-Caveat Lector- The mobs of Boston http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/026/focus/The_mobs_of_Boston+.sht ml Martin Scorsese is right: America was born in the streets - but not of New York
By Drake Bennett, 1/26/2003 AS ITS MANY CRITICS have pointed out, Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" is a big-budget historical epic about as concerned with history as, well, the average big-budget historical epic. Since the movie's release, historians have been telling anyone who will listen about just how fast and loose the movie plays with its facts, how capriciously it distorts chronology, conflates characters, and ignores inconvenient events. How, most inexcusably, it glosses over the virulent anti-black animus of the 1863 Draft Riots so as to fit them into an immigrant-versus-nativist ur-narrative. But if Scorsese and his handlers at Miramax had been able to look beyond their TriBeCa environs, they might have been able to keep their "America was born in the streets" tag-line without rewriting history. They just would have had to change the sets and costumes. Because in fact, the streets that birthed America were largely Boston streets, and the midwives weren't 19th-century gangs, they were 18th-century mobs. When we think of mobs nowadays we imagine Detroit or Los Angeles in flames, or perhaps a Jim Crow lynching. But in Revolutionary America, popular uprisings were celebrated as well as condemned. It was the tumults of the mob that Jefferson had in mind when he famously professed to Abigail Adams, "I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." Even the Tory Thomas Hutchinson-who as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts had received the unwelcome attentions of Stamp Act rioters-had to admit that, "Mobs, a sort of them at least, are constitutional." They were considered democracy in the raw, a check against governmental overreach. Of course, the Founding Fathers also had their troubles with the masses. The word "mob" was, then as now, a pejorative term-a contraction of the Latin term mobile vulgus, or "excitable, fickle crowd." Radicals and Loyalists alike referred to the mobs of ancient Rome as a shorthand for licentiousness and savagery, and regarded their own homegrown varietal with a particular mix of disdain and trepidation. Gouverneur Morris once compared a milling colonial crowd to "poor reptiles basking in the morning sun, ere noon they will bite." Robert Livingston recalled a few years after independence how, in their alliance with the mob, the revolutionaries had been "swimming with a stream it is impossible to stem, yielding to the torrent in order to direct its course." Even a darling of the mob like James Otis, when faced with a street protest in 1776, responded by scoffing, "When the pot boils, the scum will rise." The enraged masses made a convenient ally, but they were an unsavory and unsettling one, too. Until fairly recently, historians-studying the Revolution primarily through the writings of the Founding Fathers-tended to accept these negative portrayals of the mob. In the 19th century in particular, crowds were seen as irrational and brutal; "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," by the Scottish poet and journalist Charles Mackay, was one of the most influential books of its time. This view of the crowd as what John Adams disdainfully called the "grazing multitude" held up all the way through the Progressive historians. Even these champions of democracy saw the mobs primarily as tools created and manipulated by radicals like Otis and Samuel Adams. But the much-maligned mob found an influential defender in the late historian George Rud. Rud proposed, first of all, a name change. In his 1959 study "The Crowd in the French Revolution," he drew a firm distinction between mobs-in his words, "hired bands operating on behalf of external interests"-and what he christened, in a public relations coup, the "revolutionary crowd." Painstakingly picking through police arrest records, court transcripts, and other primary sources, Rud found a crowd not at the beck and call of its betters, but with its own agenda and a nascent political consciousness. While Scorsese's gangs live and die by "the ancient codes of combat" (whatever those are), revolutionary crowds, both French and American, had their own set of codes, one dating back to the Middle Ages-and their uprisings often proved strikingly obedient to it. As traced back by Rud and the English socialist historian E. P. Thompson, the roots of political uprisings lay in the venerable medieval tradition of food riots (usually over bread, with some exceptions like the Great Cheese Riot at Nottingham's Goose Fair in 1764, where whole rounds of liberated cheese were rolled through the streets). In England and France, artisans, craftsmen, laborers and the like felt that the law was simply an oppressive yoke laid on them by the rich. They lived instead according to an unwritten popular code in which crimes- counterfeiting, smuggling, evading taxes-were actively condoned as acts of defense against an oppressive state. Correspondingly, what the poor were willing to pay for food was defined by what Thompson called an older "moral economy," which saw as immoral "any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people." Throughout the late 1700s, the upstart market economy proved less and less willing to comply with the rules of the moral economy. When prices rose too high, the poor felt justified in rising up to bring them down to their "proper" level. But these actions, Thompson points out, "were validated by more sophisticated traditions than the word 'riot' suggests." In other words, for bands of hungry, angry people bent on getting their way by physical coercion, the rioters were remarkably well-behaved. The uprisings were by and large characterized by their restraint, their single- mindedness, and an ability to coordinate logistically complex tasks like the orderly distribution of grain or other provisions after a town market was taken over. In the American colonies, the crowd uprising served an even more central role. The MIT historian Pauline Maier began the reconsideration of the colonial crowd in her 1972 book "From Resistance to Revolution." Crowd actions were now seen as, to use Maier's terms, "extra-institutional" rather than "anti-institutional"; they were a way for people to "defend the urgent interests of their communities when the lawful authorities failed to act." Crowds caught purse-snatchers, secured land titles, seized grain to prevent its exportation in times of need, and disciplined public officials. Like their English counterparts, they often rose up in defense of the moral economy, whether that meant fending off market collapses (by, for example, tearing up surplus crops) or correcting moral lapses (by tearing down a bawdy house). Throughout the colonies, Boston had a reputation as a particularly "mobbish town." Perhaps most im- portantly, Maier argues, the mob represented not only the interests of the lower classes but of colonial society as a whole. It wasn't so unusual to find wealthy merchants and prominent citizens mixed in with the sailors, servants, and apprentices. Why exactly this happened is the subject of some debate. While Maier sees it as evidence of a commonality of interests over issues like taxation, contemporaries of hers like Alfred Young and Gary Nash emphasize how each class brought its own concerns to the riots. Merchants hoped to protect their smuggling business; artisans hoped to avoid competition from British imports; and the poor wished to escape impressment into the navy. But they all faced a common foe. Regardless of the exact ideological admixture, throughout the 1760s and '70s, colonial uprisings grew more organized and took on an increasingly political tone. The Stamp Act, in effect a 1765 tax leveled by Parliament on all official documents in the colonies, was a turning point, and Boston was the fulcrum on which it turned. On Aug. 14, 1765, a large crowd gathered at the corner of Washington and Essex streets to parade and then burn the effigy of Andrew Oliver, Massachusetts' designated stamp distributor. They then leveled a small building that was rumored to be the future stamp office, and, against the wishes of their upper-class leaders, attacked Oliver's house. The next day, Oliver, convinced of the error of his ways, tendered his resignation. Without a stamp man, there could be no Stamp Act, and this strategy was taken up in the other colonies with great success. As in the past, the crowd's mix of menace and restraint served it well. Gandhi might not have approved, but, as Maier puts it, "a little bit of force went a long way." By and large, damage was done to property and rarely to life and limb (though for someone like Hutchinson, whose sturdy mansion in the North End was literally reduced to a naked frame by one Stamp Act riot, that might not be much to be thankful for). While violence did threaten to spin out of control during the Stamp Act resistance, the strong colonial mob tradition kept it from going over the brink. After an initial conflagration, a tight discipline was imposed under the rallying cry "No violence or you'll hurt the cause!" The paragon of this sort of operation was the Boston Tea Party, perhaps the best known-and best- organized-crowd caper, where an accidentally broken lock on board the ship was reportedly replaced and a "Mohawk" caught trying to pocket some tea was stripped and sent home naked. The days leading up to the Revolution marked a sort of apotheosis of the mob. Once war came, the populace left the fighting to armed and (at first only slightly) more disciplined forces. After independence was won and a republic established, there was less and less place for the mob. Ironically enough, it was Sam Adams who made the point in his response to the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. He asked, "What excuse can there be for forcible opposition to the laws? If any law shall prove oppressive in its operation, the future deliberations of a freely elected Representative will afford a constitutional remedy." However, although less frequently, American crowds did continue to rise up-in Shay's Rebellion, the Fries Rebellion, the Philadelphia race and religion riots of the 1830s and '40s, the 1834 burning of a Charlestown convent, the Draft Riots, the New York kosher meat riots of 1898 (worth an article of its own), and the conflagrations that greeted the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the Rodney King acquittals, and 2001's Cincinnati police shooting. But as they've grown more rare, they've grown more violent. According to UC Davis historian Alan Taylor, this has partly been due to an increase in the private ownership of firearms. But largely it's been because of the increasing significance of race. "There's something about race," as Taylor puts it, "that just ups the hatred ante"-that, in other words, obliterates the sense of common interest at the root of the colonial mob tradition. So might Scorsese prove as interested in the Boston crowd as he's been in the Italian Mob? He could definitely find pageantry. He might open with the annual Pope's Day brawl between Boston's North and South End mobs (largely made up of young Protestant laborers and seamen) at Mill Bridge on Hanover Street. Each would build a stage with an effigy atop and then go at it to see who could take the other's down and burn it. The movie could throw in a few revisionist digs at worthies like John Adams and Paul Revere. There would even be a role for Daniel Day-Lewis-no stranger, as is well known, to the shoemaking arts-as Ebenezer Mackintosh, the charismatic cobbler who led the Boston Stamp Act protests before being pushed aside by the Sons of Liberty out of fear of his growing influence. But in the end, the whole thing might be too tame. The Boston Massacre, after all, had a measly five casualties, hardly the sort of Gtterdmmerung that makes for the closing shots of a David Lean-style epic. The taste for blood that led Scorsese to pillage Herbert Asbury's raffish book about the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies might make him betray Ebenezer Mackintosh. As the formless, gory "Gangs" showed, the great control freak Scorsese might have something to learn from the restraint of the revolutionary mob. Drake Bennett is a writing fellow at The American Prospect. This story ran on page H1 of the Boston Globe on 1/26/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. Forwarded for your information. 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