The book that Martin Scorsese’s ‘Gangs of New York’ is based on
Gangs of New York was the seventh Martin Scorsese film to be set in the city of New York, but only the second which wasn’t set in the 20th century. His previous movie about characters in the 19th century, The Age of Innocence, had been a fictional story based on Edith Wharton’s novel.
Gangs of New York, on the other hand, is very much based on true events during the period of social unrest in the mid-19th century that culminated in the American Civil War. Many of its characters were either real people, as in the case of William ‘Boss’ Tweed and Hell-Cat Maggie, or inspired by real people, as William ‘Bill the Butcher’ Cutting was.
In the case of Tweed, American History expert Professor Tyler Anbinder told National Public Radio at the time of the film’s release that it “did a very good job depicting” the man himself. In particular, he points to the movie’s accurate portrayal of “how Tweed is somewhat ambivalent about the immigrants” who recently arrived in New York. At the same time, he is a machiavellian pragmatist who sees them as a big part of “the future in terms of the electorate”.
Meanwhile, Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, was based on William Poole, the real leader of the Know Nothing movement and the Bowery Boys street gang, who operated close to Five Points in New York. Poole was one of the most notorious gang leaders in 19th century America and had a profound hatred of all non-protestant immigrants in New York.
Professor Anbinder, meanwhile, reserves the highest praise for Scorsese’s “visual images of the period”, which he describes as the most historically accurate part of the film. The Native New Yorker’s knowledge of the city was clearly a factor in the level of detail he applied to recreate Civil War-era Five Points in his sets and the stunning time-lapse sequence that closes the movie.
But is it the prequel to Mean Streets and Goodfellas?
In depicting the New York City draft riots of 1863, Anbinder thinks “he does a pretty good job”. Scorsese’s inspiration for the film draws from a specific research source, which focuses on the riots in great detail.
The source in question lends its name to the movie. Journalist Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld was first published in 1928 and has gone on to become a perennial bestseller.
It charts the entire history of New York’s gang warfare in the 19th century, of which the events of 1863 were only a part. The book ends with the transition to the Italian-American mob’s domination of the criminal underworld in New York from the early 20th century.
In this sense, it demonstrates how Scorsese likely saw his film as a fitting prologue to the great mafia crime stories that have inspired so many of his other cinematic works.