The Hardhat Riot

More about the book

In downtown Manhattan, in the shadow of the half-built Twin Towers, hardhats beat scores of hippies bloody in May 1970, four days after Kent State. This is the story of when the old Democratic Party attacked the new and of how Richard Nixon seized the breach, realizing that "these, quite candidly, are our people now." We relive the schism that tore liberalism apart by returning to when it was all laid bare one brutal day, when the Democrats' future was bludgeoned by its past, as if it was a violent last gasp to say, we once mattered to them too.