Standing Fast

Only four days after the shootings at Kent State in the Spring of 197o, a group of nearly two thousand construction workers-many working on the World Trade Center- descended on Wall Street and violently assaulted the some 1,000 anti-war protesters gathered there. The workers then went on to storm city hall and ran the US flag-which was being flown at half mast in remembrance of the deaths at Kent State-back to full mast. Less than a month latter nearly 100,000 construction workers marched through the streets of Manhattan in support of President Nixon. Nixon was so impressed by the so called "hard-hat riots" that he picked the president of the powerful New York City Building and Construction Trades Council Peter Brennan as his Secretary of Labor.

But that was then. Its unlikely you will be seeing any construction workers today marching through the streets for Bush. According to yesterday's Boston Globe:

"Democratic presidential candidates pledged their support for labor rights before a builders union yesterday, but the war in Iraq cast a shadow over the session, with union members shouting down a Republican lawmaker who backed the war and cheering Democrats who promised to get the United States out of Iraq.

"This war is a mess. We should bring the troops home now!" shouted Representative Dennis Kucinich , Democrat of Ohio, bringing the blue-collar crowd to its feet in raucous applause. Kucinich, a second-tier candidate who draws minimal support in public-opinion polls, rarely gets such an enthusiastic response at multi candidate forums.

In contrast to the stony silence that greeted Sen. John McCain when he tried defending Bush's troop surge before the AFL-CIO, the contemporary hard-hats were more direct in expressing theirdisapproval of the Iraq war

"By contrast, House minority leader John Boehner of Ohio, one of two Republicans who addressed the conference, was booed loudly when he spoke in favor of the war. "If we don't fight them [in Iraq], we will be fighting them here in America," Boehner said, before the audience shouted him down."