The Globe’s Ideas section weighed in on Gangs of New York, arguing that the film a) gets history wrong - common complaint and b) that it would have been better to make a film about 18th century Boston mobs as the founding of our nation.
But if Scorsese and his handlers at Miramax had been able to look beyond their TriBeCa environs, they might have been able to keep their “America was born in the streets” tag-line without rewriting history. They just would have had to change the sets and costumes. Because in fact, the streets that birthed America were largely Boston streets, and the midwives weren’t 19th-century gangs, they were 18th-century mobs.
The most immediate thought I had was that the Cambridge environs of this writer and his American Prospect handlers isn’t much less tony or detached than TriBeCa. But even more, it seemed the author missed the point. The whole project of GoNY was to assert that traditional mythologies of the nation’s origins - Revolutionary New England and, secondarily, the Civil War battlefield - don’t really capture the nation as we now know it - an industrialized, multi-ethnic yet centralized society which has only superficial relation to the decentralized Federalist vision of the Revolution. One might disagree with that kind of argument (it, too, poses an origin myth of sorts). And certainly the film, as I’ve written, doesn’t do the best job of dramatizing its historical project. But the version of history isn’t simply a mistake or Hollywoodizing against fact.
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