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."