A few days ago, Vance was questioned about some remarks he’d made to a far-right podcaster:
You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences. You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.
Asked about this a few days ago, he skipped the chance to save his bacon and doubled down (just like he did when it came to childless cat ladies) declaring: “Has anyone ever seen the movie Gangs of New York? That’s what I’m talking about. You know, when you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in the country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.”
Film criticism isn’t really a job requirement for a vice president, but basic mastery of facts should be—or to lower the bar really far, not saying super-stupid shit. Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York is about the rivalry between the immigrant Irish Catholics in the slums of 1850s Manhattan and their enemies, the Bowery Boys, who in some iterations were a gang tied to the anti-immigration Know Nothing Party. The violence at the heart of the movie is occasioned by an ethnic enclave of older white immigrants who are hostile to newcomers, specifically to Irish Catholics. The villain of the movie is gang leader Bill the Butcher, played with oily hair and campy menace by Daniel Day Lewis. The Irish fight back, but their violence seems generated by this malevolent hostility.
Gangs of New York is loosely drawn from Herbert Asbury’s lurid 1928 history of the New York underworld before the Civil War. Scorsese’s Bill the Butcher is based on the New Jersey-born butcher, gang leader, and brawler William Poole (most of the other characters in the film are fictional). Here’s a bit of what Poole was like, as reported in the New York Daily Herald in 1846: “William Poole and Smith Ackerman were amusing themselves by putting two dogs to fight in Christopher Street, creating a most disgraceful riot.” When someone tried to stop the fight, Ackerman “knocked him down and nearly gouged out his left eye,” and he and Poole were arrested.
But a lot of his violence wasn’t just recreational; he was a nativist “shoulder hitter” intimidating voters at the polls and later running a saloon in which Catholics—“anyone who didn’t eat meat on Friday”—were unwelcome. In 1855, in a brawl with the noted pugilist Tipperary-born John Morrissey, he was fatally wounded and on his deathbed, reported the New York Times, he declared “I think I am a goner. If I die, I die a true American, and what grieves me most is, thinking that I’ve been murdered by a set of Irish—by Morrissey in particular.”
