Rats I: Bored in Gotham

In Brief

During a recent bout of wanderlust, History House turned its attention to the treasure trove that is the New York Public Library. Inside we discovered, amongst other things, that New York City circa 1860 was just as much fun as New York City today. A look back at original newspaper headlines of the day clearly demonstrates how New York's particular brand of charm has been a part of her all the while.

Party On

You might also be interested in: Rats II: Man vs. Vermin New York's finest hour: the rat-bait. What A Gas: Part I Who discovered nitrous and why did it take them so long? Eugenics Part I: You Can’t Keep a Good Idiot Down Nineteenth Century eugenics gives 'good breeding' a whole new meaning. The Rise of the English Town by Cristopher Chalklin (4/5) This survey is one of those books you read in a couple of hours and then go check out half the books in the bibliography. If you want a crash course on how the industrial revolution changed the cities of the United Kingdom (and particularly England) this is where you start. Average wages of a manual laborer in 1700? It's here. When did mortgages become available? Newspapers? All here. A fascinating and quick read that surveys the end of the medieval and the beginning of the modern in Britain. Read more at Amazon.com

It seems to us that the rowdy class of New York has always been dealt with too tenderly. Their promiscuous stabbing affrays have come to be regarded too much in the light of a venial offense, attributable simply to a little harmless exuberance of the spirits, or, it might be, an extra glass of liquor. -New York Times editorial September 10, 1866

With the end of the Civil War (1861-65), the United States found its collective attention wandering and people needed things to do. In New York City it seems that a good number of locals contented themselves with prodigious excess, a phenomenon that did not go unnoticed. Normally an observant and sensible paper, The New York Times, in a huff of civic pride, jumped to the city's defense:

A weekly paper [1], which has recently charged that drunkenness is a wide-spread vice among American ladies, now charges our New York society at large with an amount of general vice altogether without parallel. We are told that "there is at the present moment a greater amount of absolute prostitution, of hard drinking among all classes, high and low, of gambling... of a diffused cynical disgard of morality and religion, in the City of New York than has ever before been known in its history..."

Root, Root, Root For the Home Team

In the best tradition of editorial rhetoric, the Times resorted to simply pointing the finger of judgment elsewhere:

Does the fault-finder... believe that the people of New York are harder drinkers than those of Chicago? Let him go there.[2]

A short four weeks passed before the Times ran another article, this one entitled, "Another Police Raid Needed":

Why should not the Superintendent and his energetic staff set to work... and rid the City of some two or three thousand professional rowdies -- rowdies of the class of those who set upon a quiet citizen in a crowded part of the Bowery on Saturday afternoon, and all but succeeded in beating off the officers who came to the victim's rescue?

Possibly embarrassed about eating crow, it tempered these encouragements with

Considering the vast population of New York, these violent ruffians make up but the merest fraction of the whole number of citizens.[3]

A little more than half a year passed when, in the face of mounting evidence, the Times finally decided there might be something to this business about more trouble on the streets. It devoted a substantial article to the subject of increasing crime, entitled, "The Disorderly Portion of Our Population." It read, in part, that

The number of criminals of the higher grades in New York is probably not out of proportion to its size, comparing its vast and mixed population with that of provincial towns... It must, of course, be assumed that out of this long list of lawless a very considerable proportion might properly be set down in the category of drunkards, or of persons more or less addicted to excessive drinking.

The More You Tighten Your Grip...

The concerned city of New York tried to legislate out some of these ruffians, but mostly had to settle for tighter controls on liquor. It passed Excise Laws, which in essence denied liquor permits to establishments deemed unworthy. Prostitution woes a decade later led the city to amend the Excise Laws to include brothels in the "unworthy" category. The city's definition of a brothel was quite tight: any establishment employing females was branded as such. Some of the "so-called respectable places of the kind" attempted to lever sufficient influence to retain their licenses, but the city "turned a deaf ear to all such petitions, believing that no girl of woman of good moral character will accept employment in these places, no matter how pressing [her] pecuniary wants."[4]

Bored New Yorkers, dealing with tighter liquor laws and changing attitudes that no longer regarded whoring as good clean fun, diverted themselves through various spectator sports. The city had, at that point, a strong history of bare-knuckle fighting; but, while amusing and sometimes profitable, pugilism exacted a high price from contenders. Nevertheless, this activity might have proved entertaining enough to rowdies after the Civil War had not handguns come into fashion. Quick-draw contests soon overtook boxing as the sport of choice but did not themselves last long for want of surviving participants.

Therein began a downward spiral of blood sports, as municipal controls tightened even further and the novelty of each new game wore thin. Boxing and quick-draws were quickly followed by dog- and cockfights, which soon enough led to bull- and bearbaiting. In the sport of bearbaiting, Denis Tilden Lynch avers in The Wild Seventies,

A lone bear, muzzled, was chained by a hind leg to a stake in the center of a pit into which several English bulldogs or Irish wolfhounds were thrust simultaneously to harry and destroy him.[5]

Gateway Baiting

Eventually even these more exotic diversions grew familiar. Thus was born the (not quite) inspired bull and bear fight, which was less than a roaring success:

...neither animal showed any desire to fight, and if left together in an open field perfectly untrammeled they would not approach each other. They would fight yesterday only after persistent beating, punching and pulling of the ropes.

Stumbling about, the animals scattered spectators, and, in an effort to escape, the bear crept through a window where two small boys were playing, and they "fled in great fright." Similar cockamamie matchings would continue well into the 1890s, but alternate participant species were introduced after the metropolitan bear supply waned.

Such antics attracted the attention of one Henry Bergh, and his flagship organization, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Next time, Bergh and company, having shut down the mortal combat of more appealing critters, bring dignity to NYC by saving the cute and cuddly rat.

Footnotes

1. Probably the New York Herald.
2. New York Times editorial, August 12, 1866.
3. New York Times editorial, September 10, 1866
4. New York Times, April 5, 1875
5. Lynch, p.302. Lynch notes that the future president Theodore Roosevelt disliked bear baiters, and attempted to thwart them many times during his tenure as police commissioner of New York.

Bibliography

1. Denis Tilden Lynch. The Wild Seventies. Kennikat Press, 1971.
2. Luc Sante. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. Random House, 1992.
3. . "". The New York Times, . 1851-1876.
4. . "". The New York Tribune, . 1851-1885.

 
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