Pro-War Rally

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32303, 22 May 1970, Page 13

Pro-War Rally

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) NEW YORK, May 21.

Steel - helmeted construction workers led an estimated 150,000 people in a City Hall rally and march down Broadway yesterday in support of the Administration’s Indo-China war policy.

A high police official gave the unofficial crowd estimate, but police would not make an official estimate.

It was by far the largest pro-Administration turn-out since masses have begun taking to the city’s streets to

demonstrate for and against the war in Vietnam. It appeared to exceed even a 1967 outpouring of 125,000 anti-war marchers.

The marchers, carrying American flags, made their way through Manhattan without violence.

When trouble occasionally seemed to threaten, police moved in quickly. There were 3800 of them assigned.

The lack of violence was in contrast to a May 8 rally when construction workers attacked, beat and injured 70 anti-war demonstrators and long-haired youths in the same area.

The only reported injury yesterday was to a marcher hit by a box of confetti thrown from a skyscraper window. There was one arrest of an anti-war counterdemonstrator.

They clogged Broadway for nearly a mile along the traditional ticker tape route of heroes between the Battery and City Hall. Showers of ticker tape greeted the marchers. On the steel skeleton of a new building, constructionworkers who had stayed on the job waved American flags and beat with their hammers on girders and pipes. Held aloft in the crowd were signs reading “Impeach The Red Mayor.” An effigy of the mayor (Mr John Lindsay) was hanged and then burned. The mayor, an opponent of President Nixon’s SouthEast Asia policy, was critical of police after the May 8 melee. He ordered an investigation into reports that officers stood by while anti-war demonstrators were beaten.