ABSTRACT
At the end of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) stands in a cemetery across Manhattan Island with Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), reflecting upon the violent devastation New York City just endured following the notorious draft riots of 1863. Amsterdam has come to bury his father Priest Vallon’s razor, a memento symbolizing the tribal wars between American nativists and ethnic immigrants in nineteenth-century New York history. Scorsese’s film began with Priest (Liam Neeson) using this razor to mark his face as he prepared to battle his rival Bill “The Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), a street war intended to determine whether the nativists or immigrants would control the Five Points district of Lower Manhattan. Later in the movie, Amsterdam would similarly use his father’s razor to again fight Bill, who now wielded enormous power in the city upon defeating Priest Vallon, having earned a reputation for unleashing violence upon the ethnic communities in Five Points and notoriety among the city’s political leaders. During those epic days in 1863, Amsterdam avenged his father’s death by killing Bill during another street battle, and his headstone now lies next to Priest Vallon’s. As he buries his father’s razor, Amsterdam also buries a volatile period in the city’s history, one defined by men like Priest Vallon and Bill Cutting, who together represented a generation of Americans torn by nativist and ethnic prejudices in the years before the American Civil War. Recalling his father’s words as he observes a smoldering Manhattan, Amsterdam ponders upon the ways New York City was transformed that day in 1863, a city now “born of blood and tribulation just as we are born into this world.”1 Yet Amsterdam regretfully notes in the film’s final scenes how future generations will forget about men such as Bill and his father, as well as this contested period in mid-nineteenth-century American history when the young republic stood at a cultural crossroads. Even though such pivotal moments
periodically have occurred throughout United States history, it was during this era when Americans intensely fought over the sociological definition of their country, according to Gangs of New York. With the Civil War as the historical backdrop, Martin Scorsese’s film points to this critical moment in US national history when Americans determined whether all citizens, regardless of ethnic or racial background, should be extended the rights and privileges to participate in their rapidly growing democracy.
