INTERVIEW: New PBS doc remembers impact of ‘Hard Hat Riot’
Photo: Hard Hat Riot depicts a clash between anti-war protestors and construction workers in 1970. Photo courtesy of Carl T. Gossett / The New York Times / Redux / Provided by PBS press site with permission.
The so-called Hard Hat Riot of 1970, when construction workers and students protesting the Vietnam War clashed in Downtown Manhattan, is an incident that is sometimes forgotten in the annals of American history, but now, more than 50 years after the conflict, PBS and American Experience are taking a hard look back at the riot and exploring what lessons can be learned. Hard Hat Riot, directed by Emmy Award winner Marc Levin, is now streaming on PBS platforms.
The documentary mostly centers on this Big Apple incident and the underlying tension between blue-collar workers and educated elites. The construction workers identified with the military personnel who were dying in the war, a vast majority of whom came from the working class, and they viewed the student protestors as “draft dodgers,” according to the PBS description for the documentary. The activists, on the other hand, saw the violence in Vietnam as unending and taking to the streets as their only answer.
Levin’s film doesn’t only remain in the 1970s, but also makes connections to the fraught political and economic times of 2025. “I’ll give you an example,” the director said in a recent phone interview, without missing a beat. “Just right today on the front page of The New York Times is a big op-ed headline called ‘Democrats Are in Crisis: Eat-the-Rich Populism Is the Only Answer.’ OK, so the question of what happened to the working class and their political alignment is front and center every day in the paper, on the TV talk shows, on the podcasts. What happened to the Democratic coalition of the New Deal?”
To explore some of these questions of the transformation of the working class in the United States, Levin and his team — including author David Paul Kuhn, who wrote the book that the film is based on — have fully detailed these intense few hours in the early-1970s.
“I can speak both from a professional point of view in making the film, but I can also speak from a personal point of view,” he said. “I was in New York City on that day, May 8, 1970. I was 19 years old working as an apprentice in the Maysles’ editing room on the film Gimme Shelter about the [Rolling] Stones and the end of the ‘60s. And I was listening to WINS radio because I wanted to see if Willis Reed was going to play in game 7 of the NBA Finals, the Knicks against the Lakers, when this news alert came on that the construction workers were coming down from the World Trade Center and other buildings they were working on downtown and attacking the anti-war demonstrators.”
The film includes interviews from both sides of the conflict, plus experts who help put the riot in an historical context. One of the voices toward the end of the documentary is actor Harvey Keitel.
“There’s a quite prescient commentary by Harvey Keitel, which kind of speaks to how each side had these stereotypes and couldn’t talk to each other and were incapable of bridging the gap back then,” Levin said. “I think that’s one of the things that is so applicable to today. So many of us are caught in our silos and have such a hard time really speaking or understanding the other side. Sometimes history allows us to go back and see in the past a clearer picture that helps us understand a lot more of what’s happening right now.”
Levin drew some parallels between the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, which was depicted in Gimme Shelter, and the Hard Hat Riot. Both were incidents that were symbolic ends to the 1960s, ushering in a new, darker era filled with uncertainty and violence.
“Obviously a horrible incident in terms of Altamont and the young man who was stabbed to death by the Hell’s Angels while the Stones were playing, that literally was an image caught on film that captures the death of the ‘60s only months after Woodstock,” the director said. “It turned into a tragedy, and I think you’re right, symbolic of the turning point in the culture. And I think the Hard Hat Riot also is a moment.”
The Hard Hat Riot was clear evidence that a shift had occurred in American politics. Some of the construction workers in the film talk about growing up in households where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s picture was hanging on the wall next to the image of Jesus. That was the level of reverence working-class families had for a president who helped them out of the Depression.
“You’ve got to give [President Richard] Nixon some credit,” Levin said. “He kind of had the intuition that the Republican Party, to move forward, couldn’t just be the party of blue bloods. It had to be a party that included blue collar. That was a major transformational moment, the beginning of which becomes crystallized under [President Ronald] Reagan, the so-called Reagan Democrats, and now we have the MAGA movement [Make America Great Again].”
Levin added: “It was also an economic turning point. … The World Trade Center, just the name of it alone, it’s just amazing how the men who actually built the World Trade Center were going to be left behind by the world that the World Trade Center was ushering in, a globalized world, a world of automation, a world where the financiers and the wealthy would get most of the gains and the economy over the next 50 years. And the working people had to fight to just stay where they were in 1973.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HolywoodSoapbox.com
American Experience: Hard Hat Riot is now streaming on PBS platforms. Click here for more information.
