They were also a class apart from most soldiers
over there. About three in four Vietnam veterans were blue collar whites, boys of
the lower middle-class and poorer backgrounds. Vietnam, unlike any war since at least
the Civil War, asked the most of those who came from less. New York was still a blue-collar
city at the dawn of the 1970s. The deindustrialization of America had hit it early
and hard. The consequences for the city forecasted those for America. For a time,
New York staved off the worst. There was a roaring national economy, a stock market
bubble, a "Second Skyscraper Age." That building renaissance promised to remake downtown.
Thousands of tradesmen and laborers crowded into Lower Manhattan for the work, including
building two colossal towers"
Sujet(s) : Hard Hat Riot (New-York, États-Unis ; 1970)
Guerre du Vietnam (1961-1975) -- Mouvements contestataires -- New York (N.Y., États-Unis)
Étudiants -- Violence envers -- New York (N.Y., États-Unis) -- 1945-1990
Construction -- Industrie -- Personnel -- Conditions de travail -- New York (N.Y., États-Unis) -- 1945-1990
Politique et gouvernement -- New York (N.Y., États-Unis) -- 1951-....
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780190064716. - ISBN 0190064714. - ISBN 9780190064730 (erroné)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb46634188f
Notice n° :
FRBNF46634188
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
