"Gangs of New York": How Accurate is its History?

Rating: 6/10 (20 December 2002)

Beginning in the 1920s and for about a decade and a half Herbert Asbury wrote a series of historical travelogues about the sin quarters of a few American cities. Examined were New Orleans's Latin Quarter and the Barbary Coast of California, San Francisco being its undisputed headquarters. His most popular book was, however, "Gangs of New York," which enjoyed a wide circulation and is easily found in second-hand bookstores today. My copy is an original. This book would never have enjoyed a contemporary republishing but for Martin Scorsese's adoption of its lurid story for his new, sprawling, partially engrossing but also flawed film of the same title.
Herbert Asbury was no scholar and in his introduction to "Gangs of New York" he wisely eschews any interest in or competence at sociological analysis - a reality any reader would recognize halfway into his saga. Asbury was a popularizer of legend, myth and historical record recording with a bit of raciness that appealed to 1920s readers a past that he viewed as finished and buried. His gangs were no longer a menace to urban folk (he wrote before Prohibition spawned the emergence of major organized crime, run competitively and homicidally by Italian, Irish and Jewish figures).

Scorsese aims for accuracy. In physically reconstructing the notorious "Five Points" area of Manhattan he did a good job (albeit in Italy!). But mirroring on a set the famous Mission Church, later the infamous combined hot bed residence and brothel as well as criminal base of operations, isn't the same as doing what language can do: make alive the smells and cries that emanate from as close to hell as humans in their degradation can journey.
The film starts in 1846 with a violent confrontation between Irish Catholic emigrants and so called "native" Americans, what we might consider to be low(er) class WASPS. Very low class. A blind xenophobia and religious-based hatred fuels the bloody combat and it's an accurate reflection of a New York still gripped by the violence of the aptly named "Know Nothings" (actually their response to questions about their activities, this being before the heydey of the Fifth Amendment). Not mentioned in the film is the 1849 Astor Place riot, a protest by "Know Nothings" to the appearance of a famous English actor which ended in a number of these characters being swept away by militia fire.
Scorsese continues this explanation for inter-group homicide and rioting through the July 1863 Draft Riots, probably the most deadly urban riots in American history (the jury is still out and always will be as to the death toll especially amongst blacks). This may work as cinema but it's not accurate. Gut dislike of the Irish (and later the Italians and the Jews) was certainly real in 1863 but that wasn't what the riots were about. The film does show violence against blacks including lynchings but the underlying hatred that drove thousands into the streets in mad rioting was fueled by economics.
By 1863 Irish AND Italian working class men feared that blacks would take away what often was a precarious livelihood at best. The enactment of conscription by the Federal government (coming after the Confederacy had established the precedent) did not simply arouse rage because of a fear of combat. The Draft was viewed by most white working class people, regardless of ethnic association, in two ways: it supported a war to liberate economically competitive blacks (which the film briefly shows through signs) and it bolstered the argument that the conflict was "A Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight." The film recognizes this with mention of the $300 substitute fee by which one hit with a draft notice could evade service. But the continued emphasis on religious basis as a cause of the rioting is exaggerated.
The depiction of the relatively young and politically perspicacious William Marcy ("Boss") Tweed is amusingly on target and many in the Manhattan audience laughed when he mentions, offhand, his desire to build a great courthouse in the city (the Boss Tweed Courthouse led to his imprisonment where he died because of the monumental graft with which it is forever associated. The building, beautifully restored, is again a source of political controversy).
Costumes and language largely reflect what we know of the times. Scorsese engaged Luc Sante, author and historian, and probably one of the finest chroniclers of New York's criminal past, as adviser and his efforts show.
This film has attracted much media attention and articles on the history of New York's gangs have appeared in a number of publications including Time Out New York, New York Magazine and the New York Times. On TV several good documentaries have been screened, for example on The History Channel. People wanting a serious and very well-written account of what Five Points was really like should read the book "Five Points" by Lyle Ambinder - it's close to definitive.
*****
As to the film:
It's good, not great. Twenty or thirty minutes could have been edited out and should have been. There are no opening screen credits and the first end credit is "Directed by Martin Scorsese." That isn't there for nothing: this is as much a director's all-consuming project as was James Cameron's "Titanic." Leonardo De Caprio is expectedly good as the young man seeking to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the leader of the "Natives," played by an astonishing Daniel Day-Lewis. His acting alone justifies seeing the film. Cameron Diaz is predicatably okay, not more, playing that most endearingly familiar screen role, "The Good-hearted Hooker Next Door."
Overall, 6/10.