A Few Points About Scorsese's Five Points

In a last moment of calm before the climax of Martin Scorsese's new movie, "Gangs of New York," the Protestant and Catholic combatants bow their heads to pray. The familiar irony of the moment is that the warring parties have created difference out of what they hold in common. Scorsese's movie is the story of how the arrival of Irish immigrants after the Famine turned New York's desperately poor slums into battlefields, and the place of religion in those struggles.

But did Scorsese get his history right? We talked to Noel Ignatiev, author of "How the Irish Became White" about the racial, religious and economic divisions of the period, and found that the causes of the violence were even more painful than "Gangs of New York" shows.

Did you find the movie accurate?
A lot of the timing is wrong. The book the movie was based upon, Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York," written 80 years after the fact in the 1920s, did its best to sensationalize the actual events and the movie takes liberties with the book. A dramatist is entitled to do that, but we should judge the movie as drama and not history.

Bill Cutting, Daniel Day Lewis's character, was a nativist, an anti-immigrant. But he also seemed to be motivated by his Protestant faith. Did those things really go together?
Well, what motivated him was anti-Catholicism. It was not exactly religion, unless you call hatred of popery a religion. It's a kind of bigoted mainstream American Protestantism.

Were there nativists like Bill?
The character he's based on, according to the book, was killed in the 1840s, long before the movie takes place, and not in a brawl with Catholics, but in some kind of a sordid brawl among his own. But yes, there were Protestant-Catholic brawls in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and elsewhere. A convent was burned in Boston. There were riots in Philadephia, in which Protestants attempted to burn a Catholic church. These were anti-Catholic or anti-Irish. Sometimes it was just anti-foreigner, but it was mainly anti-Irish. It was more nativist than Protestant, but religion became a kind of fuel for it.

In New York, after the Philadelphia trouble, the Catholic archbishop said,"If anyone lays a finger on a church in New York City, they'll turn the city into another Moscow," referring to Napoleon's army burning the Russian city. So nothing got to quite the point in New York as it did in Philadelphia, but there were brawls.

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