Okay, I’ve been sitting on this review of The Gangs of New York for a little while now.  The first couple of drafts didn’t come out right.  I’ve been having a  time with this one, you could say.  The problem isn’t that it’s a very hard book to write about.  It just pissed me off.  I find it difficult to produce limpid, effortless prose when writing about things that piss me off.  My usually passable style descends to something only slightly more comprehensible than fevered text message jargon.  That being said, here are Gangs of New York and why it pissed me off!

This book bears only a distant resemblance to the movie.  If they were considered in a metaphorical family, they might be cousins or, perhaps, a nephew and uncle that only see each other at Christmas and funerals.  No, they don’t attend the same weddings.  They simply aren’t that close.  Still, that isn’t what irks me about this book.  Filmmakers are obliged to take certain liberties.

If you only watched the movie, for instance, you might be surprised to discover that the book does not follow a continuous narrative.  You also wouldn’t know that the characters’ lives are separated by decades as well as gang affiliations.  William “Bill the Butcher” Poole was a Bowery Boy, but he lived after the Dead Rabbits had begun to wane.  The book is an informal history, which means it describes many stories and characters over an extended period of time.  Specifically, it describes gangs, gangsters, and villainy in lower Manhattan.  It pays particular attention to the Irish gangsters, who are described as heroes, and the pure mayhem wrought in the decades leading up to and just after the Civil War.

Much of it is more than a little racist.  Chinese gangsters, who participated in many of the same activities as their Irish contemporaries, are typically described as impotent and cowardly.  Black people are mentioned only as victims of mob violence.  Still, one could argue that a little prejudice is just a symptom of that brutish period in American history.  Asbury, our author, was writing in the 1920s and used sources from the 19th century.  Is he not bound to mention names like Ni**er Ruhl?  Isn’t he only being true to history when he implies that Jewish gangsters were ashamed to be Jewish?

Sure.  Fine.  I’ll grant it, albeit irritably.  Here’s the part that pisses me off: much of what he calls history does not appear to be true.  Many of the characters are real.  William Poole, Sadie the Goat, Gallus Mag, Monk Eastman (see picture above), and others are extremely interesting, and their stories are mostly true.  You should definitely find a good list and go perusing through biographies.  But the statistics on murder rates, descriptions of the worst slums, and stories describing the inner motives of murderers and bank robbers are either patently false or completely unverifiable.

At one point, Asbury writes about a tenement that experienced a murder every day during a period when, according to a National Geographic article, all of New York only experienced a murder roughly every month.  The author is so infatuated with violence and the mystique of powerful gang leaders that he doesn’t bother vetting his source material.  Stories about Mose the Fireboy, who is easily as cool as Paul Bunyan, are placed in the appropriate semi-mythological context, but others are just plain lies.

Here is actually a much better discussion than you’re reading now.  Go read that for a better look at the historical side of the book and movie.  Considering the book purely as a reading experience, I have to warn you that it drags a bit in the middle.  You can only read “the people rioted all day, were fired upon by cannon, took a building, and set fire to it while still inside” so many times before it gets repetitive.  The parts about the river pirates are definitely worth reading, as are the descriptions Mose and the very early gangsters.  Just take it all with a grain of salt.  Please read it.  I need someone to be bitter with.