There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  ONCE HE WAS IN OFFICE, Nixon also appeared to have no immediate solution for the war, and domestic impatience deepened over the summer of 1969, fed in part by news of a shocking war crime perpetrated by U.S. soldiers. It was revealed that in March 1968 an American infantry brigade had entered the Vietnamese village of Song My and its six hamlets, named My Lai, and killed more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians.71 This disclosure, supported by graphic images of the bloodied victims piled in a ditch, served to finally push many previously undecided citizens toward opposition to the war. “Americans must face up frankly to what has become a severe test of conscience,” possibly “one of this nation’s most ignoble hours,” the New York Times told its readers.72 The atrocity helped usher in a new phase of antiwar concern; the protracted engagement in Vietnam was no longer simply an act of disputed foreign policy, a course to be rectified, but something horrific and sickening. After My Lai, observed Tony Mazzocchi, a veteran labor organizer with the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), “a lot of people came out of the closet.”73

  It was a surprisingly broad spectrum of society that turned out on October 15, 1969, when a national one-day moratorium against the war left no doubt that antiwar sentiment had crossed over fully into the mainstream. A near “general strike” atmosphere seized the country, as at midday huge marches and observances took place involving students, teachers, businessmen, and many labor unions, including the UAW. It was in response to this overwhelming display of antiwar fervor that President Nixon took to the airwaves on November 3 to invoke “the great silent majority” of Americans who, he contended, still supported the war.

  Mazzocchi, a New York native who was a combat veteran of the Second World War, was disappointed with the lack of consistent major labor union backing for the antiwar cause. Believing that labor had a moral obligation to demand the troops return home, he began organizing public meetings featuring speakers like Senators George McGovern and Alan Cranston as well as the UAW’s Victor Reuther, and urged that labor back an antiwar amendment sponsored by McGovern and Senator Mark Hatfield that, in lieu of Congress issuing a formal declaration of war, would cease all funding of the Vietnam conflict except what was required to withdraw U.S. troops. Mazzocchi also coordinated one of labor’s most prominent antiwar efforts—a full-page advertisement that ran in the Washington Post on February 25, 1970, signed by 110 individuals from the American Federation of Teachers, the UAW, the Teamsters, and the AFL-CIO. Headlined “A Rich Man’s War and a Poor Man’s Fight,” the ad listed the war’s costs to life and limb, its moral failings, and its harm to the U.S. society and economy (“Vietnam Eats Up Workers’ Wages”; “Vietnam Causes Inflation”) while demanding the immediate withdrawal of American forces. By May 1970, Washington Labor for Peace, the ad hoc group founded to place the Post advertisement, joined Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace to hold a four-hundred-person public fast in Lafayette Square across from the White House.

  That business executives should be found clasping hands with union members and other protestors in joint opposition to the war was in itself a remarkable acknowledgment of how far antiwar opposition had come, but the provocation for the unique event at Lafayette Square, a prime-time presidential address broadcast on April 29, had in fact unified protest nationwide. In his talk, Nixon revealed that he had ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia, an incursion he defended as necessary to attack Vietcong who were using Cambodia as a safe bastion from which to launch sorties against U.S. soldiers. “We will not allow American men by the thousands to be killed by an enemy from privileged sanctuary,” the president said. He also announced that he was stepping up the bombing of North Vietnam, and then shared his justification for defying the intensity of antiwar sentiment at home. “If when the chips are down the world’s most powerful nation … acts like a pitiful, helpless giant,” Nixon averred, “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” He offered to stake his own political future on staying the course, vowing, “I would rather be a one-term president and do what I believe was right than to be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.”74

  These two new strategic actions escalating the war, and Nixon’s strongly worded defense of his policy, confirmed the antiwar movement’s worst fears. The war would go on, and on. The sense of outrage was tragically compounded on May 4 when Ohio National Guardsmen fired on a group of student protestors at Kent State University, killing four and wounding eleven. Additional shootings of young people and students occurred in Augusta, Georgia, and at Jackson State in Mississippi, triggering massive protests as numerous colleges across the country were closed by student strikes. Several unions—from the left-leaning Local 1199 to the conservative Teamsters—sent telegrams to the White House demanding the president reverse course. “We’ve Had It!” declared an ad signed by 451 West Coast trade union leaders that ran in San Francisco papers. “You have created a credibility gap of incredible proportions. You have pledged to the American people that we will be out of Cambodia by June 30. In the light of [your] record, all we can say is—we don’t believe you!”75

  While it was not given particular notice amid the storm of protest, another significant chastisement came from Walter Reuther, who demanded the country’s immediate withdrawal of its forces. On May 6 he issued a statement reprimanding Nixon for expanding a war that was based on a bankrupt policy, reminding him, “It is your responsibility to lead us out of the Southeast Asian War—to peace at home and abroad.” Tragically, it would be Reuther’s last public utterance. On the night of May 9 he and his wife, May, and four others flew in a chartered jet to the town of Pellston in northern Michigan, 260 miles north of Detroit, to inspect a UAW Family Education Center being built nearby on Black Lake. While attempting to land in fog and rain the plane descended short of the runway, clipped a number of trees, then crashed and burned a mile and a half southwest of the airport. There were no survivors.76

  In a bizarre juxtaposition, reports of the sudden loss of one of labor’s great men adjoined the extensive news accounts of one of the more shameful incidents in labor movement history—the assault on May 8 by hundreds of New York building trades workers on a lunchtime student antiwar protest in lower Manhattan. The students, from New York University, Hunter College, and area high schools, had rallied peacefully all morning at the corner of Wall and Broad streets; the construction workers had wandered over from their jobs on the World Trade Center site. “You brought down one president and you’ll bring down another,” a speaker had just assured the students, to loud applause, when the construction workers rammed their way to the front of the assembly and began using their yellow safety hard hats as bludgeons to attack the young people, as well as adult passersby who attempted to intervene. Yelling “Love it or leave it!” and “Kill the Commie bastards!” the attackers pursued their victims through the corridors of the city’s financial district, knocking them down, kicking and stomping them, before heading en masse to nearby city hall, where liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay had ordered the American flag flown at half-staff to honor the students killed at Kent State.

  Blue-collar New York had long had its doubts about Lindsay, beginning with the mayor’s first day in office, January 1, 1966, when he’d been greeted by a paralyzing Transport Workers Union (TWU) strike. In the fourteen-day strike, which sidelined thirty-three thousand workers, the patrician, Yale-educated Lindsay met an implacable foe in TWU leader Mike Quill, an Irish immigrant and former Communist. City transit jobs, traditionally a bastion of working-class Irish, were increasingly being taken by blacks and Hispanics, and Quill was under pressure to close the gap between the less-than-$3-an-hour wage paid to minority cleaners and token booth clerks and the higher wage of $4 an hour he sought to accommodate the old-guard skilled Irish motormen. The new mayor had little experience dealing with labor issues, and for a New Yo
rk politician he was singularly ill-prepared to tussle with a roughhewn character like Mike Quill, who gruffly dismissed one city offer as “a package of peanuts” and to his face told Lindsay (whose name he delighted in mispronouncing “Lindsley”), “You are nothing but a juvenile, a lightweight, and a pipsqueak. You have to grow up. You don’t know anything about the working class. You don’t know anything about labor unions.”77 When Quill was served an injunction for violating a state no-strike order governing the transit workers, he tore up the court’s papers, defiance that led to his being jailed for contempt along with eight other union leaders. The TWU leader, who suffered from a heart condition, was sent to the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital.78

  It was New York City that was in critical condition, however, losing millions of dollars a day in business and tax revenue. Bitter, unproductive strike negotiations ensued amid news reports of stranded commuters sleeping on armory cots, offices and stores unable to function, and tourists canceling their plans to visit the city. At a raucous TWU demonstration in City Hall Park, Lindsay was burned in effigy. Eventually the city capitulated, increasing wages and throwing in a special pension bonus. (Quill had scant time to savor his victory; he died of heart failure two days after being released from the hospital.)

  Working-class resentment of the new administration, however, did not abate. This restive group saw its income depreciating, its streets and neighborhoods declining, while hippies and other elites acted out and elected officials appeared to bend over backward to assist minorities and the inner city. “What the hell does Lindsay care about me?” a New York ironworker complained to journalist Pete Hamill in 1969. “He doesn’t care whether my kid has shoes, whether my boy gets a new suit for Easter, whether I got any money in the bank. None of them politicians give a good goddam. All they worry about is the niggers.”79 The mayor came in for a special bruising on February 9, 1969, when an unpredicted blizzard dumped fifteen inches of snow on New York City, closing streets and parkways for three days as the city struggled to locate snow-clearing equipment; the outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were largely ignored in the hasty cleanup effort. When the mayor traveled to Queens to walk the streets and reassure residents, he was greeted by boos and insults. “Get away, you bum!” one woman snapped as he tried to say hello, a reproach that might have been spoken by an increasing number of the city’s 8 million residents toward a mayor who seemed more intent on grooming his image for a possible run at national office than seeing that the city delivered needed services to regular working people.80

  Thus, at the time of the “hard hat” assaults of May 1970, Lindsay’s decision to honor the martyred antiwar protestors of Kent State by flying the U.S. and city flags at half-staff struck many as further evidence of his clueless detachment. Demanding the banner above city hall be restored at once to its full height, the mob of construction workers easily intimidated the small police unit on hand, who quickly arranged for the flag to be raised. Moments later, however, a mayoral aide named Sid Davidoff re-lowered it, prompting the outraged workers to leap over barricades and charge to the front doors of city hall, where they threatened to storm inside if the flag was not immediately placed again in its rightful position. When this had been done, the men removed their helmets and sang the national anthem. Before leaving the area, some crossed the street to the campus of Pace University and proceeded to smash the school’s ground-floor windows, which were covered in antiwar banners, then roughed up more students. That evening, television news reports showed scenes the likes of which America had never seen, as the burly “hard hats,” seemingly unhampered by police, mobbed and beat terrified young men and women, many of whom were shown cowering defensively on the ground.81

  Peter J. Brennan, head of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, explained that the incident had not been orchestrated by union higher-ups—a claim exposed as false by subsequent press investigation. The office of Congressman Lowenstein had learned the night before of shop stewards telling construction workers they should take time off “to go and knock the heads of the kids who are protesting the Nixon-Kent thing,” and had notified New York City police.82 Brennan was no doubt more honest when he suggested the hard hat violence was deserved payback for the “violence” of the student demonstrators, “those who spat at the American flag and desecrated it,” a view that, to the embarrassment of organized labor, was then echoed by George Meany. (There is no evidence the demonstrators had burned a flag, as Brennan and others contended.)83

  Mayor Lindsay’s wrath came to bear on the city’s police brass, which he summoned to city hall and dressed down in private for three hours, demanding a review of police methods for controlling public protest. In response to these chastisements, on May 11 an even larger crowd of construction workers, estimated at two thousand, swarmed the same streets of lower Manhattan, chanting “Lindsay Is a Bum!” and carrying signs that read IMPEACH THE RED MAYOR! Approaching Pace University, the workers held signs intended for the eyes of students watching from the safety of upstairs windows: DON’T WORRY, THEY DON’T DRAFT FAGGOTS.84

  In the wake of the hard hat spectacle, and in gratitude for Meany’s support of the incursion into Cambodia, Nixon on May 12 received the AFL-CIO executive council, offering its members an exclusive briefing on reports from the war front. Clearly pleased to have found a core of blue-collar labor support, living proof of his “silent majority,” the president also welcomed a group of building trades unionists to the White House, where one presented him with an orange hard hat with NIXON written on it. May 20 brought the crowning of the New York construction workers’ triumph, a massive, largely peaceful pro-war rally at city hall that aimed “to demonstrate that love of country and love and respect for our country’s flag are not as old-fashioned and as out of date as the ‘know-it-all’s’ would have us believe.” Police estimated the gathering at one hundred thousand people.85 Not to be outdone, the next day an antiwar crowd of about the same number convened in the same location. Calling itself the Labor-Student Coalition for Peace and hoisting signs that declared PEACE NOW, AVENGE KENT STATE, and MEANY DOESN’T SPEAK FOR ME, the rally sought to show that the hard hats did not represent organized labor and could not deter the antiwar solidarity of students and workers—a camaraderie that was largely still more wishful than fact.

  While most Americans were repulsed by the scenes of bullies assaulting peaceful protestors, others expressed a sense of gratitude and relief that at last someone had stood up to the radical demonstrators. Such reaction bespoke a resentment for the perceived excesses of the antiwar movement and youth generally—the teach-ins and endless protests, the insults to the president and the military, the disrespect for elders, the indulgence of feminists and black nationalists, and the refusal to submit to the draft. The hard hats’ sudden notoriety represented a genuine and growing sentiment—the monumental desire in the country for normalcy and the restoration of authority.

  The Republican Party would cleverly exploit that yearning in the midterm elections of 1970, luring many working-class Americans away from their traditional home in the Democratic Party. James Buckley, younger brother of the well-known conservative William F. Buckley Jr., ran for U.S. senator from New York as an independent, facing Charles Goodell, a dovish Republican, and Democrat Richard Ottinger, an antiwar congressman. With the conservative side of the electorate all to himself, Buckley hit strongly on the themes of patriotism and class resentment, building successfully on the rift the hard hats had helped open. In upstate New York he was greeted warmly in appearances at factories, even though he supported right-to-work laws, the termination of unions’ tax-exempt status for meddling in politics, and other anti-labor views. In the election, he was able to pry enough blue-collar workers from their traditional Democratic roost, and won the Senate seat.

  At the same time across the country in California, Republican governor Ronald Reagan, an arch conservative and heir to the Barry Goldwater wing of the party, was challe
nged by Jesse M. Unruh, a Democratic state politician and confidant of Robert Kennedy’s, who accused Reagan of being indifferent to the state’s rising unemployment rate. Reagan, ringing the chimes of patriotism and law and order, won reelection with substantial labor support.

  Both these elections were closely monitored by the Nixon White House as it eyed its own upcoming reelection bid in 1972. Determined to similarly pursue working-class support, the Nixon administration in December 1971 commuted the sentence of Jimmy Hoffa, who had served four and a half years of a thirteen-year term in federal prison, helping to secure the endorsement of the Teamsters. By contrast, the AFL-CIO refused to endorse the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, because of his dovish views on the war, a startling break from federation tradition. McGovern was a decorated combat veteran of the Second World War and a man so attuned to the historic difficulties of organized labor he had recently coauthored a well-regarded book about the Ludlow Massacre of 1914; on Election Day, America rejected him overwhelmingly.

  ONE POSITIVE OUTCOME of the Republican determination to identify with the concerns of working families was the passage in 1970 of the landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), which for the first time established a federal apparatus for the creation of health and safety standards for the workplace and the monitoring of related illnesses and injuries. President Nixon had only narrowly beat Hubert Humphrey in the bitterly fought election of 1968, and had reason to think he would face the popular Democratic senator again in 1972, so he saw political advantage in taking the initiative on workplace safety, just the kind of bread-and-butter issue with which Humphrey was identified, and which Republicans were intent on poaching.