The Hard Hat Riot

On May 8, 1970, four days after National Guardsmen shot four students dead at Kent State, roughly 400 construction workers and 800 office workers converged near Wall Street and Broad Street and attacked about 1,000 demonstrators marking the nationwide student strike against the Vietnam War and Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. The fight rolled north toward City Hall, where workers pushed past police to the top of the steps chanting for the flag, which Mayor Lindsay had lowered for the Kent State dead, to go back up to full staff. Students and bystanders were chased and beaten in the streets around Wall Street, Broad Street, and Pace University over more than three hours. More than a hundred people were hurt, seven of them police officers, but only six arrests came out of it. The man who led the construction workers that day, Peter J. Brennan, would be sitting in Nixon's Cabinet within three years.