If anyone can point me to some facts as to if we really shot cannons onto our own city, etc...I'd appreciate it.
My brother - who reads lots of books on history - said it was pretty accurate. I think the naval bombardment was a liberty taken for the sake of dramatic impact, but the riots themselves lasted over three days, were primarily Irish, and caused $1.5 million in damage to east-side neighborhoods. Unknown numbers killed. The Army of the Potomac was called in to quell the riots, and were camped outside the city for weeks afterward. The look/feel of Five Points was apparently very accurate (Five Points was a neighborhood very near modern-day Wall Street on the lower East side). For the record, I actually liked the film. Day-Lewis was fabulous.
When Leo confronts Cameron Diaz at the rich people's house about her stealing his pocket watch and he throws her against the wall and says, "Bitch, don't you be gankin' my bling-bling a'gin, 'r I'm'onn fuck you up harrrrrrrd!" I started to question the movie's authenticity.
The most historically accurate thing in the film IMO was its portrayal of living in a crowded, poor section of a mid-19th century city. The film really gave a visceral feel for what it must have been like to live in a section of the city that didn't have indoor plumbing and sewers, where there were tens of thousands of animals being driven through the streets and hauling stuff, etc. On the other hand, I think the movie portrayed the details of the riot inaccurately and created a historically false message. The film attempted to make a claim that the riots led (fairly directly) to a new kind of melting pot democracy/patriotism in which immigrants and native-born New Yorkers united as a working class that eventually made the city what it is today, basically summed up by the U2 "hands that build america" song. The draft riots undoubtedly had class dimensions, since you could buy your way out for $300 IIRC. The film however overplayed the mob's attacks on wealthy New Yorkers, which as far as I know, didn't happen to the extent they were portrayed. At the same time, it underemphasized the rioters targeting of Black New Yorkers, and specific events such as the deliberate burning of a Black orphanage. Blacks are really missing from the entire film, even though Five Points had the largest concentration of Blacks in New York. By making the draft riots a class riot instead of a class and race riot, Scorcese cleans up the ambiguities of the transition of Irish (and by implication every other ethnic group) from racial other to White. GONY could have been a vital explanation of class, race, and belonging in America, the film version of "How the Irish Became White." Had the film included Blacks as the targets of violent and rhetorical attacks by the nativists and the Irish, it would have been a better history, but it would have also created a more ambiguous conclusion about the uniting of the gangs and how immigrants came to be accepted as Americans. In settling for the class only story, IMO the movie fails in its goal (and the last shots of the film leave no doubt that this is its goal) of explaining New York's and America's growth.
Excellent summary, needs. Some very valid criticisms of the film. Oh, IANAHistorian. In fact, I knew little about the specifics of 1860s New York before I saw the film, and it did inspire me to do a little research on Five Points, the Irish in NYC at the time, and the Draft Riots. There is a major inconsistency between history and film on the riot front, and it's the race issue.
Here's the 1927 book the movie took alot of information from (including the title): http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...5787081/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-1043220-4518309 And a good book about 5 Points: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t..._books_1/104-1043220-4518309?v=glance&s=books
There really was a guy called Bill the Butcher but he was murdered before the Civil War (c. 1857). Some modern historians have accused Asbury of exaggerating the number of dead in the draft riots by as much as a factor of 10. Scorcese's movie probably owes more to the book than to actual history, but I thought that the production design provided some realistic atmosphere.
There was an article in the New Yorker a while back that seemed to imply that, historically speaking, the film was mostly a crock. Memories a bit fuzzy, but if I recall correctly the author was selling these tales of violence and woe to newspapers for cash -- thus the grittier the better. I'll try to find the date of the issue and author.
That's what I heard too. The rows and rows of bodies in the streets at the end of the movie were a little OTT.
I grabbed the one book off my shelf that had some details about the riots. While the numbers of dead in the movie may have been exaggerated (the official count after the riots was 106 dead, which was almost certainly an undercount) the ferocity of the fighting portrayed in the film seems fairly accurate (apart from the lack of violence against African Americans that I mentioned earlier). The book, Mary Ryan's Civic Wars, calls the riots "5 days of guerilla warfare" and a "pogrom against Black New Yorkers." She includes fairly gruesome quotes from newspapers about a Colonel O'Brien of the NYPD who was "pummeled to death, dragged through the rough pavement to his own backyard, mangled, trampled, and finally left a bloody gore on which women reputedly 'committed the most atrocious violence,'" and army regiments shelling the crowd with howitzers and attacking with organized bayonet charges. At the end of the riot, 10,000 troops (who came straight from Gettysburg) were stationed in the city.