The Go-Go Years Read Free Page A

was positively good-humored, and when, as noon approached, the rain stopped and a warm sun broke through, the mood became even better. Most of the demonstrators sat down on the sidewalk to listen to speakers.
    Eleven fifty-five: suddenly, simultaneously from all four approaches to the intersection, like a well-trained raiding force, the hardhats came. They were construction workers, many employed in the huge nearby World Trade Center project, and their brown overalls and orange-and-yellow helmets seemed to be a sort of uniform. Many of them carried American flags; others, it soon became clear, carried construction tools and wore heavy boots that were intended as weapons. Later it was said that their movements appeared to be directed, by means of hand signals, by two unidentified men in gray hats and gray suits. There were perhaps two hundred of them.
    As they pushed through the mob of seated students, it became manifest that their two objectives were to place flags at the base of the Washington statue in front of Federal Hall, otherwise known as the Subtreasury Building, and to break up the demonstration, if necessary by violence. As to the first objective, they marched toward the statue shouting “All the way, U.S.A.!” and “Love it or leave it!”; their way was barred on the steps by a thin line of policemen; the policemen, overwhelmed by greater numbers, were brushed aside; and the flags were triumphantly planted under the statue. As to the second objective: construction workers repeatedly struck students with sticks, fists, boots, screwdrivers, and pliers. They chased screaming students of both sexes down the canyons of the financial district, striking to hurt when they came within range. They ripped the Red Cross banner, indicating the presence of the new first-aid station, from the front gates of Trinity. The air was filled with the cries of the enraged and the injured, and the acrid, ominous aroma of a storm-troop putsch. Vicar Woodward, brave and exposed, stood through it all by the Trinity front gates, directing victims to theaid station inside; twice, fearing an actual invasion of the church, he ordered the gates closed.
    Inside Trinity, a communion service was in progress—a Mass, as it happened, for peace and in commemoration of the Kent State students and all the war dead in Vietnam. Those in the congregation were first aware of the noise of a rising mob filtering in from the street; then, as the service proceeded, they watched a steady stream of bloodied students walking or being carried down the nave’s side aisle to the Sacristy and Clergy Vesting Room where the young doctors and nurses were ready to treat them. In all, about fifty demonstrators were treated at the Trinity first-aid station; another twenty-three were serious enough cases to require attention at Beekman-Downtown Hospital.
    For more than a week afterward, Wall Street bristled daily with police as if it were in a fascist state.
    To the extent that it had any part in this dispiriting affair—this small but fierce and rancorous struggle that came so close to being a crystallization of the whole nation’s tragedy at that moment—professional Wall Street, the Wall Street of finance and law, of power and elegance, seemed to be on the side of the students. Perhaps out of common humanity, or perhaps out of class feeling, the bulls and bears felt more kinship with the doves than with the hawks. At Exchange Place, Robert A. Bernhard, a partner in the aristocratic firm of Lehman Brothers, was himself assaulted and severely cut in the head by a construction worker’s heavy pliers, after he had tried to protect a youth who was being beaten. A few blocks north, a young Wall Street lawyer was knocked down, kicked, and beaten when he protested against hardhats who were yelling “Kill the Commie bastards!” But most of the mighty of the Street—Communist bastards or not—had no part in the struggle. They