The violence at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the campus of Kent State in 1970 showed the deep divisions within the country, especially concerning the war in Vietnam. At the same time, they revealed tensions that went far beyond foreign policy; in both cases, the antiwar protestors tended to be racially diverse and college-educated. The police and national guardsmen, in contrast, were largely White and working-class, and second-or-third generation Americans. As Black Americans, women, and other historically disadvantaged groups began to make slow progress, it was this so-called “White ethnic” demographic that experienced the downturns of the 1970s most poignantly. The crime rate rose markedly. A turbulent economy endangered the middle-class lifestyle to which many Americans were accustomed. Affirmative action meant greater (and fairer) competition for a dwindling number of jobs. Nixon had won the presidency by pledging to stand up for the “Silent Majority” of Americans who did not sign on to the rejection of postwar values and structures flouted by civil rights groups, antiwar protests, and feminist activism. As the 1960s turned to the 1970s, this majority was no longer silent and organized to limit the impact these movements had on their country. Ironically, their use of public protest and mass organization often borrowed from the very civil rights and social movements they were reacting against.  

The Hard-Hat Riots

Many Americans were horrified by the shootings at Kent State University, but others felt a deep contempt toward the unruly student protesters. In the wake of Kent State, public action against the Vietnam War began anew. Some of the heaviest protesting took place in New York City in the midst of funeral proceedings for one of the four young people killed.

Figure 1. Hard hats shown on the cabinet table after meeting with President Nixon in 1970. Many of the construction workers involved in the counterprotests were unionized and belonged to White ethnic groups, both of which had traditionally suggested Democratic Party sympathies. The riot showed that cultural grievances against social protesters were becoming a greater priority than collective bargaining for some of these unionists, and many former Democrats voted for Republican Nixon.

On May 8, only four days after the bloodshed in Ohio, antiwar protesters were assaulted by workers who were on their lunch break. Carrying flags, brandishing their tools as weapons, and shouting “USA, All the Way!,” these workers began an impromptu counter-demonstration that turned into a violent attack on the antiwar gathering. Nearby law enforcement personnel did little to stop this rampage, and only six of the roughly 1,200 rioters were arrested. (Incidentally, many of these construction workers were in the process of building what would one day become the World Trade Center.) Although both white-collar office-workers and blue-collar construction workers took part in the melee, the event became known as the “hard-hat riot.”

The “hard-hats” barged their way into City Hall itself, demanding that the American flag, which had been lowered to half-mast in remembrance of Kent State, be raised to full-mast. President Nixon could not explicitly endorse the riot, and even met with a group of antiwar students in Washington later that day. But just a few weeks later, he met with a large gathering of union leaders that suggested a unified stand against war protests that had gotten out of hand. By praising “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism,” Nixon signaled his tacit support for the rioters’ grievances ^[1].

Civil Rights Pushback in the North

Some of the most prominent resistance to civil rights reforms took place well outside the South and were often framed as compromising Whites’ civil rights. In response to the urging of the Black community of Massachusetts, the state passed a law in 1965 which required schools to desegregate or lose state funding. Fifty-five cities were deemed to be racially imbalanced, the vast majority of them in working-class enclaves of Boston. One major problem in achieving desegregation was that Boston had been divided into a number of distinctly racial and ethnic neighborhoods for decades. Simply put, White and Black students lived far apart from one another, making desegregation logistically difficult.

When schools resisted integration, state courts ruled that they must comply. To do so, they mandated a system called busing in 1974, which involved transporting a number of children in a Black neighborhood of Boston to a school in a White neighborhood, and vice versa. Many were angered because the architects of the busing policy, including the judge who mandated it, lived in more affluent suburbs that were not affected by these rulings. Perhaps no figure personified the opposition to busing more than Louisa Day Hicks of the Boston School Committee. Arguing that the children of Boston were being treated as “pawns,” she formed an organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), consisting mostly of mothers whose children would be affected by busing, to resist the requirement. School attendance plummeted and interracial violence in newly integrated school districts became a recurring problem.

Protests against busing near Boston’s city hall became a commonplace occurrence. Although ostensibly about local control over education, it did not escape notice that ROAR consisted almost entirely of White parents. While many of their protests were peaceful, buses carrying Black students into White neighborhoods were often pelted, and protest signs against busing frequently contained racial slurs. Perhaps the most famous demonstration of the racial undertone of the busing protests was captured in Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “The Soiling of Old Glory.”