Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory by Penny Lewis (review)

In May 1970, construction workers in New York City clashed with antiwar protesters in an incident that quickly came to symbolize an apparent chasm between an antiwar movement dominated by privileged students and an American working class characterized as conservative supporters of the war in Vietnam. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, historical sociologist Penny Lewis constructs a powerful and “submerged counternarrative” that emphasizes a much more diverse working class that ultimately played a key role in opposing the war (7). Marshalling substantial social science data, Lewis argues that American workers, especially when one broadens the notion of the working class beyond union leadership and white males who worked in manufacturing, were consistently less supportive of the war than elites. Even numerous unions condemned the so-called “hardhat” demonstrations within weeks and, by 1971, the leadership of organized labor increasingly followed their rank and file members in opposing what one group identified as a “Rich Man’s War and a Poor Man’s Fight” (113).

For Lewis, the antiwar movement became a multiclass and multiracial effort that included students, GIs, veterans, and civil rights activists from organizations such as SNCC and the Chicano Moratorium whose perceptions of the war stemmed, at least in part, from the varied perspectives of their working class communities. Using movement-relevant theory to place opponents of the war within their perceived social context, Lewis explores how many American workers experienced the antiwar movement from what Lewis calls the “borderline between feeling and protest” (14). Resisting caricatures of both antiwar hippies and “hardhat hawks,” most American workers shared the sentiments, if not many of the tactics and goals, of the antiwar movement while often distrusting its organizations and leadership (16). If images dominate our collective memory of the movement, Lewis offers provocative alternatives such as former SDS members providing food to striking General Electric workers in 1970, the varied resistance of antiwar soldiers in Southeast Asia, and the efforts of predominantly working-class members of the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) in the years after the largest antiwar rallies.

Lewis concedes the role, both intentional and unintentional, of middle-class activists in limiting the growth and direction of the movement in its early years as well as the significant efforts of conservatives such as Richard Nixon in exploiting the image of the hardhat conservative. Consequently, the author aims to complicate rather than dismiss entirely the conventional narrative. Unfortunately, considering the centrality of masculinity in framing dominant yet increasingly contested assumptions about both work and military service in postwar America, the author also fails to explore the role of gender in shaping the popular narratives of the period or our subsequent collective memory. Regardless, Lewis, inspired as much by the recent Occupy Wall Street movement as opposition to the Vietnam War, succeeds in unearthing evidence of a usable past for today’s social activists—a vibrant and diverse American working class capable of solidarity and transcending both “organizational borders” and American political culture to challenge domestic and foreign policy (13).