Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks

An engaging "counter-memory" of a diverse, cross-class opposition to the Vietnam War that included the labor movement, working-class students, soldiers and veterans, and Black Power, civil rights, and Chicano activists.

Penny Lewis is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York.

This book offers a powerfully argued response to a thesis about working-class conservatism and the Vietnam War that posits that members of the working class were so alienated by hippie protestors' appearance, tactics, and lack of patriotism that they rallied around the U.S. flag and supported the war more than their middle-class fellow citizens did. Penny Lewis demonstrates that 'working-class opposition to the war was significantly more widespread than is remembered' and that 'the greatest support for the war came from the privileged elite, despite the visible dissent' of some of its members.... Methodologically responsible and exhaustively researched, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks is an indispensable contribution to scholarship about the domestic debates surrounding the Vietnam War.

On rare occasions, something enters one's mental universe so radiant that it lights up the whole mind, burning away what now seem like intellectual preoccupations of vastly less import. Such was my experience consumed by Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, a book worthy of regard as an instant classic on literature on the American experience of the Vietnam War and for an audience far beyond academia.

David Ryan:

As Penny Lewis argues and persuasively demonstrates in this theoretically and methodologically innovative book, 'working-class opposition to the war was significantly more widespread than is remembered, and parts of the movement found roots in working-class communities and politics.' She therefore sets out to revise the distorted history of the anti-war movement and then to explain theoretically why this belief has persisted for such a long time.

Richard Flacks, University of CaliforniaSanta Barbaraco, author of Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements:

This book compels us to fundamentally reexamine how we remember the Vietnam years and the movements of that period. In forcing such reexamination, Penny Lewis brilliantly challenges conventional theorizing about class, about collective identity, about protest and public opinion. It's one of those rare books that changes how both scholars and the public think about recent history—and what that history means for us now. What’s more—it's wonderfully well-written!

Todd Gitlin, Columbia University, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage:

Penny Lewis's thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and subtle book not only upends conventional wisdom about the sixties antiwar movement but does a good deal to help us rethink what class means in America.Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks is an indispensable reconsideration of a history we thought we knew.

Peter Rachleff, Macalester College, author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement:

Penny Lewis's Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks will spur readers to think differently about our present and not just the past; the tropes of the top and the bottom and of a relationship between them that imperils the great 'middle' are at the heart of our current political and social debates. Lewis explains how the enduring and familiar images of white, conservative, blue-collar workers and liberal antiwarriors from privileged milieus were created, circulated, and consumed.

Adolph ReedJr., University of Pennsylvania, author of Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene:

Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks displays historical sociology at its best. It is historically subtle, nuanced and rich, as well as theoretically sophisticated while not at all arcane. Penny Lewis provides a fresh and important, deeply and carefully contextualized account of the ways that class, and narratives about class, emerged within and around, shaped, and were shaped by the movement against the Vietnam war in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Just as important, she examines the complex impact that history has had for subsequent American political understandings, including how dominant narratives—particularly the imagery of working-class conservatism—formed in that period have persisted in constraining even left politics in the United States. This book makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary scholarship and political debate. Lewis's account is full and true.