It’s true that cigar-chomping union kingmakers like George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, were a bunch of pro-war mummies. And it’s true that Team Nixon exploited working-class resentment of rich-kid protesters amid “hard hat” rallies supporting the massacres in Vietnam. But the whole idea that the working class was uniformly pro-war and middle-class hippies were all against it is bullshit: polls and surveys at the time showed that proles were more antiwar than smug, college-educated elites.II
