Hardhats for peace, students for war: the surprising shape of public opinion in the Vietnam era.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory - Book review

Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, by Penny Lewis, Cornell University Press, 35$ pages, $22.93

The Hard Hat Riot of May 1970 has managed somehow to be both widely forgotten and universally remembered. The incident itself, in which rampaging New York construction workers beat up hippies and demanded that City Hall raise the American flag, is a piece of historical trivia. Most Americans born after it have little inkling that it occurred, and even the people who were around at the time are likely to be hazy on the details. But the image of a prowar worker in a hardhat punching a privileged protester is enshrined in our cultural memory. It's what the late '60s and early '70s were supposed to look like: college kids who hated the Vietnam War and blue-collar patriots who loved the flag.

In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hauiks, her new study of social class and public opinion during the war, the City University of New York sociologist Penny Lewis doesn't destroy that image so much as layer on all of the missing images that supplement and complicate it. Yes, she says, the antiwar movement began as a mostly middle-class affair. Yes, those middle-class activists could be patronizing or otherwise act in ways that put off working-class Americans. Yes, unions overwhelmingly endorsed the war. Yes, the Hard Hat Riot happened. But there was a lot more going on than that--so much more, in fact, that the stereotype obscures more than it illuminates.

For one thing, the picture changes radically if you stop focusing on public movements and instead look at public sentiments. Throughout the Vietnam era, Lewis demonstrates, studies of public opinion showed that "working-class people were never more likely than their middle-class counterparts to support the war, and in many instances, they were more likely to oppose it." Americans with just a grade school education were more likely to favor withdrawal than Americans who had gone to college; only at the very high end of the education ladder, among people with advanced degrees, did dovishness begin to creep up in popularity again.

The movement also changed over time. Antiwar activists broadened their base. The "prairie power" wing of the New Left brought more working- and lower-middle-class students to the marches and teach-ins. Black and Mexican protest groups, which tended not to be as middle-class as their white counterparts, called for withdrawal. Some unions turned against...