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One
icy night in 1855, the celebrated street brawler John
Morrissey walked into a Broadway saloon and spat in
the face of Bill “The Butcher” Poole, the
even more renown goliath of New York streets. Poole,
who led a murderous mob of anti-Catholic “Know
Nothings,” was the archfoe of Morrissey and other
Irish gang leaders in the pay of Tammany Hall. Morrissey
tried to blow Poole”s brains out with his pistol
but it misfired and Butcher Bill was preparing to
“bone the Irishman’s cutlet” when the
police intervened.
Later
that night Poole and some companions returned to the
same saloon and were attacked by the rest of Morrissey’s
gang. In fighting style of the period, there was berserk
mayhem with bowie knives, antique pistols, and much
chewing of ears and noses. Poole was shot in the heart,
but lingered for two weeks before gasping his famous
last words: “Goodbye, boys, I die a true American!”
Five thousand admirers marched in his funeral procession
and Poole became a martyr symbol for anti-immigrant
nativists.
The
legend of “Bill the Butcher,” generally
forgotten after the Civil War, was colorfully resurrected
in 1927 by Herbert Asbury in The Gangs of New York.
Although of dubious value as social history, Asbury’s
gang geneology of Manhattan is unquestionably wonderful
storytelling: an urban counterpart to the homeric
epic or Icelandic saga. Like the rivalry of Achilles
and Hector, the heroic combat between Morrissey and
Poole (or, later in the book, between Monk Eastman
and Paul Kelly) has beguiled generations of readers
- not least among them, Jorge Luis Borges and Luc
Sante.
Now
The Gangs of New York provides both a title and loose
narrative framework for Martin Scorsese’e $120
million film. Daniel Day-Lewis, who reportedly roused
himself to the role by listening nonstop to Eminem
CDs, plays Bill the Butcher, while Leonard DiCaprio
is the avengeful son of an Irish immigrant killed
by the gang chieftain. The film portrays the epic
street battles, two years after the historical Poole’s
murder, between the Irish Dead Rabbits and the native
Protestant Bowery Boys. It ends in the apocalypse
of the July 1863 Draft Riots, the bloodiest urban
insurrection in American history, with regiments recalled
from Gettysburg firing grapeshot point-blank at mobs
of Irish slumdwellers.
The
film’s startling claim is that “America
was born in the streets,” or, rather, in these
street wars. Scorsese, of course, is the greatest
contemporary fabulist of New York’s mean streets,
and The Gangs of New York is his urban creation myth,
explaining the origins of the world that would eventually
be inherited by his petty thiefs, “made”
guys, taxi drivers, child prostitutes, prizefighters,
crooked cops, petty bookies and Times Square hustlers.
But
is this Manhattan Illiad real history? The short answer
is that it is half the story. The violent rivalries
between native American workers and the Irish immigrant
poor did provide internal combustion for the great
engine of Tammany Hall (the Manhattan Democratic Party)
and its endlessly skillful manipulations of an ethnically
and confessionally divided working class. Indeed street
gangs, along with volunteer fire companies, were the
true grassroots of the ethnic spoils contest that
passed for “democracy” in the city with
the largest mass electorate in the mid-Victorian world.
But
the streets of Manhattan in the 1850s and 1860s were
also an epic battleground between Capital and Labor.
While Morrissey and Poole were leading their tribes
to war at the behest of ambitious political bosses,
other immigrants - English Chartists, Irish Fenians,
and German Communists - were struggling alongside
of native American trade-unionists to build a united
labor movement. This is the untold story within Asbury’s
and Scorsese’s “secret history” of
nineteenth century New York.
Gotham’s
most radical constituency - the immigrant artisans
and industrial workers of Kleindeutschland - scarcely
figure in the big screen drama. These Lower East Side
Germans (a third of the city’s population by
1870) were the most class conscious section of the
working class, equally opposed to gang leaders, political
bosses, and racist demagogues as well as to the uptown
plutocracy. Indeed, this German New York, to quote
its leading historian, was “the first stronghold
of socialism in American history.”
When
Scorsese’s film opens in 1846, as many German
as Irish immigrants were pouring into the waterfront
slums and tenement districts of New York. Likewise
tens of thousands of young Yankees were leaving their
hardscrabble farms and canal towns for the booming
railroad workshops, shipyards, and slaughterhouses
of Manhattan Island. The traditional plebian population,
with its long radical “producerist” traditions,
had to confront the competition of these new immigrants
at the same time that their trades were being deskilled
or replaced by machine production.
The
resulting social turbulence, magnified by the Crash
of 1857, cannot be compressed into a single narrative;
the reality was dialectical not allegorical. While
Irish and “American” gangs were bloodying
each other in the alleys of the Bowery, the Irish
labor leader James McGuire, the German Communist Albert
Komp and the native radical Ira B. Davis were organizing
thousands of the unemployed into a militant American
Workers League. When the bourgeois press begged the
militia “to shoot down any quantity of Irish
or Germans” as necessary to break the movement,
native workers defiantly stood shoulder to shoulder
with immigrants in Tompkins Square.
Although
the great capitalists of the day - Astor, Vanderbilt,
Grinnell, Belmont and so on - despised Tammany Hall
and its Irish allies (“Rum and Rowdyism”
in the slogan of the time), they feared gangs less
than unions, a divided working class less than a united
labor movement. Defeated in their attempt to impose
their own order on the city in the 1850s (a political
crisis that included the famed “Dead Rabbit Riots”),
the city’s mercantile elite on the eve of the
Civil War was moving toward an accommodation with
populist Mayor Fernando Wood and Democratic boss William
Tweed.
Two
groups resisted assimilation into this solution. One
was the radical wing of the labor movement, solidly
rooted amongst the Red 48’s and socialists of
Kleindeutschland, whose strategic goal was an independent
labor party. Many of them were both abolitionists
and anti-capitalists.
The
other was the Irish poor - the day laborers and sweatshop
workers - whose appalling misery (brilliantly depicted
by Scorsese) was now compounded by wartime inflation
and inflamed by the terrific losses of Irish regiments
in Virginia. The Irish were also alarmed by pro-Confederate
propaganda that warned of a tidal wave of freed slaves
in Northern labor markets if the Union won.
These
two groups - the labor vanguard and the slum poor
- played contrasting roles in the 1863 insurrection.
The draft lottery that July was universally scorned
by Northern workmen as an institutionalization of
class privilege, since the well-heeled could buy exemptions
for $300. Accordingly, the massive demonstration and
strike on Monday morning July 13th was largely led
by uptown Irish and German industrial workers, supported
by volunteer fire companies.
By
early evening, however, the trade unions had lost
leadership to street gangs and Confederate sympathisers
who directed wrath of the Irish poor against both
the mansions of the rich and the hovels of African-Americans.
The Colored Orphans Asylum was burnt to the ground
and Blacks were hounded down and hideously murdered.
The Germans and, indeed, many Irish workers (especially
those who had long lived side by side with Blacks
in the Five Points) recoiled from the carnage and
either took no part or actively opposed the pogrom.
The
hysterical upper classes, meanwhile, demanded a retaliatory
bloodbath in the slums. Six thousand federal troops,
many of them Irish New Yorkers, dutifully cleared
the streets with cannon fire and bayonet. The heroes
of Gettysburg became the butchers of New York. In
scenes which foreign observers compared to the June
1848 massacres in Paris, scores of rag clad Irish
women and children were cut down alongside of their
menfolk.
Scorsese
certainly has a poetic license to depict the great
riot as the climax of the Age of Gangs. Indeed, it
was the direct outgrowth of the political role of
street violence in dividing New York workers by religion
and race. But this catastrophe hardly annihilated
class consciousness or petrified history into a predetermined
trajectory.
Indeed,
the direct aftermath was a massive campaign, largely
led by socialists, to rebuild an independent and non-sectarian
labor movement. As one historian has emphasized, “the
massive strikes for an eight-hour workday in spring
1872 were the sober denouement to the draft riots.”
Out of these struggles, in turn, arose the powerful
New York branch of the First International, the pioneer
Workingwoman’s Association, the “red spectre
of the Commune” at Tompkins Square in 1874, and,
ultimately, the radical mayoral campaign of Henry
George that came within a hairsbreadth of overthrowing
Tammany Hall.
Certainly
we should enjoy Scorsese’s homeric tale - especially
its vivid re-imagining of 1850s Manhattan as a Third
World City - but we should not forget that socialists
and class fighters, not gangsters, left the biggest
footprints on the real streets of old New York.
Mike
Davis is a socialist and the author of a number of
books, including City of Quartz: Excavating the
Future of Los Angeles, and Magical Urbanism:
Latinos Reinvent the US Big City.
For
more Gangs of New York, see Seaghán Ó
Murchú's
The Blood Stays on the
Blade
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