Gangs - an American Tradition

Modern media, designed for the entertainment of those of short attention span and bereft of historical perspective, would have its viewers, listeners and readers believe urban gangs are an impossible to understand and wholly new phenomena in America. In the process the media has created false racial stereotypical associations with gang formation and activity. In fact, a cursory review of the history of gangs in this country demonstrates that gangs have been prevalent from the outset of European/American culture and their origins are as white as the driven snow.

"Gang" is defined by the Random House Unabridged Dictionary as follows: "a group of youngsters or adolescents who associate closely, often exclusively, for social reasons, esp. such a group engaging in delinquent behavior." Random House traces the origin of the word to Old English "manner of going, way, passage."

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives a similar origin, but a less negative meaning "a group of men, a set." Scholars note the word is used in 1627, sometime after its coinage, to connote "a company of workmen." By 1632 it had inherited a more irresponsible sense of "band of persons travelling together."

Thus, literally any group of people can qualify as a gang. But as we see through the etymology of the word itself, "gang" has taken on a criminal connotation in more recent times.

While criminal gangs have been present since time immemorial, the history of the United States of America has unfurled cheek-by-jowl with gangs. The abuses of unbridled capitalism have always kept an ample supply of disadvantaged, lower income classes roiling. Oftentimes they band together to survive by any means necessary. Such is a virtual certainty in a culture that has glorified the pirate, the outlaw, the rebel with no cause, the mafioso don, and finally the urban gang banger. Such homage to the outlaw gang has been a consistent theme of American media, literature, and art. To this day many municipalities throughout the Southern United States celebrate buccaneer days annually, lionizing historical figures such as the 19th century pirate Jean Lafitte.

Vigilante groups have been given license to terrorize immigrants, minorities, and labor organizers throughout America's history. Such groups are the quintessential models of "gangs" in the most lawless and violent sense.

A recent book by Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The rise of corporate power and the disabiling of democracy (Barrett-Koehler, 2003), validates the idea that America, by its very nature, breeds and nurtures gangs. In Nace's history of corporatism in America he suggests big corporations are the most organized and vicious gangs of all. As Nace puts it, ''nothing is illegal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.''

America's first outlaw gangs can be traced to the 18th Century colonial capitalist system. Wealthy landowners used get-rich ploys to lure masses of desperate immigrants to come to America as laborers. Once here, workers were either forced into indentured servitude, or became the victims of over-recruitment (a capitalist scheme to drive down wages - later most explicity described in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath) and thus into the ranks of the unemployed.

The life expectancy of such impoverished classes of immigrants was not long, with many perishing young from starvation, malnutrition or disease. By the mid 1700's this phenomena had created an increasing number of orphans in American cities and towns. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries nearly all municipalities maintained one or more orphanage in an effort to corral the young wayward masses. But orphanages, well intended as they might be, did little to instill a sense of belonging, let alone enfranchisement, nor could they clear the streets of the thousands of orphans and unemployed adults.

Young, in a strange land, not accustomed to prevailing culture norms, uneducated, hungry, and unaccepted by society at large, immigrant youth exercised the natural human reaction to such conditions. They banded together with those of similar origin and lot. Packs of such similarly situated youth substituted family and society with groups of their own. Often denied gainful employment such groups turned to thievery to survive. Often attacked by gangs of another species, the vigilante, such groups of like-minded, young immigrants resorted to organized violence in order to survive. Thus, America's first gangs were decidedly Anglo in ethnicity. Such gangs set the precedent for later ethnic gangs that would evolve with the later arrivals of large pools of immigrants of various ethnicities.

The problem became so widespread that by 1791 city leaders of Philadelphia called an emergency meeting to address the proliferation of gangs. Similarly, in 1825 officials in New York City were actively searching for and discussing solutions to the city's gang situation.

By the 1850s large swathes of New York City were controlled by gangs. The Irish Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and Chichester Gang were the most infamous. Their exploits were dramatized in Martin Scorsese's 2002 movie The Gangs of New York , which depicts the battles between the Dead Rabbits against an Anglo Saxon gang known as the nativists (read vigilantes). In placing the immigrant gang at war with the xenophobes Scorsese has captured the Americana essence and tradition of gangs. In dramatizing Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall bosses he also demonstrated that perhaps the most pervasively specious gang consisted of the Anglos in positions of official authority.

While the film intends to shock with graphic violence, it ignores the larger, inhumane products of those Irish and Anglo street gangs. By using the draft riots of 1863 as a

major culminating event, the omissions are all the more critical. Whether out of ignorance or prejudice the film makers perpetuate racial stereotypes in the portrayal of that racial group most commonly associated with gang activity in modern America, African Americans.

First, the film only portrays the Irish immigrant point of view, that they feel dehumanized by being forced to fight for the black man's freedom in the Civil War. While Scorsese portrays one black character he never hints at the fact that African Americans mobilized nationally to pressure the United States Government to allow them to fight in the war. Second, the film omits to show the carnage those gangs wrought in the black sections of town. For example, rioters in fact set fire to an African-American orphanage in an effort to exterminate over three hundred children. Third, the film does not mention the significant ripple effect of the actions of those white downtrodden rioters. Their destruction and violence was so widespread that the United States Army had to deploy thousands of troops from the fields of the battle of Gettysburg to the streets of New York to quell the uprising. Many historians have questioned why the Union army did not go on the offense and hunt down General Lee after repelling the best the Confederates could muster at Gettysburg. One answer provided by more thorough historians is that they couldn't pursue Lee because too many of their forces were diverted to New York to handle the draft riots.

This cinema critique is interjected for two reasons. First, it is recommended Gangs Of New York be viewed by any serious student of American gang phenomena. Second, despite the film's importance, its flaws demonstrate how deeply ingrained white racist thought has become in America - it is even apparent in the art of the liberal democratic intelligensia of today. The race/gang issue will be seen as a recurring theme as we trace the rest of America's history of gangs.

In the late 1800s with the importation of Chinese labor on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and the atrocious, degrading treatment of this clearly recognizable racial group, came a new variety of gang. In New York, San Francisco and urban parts in between, this period saw the rise of the Tong and Triad gangs, mainly composed of young Chinese. While their rituals and symbols may have been uniquely oriental, their primary activities of protection, thievery, and violence matched those of gangs of other ethnicities to date. Some historians trace a new underground growth industry to the Chinese gangs: drugs.

The Chinese gangs did not promote drug use to create a market for the opium that was readily available in their homeland. Instead, they supplied an existing demand that was created by the war between the great Union gang of the North and the great Confederate gang of the South. It is estimated that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of injured soldiers in the Civil War were introduced to opium based morphine by doctors. The more seriously injured, and more heavily sedated, veterans had become addicts. While the surrender at Appomattox may have given occasion for many Americans to celebrate, it did nothing to relieve the chronic pain of thousands of poorly treated war injuries or the nerve-wracking withdrawal symptoms of those introduced to morphine on the battle field.

While vigilante white gangs have been an American history constant, the most highly organized, widespread and destructive one became historically infamous only after decades of twentieth century struggles by the civil rights movement. That gang was formed in response to the result of the Civil War. While modern propaganda cites the Los Angeles Crips as beginning the ritual of gangs wearing colors and distinctive forms of dress in the nineteen seventies, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) sported color (white) and distinctive dress and symbols (robes, hoods and crosses) as early as 1866.

The KKK was established by former Confederate officers and soldiers in response to being dispossessed of land and political power by virtue of losing their bid to rebel against the United States of America. The KKK was so violent and prevalent throughout the Southern states that by 1870 the United States Department of Justice was formed to eliminate it. While Ulysses S. Grant was president the Department did just that, successfully prosecuting hundreds of klansmen. The Klan was reportedly near extinction by the end of Grant's second term in early 1877. However, it would rapidly regroup under the succeeding Hayes adminstration, an administration that agreed to remove all union troops from the Southern states prior to the election in exchange for Southern politicians delivering those states's electors to Hayes in the general election. Thus sanctified by the federal government, the mother of all American gangs would live to terrorize citizens for another century.

The year 1870 was noteworthy in gang history for two other reasons. First, perhaps the most feared gang in New York in that year was the 19th Street Gang. There was one qualifying trait required for membership. That is the entrant had to be an avowed Roman Catholic. That same year the first Boy's Club was founded for the purpose of affording positive activity for youth who had no parental or community direction. The Boy's Club (predeccessor to today's Boy's and Girl's Club of America) founders were specifically responding to the urban gang problem.

By the early 20th Century major urban areas were dominated by Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangs. All of these were outgrowths of the mass immigration phenomena earlier described. The 1920s constituted the golden era of gangs in American cities. Perhaps it was the act intended to "civilize" the country from shore to shore that created the greatest boost to criminal gangs in history. In January 1920 the U.S. Congress adopted the 18th Amendment to the

Constitution, banning the sale and distribution of alcohol. This greatly increased the demand for larger and better organized networks to supply a thirsty nation. In response some of the 20th

Century's most notorious gangters cut their teeth in the 20's (e.g. Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Dutch Shultz) . It was during the 1920s that La Cosa Nostra was formed by the networking of Italian gangs. It was also during the twenties that American media capitalized on the real-life adventures of organized crime vs. organized law enforcement.

With unemployment levels reaching unprecedented nadirs during the great depression of the 30's criminal gangs reached their zenith of power. Was it coincidental that the high tide of vigilantism also occured in the 1930s? As labor movements organized to fight for more work and better job conditions, they were often violently suppressed by jingoistic, predominently Anglo mobs sanctioned and protected by federal, state and local governments and financed by agricultural and corporate giants. Vigilantes murdered and terrorized Mexican, Japanese, Phillipino, and poor white farm workers throughout the Southwest, while the KKK did the same to African American agricultural workers in the South. It is estimated that the KKK's membership was several million nationwide during that decade.

Not coincidentally, it was during the near full employment period of the World War II Roosevelt adminstration that gang activity in America was reported at an all time low. But, upon return from fighting for their nation, ethnic groups - particularly those of color and thus most easily marginalized - found gainful employment tough to come by. Mexican Americans, who found wartime employment plentiful while great numbers of young whites were abroad fighting, saw their jobs arbitrarily and liberally taken away when the G.I.s returned.

It was during World War II that Mexican Americans for the first time, despite having existed as an exploited minority for a century in their own native lands, began forming inner-city gangs. During the thirties, as children of migrant workers from El Paso Texas to California hit their teens and early adulthood they adopted a distinctive dress (zoot suits), musical tastes and slang. These young Mexican Americans were referred to popularly as "Pachucos." In the summer of 1942 a number of Los Angeles based U.S. sailors instigated vigilante confrontations with such youth. The bloody fights were referred to as the "zoot suit riots." American media sensationalized the clashes, and in the process stereo-typed Mexican American youth as a threat to the American way.

For generations the powerful farm owner lobby manipulated the steady flow of immigrant laborers from Mexico. Undocumented workers were (and are) preferred because they have no right to organize or protest poor wages and working conditions. As generations of migrant Mexican families have naturalized as Americans they have become ineligible, by virtue of their rights to organize and bargain collectively, for the agricultural work they brought their families to America to perform. Many have found other forms of work. Many have not, and have repeated the cycle of their Anglo immigrant forebears who created America's first inner city gangs. Over the next several decades Pachucos took on the label "Cholos" (gang members). As economic conditions worsened, gang activity of Cholos became increasingly widespread and violent.

Many African Americans who served in World War II combat theaters were demoralized upon return to America where they had expected to be rewarded for their efforts. The optimists among them kept morale high during the war by talking of how America would finally treat them as equals. Like Mexican Americans, African Americans were the first to be laid off to make way for white male G.I.s. And like Mexican Americans, it was only after centuries of second-class treatment and deteriorating economic conditions that African Americans resorted to organized street gangs of the tradtional, American, violent brand.

The African American gang phenomena is popularly traced to south central Los Angeles in the early 1970s. It was there and then that the now infamous Crips gang was formed. Like the consolidation of the Italian gangs of the roaring twenties for purposes of profiting off the demand for illegal alcohol, the Crips proliferated with the expansion of the American illegal, street drugs demand. As the Crips became increasingly powerful and ruthless, smaller existing Los Angeles area gangs held a convention of sorts and agreed that for their own self protection they would form a confederation to combat the Crips. Thus, was born the Bloods. While the Crips were identified primarily by the donning of blue clothing and bandanas, the Bloods became identified by their red attire.

With the glamorization of ghetto gangs through American record company and radio station promotion ( industries historically heavily influenced by La Cosa Nostra) of a particular variety of rap and hip-hop music, varieties of Crips and Bloods can be found in communities of virtually any size across America. Their members are not necessarily African American. For example, in the year 2007 the biggest problem a small South Texas town is grappling with is an alleged war between local versions of the Crips and Bloods. Both sides are composed of Hispanic and Anglo youth - neither has an African-American member.

Many street gangs today are affiliated with prison gangs. As well-heeled gang kingpins get put away, they maintain their gangs within prison (with orders from from behind bars flowing to the streets) for self protection against other ethnic group prison gangs, and to continue to make money from the outside. Gaudy display of "colors" in clothing among gang members has ebbed coincident with police gang units cracking down on obvious gang indicators. Now, more popularly, tatoos signify gang affiliation.

Every gang from the inception of this country - from the 18th century Anglo paupers to the Crips and Bloods of today - are structured similarly. It is only their exterior veneers that distinguish them. Their core practices, modes of operation and rules remain largely the same. For example, today's El Eme, or Mexican Mafia, is the primary prison based gang that controls organized criminal activity by neighborhood hispanic gangs across America. El Eme's structure mirrors that of the classic American mafia, paramilitary units headed by "generals" (equivalent to mafia dons), captains (mafia capos), lieutenants and soldiers (same titles as mafia).

People join gangs in order to be part of a group that will accept them, and in some ways support them. The mechanism of joinging in simple. By participating in a criminal act with the knowledge of, or possibly for the benefit of, the gang is the route to membership.. By virtue of doing so, as it is known by one's gang sponsors, the neophyte now shares a secret with the gang; the disclosure of which will harm the survival of the individual and the group. By continuing to commit crimes an individual becomes more dependent on the gang for acceptance and survival. One also becomes that more detached and individuated from society at large.

In August 2007 CNN ran a news special where baby blue-eyed Anderson Cooper expressed shock and dismay that "hip hop gansta culture" was glorifying the "no snitching" rule of urban gangs. Cooper acted flabergasted that such a tenet could be popular within ghetto culture. Yet, the code of silence, or as La Cosa Nostra called it "Omerta", is the heart and soul of any gang constitution. It is almost the sine qua non of a gang. In fact, the code of silence of the Italian mob traces back centuries before the advent of the mafia to the mores adopted by the Sicilian populace to resist Spanish rule of their island.

Media, Music and Entertainment industries in America have glorified gangster life so consistently that the operation, codes and mores of any formalized gang in America can readily be understood in short order. Ask any modern urban gangster how times he has watched the movie "Godfather" and he is likely to answer, "fifty times." Ask him how many times he has watched the movie Scarface and he is likely to answer, "three hundred times."

It is argued by some that American culture's celebration of the criminal underworld is what makes it so appealing to today's youth. Remarkably, pundits treat as a given that this is a new phenomena. Upper-middle class and elite talking heads love to excoriate hip-hop music as unique in extolling the virtues of the thug life. Yet, popular media channels have done so since the beginning of the American Republic. A brief review of perhaps the 20th Century's most influential medium, the motion picture, demonstrates this simple truth.

In 1905 a coarsely written and brutally racist version of Reconstruction history was released in novel form, The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon. Dixon touted his book as "one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race." It was so popular among whites in America that for years after its release stage versions of this ode to America's largest and most destructive gang were performed across America. Then, in 1915 the profilic Hollywood icon D.W. Griffith produced the Clansman for the silver screen, retitled as Birth of a Nation. The film unabashadly

lionized the heroics of the post Civil War Confederate underground gang Ku Klux Klan. At the same time it caricatured African Americans in the worst stereotypical light imaginable, and Abraham Lincoln as an idiotic and evil beast. Nonetheless, for at least twenty-four years Birth remained the all-time most viewed movie in America..

It took another ode to the glory of the KKK to topple Birth as the all-time blockbuster.. That honor went to Gone With The Wind. Released in 1939, some Hollywood financial analysts still rank it as the overall top grossing movie of all time when adjusted for inflation. The book the movie was based on has sold 28 million copies to date, and its author Magaret Mitchell was awarded the pulitzer prize for what deputy editor of the Washington Post Book World recently called an "overlong, patently racist paean to the glorious Confederacy."

Through the late twenties into the early thirties scores of lesser known films which tended to glorify the life of gangsters showed in American theaters. The careers of many American film icons were literally made by playing made men. In the thirties it was George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. By the early thirties the Hays Production Code (content screening agency of the film industry) had had enough. It put out provisions banning the continued positive portrayals of bad guys. Robinson and Cagney were then cast as criminal cops, carrying on their delinquent hijinks from the inside. By the late thirties and early forties film noir became vogue, and the criminal was back in. All told, fourteen Hollywood actors - including such box office legends as Rod Steiger, Jason Robards, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino - have portrayed Al Capone in feature length films.

The seventies was boom time for the mafia gangster film. In 1972 The Godfather broke box office records. Scorsese cashed in the next year with Mean Streets, only to be outdone in 1974 by The Godfather II.

In 1983 the remake of the classic Scarface, with Al Pacino playing the Cuban immigrant gang jefe Tony Montana, ushered in a new era of gangster movie. Scorsese jumped on the bandwagon again in 1990 attempting to resurrect the glory of the Italian gang with Goodfellas. A year later came a brand new genre with the modern urban street gang classic Boyz in the Hood. That was followed by scores of movies up to the present portraying - and in many ways paying homage to - street gang culture.

Concurrent with the rise of popularity of ghetto gang bang culture film has been the pervasive rise of Hip Hop music. Right wing radio hosts regularly assign Hip Hop as the cause of numerous social ills. Not only is the assignation historically short sighted, it also incorrectly annoints artists as the primary cause of the negatives (myscegnation, racial self-abnegation, violence, and gang glorification). It ignores that the Hip Hop (or Rap) genre was begun by, and brought to prominence by, many musically gifted and socially conscious artists. It ignores the responsibilities of those controlling the recording, distribution and radio industries who have systematically weeded out such talent in favor of bling, sex, drugs, and gang banging.

Does this take us full circle? Is it the red, white, and blue American corporations that are filling the airwaves with musically inept, lyrically sadistic trash? Is it corporate America that wants youth distracted by drugs and sex, and kept in fear of random, senseless violence? Why have they silenced the socially prophetic Mos Def, Dead Prez, and Public Enemy? Why is Madison Avenue putting out a commercial about how absurd it would be for a Hip Hopper (50 Cent) to be conducting a symphony orchastra, when Hip Hop legend Wyclef Jean has been leading orchastras in an exceedingly competent fashion for years? Why are record companies and music video stations promoting the bling/sex/drug thug life at every turn when Hip Hop icon Chuck D has for many years been asking such criminals, "what you gonna do to get paid, step on the rest of the 'hood till the drug raid?" Perhaps it the very roots of Hip Hop - the lyrics pointing out what is racist, sexist, and criminally capitalistic in corporate America - that they are trying to divert attention from by kidnapping that very genre.

The website Davey D's Hip Hop Corner: The New Source For The Hip Hop Generation contains several essays and articles detailing how record company and broadcasting executives have with malice aforethouth "stole the soul" of Hip Hop music, and replaced it with lyrical worship of degredation and quick wealth obtained by any means necessary.

When considered in conjunction with American gang history, Davey D's material makes one wonder who are the more pernicious criminals - those wearing their criminality on their sleaves in the ghettos and barrios or those in suits and ties promoting the gang lifestyle while perpetuating the economic conditions that have fomented gang formation since the birth of our nation?