Penny Lewis is a professor of sociology in the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies of the City University of New York. Her new book, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Anti-War Movement as Myth and Memory, upends the widely-held image of of  a society polarized between an “effete corps of impudent snobs” (as Spiro Agnew so memorably put it) and the silent majority of staunchly patriotic and pro-war working class folks living in “middle America.” As the countermemory that Lewis offers makes clear, anti-war sentiment and activity was extremely common within the working class — much more common, in fact, than within the middle and upper classes — even though working class people did not always express themselves in the language of class politics. While challenging and correcting our conceptions of the period, Lewis also offers numerous insights into what makes for successful anti-war and community organizing, the interplay of class cultures within social movements, and the possibilities for a new class politics in our own time.

Lewis was gracious enough to sit down with Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano for a interview about the book and its implications for left politics today. This is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.