Carl T. Gossett/The New York Times/Redux
Laborers and student protesters clash during the Hard Hat Riot of May 1970.
Today’s MAGA-fied Republican Party ballyhoos itself as being a party for the working class. But when exactly did the GOP—long viewed as the partisan arm of big business and the upper-class country club milieu—start to fancy themselves the party of blue-collar workers?
According to Hard Hat Riot, a gripping new documentary from PBS’s American Experience series, the Republicans’ pro-working-class rebranding began in earnest on May 8, 1970, when hundreds of construction workers reached a collision point with a group of roughly one thousand student demonstrators protesting the Vietnam War in Lower Manhattan.
Director and co-producer Marc Levin—whose previous documentary, Chasing the Thunder, tells the story of militant marine conservationists chasing down an illegal poaching vessel on the high seas—captures the cinematic sweep of a stormy era of American political history. The veteran documentarian crafts an audiovisual mosaic of the leadup to the clash with extensive use of period-specific music, news footage, and original interviews with blue-collar laborers, politicians, and protesters against the Vietnam War, telling their stories fifty-five years later.
Hard Hat Riot traces the political roots of the May 8 incident as far back as the Great Depression, when industrial workers largely belonged to the Democratic Party Coalition during the New Deal and World War II periods due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pro-union politics. But that alliance frayed in the postwar era due to backlash against affirmative action programs from white union members. In 1966, New York City Mayor John Lindsay fought against the contract demands of the city’s large public employee unions, resulting in a paralyzing strike by the Transport Workers Union that year. Lindsay, a youthful Yale University graduate who had previously represented Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side in Congress, belonged to the now-extinct liberal wing of the Republican Party, and as such, strongly opposed the Vietnam War.
Over Barry McGuire’s evocative protest song “Eve of Destruction,” Levin shows how the anti-war movement roiled the country, stitching together clips of Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman declaring a “second American Revolution” and New York Police Department raiding anti-war campus protests at Columbia University in 1968. The film then cuts to April 30, 1970, when President Richard Nixon—who had campaigned on a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War—announced that the United States was invading Cambodia, a neutral party in the conflict. The escalation prompted national outrage, and demonstrations quickly erupted on streets and college campuses across the country.
But the immediate catalyst for the Hard Hat Riot occurred on May 4, 1970, when the National Guard opened fire on anti-war campus protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students. One of the victims was New Yorker Jeffrey Miller, whose body is shown in a now-infamous photo lying facedown on the ground as fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams in horror beside him. Four days after the shooting, Miller’s fellow New Yorkers rallied in Lower Manhattan to commemorate the slain Long Islander and further agitate against Nixon’s escalation of the war into Cambodia.
Co-producer David Paul Kuhn, whose 2020 book The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution inspired Levin’s film, explains onscreen that the protesters—most of them young and countercultural—desecrated the American flag while waving Viet Cong flags and cheering for North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Expressing their rage and grief, demonstrators chanted: “One, two, three, four, We don’t want your fucking war.” (Keep your eyes peeled for glimpses of a youthful Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel, who were in the crowd shooting what became Street Scenes, their own documentary on the day’s events.)
The optics of the protest, Kuhn says, quickly alienated less radical working-class New Yorkers, many of them veterans of World War II and the Korean War: As one of the onlooking construction workers says onscreen, “I felt they had a beating coming.” A few hours into the demonstration, a group of about 400 construction workers—who were in Lower Manhattan that day to help build the World Trade Center—surrounded the protesters, chanting “USA!” and patriotic slogans. Their ranks ballooned as nearby office workers joined in on the counterprotest.
In the ensuing maelstrom, which later came to be known as Bloody Friday, an estimated 1,000 construction workers clashed with about as many protestors, injuring roughly 100 people. Kuhn notes onscreen that “Too many police did too little” to stop the violence, which was primarily perpetrated by the counterprotesters against the antiwar demonstrators. Billy Abbate, a steamfitter in NYC’s Local 638 who took part in the riot, posits why the police declined to intervene: “They were probably on the side of the hard hats.”
Not content with beating up hippies, the rampagers marched about a mile and a half uptown to besiege Lindsay’s City Hall, where the American flag had been lowered to half-mast in honor of the murdered Kent State students. To appease the violent mob—which, according to Kuhn, eventually numbered as many as 30,000—the flag was briefly raised, but Sid Davidoff, Lindsay’s liberal administrative assistant, personally lowered it again. Unsurprisingly, Davidoff—a recurring interviewee in the film, who also appears in archival clips from the time—earned a spot on Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” Meanwhile, Lindsay, who was away from City Hall to address another peace rally about a mile north at Foley Square, evacuated to the safety of the Gracie Mansion.
I, too, was uptown that day, near Central Park, about thirty blocks south of the mayoral residence. I’d been sent from Queens to Manhattan that day to represent Richmond Hill High School for a student government-type event with my classmate Brenda. We were about six miles north of the turmoil downtown, and, not having the access to instant information that cellphones and email now provide, were unaware of the unfolding violence. That day, my long hair attracted many hostile comments and threatening glances. It wasn’t until I returned home to my apartment and turned on the news that I realized why I had felt so menaced in Manhattan.
In the aftermath of the riots, Nixon manipulated the protesters-versus-laborers contretemps to his advantage. He met with construction workers in a show of support, and even accepted an honorary hard hat at the White House from a construction workers’s union. He also appointed political scientist Michael P. Balzano, who had previously worked as a garbage collector, as a liaison to blue-collar, working-class communities, as Nixon sought rebrand the GOP as a party of blue collars rather than blue bloods.
This moment, Hard Hat Riot contends, originated the much-debated political divide between so-called “elite” college-educated Americans and manual laborers, as culture wars distracted each side from common ground in class struggle. As one insightful female protester comments in archival footage: “We’re making construction workers the enemy, instead of who the real enemy is.”
With its meticulous documentation and a sizzling 1960s-and-70s soundtrack, Hard Hat Riot vividly transports viewers back in time to one of the most explosive events of a turbulent period—an era when, as Nixon’s presidential aide Stephen Bull says in archival footage, “We were very close to revolution.” And it couldn’t feel more timely at this moment.
Fifty-five years after the riot, President Donald Trump, a pampered heir from Queens’s posh Jamaica Estates neighborhood ludicrously attempts to paint himself as the leader of a workers’ party, with his relentless “anti-woke” messaging perpetuating the divisions that erupted in May of 1970. The depiction of violence against student protesters, both at Kent State and in Manhattan, will undoubtedly strike a chord with viewers amid the Trump Administration’s crackdowns on pro-Palestine solidarity demonstrations and efforts to deploy the National Guard to cities across the United States. In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Hard Hat Riot is particularly relevant as a decades-old example of rightwing violence aimed at stifling dissent from the left. Levin is to be applauded for what may be one of the best nonfiction films ever made about the uproarious 1960s and 1970s.
Hard Hat Riot premieres Tuesday, September 30, 2025, 9:00-10:30 p.m. ET (check local listings) on American Experience on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS app.