Planting roots for Reagan

Once in a while, the Silent Majority was actually quite outspoken.

During the summer of 1969, construction workers streamed into Manhattan from Long Island and the metro area for pro-war, pro-Nixon rallies.

But by contrast, many Americans just quietly went about their lives that summer. For them, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the Mets - did not loom as large as the private obligations of career and family.

Scholars say 1969 was a key year for the conservative movement that would flower in the Reagan years and transform American politics. Conservative, traditional and religious groups all saw sharp membership increases.

For Eugene O'Brien of Valley Stream, graduation in spring 1969 with an associate's degree in police science was the beginning of a life of public service.

"That's when I became a volunteer fireman," O'Brien said. "Becoming a fireman was the most memorable thing that happened that summer, for me."

O'Brien put his degree to work for a police equipment distributor and took the first steps in a career that would culminate with the position of Nassau County's director of security.

For O'Brien and many others, jobs were a big worry that summer, as the U.S. and state economies constricted. Yet at the same time women, minorities, gays and other groups were demanding better pay, better jobs, better housing. The effects of affirmative action and civil-rights reform seemed more like waves than ripples.

Black militants brandished rifles on the Cornell University campus. In June, radicals broke from Students for a Democratic Society, forming a violent offshoot known as the Weathermen.

Psychedelic music, shoulder-length hair on men, sexual permissiveness and other trends left many Americans increasingly uncertain of their place in the world. They were the voters President Richard Nixon would reach out to as "the great silent majority of my fellow Americans."

Heeding Nixon's appeal, in downtown Manhattan, the hard-hat demonstrations continued throughout 1969 and into the next year. They were ironworkers, bricklayers, plumbers, steamfitters. Pro-Nixon, anti-hippie and proud to show it. Some workers physically assaulted anti-war demonstrators - a violent outbreak that came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot. Mostly, though, the mass demonstrations were peaceable events.

Beyond these highly visible pro-government rallies, most Americans were reeling from the speed and force of the changes and events the country faced.

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