Workers' Woodstock

Callused hands gripped tiny U.S. flags. Weathered faces shone with sweat under the midday sun. For three hours, 100,000 members of New York's brawniest unions marched and shouted, milled and sang in a massive display of gleeful patriotism and muscular pride. Basking in the ticker-tape approval of cheering office workers crowding high windows in buildings many of DAVID BURNETT them had helped erect beam by beam and load by load, the hardhatted construction workers, teamsters and longshoremen rallied through the streets of Lower Manhattan in probably the biggest pro-Government rally since the Viet Nam War began. With a crude and forceful clarity, they signaled their support of President Nixon's policies in Southeast Asia.

In sharp contrast with the vengeful hardhat attacks upon youthful peace demonstrators a fortnight before, this rally was carefully organized by the Building and Trades Council of Greater New York, which had announced that its aim was to help laborers show their "love of country and love and respect for our country's flag." Leaders of the participating unions, which included plumbers, bricklayers, steamfitters and ironworkers, had warned against violence. About 3,800 cops, some of whom had blithely watched the earlier beatings, sealed off city hall from the demonstrators and patrolled the march. The mood was tense, not angry. Mayor John Lindsay was burned in effigy and denounced by many signs: IMPEACH THE RED MAYOR and, over a mock coffin, HERE LIES THE CITY OF NEW YORK BURIED BY COMMISSAR LINDSAY.

Full Pay. But mainly the polychromatic rally, with its shimmering flow of blue, red, green and yellow hats amid thousands of American flags, was a festive affair, accenting the positive in a kind of workers' Woodstock. Banners proclaimed GOD BLESS AMERICA and the demonstrators chanted, "All the Way with the U.S.A.!" Martial music, including From the Halls of Montezuma and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, rekindled the World War II spirits of middle-aged workers. Flag-waving demonstrators clung precariously to the uncomfortable tops of moving concrete mixers.

The display of pro-Nixon sentiment was impressive, and the patriotic fervor was sincere. Yet the street rallies of the hardhats in New York City are complicated by their animosity toward campus protesters and long-haired youths, their fear of inflation and recession, their political grudges against Mayor Lindsay. Union leaders rarely have any difficulty in turning out big crowds -especially on a spring day and at full pay. But more significantly, blue-collar workers are apparently discovering, as countless college students have found, that there is a certain satisfaction in the camaraderie of expressing feelings en masse and in catching the nation's attention. The beleaguered John Lindsay aptly pointed up the benefits of this when he congratulated the workers on their "spirited and orderly" protest and urged them to "uphold the right of other groups to demonstrate peacefully too -for this is the essence of the American way."

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