The Sudden Rising of the Hardhats

They swaggered through Manhattan streets almost daily--sleeves rolled up, feisty grins on their faces, hoarsely chanting "U.S.A. all the way!" Their ranks were made up of hundreds of beefy construction workers in hardhats of plastic or metal, joined by longshoremen and blue-collar workers from a dozen other trades. Police kept the construction men well apart from spectators. Each time they marched in the financial district, the hardhats were showered with ticker tape, like national heroes.

Unsympathetic bystanders, cowed by the hardhats' display of muscle, concealed their feelings. They had good reason to. The week before, a gang of 200 hardhats, equipped with U.S. flags and lengths of lead pipe, had waded into a crowd of antiwar students in Wall Street. Police, who later said they were outnumbered, stood by as some 70 peace demonstrators were beaten.

After the fracas in Wall Street the week before, last week's show of force by the hardhats remained free of violence--but only barely. During one parade on the Avenue of the Americas, Ironworker Thomas Francis Gibbon, 43, waded into a crowd on the sidewalk when he saw some onlookers flashing the V peace sign. Gibbon grabbed his crowbar from his side and shouted: "You goddam Commie bastards!" Brandishing the crowbar, he advanced on one man in a business suit, who chose to retreat. "You goddam coward!" Gibbon yelled after him. "You don't know what an American is!"

Almost overnight, "hardhats" became synonymous with white working-class conservatives, already familiar among George Wallace's 1968 supporters. Much of the hardhats' anger was aimed at Mayor John Lindsay, the object of bitter blue-collar scorn during his re-election campaign last year because of his patrician style and his seeming over-friendliness to blacks. Some of the new outrage against Lindsay arose because he had managed to have the city hall flag lowered in honor of the Kent State dead.

One sign, conceived in an earthy moment of beer-hall bonhomie, read: LINDSAY DROPS THE FLAG MORE TIMES THAN A WHORE DROPS HER PANTS. While there were no comparable uprisings elsewhere in the country, the rebellion of the hardhats seemed only the surface of a resentment that doubtless runs deep across the nation.

Bedfellowship. James Lapham is a 27-year-old electrician with an unusual background: he is about to start work on a Ph.D. thesis in European history at St. John's University, Queens. "This isn't the '30s," he explained. "Labor is middle class and has middle-class attitudes. We don't like students coming to tell us that everything that has made us that way is rotten and has to be destroyed." Lapham was at the head of one midtown rally last week. "The basic agreement among the workers is a protest against a small elite group who are bent on changing things regardless of majority opinion," he said later. "If the majority supports the President, then that vote should be accepted."

The note of hardhat solidarity with the nation's rulers was sounded often. WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW, One sign read; GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT. The strange bedfellowship was not lost on Peter Brennan. head of Greater New York's Building and Construction Trades Council. "We're supporting the President and the country," said Brennan, "not because he's for labor, because he isn't, but because he's our President, and we're hoping that he's right." A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany drew a similar distinction: he backed Nixon on Cambodia, but attacked the President's management of the economy. New York's Brennan argued that the U.S. "must have an honorable peace, not walk out like Chamberlain did."

Last week's counter-protesters in New York showed an almost mystical respect for the flag: decals bedecked the helmets of construction workers: one skyscraper going up on Broadway sprouted flags by the dozens on its steelwork, including an immense Old Glory lit up at night. Said John D'Anella, 57, an RCA technician: "Maybe the students are smarter than we are, but they have no right to burn down buildings. We love our flag. We love our country. If they destroy the flag, they are destroying our way of life." Across the generation gap, Tom Woods, a 19-year-old elevator construction worker, agreed. "The flag--it's like a priest or the pledge of allegiance," said Woods. "It's like the flag is the roof, and under it are all the rooms."

Dropped Curtain. Patriotism aside, as these men see it, the students are throwing away educational opportunities that the hardhats never had themselves and may not even be able to offer their children. While paychecks have risen to the point where construction men are the best paid in U.S. labor, inflation has left them little better off in relative economic status, and unemployment is a nagging threat. Unlike the liberally led automobile workers, the hardhats dig in deep when threatened: last year they protested, sometimes violently, at efforts to increase the number of blacks in the building trades at Pittsburgh and Chicago.

They are not an utterly united front. One black carpenter, a World War II veteran, denounced his parading brethren as "make-believe patriots and cowards." Another construction worker called the marchers "storm troopers," and asserted that one contractor had offered his men cash bonuses to take part in the Wall Street head-busting.

The hardhats were not alone in their hostility to the specter of anarchy raised by rioting in the ghettos and on the campuses. So far, the right certainly has been less violent than the left, but the fact that citizens are bashing citizens augurs ill. Actress Shelley Winters found that after making a couple of short curtain speeches against the Kent State killings, stagehands surrounded her and threatened to drop the curtain on her head if she did it again. "They were not kidding," Shelley said.

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