Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
Penny Lewis
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by college students and elite intellectuals, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers largely supported the war effort. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, Penny Lewis challenges this collective memory of class polarization. Through close readings of archival documents, popular culture, and media accounts at the time, she offers a more accurate "counter-memory" of a diverse, cross-class opposition to the war in Southeast Asia that included the labor movement, working-class students, soldiers and veterans, and Black Power, civil rights, and Chicano activists.Lewis investigates why the image of antiwar class division gained such traction at the time and has maintained such a hold on popular memory since. Identifying the primarily middle-class culture of the early antiwar movement, she traces how the class interests of its first organizers were reflected in its subsequent forms. The founding narratives of class-based political behavior, Lewis shows, were amplified in the late 1960s and early 1970s because the working class, in particular, lacked a voice in the public sphere, a problem that only increased in the subsequent period, even as working-class opposition to the war grew. By exposing as false the popular image of conservative workers and liberal elites separated by an unbridgeable gulf, Lewis suggests that shared political attitudes and actions are, in fact, possible between these two groups.
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Reviews for Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
David Ryan
International Affairs
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.
The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture
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.
Journal of American History