Gangs

As one of the fundamental social units of the American male, gangs have comprised everything from a loose-knit group of friends gathered at a street corner to a collection of individuals banded together in a hierarchical, closed unit seeking mutual protection and monetary gain. Although the term gang has often been used to denote a social problem associated with deviance and violence, throughout American history gang membership has provided young men excluded from meaningful labor, social mobility, and other traditional expressions of male achievement with the opportunity to win respect and present a tough, honor-based, masculine identity.

White youth gangs, which existed in seaboard cities at the inception of the American republic, increased in numbers and influence during the early-nineteenth-century market revolution. During this period the old craftwork system based on apprenticeship and intergenerational fellowship faded. Gang camaraderie became a surrogate for workplace fraternity and gave young men an organizational affiliation and a collective masculine identity crafted not on the job, but in saloons, commercial amusements, and the streets.

Gangs flourished in immigrant and working-class urban areas like New York's Bowery and Five Points districts, and gang identity could coalesce around ethnic affiliation (the Irish Dead Rabbits), territory (the Bowery B'hoys), or political passions such as nativism (the True Blue Americans). Tough urban spaces fostered what the historian Sean Wilentz called “republicanism of the streets” (Wilentz, 263)—an aggressive public culture marked by honor-based competitiveness and strident antiauthoritarianism. By defiantly resisting the police and combating rival gangs in battles over public space, gang members demonstrated individual prowess and strengthened group bonds.

The competitive street culture of the nineteenth-century urban gang was founded not only on masculinity, but on whiteness as well. In a world of truculent racism, gangs of European immigrants, most notably the Irish, used violence against free blacks as a means of cultural assimilation and as a public declaration of racial belonging. This violence took its most lethal expression in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Gang membership also connected young men to the all-male world of urban politics. Youth gangs served as foot soldiers for the ward boss, and politicians provided the rent for a gang's headquarters in exchange for stuffed ballot boxes and election-day voter intimidation.

Even though the delinquent ways of street gangs were anathema to the Victorian-era middle-class creed of sober and [Page 185]industrious manhood, turn-of-the-century concerns that urban-industrial overcivilization threatened to feminize American youth prompted many social commentators to hail the youth gang as a masculinizing tonic. Educators like Granville Stanley Hall bemoaned a generation of young boys under the influence of female sentimentality, and J. Adam Puffer, in his book The Boy and His Gang (1912), suggested that gang membership was a healthy alternative for boys badly in need of male camaraderie and masculine role models.

While youth street gangs served as a basic social unit for boys transitioning from adolescence to manhood, adult gangs mirrored contemporary corporate structures, organizing along hierarchical lines and promising economic aggrandizement and social status to men who pledged their loyalty. During the Prohibition era, organized crime provided adult gangsters with avenues of rapid social mobility and access to nice homes, fancy cars, and other symbols of bourgeois respectability. When the Great Depression severely undermined the ability of many working men to earn a decent wage, the gangster's participation in the recession-proof illicit economy allowed him to continue in the masculine role of family breadwinner. Organized gangs of European ethnics, such as the Italian-American Mafia, and monumental crime figures like Chicago mob boss Al Capone were community benefactors and successful businessmen who embodied an underworld version of the heroic self-made man.

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