American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Evidence quickly surfaced that the Hard Hat Riot had been planned and coordinated. Union leaders encouraged their men to participate and contractors paid workers for the hours they missed at their job sites (the usual lunch break was only a half hour). Two mysterious men in suits with matching ribbons on their lapels were seen barking orders to the hard hats, giving hand signals, and handing out American flags. The police had been warned in advance—apparently by a construction worker who disapproved of the planned attack—but no added forces were sent to Wall Street to protect demonstrators, and the police that were around did little, if anything, to protect the assaulted victims.

  For two weeks hard hat marches and rallies in New York were frequent affairs, each time encouraged and paid for by bosses. There were further beatings of people who flashed peace signs or otherwise offended the flag-waving marchers, but the violence never again approached the level of Bloody Friday.

  The largest march was planned for May 20. Sponsored by New York’s biggest construction union, the Building and Construction Trades Council, the march was billed as a demonstration of “love of country and respect for our country’s flag.” According to one union member, “The word was passed around to all the men on the jobs the day before. It was not voluntary. You had to go. You understand these are all jobs where the union controls your employment absolutely.” Some 100,000 people marched, virtually all of them men, and most of them construction workers and longshoremen. Broadway became a sea of American flags and red, yellow, and blue hard hats, many of them adorned with flag decals. Some of the signs read “We Love Our Police, Flag and Country,” “Lindsay for Mayor of Hanoi,” and “We Support Nixon and Agnew: God Bless the Establishment.”

  The hard hat demonstrations of May 1970 helped to create one of the era’s most potent stereotypes—the image of white working-class men as beefy, aggressive, superpatriotic, anti-intellectual hawks. The stereotype gained much deeper traction with the arrival of Archie Bunker, the lead character in America’s most popular TV show from 1971 to 1976, a sitcom called All in the Family. Bunker was not only a pro-war conservative, but a bigot who railed against “women’s libbers,” “coloreds,” “spics,” “homos,” and every imaginable manifestation of 1960s progressive politics. What made Bunker a figure of fun is that his bark was always worse than his bite. No one could imagine him actually beating anyone up, so his bitter ranting stayed “all in the family”—and, for all of Archie’s bombast, his family was a loving one. The show succeeded by transforming some of the most difficult and divisive issues of the era into laughs.

  The Nixon administration did everything possible to promote the stereotype that average working-class Americans supported the war, while antiwar protesters were privileged elitists who looked down their noses at hardworking, law-abiding Middle Americans. A secret White House group called the Middle America Committee formed in 1969 to devise tactics to drive home that idea. A key member of the committee was speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, who coined the phrase “the silent majority” to describe a constituency he urged Nixon to name, cultivate, and praise. The goal was to marginalize antiwar opinion by associating it with everything that might be offensive to Middle Americans—hippies, drugs, long hair, filth, laziness, promiscuity, cowardice, insolence, overindulgence, draft-dodging, flag burning, atheism, rioting, disloyalty.

  Vice President Spiro Agnew was the loudest administration voice to champion this divide-and-conquer political strategy. He called it “positive polarization.” As Nixon’s pit bull, Agnew claimed that peaceniks had “a masochistic compulsion to destroy their country’s strength.” The “hardcore dissidents” were privileged scavengers—“vultures who sit in trees and watch lions battle, knowing that win, lose, or draw, they will be fed.” They had no worthy principles—“their interest is personal, not moral.” Nor did they care about ordinary Americans; they were merely “political hustlers” who “disdain to mingle with the masses who work for a living.” And, in one of his most famous zingers, Agnew called activists an “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

  Between the Archie Bunker TV stereotype and White House rhetoric, you could easily believe that working-class Americans were the most pro-war. Not so. In fact, a variety of polls and local referenda indicate that antiwar opinion was stronger at the bottom of the socioeconomic order than the top. For example, people with the most formal education—which roughly correlates with economic class standing—tended to be most supportive of the war. People with less formal education were consistently more likely to oppose the war. By 1970, 61 percent of Americans with no college education called for immediate withdrawal, while only 47 percent of college graduates were so dovish.

  Many union leaders had supported the war, particularly the most powerful labor leader of the era, AFL-CIO president George Meany. But as the war continued, unions were roiled by antiwar activism, especially after Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings. Suddenly labor unions were speaking out forcefully in open defiance of Meany. On May 7, 1970, for example, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) adopted a resolution condemning the war as “the most divisive and problematical fact confronting the citizens of America,” and calling for the “immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Southeast Asia.”

  These working-class Americans, far from beating up antiwar protesters, were themselves protesting the war. Sometimes they even joined forces with students. In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of labor activists collaborated with striking students at Case Western Reserve University in the days following the Kent State killings. Together they bought a full-page ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer condemning the invasion of Cambodia. The rank-and-file activists then pushed for an antiwar resolution at Ohio’s AFL-CIO convention. It was narrowly defeated, but a year later the Cleveland Federation of Labor passed a similar resolution.

  Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers (UAW) represented the most powerful union challenge to the Vietnam War. Reuther pulled the UAW out of the AFL-CIO in 1968 in defiance of Meany’s domineering pro-war politics. Three days after the Kent State shootings in 1970, Reuther sent a telegram to Nixon protesting “the bankruptcy of our policy of force and violence in Vietnam” and the escalation of militarization at home:

  At no time in the history of our free society have so many troops been sent to so many campuses to suppress the voice of protest by so many young Americans. With the exception of a small minority, the American people, including our young people, reject violence in all its forms as morally repugnant and counterproductive. The problem, Mr. President, is that we cannot successfully preach non-violence at home while we escalate mass violence abroad.

  Reuther’s statement was ignored by almost all American newspapers. Two days later, on May 9, 1970, Reuther and four others, including his wife, died in a plane crash. The New York Times obituary did not mention his opposition to the war.

  Even the hard-hat rioters in New York included men with major doubts about the war. But many of those same men detested student protesters. They saw them as snot-nosed kids who never did a real day’s work in their lives—college kids who ridiculed patriotism and religious faith, who thought they were superior, who were more concerned about the fate of Vietnamese peasants than the American soldiers dying in their place, who could afford to scream against the “establishment” knowing that their diplomas gave them access to that very establishment, and who could denounce the war without having to fight it.

  It was as unfair a caricature as the Archie Bunker stereotype of dumb, bigoted, hawkish hard hats. But it had one thing right. Working-class sons did bear the brunt of fighting in Vietnam and most of the college students who protested the war did have draft deferments or exemptions. The hard hats might have had grave reservations about the war—many did—but they were mostly worried about what it was doing to their sons, brothers, uncles, and ne
phews who were over there fighting. Everyone in their neighborhoods knew young men in Vietnam. Their rallies were widely viewed as pro-war, but it would be more accurate to see them as pro-GI. They often carried signs saying “Support Our Boys.” They might just as well have read “Support Our Boys.” As one New York hard hat put it, “Here were these kids, rich kids, who could go to college, who didn’t have to fight, they are telling you your son died in vain. It makes you feel your whole life is shit, just nothing.”

  For Nixon, the patriotic hard hat marches were just the medicine he needed. In the days after the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State shootings he behaved so erratically that many of his closest aides and advisers, including Henry Kissinger, thought he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. On the night of May 8, with protesters flooding into DC, Nixon stayed up all night, making more than fifty phone calls, eight of them to Kissinger. Most of the calls were rambling, incoherent efforts to buck himself up. At 4:22 a.m. he called his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to ask, “Have you ever been to the Lincoln Memorial at night? Get your clothes on, we’ll go!” And so they did.

  Upon arrival, Nixon approached a group of students who had been driving all night to attend the antiwar demonstration. He talked and talked, his topics ranging from the importance of travel to the mistreatment of American Indians, to college football, to the failures of Neville Chamberlain to stand up to Hitler’s aggression. After a White House aide finally showed up to pull Nixon away, the president insisted on a visit to the Capitol. On the House floor, Nixon took his old 1947 seat and pressured his valet to make a speech. Sanchez, a Cuban immigrant, spoke of his pride at recently becoming an American citizen. “The weirdest day yet,” wrote Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman in his diary.

  The flag-waving hard hats gave Nixon the bolstering he often demanded from his staff. But the White House shrewdly perceived that the hard hats might provide something more valuable than morale boosting. They might help reelect the president. Their noisy proclamations of patriotism could be presented as Exhibit A that the once “silent majority” was now on the march and rallying in support of Nixon and his Vietnam policies. Even better, the construction unions that sponsored the rallies were overwhelmingly composed of white men who had traditionally voted Democratic.

  But what could Nixon offer workers other than empty rhetoric? Like most Republicans, he wanted to weaken unions, not build them up. With a Machiavellian flourish, Nixon initially supported an affirmative action plan initiated by Lyndon Johnson because he thought it hurt unions. The Philadelphia Plan required federal contractors to hire African American workers in defiance of white-dominated construction unions that had a notorious history of racial exclusion. Almost without exception those unions restricted membership to white men. To have a decent shot at joining a construction union you had to be the friend or relative of a member. The unions viewed the Philadelphia Plan as a threat to their control over racially exclusive hiring.

  By supporting the plan, Nixon hoped simply to inflame animosities between two traditionally Democratic constituencies—African Americans and white workers. But once the hard hats began marching in New York City, he saw an opportunity to win their votes. It fit perfectly with the president’s main reelection strategy—to woo votes from white northern workers and southern segregationists, two traditionally Democratic groups who, in 1968, had voted in surprising numbers for the third-party candidacy of former Alabama governor George Wallace. Since Nixon had been elected in 1968 with a mere 43 percent of the popular vote, he knew his next bid depended on building a “new Republican majority.”

  So shortly after the largest of the flag-waving marches, the White House invited a group of union leaders to the Oval Office for a meet and greet. Led by Peter J. Brennan, president of the New York Building and Construction Trades Council, the delegation presented Nixon with a white hard hat. Brennan called it “a symbol, along with our great flag, of freedom and patriotism to our beloved country.” Brennan also personally attached an American flag pin to Nixon’s lapel, where it remained. He was the first president to wear the flag. On Nixon and his supporters, the flag pin was not an emblem of national unity, but a political badge as intentionally confrontational as the peace symbol.

  Peter Brennan and the other union leaders were looking for something more from Nixon than a signed photograph. If they were going to stand by the president on Vietnam and Cambodia, they wanted him to defang the government’s affirmative action plan. That, in fact, is precisely what happened. Over the next two years Nixon weakened the Department of Labor’s enforcement of affirmative action, spoke out often about his opposition to “quotas,” and encouraged the adoption of watered-down voluntary “hometown” desegregation plans over tough, national, government-imposed mandates. After his reelection, Nixon put a cherry on top of the deal by naming Peter J. Brennan as his new secretary of labor.

  White House counsel Chuck Colson spearheaded the effort to attract hard hat support by retreating from affirmative action. In one 1971 phone call with Colson, Nixon said, “Of course, the building trades need . . . some modification. They are ingrown and so forth. But hell. Why fight that battle? That’s somebody else’s problem. There’s no votes in it for us.” In 1972, on election night, Nixon toasted Colson: “Here’s to you, Chuck. Those are your votes that are pouring in, the Catholics, the union members, the blue-collars, your votes, boy. It was your strategy and it’s a landslide.”

  Nixon learned from the hard hats that it was a lot easier to rally support around the American flag, patriotism, and racial politics than around the war in Southeast Asia. In addition to gutting affirmative action, Nixon criticized court-ordered school desegregation. In 1968–1969, the Supreme Court and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had finally pushed forward on school desegregation in the South. Over the next few years, southern public schools (excluding universities) became the most racially integrated in the nation. In order to cultivate southern white segregationists who had voted for Wallace in 1968, Nixon distanced himself from the court-ordered elimination of dual school systems. He invoked the rhetoric of states’ rights—the standard code language for the preservation of white supremacy—and nominated two southern segregationists to the Supreme Court. Those nominations failed, but the message was sent: Nixon’s heart was with whites who believed their racial privileges were under assault.

  And for all the significant progress brought by the civil rights movement, America remained a nation that routinely valued white lives over the lives of people of color. You could see it plainly in the unequal national attention accorded the killing of white students at Kent State and the killing of African American students at historically black colleges. Two years before the Kent State shootings, on February 8, 1968, nine white highway patrolmen fired into a crowd of black students at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. The students were protesting against the whites-only policy at a nearby bowling alley. Three young men were killed—ages seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen—and twenty-eight people were injured. Most of the victims were retreating when the police began shooting and were struck with buckshot in their backs or on the soles of their feet. The “Orangeburg massacre” barely made a ripple in national consciousness or historical memory.

  And on May 14, 1970, just ten days after the shootings at Kent State, seventy Mississippi state troopers and local police fired into a crowd of black student protesters on the campus of Jackson State College. Two students were killed and twelve were wounded.

  The college had been the scene of many violent attacks. For years, white motorists had sped through campus, sometimes throwing bottles, yelling racist epithets, and even firing weapons. Occasionally, neighborhood youth barricaded the main campus thoroughfare to demonstrate their anger at white racism, but until 1970 most Jackson State students avoided confrontational activism. The risk of expulsion was too great. Black administrators at the public school could easily be fired by the all-white state sch
ool board if they did not take a hard line against student rebels. Activism had therefore always been stronger at private black institutions like Tougaloo College, where students were frequently arrested for civil rights protests but were less likely to be expelled.

  By the spring of 1970, however, a substantial number of the four thousand Jackson State students were ready to protest. Their opposition to the war in Indochina was inseparable from their struggle against persistent racism. Racial discrimination and exploitation remained deep-seated, mocking the great hopes raised by the civil rights revolution. Black poverty was extreme, and most white-owned businesses continued to deny decent jobs, training, or promotion to blacks. And in Mississippi all-white draft boards were sending African American soldiers to Vietnam in the name of freedom and democracy while continuing to treat them as second-class citizens at home.

  On the night of May 13, a few hundred students along with some young black men from the neighborhood gathered along Lynch Street and began throwing rocks and bottles at passing cars. A Jackson police officer yelled into his squad-car radio: “Better tell them security guards out there they better get them niggers into them dormitories, or we fixin’ to have some trouble out here! These niggers [are] throwin’ them bottles and things over the fence out in the street.”

  The next night was a virtual repeat of the previous night with one major exception—state troopers and local police confronted the crowd on Lynch Street directly with massive firepower, and they used it. Just after midnight the officers took positions in Lynch Street facing Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory. A crowd of a hundred-plus young men stood outside. They began to hurl insults at the officers in the street. “White pigs!” “Motherfuckers!” “Pigs go home!” The patrolmen aimed their twelve-gauge shotguns at the crowd. Vernon Weakley, one of the screaming students, saw a bottle looping toward the police. “When that bottle hit, they just started shooting, man.” Weakley tried to run but was hit in the leg. Students rushed toward the dormitory, falling on top of each other as they squirmed toward the entrances. Glass began to fall down on them from the shattered windows. Inside, Gloria Mayhorn had gone down the stairs and found herself at the front door just as the shooting began. Her first thought: “They’re shooting rice.” She scrambled back to the stairs but at the first step, on her hands and knees, she felt a pain in the back of her head: “Blood was pouring like from a faucet.” She and Weakley were among the twelve wounded.