Posted on 05/08/2015 4:26:32 AM PDT by Nextrush
I was a child 45 years ago today, my parents and I would sit down in front of television every evening to see the latest protests, often violent ones involving racial issues or the Vietnam War.
For me as a child, sometimes it looked watching Adam West on television's "Batman" without the "Zaps" and "Zowies" pasted on the screen.
But for adults the often clenched fist communist flag bearing protestors who burned draft cards and the American flag were at best distasteful, at worst traitors.
When four anti-war protestors were shot dead Monday May 4th at Ohio's Kent State University, convulsions of martyrdom protests spread out across the nation.
Many Americans were not happy to see what happened but a good number of others didn't give a rip if a bunch of commie long haired America haters bit the dust.
My steelworker uncle in Ohio took my father and I to his back yard some months later and looked over at the property where one of those killed lived, expressing his utter disdain for the family.
On this morning 45 years ago hundreds of anti-war protestors were gathered in the Wall Street area when suddenly more than 1,000 men, mostly construction workers wearing hard hats moved in. Eventually they got through a police line and began to assault the anti-war protestors, but their ultimate goal was further ahead-City Hall.
New York's liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay, had ordered Old Glory to fly at half-staff for the dead protestors.
Here is how the "St. Petersburg Times" reported the story on its front page-Saturday May 9, 1970.
"....more than 1,000 young men, many of them construction workers, voiced their opposition to Mayor John Lindsay's anti-war sentiments and stormed City Hall, clashing with police and pushing into a crowd of student peace demonstrators.
The workers, six carrying American flags, swarmed into City Hall Park chanting, 'We want Lindsay' and 'Raise that flag'.
Lindsay, who had ordered city flags at half-staff in memory of the four slain Kent State students, was downtown attending an anti-war rally.
Eleven people were taken to a nearby hospital and a number of students were treated for injuries at the scene.
Weeping students, running for cover in deeper parts of the building, shouted 'Stupid Fascists'.
The flag-carrying construction workers earlier had pushed their way through young peace demonstrators in the Wall Street area, then staged an impromptu parade up Broadway to City Hall, followed by young workers from the financial district...."
There were signs in the protestor ranks, among them "America, Love It or Leave It" and "Impeach the Red Mayor".
In the end, a postal worker raised Old Glory back to full staff at City Hall.
A You Tube account of this protest points to Peter Brennan, leader of the construction workers union, as a Richard Nixon sympathizer and agitator for the protest, which he later described the next Monday May 11th as a spontaneous reaction by the workers to flag desecration by the anti-war protestors.
As for the construction workers, P.J. O'Rourke actually dedicated one of his books to the worker who bashed his head in during that counterprotest (P.J. was a former radical leftist turned conservative).
Yeah. That was a bad day for the Left.
The people they supposedly stood for turned on them.
Lotta college kids had their world turned upside down.
What? You mean the Proles aren’t on our side?
But Abbie Hoffman said they were....
Kind of the beginning of the end for the counter-culture that hit its high point in 69...
Like when the Hells Angels appeared at a anti war rally. The hair heads thought it was cool until the HA started cracking skulls. Turns out a lot of HA were vets
Yeah. In the 60s that was still true; Not so much now.
Do not forget the fact that these "Protestors" had burned down a building on campus. Polls taken at the time showed the majority of the American public thought that more of them should have been shot.
If I recall correctly, the "Hell's Angels" were originally WWII Bomber crews. Those black jackets that became the ubiquitous symbol of biker gangs were originally bomber jackets.
That National Guard unit was made up of mostly teens?
You might want to recheck that, it isn’t accurate.
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