May '70: 9. Violent Backlash

I was there when the reactionary "white terror" kicked in.

After the Kent State shootings, a New York City-wide demonstration had called for Wall Street on Friday—that was 40 years ago today, on Friday, May 8, 1970. I have no idea who called the demo, though it targeted the financial center of US capital and was around the three demands: US Out Of Southeast Asia, End Campus Complicity With The War Machine, and Free Bobby Seale And All Political Prisoners.

A small crew of us from NYU Uptown were there—I can’t swear to it, but I think it might have been Lon E. Bich and maybe Jim Bean. I remember the big banner for Bobby, and I remember how many high school kids seemed to be in the crowd of a couple thousand, crammed into the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan.

Suddenly, just before noon, as Wall Street types on lunch further crowded the area, there was a big stir about 20 feet from us. A tight column of dozens of guys wearing construction helmets with a couple American flags was wading through the crowd. Almost immediately it became clear that they were not just pushing protesters out of the way, but slugging them, beating them to the ground and kicking them. (Some Wall Streeters helped the injured. More joined the attacks.)

We tried to rally the other kids around us to counterattack, but were physically held back by a bunch of Gandhian types, babbling about how we shouldn’t meet violence with violence. We didn’t want to have to fight our own people to get to the thugs, who were cutting through the crowd pretty quickly, so we faded with the other protesters, who were dispersing damn fast.

These were construction workers, we figured out, from lower Manhattan projects like the World Trade Center. Their attack was clearly planned. The little column we saw was one of four to hit the demo simultaneously from all sides. They moved on to attack City Hall, where the flag had been lowered to half-mast for the Kent students on the orders of Mayor Lindsay. Some spotted an anti-war banner at nearby Pace College (never a hotbed of struggle), and a crew peeled off to tear it down—and to savage a couple of dozen clueless Pace students, male and female, on the street and inside the building. They were taken to join scores of injured demonstrators being treated at area hospitals.

First I want to dispose of the myth that this was spontaneous, or a peaceful counter-protest that "got out of hand." The construction workers were kept on the clock for the day of the attack by the firms they were working for, and they were organized and led by officials and goon squad members from the Building Trades unions (and, as we learned later, from some needle trade locals as well). Not only did they wear helmets, but many carried lengths of rebar or chain, or tools.

The cops stood by passively and did jackshit to stop the attacks at any point. I’ve never been convinced one way or the other about why this happened, whether it was because they sympathized individually or because the police bureaucracy, without consulting the elected leaders of the city, decided to not to step in. 240 Centre Street certainly should have known it was coming--they’d been warned early that morning in a phone call from a construction worker whose foreman had tried to recruit him to take part.

Whether or not it was coordinated from the White House, it certainly fit right in with the main line of the Nixon Administration’s attack on opponents of the war: we were a vocal and countercultural minority or, as Nixon has described us the day after he made his Cambodia speech, "these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses." There was in America, Nixon had proclaimed the previous November, a Silent Majority, who supported the war, the American way and, by implication, his administration.

Now here were actual workers, brawny men, many of them WW2 or Korea veterans, shortened into "Hard Hats" in big bold-type newspaper headlines, stepping up to bloody the bums and uphold the Vietnam War. There is no question that subsequent larger and less violent Hard Hat demonstrations were coordinated with the administration.

On Monday May 11, a couple thousand were mobilized and paid by the same contractor/building trade union forces and joined by longshore locals and other war supporters in rallying to denounce Republican mayor John Lindsay as “a commie bastard.” Another was held on May 15, intended to counter the continuing drumbeat of anti-war protest.

No matter how coordinated this may have been from above, we were under no misapprehensions about what it represented. A large chunk of the white section of the working class in the US was offended and threatened by the anti-war movement and more generally by the long-haired, sex-drugs-and-rock&roll youthquake that it grew out of. There were plenty who would attack us, and many, many more who would applaud anyone who did. And while we might be on the rise historically, and on the offensive at the moment, we were still a minority in the country.

A big question on our plates for the rest of the month of May was how this card would be played. Would Hard Hat Riots spread well beyond their New York birthplace? Would local governments embrace them? Would the construction unions, or some different organizational form, become semi-official stormtroops for the administration?


Click here to read this series from the beginning.

Click here to read the next installment.

Read more!

May ’70: 2. Nixon Kicks It Off!

I want to continue this review of May, 1970 with a deeper look at Richard Nixon’s speech, broadcast 40 years ago tonight. It was that speech, announcing that US troops were invading Cambodia, which triggered the eruption of protest that was May 1970. Actually, you could say Tricky Dick predicted it:

My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.

The US High Command had known since 1967 that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, as the leaked Pentagon Papers later showed. Nixon had been elected in 1968 with the promise that "new leadership will end the war" and giving wink-and-nod no-comment replies to reports he had a "secret plan” to do so.

What he gave us in the first year of his administration was Vietnamization, the idea that troops of the puppet Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam) could be quickly drafted (all males between 17 and 43 were subject to call-up), trained and armed to “defend their country” and large scale withdrawals of US troops would begin. [Stop me if any of this reminds you of US policies of, shall we say, more recent vintage.]

Meanwhile, in secret, US B-52s were carrying out insanely massive high-altitude bombing raids on neighboring Laos and Cambodia in an effort to disrupt supply lines from North Vietnam to the South. Early in 1970, a US-backed coup deposed Cambodia’s neutralist monarch, Prince Sihanouk and replaced him with a sketchy pro-US general, Lon Nol. This was followed by an even more intensive and deadly secret Air Force carpet bombing of large sections of the Cambodian countryside.

Nixon on April 20, 1970 had announced that he would be withdrawing 150,000 US troops in the next year, around 40% of the force then “in country,” a necessary sop to public opinion which was turning against the war. Ten days later came this attack in violation of international law and borders. It was, Nixon claimed, a limited incursion intended to disrupt or destroy a secret Vietnamese command base just over the border.

Nixon explained to a skeptical public that he was expanding the war to end it:

A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces from Vietnam. The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program.

A majority of the American people want to end this war rather than to have it drag on interminably. The action I have taken tonight will serve that purpose.

A majority of the American people want to keep the casualties of our brave men in Vietnam at an absolute minimum. The action I take tonight is essential if we are to accomplish that goal.

Well, we certainly wanted the war ended and the troops home. But after years of having been lied to about lights at the end of the tunnel, about crucial campaigns that would change everything, about the improved combat capacity of the puppet ARVN troops, about the evil "North Vietnamese" (fighting to liberate and unite their country) we sure as hell didn’t believe a word of this.

And when Nixon raised the specter of global anarchy and the destruction of 500 years of Western Civilization, it was us as much as the Vietnamese liberation forces he was talking about.

Because May 1970 didn’t erupt from a vacuum. For two years, reading the New York Times had been a positive treat. It seemed like every day there was a report on a student protest somewhere. “Hey, the kids at the University of East Dakota at Pumpkin Squat just took over the administration building! I didn’t even know they existed.”

One immediate example: In the week before Nixon’s speech, my friend Steve reminds me, the student affairs building, a center for student activism at the Lawrence campus of the University of Kansas, was mysteriously burned to the ground. This was the culmination of a month that saw a campus strike, a call by the Black Student Union for members to arm themselves against racist threats, a lot of arson, and ongoing small scale clashes in the streets between freaks and right wing locals. The days that followed the fire featured a 7 PM curfew, ordered by the governor, and repeated skirmishes between students and cops, including street barricades and sniping. (Later that summer Lawrence cops would kill Black activist Tiger Dowdell and an unarmed 18-year-old white student, Nick Rice, shooting both in the back of the head.)

And Lawrence wasn’t even a notably radical campus.

[Next time, it’s personal: Bobby Seale and May Day in New Haven]

Click here for the start of the series.

Click here for the next segment.

Read more!

May '70: 1. Finally On Our Own...

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own…

Forty years ago today, on Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the president of the United States, appeared on television for a special announcement about the Vietnam War. He told us that US troops, tens of thousands of them, had moved into Cambodia, expanding an already prolonged and costly war into another country. He claimed it was a necessary step toward ending the war, and toward insuring that the US would not be perceived in the world as "a pitiful helpless giant."

Nixon's announcement kicked off the most intense wave of campus struggle this country has ever seen, a month of bitter and exhilarating clashes which triggered huge changes that echo to this day. May, 1970 also changed forever the lives of some significant number of the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of students and others who took part.

Today that incredible upsurge, which pretty much shut down the 1969-70 school year throughout much of the American higher education system, is remembered mainly through one of its most dramatic events--the killing of four students at Kent State University by a sustained fusillade of gunfire from Ohio National Guard troops occupying their campus.

For forty years, the veterans of those days and younger activists have struggled to keep alive the memories of Kent State and of the subsequent police murders of two more students, this time at a traditionally Black college in Mississippi, Jackson State. We have succeeded in this, helped in part by that amazing mnemonic, Neil Young’s heartbreaking song, "Ohio," which opens with the couplet at the start of this piece.

But we have, in significant ways, lost the memory of the vast eruption which Kent State and Jackson State were a part of, and whose flames the killings provided so much fuel for.

Over the course of next month, I hope to recall--in a series of posts under the heading May '70--some of that legacy, for OGs like myself who were there and for younger folk who may never have learned much at all about the events in question. I will draw on my own memories and those of friends, along with some Internet surfing, especially in the early posts. Ideally, others whose lives were shaped during that heady month will come forward to weigh in with their own thoughts and memories.

There is one final thing I’ll spell out in this first post. You can consider it a reminder for the veterans of those days. Or call it context for young folks who may find it hard to believe that, for instance, in the first week of May 1970, more than 30 ROTC buildings around the country burned or were bombed. 30. More than four a day.

The Vietnam War had created a deep, deep fissure in the American body politic, deeper than anything since the Civil War. And this time the divide was not sectional. It ran through every part of the country, divided communities, split classes, sundered families. If anything, it was generational (though that itself is a big overgeneralization). As we sang along with Phil Ochs:

It’s always the old to lead us to the war
It’s always the young to fall

And it was that split--between the young and the America we had grown up in--that made us sense, in May of 1970, that we were finally on our own…

Click here for the next installment.

Read more!