Staten Island’s political separateness has a long history. Phillip Papas, in That Ever Loyal Island, reports that when the American Revolution broke out, “99 percent of Staten Islanders remained loyal to the Crown by defying the colonial resistance movement and refusing to support American independence.” Staten Islanders clashed with others in the New York state government, and “the Staten Island delegates tried to thwart every measure that strengthened the colonial protest movement.”
Even Pete Davidson, who is from Staten Island and starred in The King of Staten Island, shits on Staten Island. “A bunch of Trump-supporting fucking jerk offs. Fuck them,” he told an interviewer. Additional comments Davidson has made on his home borough include “Hurricane Sandy should have finished the job,” “[it’s] the herpes of the five boroughs,” “a terrible borough, filled with horrible people.” “I know Staten Island isn’t all heroin and racist cops, you know,” he said. “It also has meth and racist firefighters.” (Despite all that, he still hangs out here a lot.) Staten Island may have given the world the Wu-Tang Clan, but not only did Staten Island vote for Trump, it gave him 82 percent of the vote in the 2016 Republican primary, the highest percentage of anywhere in the state.
And yet: Staten Island is complicated. In 2016, support for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton was far higher in Staten Island than Manhattan. Staten Island is the most union-dense borough in New York City and probably one of the most pro-union counties in America. (I’ve never been to another place where you might openly talk to strangers in a deli about unions as casually as you would a baseball game.) And in 2022, Staten Island was where Amazon warehouse workers finally defeated the Bezos machine in a union election, creating “one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation.” To see Staten Island as a nest of reactionary suburbanites is a mistake. When you look beneath the surface, Staten Island has its own unique history of popular struggle.
Historically, when things got too hot for revolutionaries in their homelands, some of them found themselves hiding out on Staten Island. Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary and independence fighter sometimes called the “Hungarian George Washington,” stayed on the Island. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the 19th-century Irish republican rebel who has been called “the first terrorist” for organizing the “dynamite campaign” against Britain, went to live on Staten Island after being exiled by the British. Rossa continued organizing against Britain from his New York home, and in his memoirs issued a stirring defense of being “mad”: