One event that really drove a wedge between hard hat ppl and white collar was this riot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot https://en.wikipedia.org/w

One event that really drove a wedge between hard hat ppl and white collar was this riot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot A few days after Kent State a group of construction workers head into a protest against Vietnam and pretty viciously attack a crowd of 1000 college students. There is plenty of blame to go around for this event (like any occurrence of mob action) and many sociological trends that led to this, but historians tend to mark this event as the “beginning of the end” for Union influence in the US.