The Hands That Built America: A Class-Politics Appreciation of Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York

Abstract

The mean streets of New York 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 York, a $120 million epic inspired by Herbert Asbury’s 1928 ‘informal history’ of the same name, commences with a Žctitious 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 Vallon and the Dead Rabbits.