“America was born in the streets,” reads the tag line for Martin Scorsese’s bold new historical epic, Gangs of New York, and these are mean streets, indeed. Scorsese’s film, which is set in pre-Civil War New York, revolves around the violent rivalry between Irish immigrant and Nativist street gangs, and it features any number of gang brawls, stabbings, shootings, “fish-hookings,” ratbaitings, head-clubbings, and ear-chawings. His characters murder, steal, prostitute themselves, fix elections, and even assassinate policemen and elected officials. In the film’s grand finale, they set the whole town ablaze during the New York City draft riot.

Mr. Scorsese is no stranger to graphic depictions of violence, but these scenes—in the context of American history—seem to have stunned and repelled some viewers all over again. Syndicated columnist Liz Smith referred to it as “a Grand Guignol” and “one of the most disturbing movie experiences of my long lifetime,” while others found it “spontaneously brutal,” and packed with “street squalor.”

Certainly, Scorsese’s film should not be mistaken for the historical record. Yet if anything, he has spared us many of the more sordid details. As someone who has spent many years researching New York history for my own historical novels, Dreamland and Paradise Alley, which is also set during the draft riot, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid—if not more so—than the movie depicts.

Many people seem to be astonished by this aspect of the American past. But the truth was that antebellum New York, particularly in its poorer wards, often seemed to be literally swimming in filth, and blood. The city’s sewers were so stuffed with butchers’ offal that they overflowed with gore in even the lightest rains, and it wasn’t uncommon to see little boys sailing paper boats on pools of blood in the gutters. Pigs ran loose on the street—as Scorsese faithfully shows—and ratbaiting was indeed a popular spectator sport, an “entertainment” in which sporting gentlemen bet on how long it would take a trained terrier to kill one hundred rats.

Riots broke out at the drop of a hat, and were usually put down only after extensive bloodshed. Between 1788 and 1870 there were the Doctors Riot, the Flour Riot, the Actor’s Riot, the Kleindeutschland Riot, the Police Riot, the Orange Riots—among others. Often these had a morbidly comic tinge to them, as their names imply. The Doctors Riot started because of a rumor that the medical students were secretly dissecting the corpses of the poor, and ended up with a mob ransacking the house of someone named “Sir John”—which they mistook for “Surgeon.” In the Actor’s—or Astor Place—Riot, a militia unit shot dead some 31 New Yorkers, near the current sight of the Public Theater, when they tried to tear apart a local playhouse and attack an English actor who was appearing there. In the Dead Rabbits’ Riot, rival street gangs built barricades in the streets, and celebrated July 4, 1857 by spending all day shooting at each other, until 12 people lay dead. In the Police Riot, a few months before, rival police forces actually brawled on the steps of City Hall.

Then there were the Draft Riots, which took place just over a week after the battle of Gettysburg, in July, 1863, and remain to this day the bloodiest riot in American history. What began as a protest over the first military draft turned into an orgy of racist violence, in which fighting raged up and down the length of Manhattan, and at least 119 people were killed. A colonel of militia, and numerous African American citizens, were horribly tortured and lynched in the streets. One mob even burned down the city’s Colored Orphans’ Asylum—a deed that must surely rank as the most disgraceful act ever committed in the city before September 11.

Scorsese shows us only a litte of this final outburst—but then, what moviegoer would really want to see the worst atrocities? If anything, his Gangs of New York has less disturbing, graphic violence than he has given us in such depictions of contemporary American life as Casino, or Taxi Driver.

Why, then, all the uproar? Perhaps it is because we are willing to accept our fallen present, but we don’t want to think of America as having emerged from anyplace so hard and violent. We would probably prefer to think of America as something that emerged from the deliberations of men in powdered wigs holding pewter tankards, or Abe Lincoln solemnly reciting the Gettysburg Address. Scorsese insists otherwise; in one incredible scene in Gangs, anti-Civil War gang members actually pelt a stage Lincoln with garbage while he dangles on wires above a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He reminds us at every turn that our freedom—our modern America—was born from struggle, and while we might not want to think upon this, it is best that we do.

Kevin Baker is the author of the historical novel Paradise Alley, from HarperCollins, which is set during the Civil War draft riots.

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