Friday, May 8, marks the 50th anniversary of one of the uglier incidents in New York’s history, in a year that was one of the most tumultuous in recent US history. In front of Federal Hall and under the statue of George Washington, construction workers stormed a student protest against the Vietnam War and chased both students and bystanders through the streets, beating and kicking them. Known as the Hard Hat Riots, it sparked two weeks of protests, counter protests and marches. Historians and journalists have debated the meaning of the incident ever since.

It is hard to make sense of the event without understanding the backdrop:

On April 29, 1970, President Nixon ordered American troops into Cambodia to track Viet Cong forces. The Vietnam War was already deeply unpopular and dividing America, but Nixon had run on a campaign of ending the war with honor. He asked Americans for patience in a famous November 1969 speech urging the “silent majority” of Americans who were not out protesting to stand by him. Now he was expanding the war, “leaving Vietnam through Cambodia” as the comedian George Carlin put it.

The invasion of Cambodia inflamed anti-war protesters. Students on college and high school campuses around the country began walk outs and protests. Kent State University in Ohio was one of those schools. After several days of unrest, including the torching of the campus Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) building, the National Guard was called in to quell the protests. On Monday May 4th, the Guard ordered protesters to disperse, firing tear gas into the crowd. For reasons still unclear, a sergeant fired live ammunition into the crowd, sparking a volley of 67 rounds. Thirteen students were hit, leaving four dead and nine wounded.

The sight of soldiers firing on unarmed college students shook the nation, but it also elicited sentiments that the students “got what was coming to them.” The galvanizing effect on the anti-war movement was immediate, and on Tuesday May 5th students across the nation staged more walk-outs and strikes. New York City Mayor John Lindsay ordered the American flag topping City Hall to be flown at half-mast. Students from Columbia University and City College staged a memorial march between the schools. A small group of students from NYU and Hunter College staged a protest in front of Federal Hall. All week a group gathered there without incident except for Thursday afternoon when a small group of construction workers arrived to confiscate American flags that they said were being desecrated. Mayor Lindsay declared Friday May 8th a day of remembrance and high school and college classes were canceled. Multiple small protests were staged throughout the City.

The crowd at Federal Hall grew to over a thousand, mostly high school and college students. All morning the protesters listened to speakers from the steps of Federal Hall calling for an end to the war and social injustices at home, watched over by a small line of police. Just before noon, over 200 construction workers and others descended on Federal Hall from four directions, joined by others along the way. Many of the men carried American flags and demanded to plant them in front of Washington’s statue. What happened next was unclear, but eye witnesses said a man spit on a flag, blew his nose on it, and taunted the workers. Within moments, the construction workers broke through the police barricades, punched him in the face and started their rampage. Protesters were violently thrown off the steps, “longhairs” seemed to be singled out for the most brutal attacks, but even stock traders and lawyers from nearby firms who tried to shelter the teens reported that they were savagely attacked. A female secretary reported that as she was beaten for trying to help a student a man said, “If you want to be treated like an equal, we'll treat you like one.”1

A group of workers stormed nearby Pace College, upset by an anti-war banner there, beating more students and smashing windows with crowbars and pipes. A group continued to City Hall Park demanding that the flag be raised to full mast. The park and City Hall Plaza were completely open, and the few police onsite could or would not stop the protesters. An aide to Mayor Lindsay was assaulted. A postal worker made it to the roof and raised the flag. When the flag was lowered again moments later, a larger group of angry construction workers broke through the police. Fearing that they might set fire to City Hall, Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio ordered city workers to raise the flag again. At Trinity Church on Broadway, a makeshift hospital for the students was attacked by the mob and the flag of the Episcopal Church was torn from the building. Many eye-witnesses claimed that throughout the day the police stood by and let the mob beat students. Seventy people were injured and only six arrests were made.

The press struggled to make sense of this event. Was this Nixon’s silent majority flexing their muscle? Time magazine had just declared “Middle Americans” their people of the year, and it seemed that this was middle America saying they had had enough of the revolution. The last few months had seen activist groups splinter into more violent factions, including the Weather Underground who firebombed the Manhattan home of the judge in the Panther 21 trial and accidentally blew up a Greenwich Village townhouse while making bombs. Many in America looked at events like these and began to wonder if America had, as 63% of them told a pollster for the Nixon campaign, “seriously gotten off on the wrong track.”2

There was a lot more going on below the surface though. First off, the man who taunted the workers was not a student radical, but a middle-aged man in a suit by the name of Arthur Muglia. He told a lawyer, Michael Belknap, who helped him to the hospital that he wasn’t against the war but was protesting the treatment he had been given in government hospitals. Belknap told police he was under the impression that Mr. Muglia “was not all there.” Upon returning to the scene, Belknap pleaded with construction workers to stop beating a student, at which point he was branded a “commie lawyer” and savagely beaten in the face.

Other eye-witnesses to the riots described seeing men in gray suits with union patches directing the assaults. Construction workers described being told by their shop stewards that they would get paid for walking off their job sites (mostly from the World Trade Center) and “cracking some heads.” Peter J. Brennan, President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and Vice-President of the NY State AFL-CIO, called the protests a spontaneous display of patriotism. However, many thought he directed them. Brennan, a staunch anti-communist, had clashed with Mayor Lindsay for several years over many issues, including efforts to integrate the building construction trades. Whether he was the puppet master of the May 8th assault or not, he took full advantage of the aftermath. In the following days, a rather predictable back and forth occurred as Mayor Lindsay criticized the police for their lack of action, and police union leaders accused the mayor of undermining the police. City Hall/NYPD relations were already strained, just a week earlier, Lindsay had established the Knapp Commission in response to Detective Frank Serpico’s tales of widespread police corruption.

Mayor Lindsay demanded an investigation into the May 8th incident. The NYPD interviewed hundreds of witnesses, protesters, and police. They also fielded many calls and letters supporting and opposing the construction workers. An economist from the US Labor Department described pleading with police officers to help the students and make arrests. A Mrs. Tuohey called “to give the name of the biggest communist in the Country—John Lindsay—Gracie Mansion.”

Police commanders described being stretched thin that day and unprepared for the confrontation. The log for the day describes the Special Events Squad responding to: 300 students at Queens College trying to block the Long Island Expressway, 300 marchers on West 184th Street and Jerome Avenue, 150 people marching to Union Square, 100 Young Lords and Black Panthers demonstrating in front of 100 Centre Street, 100 picketers at John Adams HS in Queens, 300 people marching on Queens Boulevard, a protest in front of the United Nations, a “large disorderly crowd at St. Francis College” and a protest blocking Broadway and 96th Street. That was all before noon! In addition, Mayor Lindsay was scheduled to address a crowd at Foley Square at 1:30 and he requested a heavy police detail including high ranking officers.

On May 11, several thousand construction workers, dockworkers and white-collar workers rallied against the mayor, calling him a “commie rat” and worse. Protests, and counter protests by students and anti-war labor groups, continued on May 12, 13, 15, and 17. It culminated in a march on May 20th Brennan organized of 150,000 workers through lower Manhattan’s “canyon of heroes” while office workers showered them with an unofficial ticker-tape parade.

It would be easy to look at these marches the same way we look at the Charlottesville march or other recent outpourings of right-wing intolerance, but it’s not that simple. The NYPD surveillance films at the NYC Municipal Archives reveal that at least some of the protesting workers were African-American and Latino. Many working-class Americans of all races looked at the Vietnam War differently than the protesters because it was them and their relatives who were fighting the war while college students were granted deferments. Said one construction worker, “I’m doing this because my brother got wounded in Vietnam, and I think this will help our boys over there by pulling this country together.”3

Brennan was the only real winner of this whole saga. On May 26th he went to the White House and presented Nixon with a hard hat. Nixon and his aides saw Brennan as a useful ally and asked him to organize labor support for Nixon’s 1972 re-election. After Nixon’s landslide victory Brennan was appointed labor secretary.

1 https://prospect.org/article/then-one-democrat-anymore/

2 https://web.archive.org/web/20150921181507/http://www.publicopinionpros.norc.org/ features/2006/jun/hugick_supp1p1.asp

3 After ‘Bloody Friday,’ New York Wonders if Wall Street is Becoming a Battle Ground. Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1970.