Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [392]
Minstrelsy was an exercise in creative cultural amalgamation, something for which New York would become famous. It blended black lore with white humor, black banjo with Irish fiddle, African-based dance with British reels. Rice’s act embraced the promiscuous racial reality of America—nowhere more dramatically evident than in the Five Points—yet it was received with greatest enthusiasm by white Boweryites, who were increasingly concerned to demarcate their culture from that of blacks. By constructing a spurious image of “blackness,” it helped develop a category of “whiteness.” At the Bowery Theater, Anglo- and Irish-Americans, in laughing together at “niggers,” forged a common class identity built on a sense of white supremacy.
RUNNING WITH THE MACHINE
Whiteness, however, was far too broad a social category to be serviceable as an everyday identity marker, especially given the diminishing percentage of African Americans in the city. Working-class communities spawned numerous social organizations, keyed to work or neighborhood, within which working-class males gained a sense of participation and belonging.
With bucket brigades obsolete—the department formally abandoned them in 1820—nrefighting became ever less a civic enterprise, ever more the private prerogative of the (as of 1825) fifty volunteer fire companies. These groups were changing, getting younger, and drawing in far more journeymen and laborers than masters and merchants. They were evolving into a species of workingmen’s fraternal order, replete with mottoes, ornate insignias, and names that honored heroes and heroines of the republic, the theater, or the turf. After work, mechanics would rendezvous at their engine house, socializing while they polished their elaborately painted machines, or they would repair to the particular bar or oyster house their company had adopted as a haunt. The volunteers developed tremendous esprit de corps and marched together, with their gleaming machines and colorful banners, in every municipal celebration.
Rivalry between these fiercely proud and intensely macho companies led to regular scuffles, ranging from prankish raids on rival firehouses to capture their regalia right on up to battles over who had the rights to a particular fire. At first alarm, some companies would send out an advance guard to put a barrel over the nearest hydrant, sit atop it, and defend it until his comrades arrived. This precipitated fierce fights for possession of the water supply, rather than conjoint concentration on wetting down the flames.
Such combat drew in others. Most fire companies attracted a set of hangers-on, usually boys (over half the school-age population was not in school). The youths were drawn by the excitement and physicality of firefighting: nothing else in urban life could match it. There were also large numbers of men—temporarily or seasonally or permanently unemployed—who enlisted as informal volunteers, helping to drag the engines. In 1824 the Common Council, complaining of the number of boys, idlers, and vagabonds hanging about the firehouses, ordered the companies to dispense with their services, but soon they were back again.
Clusters of young workingmen also formed themselves into gangs. These groups swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street or their trade. Butcher’s-boy gangs like the Highbinders were particularly obstreperous, hardened as they were by the bloody work of dispatching cattle,