Kuhn argues persuasively that the riot sparked a vast national political shift driven by a widening divide between the working class and the educated elite that has led to the era of the Trump presidency ... Kuhn’s accounts of the violence are vivid and raw. It was a brutal, ugly day, with instigators on both sides. For those of us who lived in New York at the time, the book rekindles painful memories. For me, then a young opponent of the Vietnam War, Kuhn’s narrative brought a new understanding of the spontaneous, 'demonstrably sincere' actions of the hard hats ... The author concludes with a sharp analysis of how the revolt of the White working class almost immediately reshaped American politics.

Just after the 2016 election, [Kuhn] wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined 'Sorry, Liberals. Bigotry Didn’t Elect Donald Trump.' Now he has synthesized his message with a lesson from history: The Hardhat Riot a riveting account of the May 1970 explosion of New York’s blue-collar workers who confronted an antiwar rally designed to shut down Wall Street after President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia ... By capturing the moment Mr. Kuhn reminds us of how divisive this era really was.Mr. Kuhn’s avoids polemics and judgment, yet leads the reader to understand the deeper questions implicit in so many of today’s political debates ... The divisions grew ever wider after the war, coupled as they were with dramatic demographic changes in the country, and the decision of the Democratic Party to rebuild its power base on identity politics, often with white males as a foil ... The Hardhat Riot insightfully explains why and how this happened. Perhaps the Democratic Party’s leaders will finally understand what David Paul Kuhn has been trying to tell them.

The Hardhat Riot...vividly evokes an especially ugly moment half a century ago, when the misbegotten Vietnam War and a malformed notion of patriotism combined volatilely ... Kuhn ably and amply documents the cowardly beating of women, the gratuitous cold-cocking of men and the storming of a shakily protected City Hall, where the mayor’s people, to the hard hats’ rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead ... Kuhn favors straightforward journalistic prose, with few grand flourishes. In setting scenes, he tends toward a staccato, some of it overdone ... Hardly every antiwar protester merits his go-to characterization of them as potty-mouthed hippies.

Just after the 2016 election, [Kuhn] wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined 'Sorry, Liberals. Bigotry Didn’t Elect Donald Trump.' Now he has synthesized his message with a lesson from history: The Hardhat Riot a riveting account of the May 1970 explosion of New York’s blue-collar workers who confronted an antiwar rally designed to shut down Wall Street after President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia ... By capturing the moment Mr. Kuhn reminds us of how divisive this era really was.Mr. Kuhn’s avoids polemics and judgment, yet leads the reader to understand the deeper questions implicit in so many of today’s political debates ... The divisions grew ever wider after the war, coupled as they were with dramatic demographic changes in the country, and the decision of the Democratic Party to rebuild its power base on identity politics, often with white males as a foil ... The Hardhat Riot insightfully explains why and how this happened. Perhaps the Democratic Party’s leaders will finally understand what David Paul Kuhn has been trying to tell them.

Kuhn’s revealing new book, The Hardhat Riot, does two things remarkably well. It reconstructs a detailed, compelling, and coherent narrative of the riot, assembled from what must have seemed a morass of contradictory sources ... The book also provides critical context for the riot, documenting the mounting alienation of the white working class from the ascendant New Left, and arguing convincingly for the Hardhat Riot not so much as the day that turned the tide, but as an unmistakable harbinger of political shifts in the offing, a moment when unlikely symbols of Nixon’s Silent Majority roared back, giving voice to grievances that persist to this day ... Kuhn reveals the personalities of many key participants in the conflict, fleshing out the backgrounds of student protesters, the hardhats—most of them veterans themselves—as well as some of the Wall Street suits who tagged along to cheer on the workers, and the City Hall and Pace College employees compelled to contend with the melée ... makes it a lot easier to understand where the hardhats were coming from, and how liberals’ aloof disregard for their point of view deepened divisions that right-wing demagogues continue to exploit to this day.

Throughout the narrative, the author wrestles with conflicting ideologies of patriotism, especially as symbolized by the American flag. In a trenchant epilogue, Kuhn connects dots from the events of that summer to the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump ... A welcome resurrection of a forgotten riot with relevance for our current fragmented political landscape.