Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [601]
Stopping or slowing the onrush seemed the only answer. If the government, through its tariff and other policies, could extend protection to “rich capitalists, to mammoth manufacturers, extensive railroad speculators and contractors in the public works,” why not protect workers by putting a tariff on people as well as commodities? In the boom era, however, most erstwhile allies were nowhere in sight or actively opposed to immigration restriction. Many old-timers recognized that the faucets of imported labor power were fixed in a wide-open position, that the New York working class would soon be dominated by immigrants, and that nativism was a strategy without a future. Some native-born artisans, accordingly, set out to make common cause with English Chartists, German socialists, and Irish nationalists. Others would nevertheless continue to press restrictionist demands, and street violence would flare up in the 1850s.
Whenever the crackle of street fighting subsided—or perhaps precisely when it was most furious—combative young American, German, and Irish workingmen discovered they had much in common. Many shared a visceral distaste for bourgeois culture, with its exaltation of piety and sobriety, self-control and industriousness, female domesticity and refined respectability. Many working-class men did embrace such virtues, of course, but others rejected definitions of male success that poorly paid proletarians found increasingly impossible to meet.
Some immigrants were drawn to the party of the refined; others joined the ranks of the rude boys—and transformed them into “b’hoys.” The b’hoy was a multiethnic construction, part native American rowdy, part Irish “jackeen,” part German “younker” (Kleindeutschland grocery clerks who expressed their Americanness by greasing their hair and wearing loud checked clothes to dance halls, rather than wearing the old costumes and singing the old songs with their elders in the beer halls).
This new youth culture fashioned its self-image not at work but at play—and the bastion of b’hoydom was the Bowery, long a site of rough sports for adolescents and apprentices, more recently a center of commercial entertainment. After work, rambunctious young men, free of family responsibilities and with enough money in their pockets to indulge the less expensive pleasures, rolled out of their bachelor boardinghouses in the surrounding heavily male wards and headed for the Bowery’s theaters, brothels, and dance halls.
They were usually clad in colorful attire, not bourgeois black—either the red flannel of their volunteer fire company, the costume of their gang, or the regalia of a working-class dandy. B’hoys loved dressing “high,” in mocking parody of Broadway’s exquisites—sidelocks heavily greased with soap, stovepipe hat perched on head, cigar or chaw in mouth, red shirt, black silk tie, flaring trousers, high-heeled calfskin boots. And they preened and promenaded with swaggering bravado, not proper decorum: “He rolls down the Bowery a perfect Meteor,” said one observer.
Florid body language found its counterpart in “flash talk.” The word “slang,” meaning “illegitimate language,” first came into use around 1850, and Boweryites introduced slang terms by the bushelful: “chum,” “kick the bucket,” “going on a bender,” “pal,” “blow-out,” and “So long!” “Many of slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, are powerful words,” Walt Whitman observed, and his poetry so reflected their defiant vitality that more than one reviewer observed: “He is the ‘Bowery Bhoy’ in literature.”
Many spent the bulk of their time in taverns, which the immigrants completely refashioned. In the 1840s the traditional English-style artisanal gathering place, where craftsmen passed a leisurely evening drinking ale and brandy and playing checkers, dominoes, or billiards, gave way to rural-Irish-style establishments, usually named for the owner. Most often found in a corner store or perhaps a cellar, these taverns—more often called “saloons