reading summary

FILM REVIEW

The Hands That Built America: A Class-P olitics Appreciation of Martin

Scorsese’ s The Gangs of New Y ork

B RYAN D. P ALMER

What is your money-making now? What can it do now?

What is your respectability now?

Where are your theology , tuition, society , traditions, statute-books now?

Where are your jibes of being now?

Where are your cavils about the Soul now?

‘ Song of the Broad Axe’ , 142– 6.

W alt Whitman, Chants Democratic , II

The mean streets of New Y ork have seldom been meaner .

Blood does not just run in

them, it gallops, spilled by blades and bludgeons that slice and crack the bodies of

the past in a violence that is at once ritualised and reverential. Martin Scorsese’ s The

Gangs of New Y ork , a $120 million epic inspired by Herbert Asbury’ s 1928 ‘ informal

history’ of the same name,

commences with a Ž ctitious 1846 gang battle in the Paradise

Square, heart of the infamous Five Points district of lower Manhattan, pitting Bill ‘ The

Butcher ’ Cutting and his Protestant ‘ Know Nothing’ nativists against the Irish Catholic

immigrant forces of Priest V allon and the Dead Rabbits.

Historical hurt: ‘ The blood stays on the blade’

This opening scene of gore and mayhem, in which the white snow is soon stained

various shades of red and pink, sets the cinematic stage, with the victorious Butcher

withdrawing his knife from V allon’ s chest, affording an opportunity for the close-up

gush of spurting blood, a kind of Scorsese ‘ money shot’ . ‘ Ears a nd noses are the

trophies of the day’ , proclaims Cutting to the triumphant nativist ranks as the defeated

D e a d R a b b i t s s t a nd o d dl y s u b d u e d , t h e e n t i re c o m b a t i v e l o t l o o k in g , m a n y

commentators ha ve remarked, a s if they stepped off a set c ast midway between

Historical Materialism , volume 11:4 (317– 345)

Also available online – www.brill.nl

This paper was Ž rst presented to T oronto’ s Marxist Institute in February 2003, and the author

is grateful to the audience for its critical comment.

Asbury 1928. Brav eheart and Mad Max , the weaponry eerily reminiscent of some working-class

street-warfare equivalent of the gynaecological instruments of Dead Ringers .

Y et this surreal gladiatorial imagery is introduced by a scene of seeming incongruity ,

marked by consummate gentleness. A supposedly celibate priest tutors his motherless

son about life’ s harshness, and the need to keep them always in mind. As he prepares

for the impending battle with a meticulous toilet, V allon shaves while his young boy ,

Amsterdam, watches in the shadows. A father ’ s hand passes a blood-stained straight

razor to his son, who starts to wipe the red residue on the bottom of his jacket. ‘ No

son, never ’ , admonishes the priest, who continues with caring guidance, ‘ The blood

stays on the blade. . . . Someday you’ ll understand.’

This insistence that the historical blood stays on the b lade is Scorsese’ s under-

appreciated accomplishment, a metaphor of history’ s hurt that is suggestively extended

into a range of complex realms associated with United States class and state formation.

T o be sure, the odd mainstream critic does indeed gesture toward this fundamental

historicisation. Jami Bernard of the New Y ork Daily News ends her review , ‘ Scorsese &

the Age of Violence,’ with brief, if historically misguided and somewhat pejorative,

allusion to what she claims is The Gangs of New Y ork ’ s large truth, ‘ that today’ s melting

pot is yesterday’ s witches’ brew’ . More insightful, because it of fers at least a few words

of elaboration upon such a rhetorical one-liner , is A.O. Scott’ s New Y ork Times ‘T o Feel

a City Seethe’ . Scott appreciates Scorsese’ s ambition, the creation of ‘ a narrative of

historica l c hange,’ constructed ‘ from the ground up’ . Moreo ver, S cott grasp s the

uniqueness of this presentation: ‘ There is very little in the history of American cinema

to prepare us for the version of American history Mr . Scorsese presents here. It is not

the usual triumphalist story of moral progress and enlightenment, but rather a blood-

soaked revenger ’ s tale, in which the modern world arrives in the form of a line of

soldiers Ž ring into a crowd.’

But such gestures toward the reciprocities of past and present hardly abound in the

reviews, most of which are incarcerated within the pageantry of speciŽ c personas:

Daniel Day-Lewis’ s riveting role as the Butcher, the rage level appropriate to the

theatrical rendition supposedly primed by Day-Lewis blasting his eardrums non-stop

with Eminem ; Ca mero n Dia z ’ s misca st b ea u tiŽ c a tion of a ‘ b lu dget’ , t he f emale

pickpocket, Jenny Everdeane; and the rather unfortunate Leonardo DiCaprio, the

Ž lm’ s ‘ star ’ and narrator , Amsterdam V allon, who Ž nds himself ironically outclassed

and overshadowed by the rough-hewn Day-Lewis and his mesmerising performance.

While most critics swoon over the stunning Five Points set, constructed on the grounds

318 • Br yan D. Palmer

See the depiction of weaponry in Scorsese 2002, p. 146.

For exact dialogue, I rely on Scorsese 2002. All quotes from dialogue in the Ž lm are from

this source, unless otherwise stipulated.

Bernard 2002; Scott 2002. of the Cinecitta studios in Rome and supervised by Dante Ferretti, one reviewer noted

with irritation that the ‘ fetish for authenticity’ – bought and properly paid for in the

hiring of various consultants who advised actors, crew , and director on such essentials

as Chinese opera, butchering, hand-lettered signs, and mid-nineteenth-century Ž ghting

techniques – got in the way of the drama.

No t su rprisingly , however, historia ns (and New Y ork journa lism’ s historic ally

minded) and socialists Ž rst out of the gate with their comments have found the Ž lm’ s

lack of authenticity a disappointment, a point made most tellingly in Joshua Brown’ s

thoughtful London Review of Books ‘ The Bloody Sixth’ and, in a journalistic equivalent,

Pete Ha mill’ s Da ily News ‘ T rampling City’ s History’ . As J. Hob erman c omp la ins

succinctly , Scorsese’ s Ž lm is ‘ a hothouse historical fantasy inspired by the already

fantastic demimonde chronicles’ of Asbury , the result a reading of ‘ the present back

into history’ that ‘ reimagines the past to suit itself . . . a lavish folly’ . No Sexy Beast

this, Hoberman dubs Gangs a very rough beast indeed, one ‘ saddled with abundant

b ac kstory’ . I f history is not, à la Henry Ford, nec essa rily b unk, Sc orsese stands

condemned by some as turning it into little more than that.

Scorsese: an unconscious Brecht in an unconscious age

For the most part, I approach the Ž lm differently . If, as Fredric Jameson has argued,

the one ‘ transhistorical’ imperative of all Marxist, dialectical thought is the demand

to ‘ always historicize!’ , it must be recognised that in cultural production, not unlike

the actual research and writing of history , the issue of authenticity can never be reduced

to the merely fa ctu al. Yet there is a differenc e sepa ra ting histo rica l f rom artistic

produ ctions, and the disc iplines of dependency on evidence a re obviou sly more

rigorous within the writing of history than they can, or perhaps should, be in the

ma king of historical Ž lm. As Jameson suggests, within the projects of theory and

cultural criticism, a developing ‘ metacommentary’ focuses less on ‘ the text itself than

the interpretations through which we attempt to confront and appropriate it’ . Jameson

thus makes the case in The Political Unconscious for a speciŽ c aesthetics of presentation,

the narrative form, alongside an understanding of interpretation’ s primacy:

These divergent and unequal b odies of work are here interrogated a nd

evaluated from the perspective of the speciŽ c critical and interpretive task

of the present volume, namely to restructure the problematics of ideology ,

Film Review • 319

T uran 2002.

Brown 2003; Hamill 2002; Hoberman 2002; Anbinder and Cocks 2002. Two decidedly hostile

socialist reviews are Sustar 2003; Walsh 2003a. An intriguing set of comments from the historian

James M. McPherson, which concentrates on the draft riots, the $300 commutation fee, and the

alliance of New Y ork’ s poor whites and Democratic Party/ mercantile é lite supporters of the

racist plantocracy , is found in W alsh 2003b. of the unconscious and desire, of representation, of history , and of cultural

production, around the all-informing process of narrative , which I take to

be (here using the shorthand of philosophical idealism) the central function

or instance of the human mind. . . . I happen to feel that no interpretation

can be effectively disqualiŽ ed on its own terms by a simple enumeration of

inaccuracies or omissions, or by a list of unanswered questions. Interpretation

is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric battleŽ eld, on which

a host of interpretive options are either openly or implicitly in con ict. If

the positivistic conception of philological accuracy be the only alternative,

then I would much prefer to endorse the current provocative celebration of

strong misreadings over weak ones.

In short, art, unlike the writing of history , which combines a conceptual imagination

with a rigorous and disciplined recourse to actualities of evidence and event, thrives

Ž rst and foremost through its creative licence. That licence succeeds, for Marxists at

least, if it historicises experience in ways that illuminate truths that are often obscured

over time, and that have remained hidden from engagement precisely because large

connections and continuities in historical process have been seemingly fractured by

change, the tyranny of present-mindedness (which severs our lives from those of

earlier generations), and the necessary but unfortunate limitations of painstaking

scholarly reconstructions that often get the empirical detail of various trees right only

to lose sight of the broad expanse of the forests of the longue duré e .

Scorsese, I will suggest, has managed to do what few historians, and even fewer

Ž lm-makers, can legitimately claim as accomplishment. In compressing mid-nineteenth-

century history , he develops a narrative that leads inexorably toward some of the

major sociopolitical dilemmas of a revolutionary encounter with the making of modern

American cla ss society . Something of an unconscious Bertolt Brecht of our times,

Scorsese’ s cast of Three Penny Opera characters has, in the past, included child prostitutes,

delusional taxi-drivers, made guys, punch-drunk boxers, dirty cops, and other assorted

and sordid urban hustlers. It is not surprising that he is enthralled by the gangs of

an earlier epoch. Like Brecht, as T erry Eagleton has noted, Scorsese starts not from

the ‘ good old things’ so prevalent in what we might designate Hollywood’ s capacity

to nostalgise the past, but from the ‘ bad new ones’ of our own unfortunate historical

moment.

His major Ž lms, from Mean Streets through T axi Driver and Raging Bull to

Good Fellas have never managed to step out of the conŽ nes of an almost obsessional

Ž xation on the violence of the present, and although these Ž lms have made strong

statements, they have always proven politically enclosed in ways that the historicised

320 • Br yan D. Palmer

Jameson 1981, pp. 9, 13.

Eagleton 1981, p. 6. The Gangs of New Y ork is not.

As a consequence, Robert De Niro’ s drift into pathology

in T axi Driver , while powerfully evocative as a representation of social crisis in the

‘ post’ -1960s decade of the 1970s, never manages to shake loose of a fundamentally

alienated individuality . When T ravis Bickle stands deŽ ant before a full-length mirror ,

asking, ‘ Are you talking to me?’ , his tone increasingly one of menacing belligerence,

Scorsese is not necessarily able to draw us into this one-way conversation. Indeed,

we want no part of it. But in Amsterdam’ s voice-over commentaries in The Gangs of

New Y ork , or in the Butcher ’ s racist soliloquies, it is impossible not to engage with the

politicised meanings of collective historical process, however unsettling they may be.

If Scorsese’ s Ž lm thus stands very much as one director ’ s urban myth creation, it

nevertheless works on the large, often Brueghel-like cinematic canvas, precisely because

its art of representation intersects with historical developments in insightful and

stimulating ways. The Ž lm does talk to us as Marxists, I would maintain, if only we

can get past the tyrannical fetishisation of ‘ factuality’ to glimpse the wider worlds of

class and state formation as they were made in the mid-nineteenth century , and as

that making lived on, in various ways, over the course of the next one hundred and

Ž fty years.

Historical authenticity and Ž lm

Historians have of late commented much on Ž lm, and their judgements often turn

on various ‘ truth tests’ . In a way , this is oddly out-of-step with contemporary discussion

of historiography and historical method, given that in certain avant-garde historical

circles ‘ truth’ itself, and the possibility of achieving it in any authorial narrative of

the past, is generally regarded with scepticism. So, too, have historians questioned

the ways in which evidence itself is constructed, asking of seemingly routinely generated

sources such as the census how they came to be and what their relationship was to

evolving structures of power and the not inconsiderable authority of an ‘ archives of

knowledge’ . Imagine asking of Foucault’ s histories of sexuality or of the meanings of

prison discipline if they are, in actuality , ‘ true’ , or arguing forcefully for the ultimate

‘ truth’ of a newspaper account or a case Ž le: I can hear the peels of jaundiced laughter

from the high pews of contemporary theory’ s sophisticates. Why do we expect the

transparency of truth and a discipline of balance in historical Ž lm-making, at the same

time that we often let others, who work in much closer proximity to archives, evidence,

and the layered sedimentation of historical experience, so easily off the hook?

Natalie Zemon Davis discusses authenticity in ways characteristic of historians’

demands of Ž lm, and no one, perhaps, has more experience than Davis in actually

Film Review • 321

T wo helpful overviews are Kelly 1980 and Connelly 1991. working through the creation of an historical Ž lm, her role in The Return of Martin

Guerre being somewhat exceptional. Moreover , Davis grapples sensitively with the

ways in which the creations of Ž lm and historical writing dif fer , but are also grounded

in speciŽ c common concerns.

She cites two reasons that historical Ž lms go off-track.

Davis is critical, for example, of Hollywood’ s underestimation of Ž lm audiences, and

the almost ubiquitous suggestion that mainstream cinema distorts the past the better

to make it palpa ble to audiences suffocating in their present-mindedness. Steven

Spielberg’ s Amistad , for instance, was said to have pandered to what he imagined to

be contemporary Ž lm-goers’ need to have the past relate simply and clearly to modern

experience, a reductionism that Davis rightly deplores.

But, more relevantly for any

discussion of The Gangs of New Y ork, Davis singles out a habit of cinematic production

that demonstrates ‘ too cavalier an attitude toward the evidence about lives and attitudes

in the past’ .

This is a tall-order critique, for most historians would, if answering honestly , accent

how humble we should be when claiming knowledge of attitudes in the past. Davis

then hooks on to this deeply dif Ž cult issue an injunction that, ‘ W e must respect that

evidence, accepting it as given, and let the imagination work from there’ . The phrase

that evidence must be accepted ‘ as given’ , necessarily gives one cause to pause, but

granting Davis the beneŽ t of certain doubts, it is apparent that, for her , making Ž lms

and making histories, save perhaps for the pride of place reserved for dramatisation

in cinematic productions, are similar creative projects. Y et I am not so convinced that

Ž lm should operate by the same rules as those we have elaborated for historical texts,

especially given that some historians clearly do not recognise the rules of evidence

that Davis alludes to (although I would agree with what I take to be Davis’ s main

point, that evidence should be grappled with seriously , something that is ironically

too often lost sight of in the textualism of our times).

Davis moves on to even more narrowly conŽ ning ledges:

If . . . we still decide to depart from the evidence – say in creating a composite

cha ra cter or cha nging a time f rame – then it shou ld be in the spirit of

the evidence and plausible, not misleading. Exceptionally , a historical Ž lm

might move signiŽ ca ntly away from the evidence out of playfulness or

an experiment with counter-factuality , but then the audience should be let

in on the game and not be given the impression of a ‘ true story’ .

Counter-factuality aside, for surely no director is concerned with arguments about

historical method, circa 1972, Davis’ s position, for all its attractiveness, constructs the

322 • Br yan D. Palmer

See, among other statements, Benson 1988, pp. 55– 8.

Zemon Davis 2000, p. 131, drawing on Perry 1998, p. 100.

Zemon Davis 2000, p. 130. problem of authenticity in rather narrow ways, precisely because it locates an historical

Ž lm’ s ‘ truth testing’ within the parameters of afŽ rmation of ascertainable ‘ facts’ : the

na tu re of costumes; the location and cha rac ter consistencies of speciŽ c historical

individuals; the sequence of events. What is the meaning of a Ž lm-maker ’ s adherence

to ‘ the spirit of the evidence’ ? How are we to ascertain if a direction taken is plausible,

rather than misleading? Surely these caveats are centrally about interpretation , and

where the possibilities of history’ s meanings lie. These are large, often contentious,

matters, not easily reducible to ways of presenting history so as to convince readers

and viewers of its authenticity . W e may know , with some certainty , what Civil W ar

soldiers wore, but are we so easily in agreement about what the historical meaning

of the Civil W ar indeed was?

How , if issues of authenticity are broached in this way ,

extending beyond the questions we can answer decisively into arenas where con icting

historical opinion certainly exists, are we to ascertain just how audiences might ‘ be

let in on the game’ , and the explanation of creative licence professed? It is a question

easier asked than answered, unless one reverts to the most banal of signiŽ cations.

W ould we really want Ken Russell’ s The Devils, a Ž lm that speaks to the almost timeless

themes of power , hypocrisy , and evil’ s corruptions as much as it does to medieval

witchcraft and its suppression by established authorities of Church and State, to y

warning ags concerning historical ‘ authenticity’ in the face of its viewers? Is this not

also underestimating an audience’ s capacity to make discriminating judgements?

T aken in this light, Davis’ s injunctions, as sensible as they appear on the surface,

tend to bypass what I would consider historical Ž lm’ s most signiŽ cant emancipatory

potential, the capacity to make the past speak to our present without boiling it down

to digestible ‘ authenticities’ . Larger relational truths that, in Marxist terms, are central

motifs in the making of the modern world, will tend to get lost in the shuf e to

produce realities of everyday life and chronological validities and comprehensiveness.

Highly complex and historically developed processes such as class and state formation

Film Review • 323

I happen to agree with the general argument about the signiŽ cance and meaning of the

Civil War, propounded by radicals since the time of Marx, and running through the writings of

W .E.B. Du Bois and into the best modern historical writing, such as that of James M. McPherson.

This stresses the revolutionary character of the confrontation. That said, there remain questions

even within Marxist analysis. For instance, precisely because the victory of bourgeois forces in

the C ivil War was inevitab le, given the timing of the con ict and the historica lly situated

development of the productive forces, the class meanings of the Civil W ar are still open to dif ferent

analytical accents. McPherson’ s tilt on the $300 commutation fee, for instance, is apparently to

downplay its material signiŽ cance on the grounds that there were ways around paying and the

state, at various levels, orchestrated loopholes. Yet McPherson recognises the fee’ s symbolic

importance as a visible reminder of inequality (albeit too lightly in my judgement). This, and

other evidence, conditions McPherson’ s argument that making too much of the draft and adhering

to the claim that the Civil W ar was a rich man’ s war, but a poor man’ s Ž ght, overstates the

signiŽ cance of draftees (who comprised only 74,000 of the 1,000,000 men Lincoln called for and

got to Ž ght for the North). This may be true enough, but the class symbolism of the $300 exemption

fee was a powerful factor in mobilising working-class resentments. See W alsh 2003b.

Ironically , some historians found Zemon Davis’ s involvement in The Return of Martin Guerre

problematic in this very area. See, for instance, Finlay 1988. Note the further statements of Zemon

Davis 1987; 1988. or the problematic character of collective solidarities criss-crossed with fragmentations

of race, gender , and national identity , all of which are pivotal in understanding why

revolution has both been an absolute imperative for humanity and an undertaking

that has almost universally failed, are inevitably obscured in this constricted appreciation

of historicisation.

What must be acknowledged is that the imperatives of social history’ s evolution

ma y well take us in this narrow direction of the reproduction of authentic detail

regardless o f larger issues of interpretation a nd meaning. Soc ia l historians once

imagined their project as one of liberating historical research and its dramas from the

limitations of an ideological consensual historiography . Their agenda was, it could be

suggested, a radical provisioning of pasts locked into speciŽ c paradigms. ‘ Histories

from below’ and studies of subaltern groups, as well as attention to resistance, not to

mention scrutiny of theories associated with Marx and other radical Enlightenment

thinkers, all spoke in a 1960s idiom of challenge that was rooted in the desire to turn

the interpretive tables and stand ‘ history’ on its proverbial head. But social history

has moved of f this ground and, along with the new cultural history , has located new

subject matters, new theoretical frameworks, and is now coloured by new perspectives,

few of which embrace revolution as a desired end. Social histories have developed

in ways distanced from the working class and its collective struggles, and have recently

a cc ented sub jectiv it y , lib era l order co nsensu s, a nd v aried a cc ommo d a tions a nd

adaptations. As insightful a s are studies orchestrated by such concerns, they a re

dif ferentiated from the radical understandings of a useable past that animated social

history’ s beginnings. Whereas the general strike or the riotous confrontation Ž gured

as central subjects two and three decades ago, we now have studies of tourism, royal

pageantries, and the debutante ball.

This is not unrelated to how historians approach the issue of historical Ž lm and

authenticity . For , as social historians have increasingly valorised subjectivity over

collec tivity , and immersed themselves in the specta cle and the micro-experience,

insisting on the equa lly politicised weight of realms perhaps once understood as

somewhat removed from the directly political, our conceptualisation of the dimensions

of the political has expanded and, it might be suggested, inevitably suf fered dilution.

In the process we may reify detail over political engagement. Many historians relate

to Ž lm, I think, out of this new , and somewhat politically problematic, context. Thus,

c ontemp or ary c omment o n Ž lm a nd histo ry t ha t strikes too lit era list a no te on

authenticity may invariably be limiting Ž lm’ s possibilities, just as social history has

become, over the last decade, increasingly distanced from its 1960s origins in a political

project of remaking the social order , constraining its engagement with a transformative

project. Marxists demand more of Ž lm (and of history), because more is at stake than

‘ art for art’ s sake’ (although by this I do not suggest some blunt demand that all art

merely serve class-struggle ends, and that we must see some kind of Stalinist socialist

324 • Br yan D. Palmer realism as the only ‘ true’ political aesthetic), more at stake than ‘ historical authenticity

for authenticity’ s sake’ .

Film-makers, it needs to be pointed out, do not see any of this as a problem. They

understand, for the most part, that they are not putting historical fact on Ž lm. Their

purpose is rarely one of making histories visually true, but of presenting histories

that relate to the intersections of past and present. T o stop the histories of the past,

at any given ‘ moment’ , and expect Ž lm-makers to both get detail and continuity right,

is not only asking a lot, it may be demanding that a gutting of any potential politics

take place in the name of ‘ authenticity’ . John Sayles, criticised by historians for playing

fast and loose with the ‘ facts’ of Matewan ’ s past, getting details of mining experience

wrong,

offered the rejoinder that he deliberately reconŽ gured the historical terrain

the b etter to co nvey throu gh an atypic al event, the Ma tewa n Ma ssa cre, a la rger

representative history .

In a sense, the issue is even more elastic than Sayles’ s defence,

because it could well be the case that an ‘ historical’ Ž lm would collapse historical

experience into a particular periodisation doing actual violence to a speciŽ c time-

frame, b ut use a kind of na rrative to do gra nder justic e to historical trends and

experiences. What, historians who do not have such licence need to be asking themselves,

can be wrong with such a representational strategy given the paucity of historical

consciousness that exists in our times?

The slight, we as historians must recognise,

is less on movie-goers in the twenty-Ž rst century , than it is on ourselves as ‘ practitioners’

and ‘ dues-payers’ of a particular guild.

The Gangs of New Y ork and the detail of (non-)authenticity

What is wrong with Scorsese’ s The Gangs of New Y ork ? The list is long, starting with

the pivotal place of gangs and race riots.

The Dead Rabbits-Bowery Boy Riot took place on 4 July 1857, and had no connection

to the traumatic events of the Draft Riots of 1863, in which no naval bombardment

of the Five Points district ever took place. Indeed, the Five Points, although it was

the site of rioting, was hardly the epicentre of the Draft Riots outbreak, which probably

left approximately 120 dead: the concentrated Ž ghting was uptown in streets in the

20s and 30s, strongholds of the Republican Party . While Scorsese’ s historical consultant,

Luc Sante, declares with certainty that ‘ the core of the participants [in the Draft Riots]

Film Review • 325

Ramirez 1999.

Brier 1988; Dubofsky 1990; and the more sympathetic discussion of Matewan and historical

criticism in Newsinger 1995.

Mico 1995, pp. 13, 11– 28 and Sayles 1987.

With respect to The Gangs of New Y ork , it needs to be recognised that those making the Ž lm

were not unaware that they were doing violation to the ‘ authentic’ record of the past, in as much

as they were cognisant of how they were blurring chronology and event into a congealed

presentation of a Ž ction that was nevertheless rooted in a general historicisation. See Scorsese

2002; Anbinder and Cocks 2002. unquestionably came from the Five Points’ , more scrupulous research has established

that only two of the hundreds of rioters arrested could be established to have been

residents of the infamous Sixth W ard. But the anti-black pogrom in the Five Points

was nevertheless virulent, and interested Democratic Party attempts to depict the

‘ Bloody Sixth’ as free of riotous taint in 1863 were little more than cover-ups. Mobs

of hundreds of Irish attacked African-American workplaces, bars employing black

waiters, the New Y ork African Society for Mutual Relief, and shanties, b oarding-

ho uses, and tenements in whic h b la cks resided, ma ny of them on Ba xter Street.

Buildings were torched (although not the Five Points Mission), blacks were beaten in

the streets, and rough musickings were the nightly norm. Three days of violence

convinced most African-Americans in the Five Points that ‘ their only safety is in ight’ .

This capped forty years of insecurity for blacks in the Sixth W ard. In the 1820s, the

African-American population of the district had been roughly 15 per cent (or twice

the norm throughout New Y ork City) of those living in the congested slum. But many

blacks left the Five Points after a series of anti-abolitionist riots and confrontations in

the 1830s and 1840s; the 1863 debacle drove the Ž nal African-American population

of the Five Points into retreat, where it settled in safer havens such as Long Island.

Once home to over 1,000 blacks, the Five Points, which claimed a black population

of just under 400 in 1863, recorded only 132 ‘ coloured’ residents in the 1870 census.

Despite this obvious openness to racism, a nativist leader such as Bill Cutting would

never have set himself up in the Five Points, let alone come to have ruled the rookeries

of the rough fare, demographic, commercial, and cultural, that intersected the old

Anthony , Orange, and Cross Streets. For the dominant immigrant population was

Irish Catholic. A Know Nothing like Butcher Bill had no base in the Five Points: in

an 1856 presidentia l election, the Democratic candidate polled an overwhelming

majority of 574 votes, outdistancing his Republican and nativist rivals who managed

between them to secure a meagre 25 ballots. Indeed, Cutting’ s actual inspiration, the

real-life Bill ‘ the Butcher ’ Poole, memorialised in Asbury’ s The Gangs of New Y ork ,

plied his trade, his Know-Nothingism, and his legendary prowess in the bar-room

brawl in what is now Christopher Street and the W est Village piers, rather than in

the Sixth Ward itself. S hot in the heart by Irish gang leader John Morrissey in a

Broadway saloon on a bitter cold 1855 night, Poole clung to life for two weeks before

dying, his last words, ‘ Good-bye boys, I die a true American’ , destined to be appropriated

as the rallying cry of nativist forces, who gathered 5,000 strong to march ‘ The Butcher ’ s’

body through New Y ork streets in a declaration of martyrdom.

326 • Br yan D. Palmer

Brown 2003, p. 33; Anbinder 2002, pp. 314– 18; Sante 1991, p. 353. On the Draft Riots the

two major modern statements are Bernstein 1990 and Cook 1974.

Asbury 1928, pp. 81– 100. As James M. McPherson has suggested, Scorsese’ s understanding of this Democratic

Party hegemony , especially the pivotal role of its anti-Civil-W ar wing and its ties to

New Y ork City’ s mercantile é lite, which sealed a pro-Southern plantocracy alliance

of the richest and poorest (decidedly not the skilled, organised working-class) segments

of the North’ s metropolitan capital is sca nt indeed. The Ž lm does far too little in

exploring the ugly politics of this Democratic Party faction, bypassing such Ž gures

as Fernando W ood of the Mozart Hall group, who called for New Y ork to secede from

the Union in 1861. W ood and his fellow pro-Confederacy ‘ Copperheads’ utilised their

power and their control of sections of the press (W ood’ s brother Benjamin was a long-

time editor of the New Y ork Daily News , the largest circulation daily in the United

States at the time) to fan the ames of racist animosity . They used a recent history of

blacks being driven from the New Y ork docks as strike-breakers in June of 1863, as

well as a tense economic climate in which rising rents, higher food prices, and a rash

of trade-union orga nising signa lled, in the wo rds of Fi nche r ’ s T ra de Rev iew , ‘ The

Upheaving Masses in Motion!’ to exacerbate fears among workers that hoards of freed

slaves were about to invade Northern cities such as New Y ork and overrun job markets

long designated the ‘ property’ of ‘ white labour ’ . In adding insult to injury , according

to the ‘ Copperheads’ , the Northern white working class was being asked to Ž ght a

war that was destined to lead to its economic and social ruination.

Beyond these lapses in authenticity and problems of adequate coverage of the

la y of the contemporary political land in The Gangs of New Y or k lie a plethora of

what some historians will designate ‘ howlers’ . The cavernous underground tunnels

in which Amsterdam retreats to have Jenny lick his wounds, replete with its background

of stone ledges lined with skulls, could not have existed in the Five Points, whose

marshy subsoil deŽ es such a labyrinth. Scorsese’ s depiction of the New Y ork City

Chinese in the early 1860s is perhaps seemingly the most egregious pushing of the

authenticity envelope: constructed as pig-tailed and inscrutable, but commercially

adept enough to entice the nativists to celebrate at their Mott Street Sparrow’ s Chinese

Pagoda, in which Oriental acrobats bounce off the oor and caged prostitutes are

suspended from the ceiling, auctioned of f by none other than P .T . Barnum, the Chinese

hate the Butcher and have a silent agreement with Amsterdam. In actuality , the Asian

population in or adjacent to the Five Points in 1863 was tiny to the point of being

inconsequential, and Chinese immigration to New Y ork City did not begin in earnest

until after completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Just as China town

would be an actual creation post-dating the period in which The Gangs of New Y ork

is set, so too would be the authority of a central Ž gure in the Ž lm, William ‘ Boss’

T weed of T ammany Hall. In the time period in which Amsterdam pursues his revenge

Film Review • 327

W alsh 2003a; 2003b; Montgomery 1967, pp. 102– 7. of his father ’ s killing at the hands of Bill Cutting, T weed was indeed climbing the

ladder , but his Ring would not control New Y ork until later in the 1860s and 1870s.

Nor would Barnum’ s American Museum burn in 1863, during the Draft Riots, but in

1868, or public hangings, the last of which happened in 1835, be a part of the political

theatre of the early 1860s.

Finally , although no reviewer to my knowledge (historian or Ž lm critic) has mentioned

this, there is scant evidence, if any , that cross-dressing fairies, or ‘ She-Hes’ , would

have frequented the Five Points with such conŽ dence that they would walk the streets

openly and cause barely a ripple of notice in public dances put on by proselytizing

Protestants. T o be sure, the Bowery border of the Five Points was an early promenade

of all manner of sexually open and transgressive characters, and the Sixth W ard was

infamous as a centre of commercialised vice, but even George Chauncey’ s diligent

searches have found no reference to Five Points’ fairies. The closest we can come to

locating such a ‘ She-He’ presence anywhere near the Sixth Ward is the late 1870s

Armory Hall dance pavilion at the corner of the Lower East Side’ s Hestor and Elizabeth

Streets, where an Irish sex and entertainment entrepreneur , Billy McGlory , hired half

a dozen men who powdered and rouged themselves, sometimes dressing in feminine

attire, to entertain high-rollers and big-spenders with a risqué sexual ‘ circus’ in the

curtained privacy of solitary booths. McGlory was a graduate of the Five Points, and

bare-knuckled it in the 1850s with the Forty Thieves and Chichesters, but his Armory

Hall was a night haunt and its offerings hardly the norm of daylight hours.

More serious because it is more sinister , as Joshua Brown has suggested, is Scorsese’ s

residual assimilation of Asbury’ s reproduction and sensationalising of the nineteenth-

century missionary slum literature, epitomised by Matthew Hale Smith’ s Sunshine

and Shadow in New Y ork (1868), in which the Five Points is constructed as a degraded

netherworld of vice and violence, an anarchistic orgy of brutality and criminality

coincident with the arrival of the immigrant Irish.

‘ A culture of poverty’ in which

the belligerence of the ‘ underclass’ is accented, suggests Brown, excuses the nativism

that animated Asbury and that paints the gangs and the Five Points district itself in

bold, ‘ larger-than-life’ strokes that distort the history of oppression within which the

immigrant Irish worked and suffered. As Happy Jack, a one-time Dead Rabbit turned

‘ crusher ’ cop, escorts a sight-seeing crew of uptown ladies and gentlemen through

the Five Points, he waxes eloquent on the Irish arrival in America: ‘ Ah, but only

shattered dreams await them. Pauperism and dereliction. Drunkenness and depravity .

328 • Br yan D. Palmer

The above paragraphs draw upon Brown 2003, pp. 33– 4; Hamill 2002; Callow , Jr . 1966;

Connable and Silberfarb 1967, pp. 138– 72; Mandelbaum 1990; Beck 1898, pp. 11– 12; Ernst 1965,

p. 45; Kuo W ei T chen 1990, pp. 16– 63; W erner 1926; Chauncey 1994, p. 37; Asbury 1928, pp.

186– 9.

Brown 2003, pp. 33– 4; Smith 1868; Ladies of the Mission 1854. Anbinder 2002, pp. 14– 37,

outlines the literature on the Five Points ‘ culture of poverty’ , in what he calls the ‘ Five Points

of the mind’ . Molestation and murder , kind sirs a nd ladies.’ Evangelicals it through the Ž lm,

deploring the God-forsaken vice, misery and squalor of the Sixth W ard. ‘ They said it

was the worst slum in the world’ , Amsterdam narrates, ‘ T o us it was home.’ And, in

Scorsese’ s construction, the gangs are the families of the Five Points. But archaeological

evidence unearthed in the early 1990s, with the construction of a new court house in

an old neighbourhood of what was once The Bloody Sixth, tells a different tale. Some

850,000 artefacts were uncovered, and while the job of dating precisely these remnants

of the past was never done, they do suggest a varied socio-economic life considerably

at odds with the Asbury-Scorsese myth-making. The assortment of buttons, needles,

fabrics, medicine bottles, combs, hairbrushes, and crockery dug out of the bowels of

an old Sixth W ard block hints at the robust presence of home work and family routines

that have unfortunately been overshadowed by the extravagant depiction of ‘ the dark

side’ all too prominent in nineteenth-century accounts of the Five Points upon which

both Asbury and Scorsese have drawn uncritically .

Bo rn of resista nce to the imp ersonal ca sh nexus of the wa ge relation and the

‘ market revolution’ , gangs were marked with the mechanic accents of dishevelled

trades and rough labours resistant to the encroachments of capitalism, which increasingly

brought under its sway the relations of master and man in various tanneries, distilleries,

slaughterhouses, modest manufactories (producing looking glasses, umbrellas, shoes),

tobacco works, furniture-producing sheds, building sites, artisanal trades, a nd on

pub lic works p rojects and the doc ks of the transa tlantic tra de. This process also

demanded class subordination in the wider non-work worlds of politics and culture.

The gangs, in their recalcitrance, were complemented by other arenas of youthful

masculine associational life, including Ž re companies, local militias, and target and

sporting clubs.

All of this was played out not only in the mayhem of the so-called ‘ ancient laws

of combat’ so extolled by Scorsese in his depiction of the a lmost constitutiona list

courts of con ict participated in by various gangs – Shirt T ails, Plug Uglies, Daybreak

Boys, Chichesters, American Gu ards, Little Forty Thieves, Roach Guards, Na tive

Americans, Bowery Boys – but also through the Ž lm’ s protagonists, The Butcher and

the V allons (father and son). It left its mark on and was in uenced by the emerging

radical, and often German-led, trade-union movement, a point stressed by one of the

few explicitly socialist reviews of The Gangs of New Y ork that suggests something

positive in Scorsese’ s contribution, Mike Davis’ s ‘ The Bloody Streets of New Y ork’ .

Davis feels that Scorsese gets the squalor and oppression of the Five Points right,

differentiating him from other historians. But he Ž xes his sights on what Scorsese

(and indeed almost every other reviewer) has missed. For New Y ork’ s mid-century

Film Review • 329

W alsh 2003a. immigration stream was not merely fed by tributaries of starving, cholera-ridden, job

and freedom-seeking Irish.

As late as 1860, New Y ork’ s major Old W orld population, its 203,000 Irish immigrants,

was rivalled seriously in terms of the newly-arrived only by some 118,000 Germans.

Broadly speaking, these Germans had been forged in different circumstances than

those of the destitute Irish, the failed revolutionary impulses of 1848 being of paramount

importance. Y et there were some within the Irish diaspora, such as radical Fenians,

who connec ted with G erman radicalism (a s well as with the smaller enc laves of

Scottish Jacobins and English Chartists), especially in New Y ork’ s Lower East Side

Kleindeutschland, a 400 city-block area adjacent to the Five Points, encompassing the

city’ s T enth, Eleventh, Thirteenth and Seventeenth W ards. There, German socialists

and communists toiled for wages and struggled to build a workers’ movement that

united ethnicities and trades. Roughly Ž fteen per cent of New Y ork’ s population in

these years was German-born, and thoughts of the red promise of 1848 and its barricades

still permeated a consciousness of producer rights, labour-capital con ict, and social

justice. This heritage reached forward from the nascent beginnings of labour radicalism

in the 18 5 0s into struggles fo r the sho rter working da y in the 18 60 s and 18 7 0s,

culminating in the massive successes of the New Y ork City Knights of Labor , which

contained subterranean cells of anarcho-communist in uence in a secret order within

the order known as the Home Club. The Henry George mayoralty campaign of 1886,

a mobilisation that came dangerously close to securing power for the working class

in the cou ntry’ s majo r metropo litan centre, wa s perha ps the culminatio n of this

nineteenth-century politics of class struggle, which achieved the 1880s designation,

‘ The Great Upheaval’ .

Despite overlapping connections among the dif ferentiated working-class constituencies

of this at times generalised upsurge, the day labourers and sweated workers of the

Irish Five Points travelled Scorsese’ s meanest streets, and their historical experience

was never quite that of the artisanal proletarianisation and radicalism associated with

German New Y ork. Irish gang lives and Ž re company raucousness pegged them as

‘ traditionalists’ in their politically unconscious resistance. In 1863, they rioted against

the Draft, and its $300 exemption for the ‘ socially superior ’ ; they resented the rich,

but they killed their poor black brothers and sisters. Among German radicals, such

‘ traditionalist’ hostilities to established bourgeois power were scorned, and as Irish

and na tivist ga ngs battled throughou t the 185 0s, knocking hea ds a nd eventua lly

exchanging primitive pistol Ž re in the crooked alleyways off the Bowery , European

immigrant rebels embraced abolitionism, variants of anticapitalism, co-operation, and

trade unionism. During the Depression of 1857, as the Dead Ra bbits honed their

weapons, German radicals combined with Irish and native American labour Ž gures

to beat back the rising tide of unemployment. When the Draft Riots erupted in 1863,

many dissident Germans rep udia ted the deadly f ormalisa t ion of c lass privilege

330 • Br yan D. Palmer embodied in the exemption fee, just as they condemned the vicious attacks on black

Americans as a tragic division of the ranks of the powerless. But the radicals could

not keep the anti-black, largely Irish Catholic mob in check, and were soon swept off

the streets as the ugliness of the moment brushed class solidarities aside in the name

of an incendiary racist revenge.

With this much wrong and missing from Scorsese’ s Ž lm what can be right and

powerfully suggestive about it? In a word, quite a bit.

Class politics and the Janus vision of a fragmented working class

The message of Scorsese’ s Ž lm is not so much that America was made in its bloody

streets, as so many critics claim with interpretive certainty and ease. Rather , The Gangs

of New Y ork is suggestive of a more two-sided historical exchange. At the core of

Scorsese’ s representation is, to be sure, the impulse ‘ from below’ , the place of the

rough culture of masculine muscle and the street authority of head-knocking violence

and intimidation. As the Butcher puts it, with characteristic brutality:

The spectacle of fearsome acts. Someone steals from me, I cut off his hands.

He offends me, I cut out his tongue. He rises against me, I cut off his head,

and stick it on a pike. Hold it high in the streets so all can see. That’ s what

preserves the order of things.

But what is apparent in the Ž lm is that this plebeian power is never entirely removed

from relations of reciprocity with other structures of order , in which the terrorism of

established (and often quite ‘ polite’ ) authority is more masked. In this sense, the

violence of Scorsese’ s mean streets is in reality more integrated with the institutions

of class domination than most critics seem to grasp. The gangs exist in symbiotic

relationship with other spheres: the police; the law; the political boss; agencies of

discipline to which youth can be submitted for ‘ an education’ ; the state. If this is not

historically ‘ true’ , in all of the particular evidential detail, it is nevertheless true in a

larger relational sense, and Scorsese is thus able to sustain analytical insights through

his Ž lm that are in some ways beyond what historians can ‘ prove’ with recourse to

the archives. Moreover , The Gangs of New Y ork conveys with panache a contest between

one sector of the plebeian poor , with its backward-looking feudalistic understandings

of American ‘ loyalty’ , and its class nemesis, a forward-marching bourgeoisie that

Film Review • 331

The above paragraphs dra w on Davis 200 3, which contrasts ma rkedly with other left

commentary in Sustar 2003 and the even more vehement antagonism in Walsh 2003a. See, for

background on labour organisation and German radicalism, Wilentz 1984; Schneider 1994; Levine

1986 and 1992; Wittke 1952; Binder and Reimers, 1995, pp. 59– 92. For discussions of working-

class typologies relevant to this period that include discussion of ‘ traditionalism’ see Dawley

and Faler 1976; Laurie 1980, pp. 53– 66. On the Knights of Labor and the Home Club see Weir

2000, pp. 23– 46. would fashion its power and authority in production and exchange as well as out of

the enticing carrot of ‘ democracy’ and welfare provisioning, backed by the violent

stick of the state’ s repressive terror .

For all of Bill Cutting’ s ‘ ownership’ of the Five Points, it is an oddly feudal vassalage

that is his due: ‘ but in all the Five Points there’ s nothin’ that runs, walks, or cocks his

toes up don’ t belong to Bill the Butcher ’ , Johnny tells Amsterdam as they walk through

the streets of the Bloody Old Sixth. T ribute and loyalty are the gang leader ’ s due, his

ré gime less one of accumulation than it is rightful obeisance, driven not so much by

the relentless need, logic and laws of capitalist development, but by a purposeful

resistance to winds of change:

Everything you see belongs to me, to one degree or another . The beggars

and newsboys and quic k thieves here in Paradise. The sailor dives and

gin mills and blind tigers on the waterfront. The anglers and amusers, the

She-Hes and Chinks. Everybody owes, and everybody pays. Because that’ s

how you stand up against the rising of the tide.

This is, Ž rst and foremost, an ideological stand, one made against inevitable historical

defeat. As T weed reminds the Butcher in a public encounter , ‘ Y ou’ re a great one for

Ž ghting, Bill, I know , but you can’ t Ž ght forever .’ ‘ I can go down doing it’ , replies

Cutting. ‘ And you will’ , is the Boss’ s curt reply .

For Scorsese seldom lets us pass through those Paradise Alley/ Five Points’ streets

in which Amsterdam is tutored on the lord’ s tithes without confronting a looming

sign, ‘ Money Lent’ , symbolic of the new relations of the cash nexus that are everywhere

transforming the meanings of everyday life for the plebeian masses and their rude

seigneu ria l o verlords. The Ž lm never allows us to fo rget that the ga ng leader ’ s

proprietary right is fragile, precisely because it is in a state of transition. DeŽ ant of

capital and the state, the ‘ muscle’ that the Butcher commands is clearly on its last legs

in 186 3, and Bo ss Tweed reminds the Bu tc her of this ha rd reality in words b oth

deferential and demanding. T weed pleads with Cutting to curb his excesses in the

name of a larger prize of shared spoils:

Bill, I can’ t get a day’ s work done for all the good citizens coming in here

to fret me about crime in the Points. Some, I’ m horriŽ ed to say , have gone

so far as to accuse T ammany of connivance with this so-called rampant

criminality . What am I to do? I can’ t have this. Something has to be done.

The Butcher , who knows well that T weed controls the police, is able to at Ž rst shrug

the problem off with an offering of a public hanging to appease the malcontented,

and the expectation that, in the end, since the state and its armed force appears to

him a malleable tool of speciŽ c interests, the politicians ought to be able to get ‘ the

crushers’ , or cops, to do whatever is needed. T weed is aghast at the crudity of the

332 • Br yan D. Palmer suggestion: ‘ The police? Oh, Jesus, no. Jesus, no. The appearance of the law must be

upheld. . . . Especially while its being broken.’

For a time, the old street power and the new mac hine politics of an emerging

capitalist state work in tandem. But, in the end, the alliance must crack, for the Butcher

knows only raw power and its threat of fearsome acts: ‘ Mulberry Street and W orth.

Cross and Orange and Little Water . Each of the Five Points is a Ž nger , and when I

close my hand the whole territory is a Ž st. I can turn it against you.’ T weed, emblematic

of the capitalist project of hegemony , has a wider vision, in which ‘ progress’ pays:

But we’ re talking about different things, Bill. I’ m talking about civic duty .

Responsibilities we owe to the people. Schools and hospitals, sewers and

utilities; street construction, repairs and sweeping. Business licences, saloon

licences, carting licenses . . . streetcars, ferries, rubbish disposal. There’ s a

power of money to be made in this city , Bill. With your help, the people

can be made to understand that all of these things are best kept within what

I like to call the T ammany family . Which is why I’ m talking about an alliance

between our two great organizations.

Just as the declining powers of feudal Europe bartered for a time their fading longevity ,

placating an emerging bourgeoisie, Cutting and T weed dance their mutual material

attra ction through mu ch of Sc orsese’ s Ž lm. But, ultimately , the Butcher ’ s ragged

honour , soiled to its violent core by his commitment to an ideology of nativist and

racist entitlement, cloaked in the convenient garb of patriotic ‘ Americanism’ , is incapable

of being as pliant as T weed, whose instincts, like those of capital, are to turn every

proŽ t, whatever the ‘ price’ and with whomever will enhance the prospects of this

happening. Eventually , Bill will no longer play . He wants no part of anything that

will ‘ befoul his [father ’ s] legacy by givin’ this country over to them what’ s had no

hand in the Ž ghting for it? Why? Because they come off a boat, crawling with lice

and beggin’ you for soup?’ Cutting believes in history , however distorted his sense

of the past; for him, the blood truly does stay on the blade. T weed, Henry Fordesque

in his willingness to massage the historical past into whatever suits the accumulative

appetites of the present, informs Bill, ‘ you’ re turning your back on your future’ . ‘ Not

our future’ , replies the Butcher . By the end of the Ž lm, the Butcher ’ s absolutist Five

Points ‘ state’ and the rising bourgeoisie of the capitalist nation are mortal enemies.

T weed bemoans the outcome, ‘ Y ou don’ t know what you’ ve done to yourself ’ . Cutting

is, ironically , the more eloquent:

Y ou think lighting strikes when you talk, Mr . T weed, but I can’ t hardly hear

you. . . . I know your works. Y ou are neither cold nor hot. So because you

are lukewarm, and are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my

mouth. Y ou can build your Ž lthy world without me. . . . Come down to the

Film Review • 333 Points again and you’ ll be dispatched by mine own hand. Now go back to

your celebration and let me eat in peace. I’ ve paid you fair .

The Ž lm ends for the Butcher as it began, but with the mythical gang leader on the

opposite end of the knife. ‘ Its fair ’ , Cutting might well have remembered himself

saying, ‘ a touch indelicate, but fair .’

But T weed’ s victory , a metaphor for capital’ s capacity to vanquish ‘ the ancient’

powers of its plebeian challengers, is not possible without new pacts with sectors of

the subaltern classes. In Amsterdam and the revived Irish immigrant Dead Rabbits,

T weed Ž nds a forceful alliance, one that seals his victory with the glue of incorporation,

the rising youth gang leader bartering for political representation and grasping the

potential power of the Luxemburgist mass uprising:

There’ s more of us coming of f these ships every day . I heard Ž fteen thousand

Irish a week. And we’ re afraid of the Natives? Get all of us together and

we ain’ t got a gang, we got an army . Then all you need is a spark. Something

to wake us all up.

As the Draft Riots provide that Ž rst spark, ignited in the resentments of the poor

against the rich and their capacity to buy the continued lives of their sons with a few

hundred do llars, Sc orsese su ggests, through Amsterda m’ s grop ing toward cla ss

consciousness, the coming con agration that pits labour irrevocably against capital:

From all over the city they came. Ironworkers, factory boys, day laborers,

schoolteachers, street cleaners. . . . Irish, American, Polish, German, anyone

who never cared about slavery or the Union – whole or sundered. . . . The

Earth was shaking now , but we was the only ones who didn’ t know it.

And because they did not know it, because the Earth’ s shaking took place with workers

handicapped in their state of unconsciousness, the waking up did not happen.

The Ž rst cries of the Draft Riots were screams of class rage. ‘ Nobody goes to work

today . They shut the factories down.’ Outraged yells of, ‘ The Hell with your damned

Draft!’ , were punctuated by images of rioters ripping the doors of a mansion open,

smashing exquisite vases and splintering a billiards table. The symbolism of such acts

was unmistakable: ‘ Let’ s smash the bastards to hell!’ Material meanings were posed

with blunt determination: ‘ Hey! There’ s a three-hundred dollar man. Get him!’ But

all of this quickly give way to the sorry descent into racist vendetta. As a woman in

the crowd yells, ‘ Come on, lads! Kill the nigger bastards! String them up!’ , the Draft

Riots move rapidly out of their articulation of class resentments and into sickening

scenes of lynching, beating, and burning a live scapegoated African-Americans , a

hideous carnage of white rage. And the Natives and the Dead Rabbits square off.

Cla ss stru ggle is overwhelmed b y intra-cla ss warfare: white a gainst black; white

against the not-quite-white-enough.

334 • Br yan D. Palmer The ultimate victor is the newly consolidated state, with its special bodies of armed

men subduing its unconscious proletarian challenge (ordered by the feudal gangs) as

a prefatory volley to its subjugation of the seigneurial slave ré gime. Capital wrought

its vengeance against the Ž rst deformed working-class insurrection that struggled to

unfold in New Y ork’ s streets in 1863, just as it would crush the regionalised power

of a counterposed ‘ order ’ premised on unfree labour . Thousands of federal troops,

many of them working-class Irish New Y orkers, slashed into and Ž red upon crowds

of their mothers and sisters, uncles and cousins. New Y ork streets succumbed, as

would Savannah plantations. Scores of the poor dropped in the bloody streets of New

Y ork metropolitan industrialisation, just as poor whites would fall throughout the

slave South. The corpse of Northern, urban class struggle was riddled with the bullets

and bayonets of a state that was about to extend its colonisation and conquest of a

way of life incompatible with the ever-widening ethos of the market revolution and

its demanding extensions of the reach of accumulation and exploitation. As one of

the Scottish actors, the Irish Nativist McGloin, comments, in summing up his sense

of what the Ž lm is about:

[P]olitics is an extension of war by other means. Looking at the period in

which the Ž lm takes place, the tension between these two outlooks seems

to be present, because there’ s a brutal, intense warfare happening between

the gangs. But this tribalism is ultimately superseded when the big guns

come. Who’ s got the big guns? The state. And the way the Ž lm covers that

enormous scope is wonderful.

What The Gangs of New Y ork depicts, through its historically inaccurate congealing of

the Dead Rabbits-Native American gang warfare with the Draft Riots, is the larger

historical accuracy of ca pital’ s simultaneous subjugation of the cha llenges of the

plebeian street and the Southern plantocracy . This came about through the power of

the capitalist state at the same time as it was a formative moment in the consolidation

of that state.

Had Scorsese’ s Ž lm made only this elementary point, it would have made a signiŽ cant

contribution. The Draft Riots were indeed the climax of an age, and, if the gangs were

b ut a p art of tha t historica l moment, ra ther than its deŽ ning featu re, they were

nevertheless an articulation of critical components of class formation. The ‘ muscle’ of

the mea n, plebeian streets and the politics of provisioning that Boss T weed and

T ammany Hall came to epitomise were a Faustian bargain in the complex relations

of industrial-capitalist America’ s formative years. A good part of the rough and smooth

hands that came together in an ‘ alliance’ of the 1850s and 1860s ended with the Civil

Film Review • 335

Gary Lewis in Scorsese 2002, p. 95. W ar and the consolidation of United States capital and its servile state. ‘ Democracy’

was born as the gang-ordered ‘ electioneering by riot’ gave way to the more orchestrated

ordering of votes by political machines, which bought their purchase of the public

purse with soup and jobs and secured their hegemony with the disembodied ‘ votes’

of the poor . What T weed bemoaned in the Draft Riots was not , of course, the racist

wall of Ž re that now separated black and white workers, nor the deaths of so many

on both sides of the colour line. ‘ W e’ re burying a lot of votes down here tonight’ , he

moans, for , in America, votes, like time, are money . Amsterdam is left the last, sad

word, the voice of class unconsciousness:

How many New Y orkers died that week we never knew . W e thought there

wouldn’ t be no country left by the end of it. And that no matter how much

blood they spilt to build the city up again, and keep on building, for the

rest of time, it would again be like no one even knew that we was ever here.

Having won the ear of the political boss on the basis of his ‘ traditionalist’ street muscle,

the young V allon barters effectively within capitalism’ s metaphorical network of the

state’ s brokerage politics. He cajoles Boss T weed, wins Monk away from the limiting

loya lties o f self a nd st rength, p ut ting him on the hu stings and giving vo ic e to

‘ democratic’ possibility , in the end securing the election of a sherif f who threatens the

Butcher more than he does the evolving machinery of hegemonic urban politics. Y et,

for all of Amsterdam’ s su cc essful pulling of the wires of modern state-b uil ding

somewhat successfully ‘ from below’ , he ultimately Ž nds himself and his class on the

short end of power ’ s historical stick.

What this suggests is that historians have perhaps been of late too quick to revere

‘ republicanism’ s’ rhetoric of egalitarianism, while ignoring Alan Dawley’ s old suggestion

that, in the United States, electoral politics ‘ was the main safety valve of working-

class discontent’ , the ballot box a cofŽ n of class consciousness.

But something lived

on in this cofŽ n. It produced a twentieth-century New Y ork that would simultaneously

sustain a social-democratic polity and racial inequality , a vibrant and militant working

class and widening gaps between rich and poor , episodic instances of labour-capital

con ict and political administrations and histories of corruption and cynicism.

Amsterdam would have said: ‘ it’ s a funny feeling being took under the wing of a

dragon. It’ s warmer than you think’ .

The Dead Rabbits, both their ‘ muscle’ and their

negotiations, were gone, but they could hardly be forgotten.

336 • Br yan D. Palmer

Dawley 1976.

Freeman 2000.

Amsterdam’ s comment takes us, I would argue, in dif ferent, indeed more fruitful directions

than those posed by W alsh’ s rejection of what he considers Scorsese’ s misanthropy . W alsh wants

to merely reject the backward ideology of racism and ‘ mindless violence’ that he sees as the

central animating forces in Scorsese’ s ‘ street level’ ‘ reactionary and anti-intellectual distortion

of history’ . W alsh cites the 1840s and 1850s as a Renaissance period, in which the in uence of Class and race: a relation of proximity

Race and understandings of Americanism and whiteness are obviously central to both

contemporary historiography and Scorsese’ s The Gangs of New Y ork .

Many critics will

no doubt Ž nd the chaotic congealments of the Ž lm suspicious. How can Bill Cutting,

a nativist anti-Irish bigot, walk side-by-side with Irish Catholics such as McGloin, or

cultivate a young Irish proté gé , Amsterdam? Could the Dead Rabbits, an Irish Catholic

street gang, have harboured blacks? The particularities of a detailed factuality are

perhaps, however , less important that the suggestiveness of Scorsese’ s depiction of

what Five Points’ life was like racially .

There is no mistaking the interracial and cross-ethnic character of the Sixth W ard,

and like many similar urban districts of the United States at mid-century , racial and

ethnic mixing was a norm that co-existed with varied levels of racism that cut themselves

into the fabric of everyday life. This process was, however , a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, as Fanny Kemble noted in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia

Plantation (1863 ), the more the I rish and Afric an-American peoples were lumped

together , the greater the hostility between them. On the other, as was apparent in

New Y ork and Boston, ‘ mixed’ marriages often involved poor black men and poor

Irish women. The Five Points was a cauldron of this ‘ race mixing’ , its dance halls,

cock pits, hotels of assignation, sexualised streets, grog shops, and raucous theatres

a venue for liaisons and cultural crossovers. Frederick Douglass regarded the Bloody

Old Sixth as little more than a receptacle for ‘ the Ž lthy scum of white society’ , but

there is no doub t tha t b lacks and whites mixed on more equal terms in its dark

alleyways, squalid tenements, and biracial bagnios than in uptown salons, where

rela tions b etween blac ks a nd whites turned la rgely o n the necessity of Afric an-

Americans serving their plutocratic masters. It was, not surprisingly , in the notorious

Five Points that an 1844 dance contest pitted the Irish ‘ Master ,’ John Diamond, against

the black ‘ Juba,’ William Henry Lane.

Scorsese materialises this black-white relation and, although historians are prone

to downplay crass economism in our understandings of class and race, the Butcher ’ s

nativism/ racism are constant reminders of just how critical the hierarchy of racialised

wages was in the making of class. As Bill surveys the Irish descending the ships in

the harbour onto the streets of republican citizenry he snorts, ‘ I don’ t see no Americans.

Film Review • 337

Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow , Dickinson, Whitman, and Stowe was

paramount. I do not dispute the signiŽ cance of this ‘ high’ culture and its accomplishment, but

question the validity of divorcing it entirely from ‘ lower ’ forms of thought and cultural practice,

as is surely indicated by the case of Whitman. Moreover, it is necessary to understand the class

in ections of problematic historical processes, rather than simply rejecting them as wrong and

inadequate. See W alsh 2003a.

On whiteness studies, both their richness and suggestiveness, as well as some problems of

the Ž eld’ s handling of evidence, see Arnesen 2001, with replies by James Barrett, David Brody ,

Barbara J. Fields, Eric Foner , Victoria C. Hattam, Adolph Reed Jr ., and a rejoinder by Arnesen.

See Ignatiev 1995, especially pp. 41– 2. 33

This could also be said about the representation of the Chinese in Lower Manhattan in the

1860s which, as indicated earlier, is historically inaccurate. The question that needs asking about

Scorsese’ s representation of the Chinese, which like a host of other historically problematic

‘ imaginings’ in the Ž lm, is whether or not they distort the large ‘ narrative’ of United States

history or contribute to an appreciation of ‘ larger ’ interpretations related to issues of representation.

For instance, did Scorsese succumb to the Orientalist constructedness of Asian peoples, their

cultures and ways of life encased in the mysteriousness of ‘ the Other ’ ? Or, rather, was he placing

them, however historically out of time, in the large historicised proximities of white-Asian

relations, recognising, nevertheless, that Asian-white relations were different from black-white

relations in as much as the common dialogues and overlapping histories (in terms of work and

sociability) that animated African-American, white ethnic, and native-born working people in

the mid-to-late nineteenth century were much less in play for whites and Asians? There is no

doubt that, in presenting Amsterdam as the sole humane link among whites, blacks, and Asians,

Scorsese’ s Ž lm relies on Hollywoodesque conceptions of ‘ the heroic’ protagonist stepping outside

of history , and for this he can be criticised. But, whether he has lapsed into the racist imagery

of the inscrutable Chinese or attempted to locate Chinese-white relations in plebeian Manhattan

as rather more complicated by social distance than other race relations is, to my mind, somewhat

open to question. On Orientalism and the social construction of Asian otherness see Said 1979,

which, of course, deals with the Muslim Orient, but which is applicable to the conception and

social construction of other Asian societies, including China.

The script in Scorsese 2002, p. 210, is not the same as the actual language of the Ž lm. I have

relied here on notes taken.

I see trespassers. Paddies who’ ll do a job for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime

and a white man used to get a quarter for – then moan about it when you treat them

like niggers.’ Professing his preference to shoot ‘ each and every one of them before

they set foot on American soil’ , Cutting acknowledges that he does not have the guns.

It is as if Scorsese is forced to acknowledge that, in some instances, mere Ž repower

cannot do the job.

And so black and white, Irish and ‘ Native’ , come together , their lives in the Five

Points ones that Ž nd themselves invariably cheek-by-jowl. More could have been done

with this in The Gangs of New Y ork , of course, and the few African-Americans that

appear in the Ž lm are underdeveloped as characters and as a racial presence.

They

are almost always at a distance, until they are the object of racist assault and killing,

during the Draft Riots, when the threat of blacks rampaging through the workplaces

and neighbourhoods of white immigrant New Y ork (not unlike Barnum’ s elephant,

the emblematic African ‘ beast’ , loose in the streets of urban civilisation) is seemingly

realised with sudden viciousness. Nevertheless, there are hints in Scorsese’ s Ž lm of

the symbiosis of black-white rela tions, and of the ways in which this reciprocity

conditioned the nature of racism.

This is conveyed visually in a striking brothel scene, where a black prostitute is

draped over Amsterdam’ s slumbering shoulder as Jenny dresses the Butcher ’ s wounds

across the table. White and black, Irish Catholic and nativist, are, in this view , literally

touching. As an Irish Ž ddler plays, an African-American entertains the crowd with

the energetic tap dance that was one of the Five Points’ cultural inventions. Bill’ s

analytical oratory takes us somewhere interpretively important: ‘ Look at that. What

is that? Rhythms of the Dark Continent tapped down and thrown into an Irish stew ,

and out comes an American mess. A jig doing a jig.’

This passage of racist commentary

338 • Br yan D. Palmer is perhaps as insightful as many recent writings on whiteness and United States racism

precisely because it conveys the proximities within which working-class racism was

ma de . U nlike o ther nine teent h-c ent u r y ra ci sms, b orn o f emp ire’ s c on qu est s o f

civilisations of colour , working-class racism in the United States was forged, not at a

distance, but in the hearts and minds of closeness, one part of which was competition,

another being co-mingling, co-existence, and cultural blending. Out of this would

come the vehement denial of dependencies that were often articulated in intensities

that explain both the violence and deeply sexualised nature of American racism. And

this is precisely why the fomented racism of the immediate Draft Riots context was

one part economic (the threat of job loss) and one part sexual, in which grotesque

caricatures of ‘ Miscegenation Balls’ ran in the Copperhead press, depicting Lincoln

and other prominent Republicans dancing with caricatured African-American women.

Along with jobs, blacks were widely presented as on the move to steal white men’ s

wives and sisters. Bill’ s brief comment on the ‘ race mixing’ of 1860s plebeian culture

thus takes us into twentieth-century class and race relations where northern black-

white sex districts, the evolution of blues and jazz, the hideous history of the lynch

mob, and the sexualisation of racist legal attacks like that fomented on the Scottsboro

Boys come together .

Masculinising class and the gendered obliteration of women

The one area where there is little to defend in The Gangs of New Y ork relates to women.

It is simply not possible to say much positive about Scorsese’ s Ž lm in this regard.

In focusing, in typical Hollywood style, on the amboyant attractiveness of Jenny ,

who ma rches through the Ž lm as Ž rst, a tou gh- minded, relentlessly c ynic al and

staunchly independent pickpocket, a former object of Bill’ s honourable, but inevitably

compromised, attractions, and then, second, as Amsterdam’ s unconditional lover who,

third, returns to her stubborn sensibilities of a personal agenda, Scorsese constructs

women as the adornment of men. They are merely an appendage to the gangs, either

used up and discarded (Hellcat Maggie) or forced, ultimately , to break ranks in futile

escape. Jenny , to be sure, does have one of the more powerfully representative gestures

of historiographical critique in the Ž lm. She traces her route to California with a hand

on a map, her Ž nger outlining the journey to the freedoms of the west, not through

the continent, but around land masses, the ocean-going route moving south along the

eastern seaboard, continuing down the coast of South America and around Cape Horn,

and then back up the continents to San Francisco. This pilgrimage will of course be

thwarted, and Jenny’ s dreams end, as many did, badly . But could there be a more

Film Review • 339

See, for only a suggestion of the scope of all of this, Mumford 1997; Palmer 2000; Carter

1969. decisive repudiation of Frederick Jackson T urner ’ s long-in uential ‘ frontier thesis’ , in

which the lure of land and the west was said to be a safety value that siphoned off

class discontents and explained the quiescence of United States labour?

It can not be said, of course, that Scorsese is blind to gender . This, and many of his

other Ž lms, present a gendered reading of their subject, for masculinity is central to

all of Scorsese’ s plot lines, and is most emphatically a dominant structure in The Gangs

of New Y ork . Indeed, it is too dominant because in its overzealous depiction of the

gangs it manages to one-sidedly write out of the history too much, including the

presence of women, and, with the ironic origin of the Ž lm in Amsterdam’ s childhood

memory of his father ’ s murder at the Butcher ’ s hand, children. It is almost as if

Scorsese has followed a radica l-feminist plot line, in which the violent power of

patriarchy is unleashed in all-encompassing ways that obliterate the agency , indeed

often the very presence, of women and the young.

T o be sure, the Five Points was no safe haven for infants, adolescents, and females.

While The Gangs of New Y ork is notably negligent in developing women as characters

and as a force in the Five Points adequately , it perhaps makes the necessarily brutal

point with stark suggestiveness: family life and the possibilities for women and children

in the Bloody Ould Sixth of the 1850s and 1860s was culturally claustrophobic and

socially catastrophic. As Carol Groneman Pernicone’ s unpublished dissertation reveals,

the death rate of children in the notorious ward was a predator stalking family life

relentlessly: one out of every three children in the Five Points died before the age of

Ž ve, which registers in the Ž lm with the brief allusion to Jenny’ s stillborn child. With

Irish male labourers equally likely to succumb to the dangers of work in the manual

and construction trades, women were left the small pickings of the sweated trades or

the travails of the street, such as hot corn selling:

Hot Corn! Hot Corn!

Here’ s your lily white hot corn.

All you that’ s got money –

Poor me that’ s got none –

Come buy my lily hot corn.

But such penny capitalism of the alleyways and squalid squares could easily shade

over into the bartering of sexual treating that was a benign version of the occupation,

if not of choice then of necessity , of many Five Points’ females: prostitution.

340 • Br yan D. Palmer

On the T urner thesis see Billington (ed.) 1966.

On women’ s New Y ork sweated work, prostitution, and other aspects of female experience

in the Ž rst half of the nineteenth century see Stansell 1986; Groneman Pernicone 1973. The Hot

Corn stanza is from Asbury 1928, p. 8. The hands that built America

If Scorsese misses obvious opportunities to represent women and blacks more fully ,

he is also immune to the daily labours that sustained life in all of mid-nineteenth-

century America, even in the Five Points. There is almost no engagement with the

trades and occupations that dotted the landscape of the life of the Sixth W ard, and

that gang formation was materially embedded within. Perhaps the sole exception is

the portrayal of the Butcher ’ s technique, but this merely proves the rule of Scorsese’ s

disinterest in actual labour . For the Butcher ’ s butchering has almost nothing to do

with meat as a commodity and, indeed, the only ‘ cuts’ that are dispensed are given

as a gift to an old ‘ mother ’ by the lordly , benevolent Bill. Rather , carcasses are esh

useful for demonstrating the particular knife thrusts that will result in wounds or

kills. The dilapidated businesses of the Five Points, in which cigars, chairs, and combs

were made, the dirty tasks of slaughtering animals, tanning hides, and brewing drink

undertaken, or the back-breaking labours of those casually employed on the docks

or as teamsters, hod carriers, and the like sweated out, are not even a shadowy presence

in the Ž lm. Money is made through theft and the quick score of raking in bets on

prize Ž ghts. The streets and alleys are scenes for standing, scoring, and squaring off

in combat. ‘ W ork’ , conceived as wage-labour , is non-existent.

This is, to be sure, a further shortcoming, but, given that the Ž lm is concerned not

so much with the extraction of surplus-value and the production of goods and services,

as it is with the ensemble of relations at the core of class politics and its relation to

state formation, this strikes me as a shortcoming that can be lived with. The Gangs of

New Y ork is about the exchange relations of class politics in a nascent capitalist order

rather than the productive relations of a capitalist economy . Scorsese is nevertheless

unambiguous and adamant that his Ž lm is about the hands that built America, in as

much as the machinery of politics, republican order , and democratic ‘ governance’ are

re ections of capitalist enterprise and its class relations and creations of that layered

materiality . Indeed, the symbolism of hands is everywhere throughout the Ž lm, from

its opening to its close, and the parade of panoramic, historical shots of the built New

Y ork skylines are ashed at the viewer with U-2’ s ‘ The Hands That Built America’

rounding of f the Ž lm’ s musical score. If, unlike Brecht, Scorsese is unconcerned with

the actual erection of towers, the hauling of stone, and the forging of materials, The

Gangs of New Y ork never loses sight of the varied hands that held knives and brickbats,

that passed the stained blade from generation to generation, that bloodied rivals, that

stuf fed ballot boxes, that lynched blacks and clasped possibilities of class and racial

solidarity , such hands being the often invisible counterpart to the sinewy arms and

calloused Ž ngers of waged labour . In the contradictory wrestling that is the essence

of modern history , these were indeed the plurality of hands that built, unevenly and

often brutally and tragically , a United States of America in which class power was

seldom far from the surface of relations that so many have bathed in obfuscation.

Film Review • 341 Scorsese, whatever his aws, is to be applauded for presenting us with a dif ferent,

and more insightful, visualisation.

It perhaps cultivates awarenesses that might take us beyond the spaces Scorsese

himself inhabits, to new ground, like that envisioned by Walt Whitman, who penned

lines of verse at roughly the same time that the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys

clashed in 1857. That ‘ dreadful Ž ght’ left much blood on many blades, with 12 dead

and 37 injured. Whitman had the capacity to see differently:

I see those who in any land have died for the good cause,

The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run out,

(Mind you O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never run out.)

I see the blood wash’ d entirely away from the axe,

Both blade and helve are clean,

They spirit no more the blood of European nobles, they clasp no more the

necks of queens.

I see the headsman withdrawn and become useless,

I see the scaffold untrodden and mouldy , I see no longer any axe upon it,

I see the mighty and friendly emblem of the power of my own

race, the newest, largest race.

‘ Song of the Broad Axe’ , 175– 83.v

W alt Whitman, Chants Democratic , II

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Film Review • 345

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