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https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/labor

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Origins of The Labor Movement

The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794 marks the beginning of sustained trade union organization among American workers.
WATCH: The Labor Movement
From that time on, local craft unions proliferated in the cities, publishing lists of "prices" for their work, defending their trades against diluted and cheap labor and, increasingly, demanding a shorter workday in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Thus a job-conscious orientation was quick to emerge, and in its wake there followed the key structural elements characterizing American trade unionism. First, with the formation in 1827 of the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia, central labor bodies began uniting craft unions within a single city, and then, with the creation of the International Typographical Union in 1852, national unions began bringing together local unions of the same trade from across the United States and Canada (hence the frequent union designation "international"). Although the factory system was springing up during these years, industrial workers played little part in the early trade union development. In the 19th century, trade unionism was mainly a movement of skilled workers.

Did you know? In 2009, 12 percent of American workers belonged to unions.

Early Labor Unions

The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship. The transforming economic changes of industrial capitalism ran counter to labor's vision. The result, as early labor leaders saw it, was to raise up "two distinct classes, the rich and the poor." Beginning with the workingmen's parties of the 1830s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century. Most notable were the National Labor Union, launched in 1866, and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880s.

On their face, these reform movements might have seemed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing broadly to all "producers" rather than strictly to wageworkers, and eschewing the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. But contemporaries saw no contradiction: trade unionism tended to the workers' immediate needs, labor reform to their higher hopes. The two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in a common working-class constituency and to some degree sharing a common leadership. But equally important, they were strands that had to be kept operationally separate and functionally distinct.
PHOTOS: These Appalling Images Exposed Child Labor in America
American Federation of Labor

During the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed labor reform purposes. When it refused, they joined in December 1886 to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The new federation marked a break with the past, for it denied to labor reform any further role in the struggles of American workers. In part, the assertion of trade union supremacy stemmed from an undeniable reality. As industrialism matured, labor reform lost its meaning-hence the confusion and ultimate failure of the Knights of Labor. Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution. The founders of theAFL translated this notion into the principle of "pure and simple" unionism: only by self-organization along occupational lines and by a concentration on job-conscious goals would the worker be "furnished with the weapons which shall secure his industrial emancipation."

That class formulation necessarily defined trade unionism as the movement of the entire working class. The AFL asserted as a formal policy that it represented all workers, irrespective of skill, race, religion, nationality or gender. But the national unions that had created the AFL in fact comprised only the skilled trades. Almost at once, therefore, the trade union movement encountered a dilemma: How to square ideological aspirations against contrary institutional realities?

Discrimination in The Labor Movement

As sweeping technological change began to undermine the craft system of production, some national unions did move toward an industrial structure, most notably in coal mining and the garment trades. But most craft unions either refused or, as in iron and steel and in meat-packing, failed to organize the less skilled. And since skill lines tended to conform to racial, ethnic and gender divisions, the trade union movement took on a racist and sexist coloration as well. For a short period, the AFL resisted that tendency. But in 1895, unable to launch an interracial machinists' union of its own, the Federation reversed an earlier principled decision and chartered the whites-only International Association of Machinists. Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement. In 1902, blacks made up scarcely 3 percent of total membership, most of them segregated in Jim Crow locals. In the case of women and eastern European immigrants, a similar devolution occurred-welcomed as equals in theory, excluded or segregated in practice. (Only the fate of Asian workers was unproblematic; their rights had never been asserted by the AFLin the first place.)

Samuel Gompers

Gompers justified the subordination of principle to organizational reality on the constitutional grounds of "trade autonomy," by which each national union was assured the right to regulate its own internal affairs. But the organizational dynamism of the labor movement was in fact located in the national unions. Only as they experienced inner change might the labor movement expand beyond the narrow limits-roughly 10 percent of the labor force-at which it stabilized before World War I.

In the political realm, the founding doctrine of pure-and-simple unionism meant an arm's-length relationship to the state and the least possible entanglement in partisan politics. A total separation had, of course, never been seriously contemplated; some objectives, such as immigration restriction, could be achieved only through state action, and the predecessor to the AFL, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (1881), had in fact been created to serve as labor's lobbying arm in Washington. Partly because of the lure of progressive labor legislation, even more in response to increasingly damaging court attacks on the trade unions, political activity quickened after 1900. With the enunciation of Labor's Bill of Grievances (1906), the AFL laid down a challenge to the major parties. Henceforth it would campaign for its friends and seek the defeat of its enemies.

This nonpartisan entry into electoral politics, paradoxically, undercut the left-wing advocates of an independent working-class politics. That question had been repeatedly debated within theAFL, first in 1890 over Socialist Labor party representation, then in 1893-1894 over an alliance with the Populist Party and after 1901 over affiliation with the Socialist party of America. Although Gompers prevailed each time, he never found it easy. Now, as labor's leverage with the major parties began to pay off, Gompers had an effective answer to his critics on the left: the labor movement could not afford to waste its political capital on socialist parties or independent politics. When that nonpartisan strategy failed, as it did in the reaction following World War I, an independent political strategy took hold, first through the robust campaigning of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, and in 1924 through labor's endorsement of Robert La Follette on the Progressive ticket. By then, however, the Republican administration was moderating its hard line, evident especially in Herbert Hoover's efforts to resolve the simmering crises in mining and on the railroads. In response, the trade unions abandoned the Progressive party, retreated to nonpartisanship, and, as their power waned, lapsed into inactivity.

The Labor Movement and The Great Depression
WATCH: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal
It took the Great Depression to knock the labor movement off dead center. The discontent of industrial workers, combined with New Deal collective bargaining legislation, at last brought the great mass production industries within striking distance. When the craft unions stymied the ALF's organizing efforts, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and his followers broke away in 1935 and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which crucially aided the emerging unions in auto, rubber, steel and other basic industries. In 1938 the CIO was formally established as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions and collective bargaining had taken hold throughout the industrial economy.

In politics, its enhanced power led the union movement not to a new departure but to a variant on the policy of nonpartisanship. As far back as the Progressive Era, organized labor had been drifting toward the Democratic party, partly because of the latter's greater programmatic appeal, perhaps even more because of its ethno-cultural basis of support within an increasingly "new" immigrant working class. With the coming of Roosevelt's New Deal, this incipient alliance solidified, and from 1936 onward the Democratic Party could count on-and came to rely on-the campaigning resources of the labor movement.

Collective Bargaining

That this alliance partook of the nonpartisan logic of Gompers's authorship-too much was at stake for organized labor to waste its political capital on third parties-became clear in the unsettled period of the early cold war. Not only did theCIO oppose the Progressive party of 1948, but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supported Henry Wallace for the presidency that year.

The formation of the AFL-CIOin 1955 visibly testified to the powerful continuities persisting through the age of industrial unionism. Above all, the central purpose remained what it had always been-to advance the economic and job interests of the union membership. Collective bargaining performed impressively after World War II, more than tripling weekly earnings in manufacturing between 1945 and 1970, gaining for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace. But if the benefits were greater and if they went to more people, the basic job-conscious thrust remained intact. Organized labor was still a sectional movement, covering at most only a third of America's wage earners and inaccessible to those cut off in the low-wage secondary labor market.

Women and Minorities in the Labor Movement

Nothing better captures the uneasy amalgam of old and new in the postwar labor movement than the treatment of minorities and women who flocked in, initially from the mass production industries, but after 1960 from the public and service sectors as well. Labor's historic commitment to racial and gender equality was thereby much strengthened, but not to the point of challenging the status quo within the labor movement itself. Thus the leadership structure remained largely closed to minorities-as did the skilled jobs that were historically the preserve of white male workers-notoriously so in the construction trades but in the industrial unions as well. Yet the AFL-CIOplayed a crucial role in the battle for civil rights legislation in 1964-1965. That this legislation might be directed against discriminatory trade union practices was anticipated (and quietly welcomed) by the more progressive labor leaders. But more significant was the meaning they found in championing this kind of reform: the chance to act on the broad ideals of the labor movement. And, so motivated, they deployed labor's power with great effect in the achievement of John F. Kennedy's and Lyndon B. Johnson 's domestic programs during the 1960s.

Decline in Unions

This was ultimately economic, not political power, however, and as organized labor's grip on the industrial sector began to weaken, so did its political capability. From the early 1970s onward, new competitive forces swept through the heavily unionized industries, set off by deregulation in communications and transportation, by industrial restructuring and by an unprecedented onslaught of foreign goods. As oligopolistic and regulated market structures broke down, nonunion competition spurted, concession bargaining became widespread and plant closings decimated union memberships. The once-celebrated National Labor Relations Act increasingly hamstrung the labor movement; an all-out reform campaign to get the law amended failed in 1978. And with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, there came to power an anti-union administration the likes of which had not been seen since the Harding era.

Between 1975 and 1985, union membership fell by 5 million. In manufacturing, the unionized portion of the labor force dropped below 25 percent, while mining and construction, once labor's flagship industries, were decimated. Only in the public sector did the unions hold their own. By the end of the 1980s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, half the proportion of the early 1950s.

The labor movement has never been swift to change. But if the new high-tech and service sectors seemed beyond its reach in 1989, so did the mass production industries in 1929. There is a silver lining: Compared to the old AFL, organized labor is today much more diverse and broadly based: In 2018, of the 14.7 million wage and salary workers who were part of a union (compared to 17.7 million in 1983), 25 percent are women and 28 percent are Black.

Sources

TED: The Economics Daily. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction.

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https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/decline-of-global-extreme-poverty-continues-but-has-slowed-world-bank

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2018 Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

The percentage of people living in extreme poverty globally fell to a new low of 10 percent in 2015 - the latest number available - down from 11 percent in 2013, reflecting steady but slowing progress, World Bank data show. The number of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell during this period by 68 million to 736 million.

" Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history. This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time," World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. "But if we are going to end poverty by 2030, we need much more investment, particularly in building human capital, to help promote the inclusive growth it will take to reach the remaining poor. For their sake, we cannot fail."

Despite the tremendous progress in reducing extreme poverty, rates remain stubbornly high in low-income countries and those affected by conflict and political upheaval.

The estimates will be published in "Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle," a report to be released on Oct. 17, End Poverty Day.

About half of the world's countries now have poverty rates below 3 percent, but the report finds that the world as a whole is not on track to achieve the target of less than 3 percent of the world living in extreme poverty by 2030. In the 25 years from 1990 to 2015, the extreme poverty rate dropped an average of a percentage point per year - from nearly 36% to 10%. But the rate dropped only one percentage point in the two years from 2013 to 2015.

The deceleration in global numbers stems mainly from an increasing concentration of extreme poverty in regions where poverty reduction has lagged. A case in point is Sub-Saharan Africa, where, under all but the most optimistic scenarios, poverty will remain in double digits by 2030, absent significant shifts in policy. Slowing declines in poverty also reflect falling commodity prices, conflict, and other economic challenges for developing countries.

The World Bank's preliminary forecast is that extreme poverty has declined to 8.6 percent in 2018.

The table below summarizes poverty estimates in 2013 and 2015, globally and for all World Bank regions. The international poverty line is currently valued at $1.90 in terms of 2011 purchasing power parity, which equalizes its purchasing power across all countries and currencies.

Two regions, East Asia and Pacific and Europe and Central Asia, have reduced extreme poverty to below 3 percent. The Middle East and North Africa region had previously been below 3 percent in 2013, but conflict in Syria and Yemen raised its poverty rate in 2015.

The report will also provide data on the World Bank's other main goal: increasing shared prosperity, defined as raising the incomes of the bottom 40 percent in each country.

In addition, it will explore new ways of looking at and measuring poverty. The new measures will allow the World Bank to better monitor poverty in all countries, in multiple aspects of life, and for all individuals in every household.

The report launch event will be webcast on World Bank Live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 17.

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Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but Has Slowed: World Bank

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Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

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xavier tijerina-3rd

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https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people

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i would pick Henry ford because he was a good man to the workers and he was as rich man

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1. The Forty Thieves

One of Gotham's earliest known criminal outfits, the Forty Thieves operated between the 1820s and 1850s in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. This band of Irish thugs, pickpockets and ne'er-do-wells first came together in a grocery store and dive bar owned by a woman named Rosanna Peers. Under the leadership of Edward Coleman-a notorious rogue who was later hanged for beating his wife to death-what started as a motley group of petty criminals soon blossomed into a feared street gang with its own rules and organizational structure. Members of the Forty Thieves reportedly had quotas that required them to steal a certain amount of goods each day or face expulsion. What's more, the gang even franchised itself in the form of the "Forty Little Thieves," a collection of juvenile apprentices who served as pickpockets and lookouts.

2. The Bowery Boys

One of the most storied gangs of New York, the Bowery Boys were a band of lower Manhattan toughs who clashed with the Irish Five Points gangs during the 1840s, 50s and 60s. Unlike some of their criminal counterparts, most of the Bowery Boys dressed in elegant clothing and held legitimate employment as printers, mechanics and other apprentice tradesmen. But when they weren't on the job, these young hoodlums haunted the saloons and back alleys of the Bowery and engaged in bloody turf wars with rival gangs like the Dead Rabbits.

The Bowery Boys often acted more as a political club than a mob, and many of their brawls were with supporters of rival politicians. The gang would sometimes even station its members at polling places to intimidate voters into supporting a particular candidate. In return, the gang's home district would receive money and preferential treatment once the politician was in office.

3. The Dead Rabbits

This crew of Irish immigrants was one of the most feared gangs to emerge from Five Points, so named for its location at the intersection of five crooked, narrow, downtown streets. For more than 60 years, Five Points (near modern-day Chinatown) was one of the city's most notorious-and dangerous-neighborhoods. Throughout the 1850s, the Dead Rabbits excelled at robbery, pick-pocketing and brawling-particularly with their sworn enemies, the Bowery Boys. The group was made up mostly of young men, but it wasn't unheard of for women to join in on the violence. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was "Hell-Cat Maggie," a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. While the Rabbits mostly dabbled in petty crime, they were also famous for the events of July 4, 1857, when one of their street fights with the Bowery Boys turned into a bloody riot that killed a dozen people.

The Dead Rabbits supposedly began as an offshoot of another gang called the Roach Guards, but some historians have suggested the two were actually one and the same. In fact, one popular theory argues that the term "dead rabbit" was simply a pejorative used by the Bowery Boys and the New York press in reference to members of the Roach Guards and other Five Points gangs.

4. The Daybreak Boys

New York's 19th-century gang activity wasn't limited to the rough and tumble streets of Manhattan-it also extended into the waters of the East River. The Daybreak Boys were one of the most ruthless crews of "river pirates" who preyed on the city's booming shipping industry during the late 1840s and 1850s. As their name suggests, the Daybreakers- whose leaders went by such colorful monikers as Cow-legged Sam McCarthy and Slobbery Jim -preferred to strike in the hours before dawn. Using small rowboats, these juvenile gangsters would silently row their way alongside anchored shipping vessels. Sneaking aboard, they would steal as much cargo as they could before returning to their dinghies and escaping to a rendezvous point at a gin mill in the Fourth Ward.

To prove their mettle, prospective members were reportedly required to have already killed at least once before joining the group, and the Daybreak Boys were supposedly responsible for more than 30 murders- it wasn't unusual for an unlucky watchman to end up with a slit throat or a fractured skull during one of their robberies. The gang reportedly fell apart in the late 1850s after a police crackdown, but not before they had claimed thousands of dollars in booty.

5. The Whyos

Formed from the remnants of several defunct Five Points outfits, the Whyos were one of the most dominant New York street gangs from the 1860s to the 1890s. The group started out as a loose collection of petty thugs, pickpockets and murderers, but by the 1880s they had graduated to more high-class crime like counterfeiting, prostitution and racketeering. As their grip on Manhattan tightened, many of the gang even opened legitimate side businesses such as casinos and saloons.

They may have masqueraded as upstanding citizens, but the Whyos were still notoriously tough customers. One hood by the name of "Dandy" Johnny Dolan supposedly carried a copper eye gouger and wore shoes outfitted with axe blades. Another Whyo called Piker Ryan was once caught with a detailed price list of all the gruesome deeds he could be hired to perform. A simple punch to the face was only two bucks, chewing off an ear cost $15 and a murder-which Ryan's catalogue described as "doing the big job"-went for the princely sum of $100.

6. The Five Points Gang

This legendary mob came together in the 1890s, when the Italian gangster Paul Kelly united the remaining members of the Dead Rabbits, Whyos and other Five Points gangs under his own banner. From his headquarters in the New Brighton Dance Hall, Kelly marshaled an army of 1,500 thugs in bloody turf wars with his archrivals, a Jewish gang run by the famed hood Monk Eastman. The two groups engaged in constant brawls and once even squared off in a massive gun battle under the Second Avenue elevated train line.

When they weren't participating in Wild West-style shootouts, the Five Pointers ran widespread robbery, racketeering and prostitution rings. They also dabbled in legitimate front businesses and worked as strong-arm men for the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. The gang's influence eventually waned in the 1910s, but not before they had helped train the next generation of mob bosses. Among others, the Five Pointers initiated thugs like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio into a life of organized crime.

7. The Eastman Gang

Led by the Jewish mobster Edward "Monk" Eastman, the Eastman Gang rose to become one of New York's most feared criminal organizations in the 1890s. As the kings of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the 1,200 "Eastmans" raked in huge profits running brothels, protection rackets, drug rings and even murder-for-hire operations. Like their rivals in the Five Points Gang, Eastman's boys also teamed with corrupt politicians in voter fraud. In return, the city's crooked lawmakers turned a blind eye to the gang's illicit activities.

A career criminal, Monk Eastman delighted in violence and was known to personally dish out beatings to his enemies. This hands-on approach proved to be his undoing in 1904, when he was arrested and jailed for a simple street mugging. With their leader behind bars, the Eastmans splintered into several smaller, less powerful factions in the 1910s. Monk Eastman later enlisted in the armed forces and forged a legendary reputation fighting in the trenches of World War I. But while he returned to New York a war hero, the former gang boss's old life ultimately caught up with him, and he was brutally gunned down on a city sidewalk in 1920.

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From river pirates to knife-wielding adolescents, get the facts on seven of 19th century New York's most notorious street gangs.

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I would want to pick Henry Ford because he was wealthy rich and he wasn't so selfish with his money he was actually fair with his it.

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Origins of The Labor Movement

The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794 marks the beginning of sustained trade union organization among American workers.
WATCH: The Labor Movement
From that time on, local craft unions proliferated in the cities, publishing lists of "prices" for their work, defending their trades against diluted and cheap labor and, increasingly, demanding a shorter workday in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Thus a job-conscious orientation was quick to emerge, and in its wake there followed the key structural elements characterizing American trade unionism. First, with the formation in 1827 of the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia, central labor bodies began uniting craft unions within a single city, and then, with the creation of the International Typographical Union in 1852, national unions began bringing together local unions of the same trade from across the United States and Canada (hence the frequent union designation "international"). Although the factory system was springing up during these years, industrial workers played little part in the early trade union development. In the 19th century, trade unionism was mainly a movement of skilled workers.

Did you know? In 2009, 12 percent of American workers belonged to unions.

Early Labor Unions

The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship. The transforming economic changes of industrial capitalism ran counter to labor's vision. The result, as early labor leaders saw it, was to raise up "two distinct classes, the rich and the poor." Beginning with the workingmen's parties of the 1830s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century. Most notable were the National Labor Union, launched in 1866, and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880s.

On their face, these reform movements might have seemed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing broadly to all "producers" rather than strictly to wageworkers, and eschewing the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. But contemporaries saw no contradiction: trade unionism tended to the workers' immediate needs, labor reform to their higher hopes. The two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in a common working-class constituency and to some degree sharing a common leadership. But equally important, they were strands that had to be kept operationally separate and functionally distinct.
PHOTOS: These Appalling Images Exposed Child Labor in America
American Federation of Labor

During the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed labor reform purposes. When it refused, they joined in December 1886 to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The new federation marked a break with the past, for it denied to labor reform any further role in the struggles of American workers. In part, the assertion of trade union supremacy stemmed from an undeniable reality. As industrialism matured, labor reform lost its meaning-hence the confusion and ultimate failure of the Knights of Labor. Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution. The founders of theAFL translated this notion into the principle of "pure and simple" unionism: only by self-organization along occupational lines and by a concentration on job-conscious goals would the worker be "furnished with the weapons which shall secure his industrial emancipation."

That class formulation necessarily defined trade unionism as the movement of the entire working class. The AFL asserted as a formal policy that it represented all workers, irrespective of skill, race, religion, nationality or gender. But the national unions that had created the AFL in fact comprised only the skilled trades. Almost at once, therefore, the trade union movement encountered a dilemma: How to square ideological aspirations against contrary institutional realities?

Discrimination in The Labor Movement

As sweeping technological change began to undermine the craft system of production, some national unions did move toward an industrial structure, most notably in coal mining and the garment trades. But most craft unions either refused or, as in iron and steel and in meat-packing, failed to organize the less skilled. And since skill lines tended to conform to racial, ethnic and gender divisions, the trade union movement took on a racist and sexist coloration as well. For a short period, the AFL resisted that tendency. But in 1895, unable to launch an interracial machinists' union of its own, the Federation reversed an earlier principled decision and chartered the whites-only International Association of Machinists. Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement. In 1902, blacks made up scarcely 3 percent of total membership, most of them segregated in Jim Crow locals. In the case of women and eastern European immigrants, a similar devolution occurred-welcomed as equals in theory, excluded or segregated in practice. (Only the fate of Asian workers was unproblematic; their rights had never been asserted by the AFLin the first place.)

Samuel Gompers

Gompers justified the subordination of principle to organizational reality on the constitutional grounds of "trade autonomy," by which each national union was assured the right to regulate its own internal affairs. But the organizational dynamism of the labor movement was in fact located in the national unions. Only as they experienced inner change might the labor movement expand beyond the narrow limits-roughly 10 percent of the labor force-at which it stabilized before World War I.

In the political realm, the founding doctrine of pure-and-simple unionism meant an arm's-length relationship to the state and the least possible entanglement in partisan politics. A total separation had, of course, never been seriously contemplated; some objectives, such as immigration restriction, could be achieved only through state action, and the predecessor to the AFL, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (1881), had in fact been created to serve as labor's lobbying arm in Washington. Partly because of the lure of progressive labor legislation, even more in response to increasingly damaging court attacks on the trade unions, political activity quickened after 1900. With the enunciation of Labor's Bill of Grievances (1906), the AFL laid down a challenge to the major parties. Henceforth it would campaign for its friends and seek the defeat of its enemies.

This nonpartisan entry into electoral politics, paradoxically, undercut the left-wing advocates of an independent working-class politics. That question had been repeatedly debated within theAFL, first in 1890 over Socialist Labor party representation, then in 1893-1894 over an alliance with the Populist Party and after 1901 over affiliation with the Socialist party of America. Although Gompers prevailed each time, he never found it easy. Now, as labor's leverage with the major parties began to pay off, Gompers had an effective answer to his critics on the left: the labor movement could not afford to waste its political capital on socialist parties or independent politics. When that nonpartisan strategy failed, as it did in the reaction following World War I, an independent political strategy took hold, first through the robust campaigning of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, and in 1924 through labor's endorsement of Robert La Follette on the Progressive ticket. By then, however, the Republican administration was moderating its hard line, evident especially in Herbert Hoover's efforts to resolve the simmering crises in mining and on the railroads. In response, the trade unions abandoned the Progressive party, retreated to nonpartisanship, and, as their power waned, lapsed into inactivity.

The Labor Movement and The Great Depression
WATCH: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal
It took the Great Depression to knock the labor movement off dead center. The discontent of industrial workers, combined with New Deal collective bargaining legislation, at last brought the great mass production industries within striking distance. When the craft unions stymied the ALF's organizing efforts, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and his followers broke away in 1935 and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which crucially aided the emerging unions in auto, rubber, steel and other basic industries. In 1938 the CIO was formally established as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions and collective bargaining had taken hold throughout the industrial economy.

In politics, its enhanced power led the union movement not to a new departure but to a variant on the policy of nonpartisanship. As far back as the Progressive Era, organized labor had been drifting toward the Democratic party, partly because of the latter's greater programmatic appeal, perhaps even more because of its ethno-cultural basis of support within an increasingly "new" immigrant working class. With the coming of Roosevelt's New Deal, this incipient alliance solidified, and from 1936 onward the Democratic Party could count on-and came to rely on-the campaigning resources of the labor movement.

Collective Bargaining

That this alliance partook of the nonpartisan logic of Gompers's authorship-too much was at stake for organized labor to waste its political capital on third parties-became clear in the unsettled period of the early cold war. Not only did theCIO oppose the Progressive party of 1948, but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supported Henry Wallace for the presidency that year.

The formation of the AFL-CIOin 1955 visibly testified to the powerful continuities persisting through the age of industrial unionism. Above all, the central purpose remained what it had always been-to advance the economic and job interests of the union membership. Collective bargaining performed impressively after World War II, more than tripling weekly earnings in manufacturing between 1945 and 1970, gaining for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace. But if the benefits were greater and if they went to more people, the basic job-conscious thrust remained intact. Organized labor was still a sectional movement, covering at most only a third of America's wage earners and inaccessible to those cut off in the low-wage secondary labor market.

Women and Minorities in the Labor Movement

Nothing better captures the uneasy amalgam of old and new in the postwar labor movement than the treatment of minorities and women who flocked in, initially from the mass production industries, but after 1960 from the public and service sectors as well. Labor's historic commitment to racial and gender equality was thereby much strengthened, but not to the point of challenging the status quo within the labor movement itself. Thus the leadership structure remained largely closed to minorities-as did the skilled jobs that were historically the preserve of white male workers-notoriously so in the construction trades but in the industrial unions as well. Yet the AFL-CIOplayed a crucial role in the battle for civil rights legislation in 1964-1965. That this legislation might be directed against discriminatory trade union practices was anticipated (and quietly welcomed) by the more progressive labor leaders. But more significant was the meaning they found in championing this kind of reform: the chance to act on the broad ideals of the labor movement. And, so motivated, they deployed labor's power with great effect in the achievement of John F. Kennedy's and Lyndon B. Johnson 's domestic programs during the 1960s.

Decline in Unions

This was ultimately economic, not political power, however, and as organized labor's grip on the industrial sector began to weaken, so did its political capability. From the early 1970s onward, new competitive forces swept through the heavily unionized industries, set off by deregulation in communications and transportation, by industrial restructuring and by an unprecedented onslaught of foreign goods. As oligopolistic and regulated market structures broke down, nonunion competition spurted, concession bargaining became widespread and plant closings decimated union memberships. The once-celebrated National Labor Relations Act increasingly hamstrung the labor movement; an all-out reform campaign to get the law amended failed in 1978. And with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, there came to power an anti-union administration the likes of which had not been seen since the Harding era.

Between 1975 and 1985, union membership fell by 5 million. In manufacturing, the unionized portion of the labor force dropped below 25 percent, while mining and construction, once labor's flagship industries, were decimated. Only in the public sector did the unions hold their own. By the end of the 1980s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, half the proportion of the early 1950s.

The labor movement has never been swift to change. But if the new high-tech and service sectors seemed beyond its reach in 1989, so did the mass production industries in 1929. There is a silver lining: Compared to the old AFL, organized labor is today much more diverse and broadly based: In 2018, of the 14.7 million wage and salary workers who were part of a union (compared to 17.7 million in 1983), 25 percent are women and 28 percent are Black.

Sources

TED: The Economics Daily. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction.

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I would want to be Henry Ford because he was rich and he was also generous with his wealthy money

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https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/decline-of-global-extreme-poverty-continues-but-has-slowed-world-bank

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2018 Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

The percentage of people living in extreme poverty globally fell to a new low of 10 percent in 2015 - the latest number available - down from 11 percent in 2013, reflecting steady but slowing progress, World Bank data show. The number of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell during this period by 68 million to 736 million.

" Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history. This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time," World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. "But if we are going to end poverty by 2030, we need much more investment, particularly in building human capital, to help promote the inclusive growth it will take to reach the remaining poor. For their sake, we cannot fail."

Despite the tremendous progress in reducing extreme poverty, rates remain stubbornly high in low-income countries and those affected by conflict and political upheaval.

The estimates will be published in "Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle," a report to be released on Oct. 17, End Poverty Day.

About half of the world's countries now have poverty rates below 3 percent, but the report finds that the world as a whole is not on track to achieve the target of less than 3 percent of the world living in extreme poverty by 2030. In the 25 years from 1990 to 2015, the extreme poverty rate dropped an average of a percentage point per year - from nearly 36% to 10%. But the rate dropped only one percentage point in the two years from 2013 to 2015.

The deceleration in global numbers stems mainly from an increasing concentration of extreme poverty in regions where poverty reduction has lagged. A case in point is Sub-Saharan Africa, where, under all but the most optimistic scenarios, poverty will remain in double digits by 2030, absent significant shifts in policy. Slowing declines in poverty also reflect falling commodity prices, conflict, and other economic challenges for developing countries.

The World Bank's preliminary forecast is that extreme poverty has declined to 8.6 percent in 2018.

The table below summarizes poverty estimates in 2013 and 2015, globally and for all World Bank regions. The international poverty line is currently valued at $1.90 in terms of 2011 purchasing power parity, which equalizes its purchasing power across all countries and currencies.

Two regions, East Asia and Pacific and Europe and Central Asia, have reduced extreme poverty to below 3 percent. The Middle East and North Africa region had previously been below 3 percent in 2013, but conflict in Syria and Yemen raised its poverty rate in 2015.

The report will also provide data on the World Bank's other main goal: increasing shared prosperity, defined as raising the incomes of the bottom 40 percent in each country.

In addition, it will explore new ways of looking at and measuring poverty. The new measures will allow the World Bank to better monitor poverty in all countries, in multiple aspects of life, and for all individuals in every household.

The report launch event will be webcast on World Bank Live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 17.

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Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but Has Slowed: World Bank

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Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

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Strikes have played a significant role in the economic, political, and social life of the United States throughout its history. From strikes by shoemakers, printers, bakers, and other artisans in the era of the Revolution through the bitter airline strikes two centuries later, workers repeatedly tried to defend or improve their living and working conditions by collectively refusing to work until specific demands were met.

Since the early 1880s, when reliable statistics were first compiled, American workers have struck with a frequency roughly equal to that of their peers in Europe. Strikes in the United States, however, have tended to last longer than elsewhere, with a mean duration between 1881 and 1974 of twenty days. Accordingly, the total number of workdays lost in strikes proportionate to the size of the work force has been higher in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world.

The United States also has had the bloodiest labor history of any industrial nation. The first strike fatalities were two New York tailors, killed in 1850 by police dispersing a crowd of strikers. Since then, according to one estimate, well over seven hundred people - mostly strikers - have died in strike-related violence, and the total may be much higher. Some died in famous incidents, such as the 1913 Ludlow Massacre, when National Guardsmen attacked a tent colony of striking Colorado miners, or the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, when ten supporters of a steel strike were killed by Chicago police. Most, however, died in little-noted confrontations with company guards, private detectives, scabs, or police.

Although wage disputes have been the single most common cause of strikes, workers have walked off their jobs for many reasons, including efforts to win union recognition, shorten the workday, gain or defend control over the work process, improve working conditions, and protest the disciplining of unionists. Strikes have been called to exclude nonwhites or women from jobs and, more rarely, to protest racial discrimination. Unlike elsewhere, political strikes over non-work-related issues have been uncommon.
Strikes have played a major role in both the rise and fall of unions (though many have occurred without union involvement). Often strikes have stimulated the formation of new unions or union federations. The first citywide labor federations, formed in the 1820s and 1830s, grew out of strikes by artisans seeking to shorten their workday. Over a century later, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was indirectly an outgrowth of a wave of strikes by industrial workers. Conversely, failed strikes have destroyed many unions. The American Railway Union, for example, was unable to survive the defeat of its 1894 strike against the Pullman Car Company. More recently, the mass firing of striking air traffic controllers by the Reagan administration led to the demise of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.

IMMIGRATION FROM 1870 TO 1920:
---About 24 million immigrants. 60% from Southern and Eastern Europe, about 25% Northern Europe (Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia), 15% other (Asian Mexican, etc).Approximately 35,000 workers a year were killed annually in work-related accidents from 1880 to 1900. Injured workers totaled another 536,000. Between 1905 and 1920, there were an average of 2000 fatal accidents in the coal mining industry every year. The unemployment rate before World War I rarely fell below 8% for full-time jobs. Underemployed workers probably counted for about 25% of the work force. A minority of urban workers had full-time year-round work. Before 1920 about one in every four non-farm children under fourteen worked full-time. Before the 1930s less than half of Americans received more than a grade school education.

The Great Strike, 1877

See also The Aftermath of the Great Strike

In the era of dramatic industrialization following the Civil War, the most powerful of the big business corporations were the railroad companies. In order to protect their profits during the economic depression that had begun in 1873, they companies had reduced the pay of railroad workers by ten percent.

In 1877 they announced another ten percent reduction in the workers' pay, and also that railroad employees would be required to use company hotels when away from home, which meant a further reduction in real wages. On top of this, they decided to reduce the work-force - which meant unemployment for some and intensified labor for those remaining.

On July 16, a spontaneous strike erupted in Martinsburg, West Virginia and quickly spread to cities from St. Louis and Chicago to New York and Baltimore - hitting Pittsburgh on July 19.

To "keep the peace" and break the strike, state militia units from Philadelphia were ordered to Pittsburgh. (Militia units from Pittsburgh were deemed unreliable because they sympathized with the strikers.) On July 21, six hundred troops arrived from Philadelphia. Led by Superintendent Robert Pitcairn of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a posse of constables with arrest warrants for the strike leaders, they found themselves confronted by crowds of men, women and children. The crowds, loudly protesting the troops' presence and expressing support for the strikers, sought to prevent military action. The militiamen responded with a bayonet charge that resulted in injuries and provoked a hail of rocks from some sections of those assembled. The troops then opened fire on the unarmed men, women, and children, scattering them - and leaving at least twenty dead (including one woman and three small children) and twenty-nine wounded.

Workers from other cities and towns in Pennsylvania joined in the strikes or in rallies and meetings supporting the strike. General strikes, mass demonstrations, and sometimes violent confrontations rocked cities in many other states as well, though none exceeded the violence of the Pittsburgh battles.

On July 26, however, regular troops of the U.S. Army joined with state militia units to take control of the city and reopen all railroad operations in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City. The strike was systematically broken throughout the country by similar means by the end of July. This was the first time in U.S. history that federal troops were utilized against strikers and labor protests

Haymarket Riot, 1886

The Haymarket Martyrs memorial

Powderly called for the Knights of Labor to participate in a planned one-day strike on 1 May in support of the eight-hour day. (40,000 to 60,000 participated). 3 May -- six strikers were killed at the McCormick Reaper Manufacturing Company, after police fired into the crowd who had attacked strikebreakers

4 May -- 13 - 1400 participated in a meeting at Haymarket Square, called by anarchist August Spies, Knights of Labor, and many socialists unions and international anarchists, protesting the use of police force to disperse strikers.

At 10 P.M. when 180 police arrived to order the crowd out, a bomb thrown into their midst killed 7, and wounded at least 60. It was assumed that an anarchist threw the bomb and raids were conducted on all known radical groups, including trade union leaders.

Judge Joseph E. Gary presided over the trial of Samuel Fielden, speaking when the bomb was thrown, August Spies, Albert Parsons, Michael Schwab, Adoph fisher, George Engel, and Oscar Neebe, who were charged with conspiring to kill.

Although no evidence linked specific persons to the incident, the prosecution focused on their radical beliefs and advocacy of violence to achieve goals. This political trial resulted in 7 convictions (the 8th defendant hung himself).

Four were sentenced to death (Spies, Parsons, Fisher, Engel), two to life in prison (Fielden, Schwab), one to 15 years (Neebe). They are found guilty on the grounds that it is not necessary to plan a murder for members of a conspiracy to
be murderers or accessories before the fact As a result, an anti-radical and anti-union feeling swept the American public mind.

Homestead Strike - July 1892

5,000 steelworkers struck Andrew Carnegie's steel plant near Pittsburg PA.

A pitched battle erupted between the strikers and 300 Pinkertons hired by plant manager Henry Clay Frick who had been hired to protect the strikebreakers. Seven guards were killed.

9 July - 7,000 state troopers were sent in by Governor Pattison. 15 July - the steel mill was reopened by strikebreakers. By Nov 14, Frick had broken the 24,000-member Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and
the strike ended.

Pullman Strike - 1894

George Pullman , Pullman Palace Car Co., had established a model town for his workers near Chicago which promoted a clean healthy atmosphere, giving Pullman a public image as a benevolent, paternalistic industrial captain.

The panic of 1893, worse in US history at that time, caused a wage cut by 1/3, but no lower rent on company housing nor price reduction at company stores. When Pullman fired a suspected union organizer, a strike grew ugly by 1894.

Eugene Debs , leader of the American Railway Union , aided strikers by refusing to handle railroads using Pullman cars, encouraging other unions to join.

The strike was ended by a court injunction, based on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, after which President Cleveland sent in 10,000 federal troops (because of "interference" with the US mail), who along with 2,000 state troops smashed the ARU.

Pullman workers exit the factory gates after a day's work. Most employees walked
the short distance to their nearby Pullman-owned homes and apartments.

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Strikes have played a significant role in the economic, political, and social life of the United States throughout its history. From strikes by shoemakers, printers, bakers, and other artisans in the era of the Revolution through the bitter airline strikes two centuries later, workers repeatedly tried to defend or improve their living and working conditions by collectively refusing to work until specific demands were met.

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https://www.history.com/news/7-infamous-gangs-of-new-york

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1. The Forty Thieves

One of Gotham's earliest known criminal outfits, the Forty Thieves operated between the 1820s and 1850s in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. This band of Irish thugs, pickpockets and ne'er-do-wells first came together in a grocery store and dive bar owned by a woman named Rosanna Peers. Under the leadership of Edward Coleman-a notorious rogue who was later hanged for beating his wife to death-what started as a motley group of petty criminals soon blossomed into a feared street gang with its own rules and organizational structure. Members of the Forty Thieves reportedly had quotas that required them to steal a certain amount of goods each day or face expulsion. What's more, the gang even franchised itself in the form of the "Forty Little Thieves," a collection of juvenile apprentices who served as pickpockets and lookouts.

2. The Bowery Boys

One of the most storied gangs of New York, the Bowery Boys were a band of lower Manhattan toughs who clashed with the Irish Five Points gangs during the 1840s, 50s and 60s. Unlike some of their criminal counterparts, most of the Bowery Boys dressed in elegant clothing and held legitimate employment as printers, mechanics and other apprentice tradesmen. But when they weren't on the job, these young hoodlums haunted the saloons and back alleys of the Bowery and engaged in bloody turf wars with rival gangs like the Dead Rabbits.

The Bowery Boys often acted more as a political club than a mob, and many of their brawls were with supporters of rival politicians. The gang would sometimes even station its members at polling places to intimidate voters into supporting a particular candidate. In return, the gang's home district would receive money and preferential treatment once the politician was in office.

3. The Dead Rabbits

This crew of Irish immigrants was one of the most feared gangs to emerge from Five Points, so named for its location at the intersection of five crooked, narrow, downtown streets. For more than 60 years, Five Points (near modern-day Chinatown) was one of the city's most notorious-and dangerous-neighborhoods. Throughout the 1850s, the Dead Rabbits excelled at robbery, pick-pocketing and brawling-particularly with their sworn enemies, the Bowery Boys. The group was made up mostly of young men, but it wasn't unheard of for women to join in on the violence. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was "Hell-Cat Maggie," a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. While the Rabbits mostly dabbled in petty crime, they were also famous for the events of July 4, 1857, when one of their street fights with the Bowery Boys turned into a bloody riot that killed a dozen people.

The Dead Rabbits supposedly began as an offshoot of another gang called the Roach Guards, but some historians have suggested the two were actually one and the same. In fact, one popular theory argues that the term "dead rabbit" was simply a pejorative used by the Bowery Boys and the New York press in reference to members of the Roach Guards and other Five Points gangs.

4. The Daybreak Boys

New York's 19th-century gang activity wasn't limited to the rough and tumble streets of Manhattan-it also extended into the waters of the East River. The Daybreak Boys were one of the most ruthless crews of "river pirates" who preyed on the city's booming shipping industry during the late 1840s and 1850s. As their name suggests, the Daybreakers- whose leaders went by such colorful monikers as Cow-legged Sam McCarthy and Slobbery Jim -preferred to strike in the hours before dawn. Using small rowboats, these juvenile gangsters would silently row their way alongside anchored shipping vessels. Sneaking aboard, they would steal as much cargo as they could before returning to their dinghies and escaping to a rendezvous point at a gin mill in the Fourth Ward.

To prove their mettle, prospective members were reportedly required to have already killed at least once before joining the group, and the Daybreak Boys were supposedly responsible for more than 30 murders- it wasn't unusual for an unlucky watchman to end up with a slit throat or a fractured skull during one of their robberies. The gang reportedly fell apart in the late 1850s after a police crackdown, but not before they had claimed thousands of dollars in booty.

5. The Whyos

Formed from the remnants of several defunct Five Points outfits, the Whyos were one of the most dominant New York street gangs from the 1860s to the 1890s. The group started out as a loose collection of petty thugs, pickpockets and murderers, but by the 1880s they had graduated to more high-class crime like counterfeiting, prostitution and racketeering. As their grip on Manhattan tightened, many of the gang even opened legitimate side businesses such as casinos and saloons.

They may have masqueraded as upstanding citizens, but the Whyos were still notoriously tough customers. One hood by the name of "Dandy" Johnny Dolan supposedly carried a copper eye gouger and wore shoes outfitted with axe blades. Another Whyo called Piker Ryan was once caught with a detailed price list of all the gruesome deeds he could be hired to perform. A simple punch to the face was only two bucks, chewing off an ear cost $15 and a murder-which Ryan's catalogue described as "doing the big job"-went for the princely sum of $100.

6. The Five Points Gang

This legendary mob came together in the 1890s, when the Italian gangster Paul Kelly united the remaining members of the Dead Rabbits, Whyos and other Five Points gangs under his own banner. From his headquarters in the New Brighton Dance Hall, Kelly marshaled an army of 1,500 thugs in bloody turf wars with his archrivals, a Jewish gang run by the famed hood Monk Eastman. The two groups engaged in constant brawls and once even squared off in a massive gun battle under the Second Avenue elevated train line.

When they weren't participating in Wild West-style shootouts, the Five Pointers ran widespread robbery, racketeering and prostitution rings. They also dabbled in legitimate front businesses and worked as strong-arm men for the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. The gang's influence eventually waned in the 1910s, but not before they had helped train the next generation of mob bosses. Among others, the Five Pointers initiated thugs like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio into a life of organized crime.

7. The Eastman Gang

Led by the Jewish mobster Edward "Monk" Eastman, the Eastman Gang rose to become one of New York's most feared criminal organizations in the 1890s. As the kings of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the 1,200 "Eastmans" raked in huge profits running brothels, protection rackets, drug rings and even murder-for-hire operations. Like their rivals in the Five Points Gang, Eastman's boys also teamed with corrupt politicians in voter fraud. In return, the city's crooked lawmakers turned a blind eye to the gang's illicit activities.

A career criminal, Monk Eastman delighted in violence and was known to personally dish out beatings to his enemies. This hands-on approach proved to be his undoing in 1904, when he was arrested and jailed for a simple street mugging. With their leader behind bars, the Eastmans splintered into several smaller, less powerful factions in the 1910s. Monk Eastman later enlisted in the armed forces and forged a legendary reputation fighting in the trenches of World War I. But while he returned to New York a war hero, the former gang boss's old life ultimately caught up with him, and he was brutally gunned down on a city sidewalk in 1920.

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From river pirates to knife-wielding adolescents, get the facts on seven of 19th century New York's most notorious street gangs.

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Above: the crowded streets of Five Points, where the Forty Thieves first made mischief
What does it mean to be the 'first' gang in New York? Most likely, it means you weren't really the first. Just the first to be caught at doing it.

New Yorkers seem to create a grim romanticism around 19th century gang life because the underworld they lived in seem increasingly more exotic. They were unofficial rulers of neighborhoods vastly changed today. Hell's Kitchen. The Tenderloin. The sleazy Fourth Ward.

And of course Five Points, the centerpiece of the Sixth Ward. That's where New York's first recorded gang, the Forty Thieves, got their start, in the back room of the 'grocery store' owned by one Rosanna Peers.

No evidence remains of what Rosanna might have looked like, but gather together what you will from the evidence. Selling hard liquors along with " brown-streaked cabbages and tattered lettuce," Rosanna's establishment was ostensibly the first bar on Centre Street in 1825, and would certainly not be the last.

I wouldn't exactly lionize her abilities, but you can't say she wasn't an entrepreneur of sorts. The cheapness of her "rutgot rum" attracted the most charming thugs and pickpockets in the city, and soon they formed a merry band of crooks, watching each other's backs, delineating common territory, and sharing their ill-gotten wealth. The Forty Thieves - almost all Irish immigrants and almost certainly more than forty - would grow to terrorize the streets of downtown New York for over 25 years.

Their first leader was Edward Coleman who must have some certain gruff charm as he gathered up teams of dime criminals for more elaborate jobs, including staking out this corner of Five Points, defending it from rivals. His organization included a rather strict quota system, where members had to bring back a certain amount of stolen goods or be thrown out. Rejects were either disposed of or fled to join rival gangs that soon organized in other neighborhoods.

Coleman would lead until 1838, when he violently beat and killed his wife, a 'hot corn' girl who had brought back inadequate wages from a day's work. This heinous crime earned Coleman the distinction of being the first man hung in the newly built Tombs prison, just a few blocks away.

The Forty Thieves lived on without him and were such a successful organization that they recruited younger delinquents for a specialized Forty Little Thieves, filthy tots from the street of Five Points dispatched like ruddy faced Oliver Twists to pick pockets and troll the streets for law enforcement.

They fade away into New York history, breaking off and joining other, more powerful and more politically connected gangs. They were only the seed of lawlessness in a neighborhood that would soon grant a wretched neighborhood its rather notorious status today.

As for Ms. Peer, she apparently felt no ambivalence about her clientele; another early Five Points gang, the Kerryonians, also used her rum-filled backroom as a headquarters. The Kerryonions, comprised specifically of Irish immigrant men from the county Kerry, were less terrifying than the Forty Thieves - unless you were British, whom they reserved a special hatred for.
Below: the approximate location of Ms. Peer's grisly grocer:

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Beware the Forty Thieves, very first gang of New York - The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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Above: the crowded streets of Five Points, where the Forty Thieves first made mischief What does it mean to be the 'first' gang in New York? Most likely, it means you weren't really the first. Just the first to be caught at doing it. New Yorkers seem to create a grim romanticism around 19th century ...

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10% of the population controlled 90% of the wealth and many people were living in poverty while very little were living in extravagance.

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I would have been Henry Ford because he was generous and gave to charity.

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I would have been Henry ford because he was a captain of industry. He cared for his workers and he believed that they should get well paid cause they would work better

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I would be Andrew Carnegie because he was an inventor and he made money,gave it away and was a very liked man by everyone and I'd help the people that are on the streets.

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Henry Ford was a very good man and a philanthropist and gave away and also everyone liked him.

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https://bt.barnard.edu/nycgildedages/exhibit/

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NYC's Gilded Ages is a digital exhibit that was created by students in the Barnard College course, New York City's Gilded Ages: Coming of Age, Past and Present, during the fall 2015 semester. The class and virtual exhibit were made possible by cooperation with the New-York Historical Society and with funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Students were advised by Barnard professors and New-York Historical Society curators. New York City's Gilded Ages: Coming of Age, Past and Present is part of Barnard's educational initiative, Barnard Teaches: Real Place + Digital Access, which explores, integrates, and extends the concept of placed-based learning with new and emerging digital technologies.

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The First Gilded Age (ca. 1870-1920) was a period of extreme socioeconomic and cultural change. As this industrial era promoted a thriving American infrastructure, and a narrow band of wealthy elites at its peak, the transformation of the cityscape came at a cost: unfettered capitalistic gains were supported through the exploitation of natural resources, colonized peoples, immigrants, and laborers. Similarly, the Second Gilded Age, the global one of our modern era, has also been characterized by the dichotomy of economic inequality, and the consequent cultural, economic, and environmental changes that have resulted. Across both eras, nowhere were the effects of progress more prominent than at its epicenter: New York City.

So, what defines a Gilded Age of this massive urban scale? Key qualities include wealth and income inequality, immigration, and rapid changes in the urban environment. More importantly, however, are not the changes to the city, but to the people living in it. Both Gilded Ages are defined by an explosion of voices across all races, genders, and social classes, each occupying a different role in society that, when combined, reflects the myriad of different characteristics of these eras. But not all individuals had access to means of memorialization. The wealthiest have the means to commemorate themselves and their loved ones, and we can piece together their legacies by what they have left behind. In this sense, their personal belongings aren't simply objects; they exist in time, place, and space, inseparable from not only personal identities, but also from the major issues and conflicts of their time. Material objects-the things that people wear, display, or use-are laden with meanings and communicate information such as wealth, gender, age, and personal taste. At the same time, objects are also integral in creating identities; they can help a person both feel and look the part they aspire to play on the urban stage. As social historians, it is our role to investigate the multifaceted nature of these objects, to combine their narratives to paint an accurate picture of lives both past and present.

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NYC's Gilded Ages | Coming of Age, Past and Present

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NYC's Gilded Ages is a digital exhibit that was created by students in the Barnard College course, New York City's Gilded Ages: Coming of Age, Past and Present, during the fall 2015 semester. The class and virtual exhibit were made possible by cooperation with the New-York Historical Society and with funding provided by The Andrew W.

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2018 Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

The percentage of people living in extreme poverty globally fell to a new low of 10 percent in 2015 - the latest number available - down from 11 percent in 2013, reflecting steady but slowing progress, World Bank data show. The number of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell during this period by 68 million to 736 million.

" Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history. This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time," World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. "But if we are going to end poverty by 2030, we need much more investment, particularly in building human capital, to help promote the inclusive growth it will take to reach the remaining poor. For their sake, we cannot fail."

Despite the tremendous progress in reducing extreme poverty, rates remain stubbornly high in low-income countries and those affected by conflict and political upheaval.

The estimates will be published in "Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle," a report to be released on Oct. 17, End Poverty Day.

About half of the world's countries now have poverty rates below 3 percent, but the report finds that the world as a whole is not on track to achieve the target of less than 3 percent of the world living in extreme poverty by 2030. In the 25 years from 1990 to 2015, the extreme poverty rate dropped an average of a percentage point per year - from nearly 36% to 10%. But the rate dropped only one percentage point in the two years from 2013 to 2015.

The deceleration in global numbers stems mainly from an increasing concentration of extreme poverty in regions where poverty reduction has lagged. A case in point is Sub-Saharan Africa, where, under all but the most optimistic scenarios, poverty will remain in double digits by 2030, absent significant shifts in policy. Slowing declines in poverty also reflect falling commodity prices, conflict, and other economic challenges for developing countries.

The World Bank's preliminary forecast is that extreme poverty has declined to 8.6 percent in 2018.

The table below summarizes poverty estimates in 2013 and 2015, globally and for all World Bank regions. The international poverty line is currently valued at $1.90 in terms of 2011 purchasing power parity, which equalizes its purchasing power across all countries and currencies.

Two regions, East Asia and Pacific and Europe and Central Asia, have reduced extreme poverty to below 3 percent. The Middle East and North Africa region had previously been below 3 percent in 2013, but conflict in Syria and Yemen raised its poverty rate in 2015.

The report will also provide data on the World Bank's other main goal: increasing shared prosperity, defined as raising the incomes of the bottom 40 percent in each country.

In addition, it will explore new ways of looking at and measuring poverty. The new measures will allow the World Bank to better monitor poverty in all countries, in multiple aspects of life, and for all individuals in every household.

The report launch event will be webcast on World Bank Live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 17.

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Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but Has Slowed: World Bank

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Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

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https://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/archives/1598-the-real-gangs-of-new-york

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At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year.

"We live in a criminal environment," said one expert. "There are cops in our schools, the mayor is obsessed with crime, innocent people are being shot 41 times. It creates a mentality of crime in young people."

This particular expert has first-hand experience with the question. She is 19 years old and a member of the Latin Queens, complete with the tattoo of a crown on her ankle.

The city has spent increased amount of money and energy in recent years trying to crack down on gangs that recruit young people like her.

In 1997, the mayor stepped up his effort to combat gangs, focusing on them as criminal enterprises, not just as groups of juvenile delinquents. In 1998, the Board of Education agreed to give school security over to the police department with officers patrolling some hallways. And last year, a bill was introduced that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners.

Despite such efforts, gangs and their crimes are a routine part of news headlines. Recently 18 members of The Mexican Boys gang were arrested for carrying knives and guns on their way to a party of a rival gang in Brooklyn. The Albany County jail had the highest rate of violence in its history this year, with many of the incidents occurring between New York City and upstate gangs. And last month, three teenagers were arrested in connection with the shooting death of a man in Central Park, the first homicide there in two years. The teens claimed affiliation with both the Bloods and the Crips, though police later determined that they were lying. Clearly, gangs still hold some appeal.

The 19-year-old member of the Latin Queens, who asked that only her last name, Vargas, be used, suggested some reasons why.

"There are no jobs, no programs for youth, our schools are falling apart," Vargas said. "Our youth bond together for protection and opportunity."

While not everybody would agree with her - New York offers more cultural opportunities and youth programs, some say, than many other cities with gang problems -- Councilmember Ken Fisher, chair of the Youth Services Committee, seemed to Agree with Vargas at least in part. "I find it troubling that the same day we hear the police testify to an increase in gang members the mayor proposes a 20 million dollar cut in funding for youth services," said Fisher.

Youth gangs have been a part of New York City life as long as young people have been hanging out on the streets looking for something to do. Unlike adult crimes, most juvenile crime is committed in groups. And gangs offer a sense of identity, camaraderie, and financial payoff for their loyalty.

Notable New York City Gang Movies

West Side Story (1961)
This Academy Award winning adaptation of the Broadway musical pits two rival street gangs-the Jets and the Sharks-against each other in a song-and-dance version of Romeo and Juliet.

The Cross and the Switchblade (1971)
Based on a true story, Pat Boone plays a small-town preacher who helps gang leader Nicky Cruz get off the streets and onto the "straight and narrow."

Mean Streets (1973)
Robert De Niro plays a wanna-be hood on the streets of Little Italy in Martin Scorsese's breakthrough film.

Lords of Flatbush (1974)
Starring a young Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, the movie tracks the action and ethos of 1950's teen leather-gang in Brooklyn.

Warriors (1979)
An action flick that reached cult status for its inner city kids with big-hair waging massive turf wars.

Year of the Dragon (1985)
A Polish cop's attempt to rid Chinatown of crime and drug cartels turns the neighborhood into a modern Dodge City.

New Jack City (1991)
New York City street thugs turn into a massive drug syndicate and make actors Ice-T, Wesley Snipes, and Chris Rock household names.

Gangs of New York (due out Fall 2001)
Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz star in an $80 million blockbuster about the rise of Irish and Italian youth gangs in the Bronx of the nineteenth century.

The difference is that today's gangs are more widespread and more dangerous. It is estimated that 94 percent of medium and large-cities in the U.S. have gang activity. And with easy access to guns and the drugs market, gangs present a more substantial criminal force.

"These kids are not afraid of death or jail," said Robert DeSena who has worked with Brooklyn gangs since 1975. "Once a kid reaches that mindset, you've got a hard-core challenge."

DEFINING IMAGE

Popular images of gang members range from Tony, who fell in love with a rival gang member's sister in West Side Story, to the violent gang-bangers who run the Los Angeles streets in the movie Boyz 'N the Hood. There are a wide range of perceptions, and misperceptions, of what youth gangs do and who is a part of them.

The New York Police Department defines a gang as a group that engages in criminal behavior and has a formal organizational structure, identifiable leadership, and territory. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are approximately 750,000 gang members in 28,000 gangs in the U.S., although no one really knows how many there are because accurate counts are nearly impossible to make. It is estimated that females make up approximately 20 percent of the national gang population. And while the average age of gang members is 17, nearly half of all gang members range in age from 18 to 25 year.

The New York Police Department recently reported that the known gang members in the city increased from 11,000 to 15,000 in the past year. However, many researchers doubt the validity of such numbers.

"I've stayed away from New York statistics for years," said Malcolm Klein from the Center for Research for Crime and Social Control, who has been studying gangs for over two decades. Prior to 1976, New York City's Youth Services Administration kept more dependable gang statistics in the city, but in the fiscal problems of the city, the administration was disbanded and tracking was handed over to police.

While the ethnic make-up of gangs, the streets they call "turf," and the names they give themselves have changed over time, the common factor is social class. Most gang members come from lower or working-class backgrounds, looking for a way to gain power in the social order.

HISTORY OF GOTHAM STREETS

Youth gangs have always been part of New York City life.

In 1807, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in lower Manhattan complained to the city about the gangs of white, working class youths who harassed churchgoers, according to the book, "Gotham" by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace. By the 1820's, the authors explain, young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."

Until the mid-1900's, a majority of gangs in America were white, composed of boys from various European backgrounds.

The postwar gangs in the 1940's-1960's were primarily "turf" gangs who defended their areas against neighboring ethnic groups and new immigrants. In his recent book, "Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings," Eric Schneider presents Postwar gang life as a world of switchblades, zoot suits, slums, and bebop music. Young men took on brash names like Enchanters, Young Lords, Bishops, Greene Avenue Stompers, and the Latin Gents.

While youth gangs were often seen as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill seeking and immediate gratification," says Schneider, they provided a social structure for working-class boys that provided a sense of identity, place, and masculinity.

By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members were either African-American or Hispanic. And the late 1980's and early 1990's saw the growth of West Coast gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, although most experts dispute the notion that the gangs actually migrated across the country. Instead they are local, non-centralized gangs that go by the same names and wear the same identifying colors.

Today in New York, the most prominent New York City gangs are Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Nietas, Five Prisoners, Silenciosos, Matatones, Rat Hunters, and Zulu Nation. They are groups that span ethnicity, race, and neighborhoods.

FROM TURF TO DRUGS, FROM FISTS TO GUNS

Two major changes in recent years have transformed the nature of youth gangs.

First, the influx of illegal drugs--first heroin, then cocaine, and then crack cocaine--changed street gangs from social groups to economic enterprises. Instead of fighting over the geography of turf, gangs began to wage war over corners used to sell drugs. The institution of the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973 and stiffer prison penalties for adults, had a bitterly ironic result: Drug dealers began to recruit minors to do much of their selling on the streets.

While gangs have become a significant part of the drug trade (a recent study that gangs are involved in about a quarter of the drug arrests), most researchers argue that youth gangs are not major drug traffickers.

"Drug gangs separate themselves from street gangs," said Klein. "Drugs requires tight corporate-like structure that youth do not have."

The second and perhaps the most devastating change is the availability of guns. It is estimated that gang related homicides increased nearly five times between 1987 and 1994.

"Violence has always been around, usually concentrated amongst the poor," said Geoffrey Canada, who runs the non-profit Rheedlin Center for Children and Families in Harlem. "The difference is that we never had so many guns in our inner cities. The nature of the violent act has changed from the fist, stick, and knife to the gun."

THE RIKER'S ISLAND GANG MUSEUM

To visit the offices of the Gang Unit at Riker's Island is to visit a virtual museum of gang paraphernalia.

The walls are covered with photographs of gang member tattoos, red and blue bandanas from the Crips and the Bloods, and rosaries with black and yellow beads used by members of the Latin Kings. There is a display of home-made weaponry: knives made from pocket combs, razor blades fashioned from bottle caps, and even a small gun made from a toilet paper roll and rubber bands. And on the desk are computers used to enter the information into the city's gang database.

It is all part of the Corrections Department's "zero tolerance" policy on gangs and the city's attempt to enhance its gang intelligence.

At Riker's Island, gang members are stripped of any kind of identifying clothing or trinkets, forced to live in the same rooms with rival gangs, and any act of violence automatically adds time to their sentence. The Correction's Department says it is working. The incidence of violence in the city's jail is at the lowest in over a decade.

The School Safety and Prevention Service's division of the New York City operates under a similar notion. If any student exhibits gang behavior-wearing colors, using hand signals, graffiti, or any criminal activity-they are immediately removed from school.

Efforts to pass legislation to control gangs are generally more difficult. Most of the state legislation has to do with graffiti and tougher sentences for assault.

Last year in the city, Councilmembers John Sabini and Michel Abel introduced a bill that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners. The legislation drew criticism from civil rights groups and others who thought the law would lead to police abuse. Currently the proposed legislation is still sitting in committee.

FINDING SOLUTIONS

While legislators and police often take the credit for drops in gang related crime, the ebb and flow of gangs are more susceptible to other less tangible factors.

There are several theories of why New York City has less of a problem with gangs than cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

One is that today's gangs operate in an automobile culture that facilitates drive-by-shootings and drug dealing, and enables gangs to travel in greater anonymity. New York's mass transit system makes it more difficult for such activities. Another theory is that New York City has more opportunities for young people that fill the similar needs as a gang.

"In New York you can be part of a religious group, an arts club, a cultural group, you can even be part of a doo-wop group," said Councilmember Ken Fisher, who is Chair of the Youth Services Committee. "There are more opportunities for someone to belong to something."

There are also a host of non-profits that work with gang members on a one-to-one basis. The main challenge for these groups is to offer something that replaces the protection, identity, and money young people gain from being part of a gang.

Robert DeSena, a retired schoolteacher and founder of Council for Unity a group that works to bring rival gangs together says many of the gang members he meets are looking for a way out.

"Violence is exhausting and gangs realize they are unable to exterminate the opposition," said DeSena. DeSena works to build a network of protection and support that replaces gang life. The youth are responsible for running their own cultural events, support meetings, marketing the programs, soliciting members-using skills they had previously used on the street. The members are paired with alumni of the program who work as mentors, often hiring the youth to work at their companies.

"You get an ex-gang member who works for Price Waterhouse to take an interest in a kid," said DeSena, "and the kids will take notice."

OTHER LINKS:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year. We live in a criminal environment, said one expert....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year.

"We live in a criminal environment," said one expert. "There are cops in our schools, the mayor is obsessed with crime, innocent people are being shot 41 times. It creates a mentality of crime in young people."

This particular expert has first-hand experience with the question. She is 19 years old and a member of the Latin Queens, complete with the tattoo of a crown on her ankle.

The city has spent increased amount of money and energy in recent years trying to crack down on gangs that recruit young people like her.

In 1997, the mayor stepped up his effort to combat gangs, focusing on them as criminal enterprises, not just as groups of juvenile delinquents. In 1998, the Board of Education agreed to give school security over to the police department with officers patrolling some hallways. And last year, a bill was introduced that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners.

Despite such efforts, gangs and their crimes are a routine part of news headlines. Recently 18 members of The Mexican Boys gang were arrested for carrying knives and guns on their way to a party of a rival gang in Brooklyn. The Albany County jail had the highest rate of violence in its history this year, with many of the incidents occurring between New York City and upstate gangs. And last month, three teenagers were arrested in connection with the shooting death of a man in Central Park, the first homicide there in two years. The teens claimed affiliation with both the Bloods and the Crips, though police later determined that they were lying. Clearly, gangs still hold some appeal.

The 19-year-old member of the Latin Queens, who asked that only her last name, Vargas, be used, suggested some reasons why.

"There are no jobs, no programs for youth, our schools are falling apart," Vargas said. "Our youth bond together for protection and opportunity."

While not everybody would agree with her - New York offers more cultural opportunities and youth programs, some say, than many other cities with gang problems -- Councilmember Ken Fisher, chair of the Youth Services Committee, seemed to Agree with Vargas at least in part. "I find it troubling that the same day we hear the police testify to an increase in gang members the mayor proposes a 20 million dollar cut in funding for youth services," said Fisher.

Youth gangs have been a part of New York City life as long as young people have been hanging out on the streets looking for something to do. Unlike adult crimes, most juvenile crime is committed in groups. And gangs offer a sense of identity, camaraderie, and financial payoff for their loyalty.

Notable New York City Gang Movies

West Side Story (1961)
This Academy Award winning adaptation of the Broadway musical pits two rival street gangs-the Jets and the Sharks-against each other in a song-and-dance version of Romeo and Juliet.

The Cross and the Switchblade (1971)
Based on a true story, Pat Boone plays a small-town preacher who helps gang leader Nicky Cruz get off the streets and onto the "straight and narrow."

Mean Streets (1973)
Robert De Niro plays a wanna-be hood on the streets of Little Italy in Martin Scorsese's breakthrough film.

Lords of Flatbush (1974)
Starring a young Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, the movie tracks the action and ethos of 1950's teen leather-gang in Brooklyn.

Warriors (1979)
An action flick that reached cult status for its inner city kids with big-hair waging massive turf wars.

Year of the Dragon (1985)
A Polish cop's attempt to rid Chinatown of crime and drug cartels turns the neighborhood into a modern Dodge City.

New Jack City (1991)
New York City street thugs turn into a massive drug syndicate and make actors Ice-T, Wesley Snipes, and Chris Rock household names.

Gangs of New York (due out Fall 2001)
Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz star in an $80 million blockbuster about the rise of Irish and Italian youth gangs in the Bronx of the nineteenth century.

The difference is that today's gangs are more widespread and more dangerous. It is estimated that 94 percent of medium and large-cities in the U.S. have gang activity. And with easy access to guns and the drugs market, gangs present a more substantial criminal force.

"These kids are not afraid of death or jail," said Robert DeSena who has worked with Brooklyn gangs since 1975. "Once a kid reaches that mindset, you've got a hard-core challenge."

DEFINING IMAGE

Popular images of gang members range from Tony, who fell in love with a rival gang member's sister in West Side Story, to the violent gang-bangers who run the Los Angeles streets in the movie Boyz 'N the Hood. There are a wide range of perceptions, and misperceptions, of what youth gangs do and who is a part of them.

The New York Police Department defines a gang as a group that engages in criminal behavior and has a formal organizational structure, identifiable leadership, and territory. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are approximately 750,000 gang members in 28,000 gangs in the U.S., although no one really knows how many there are because accurate counts are nearly impossible to make. It is estimated that females make up approximately 20 percent of the national gang population. And while the average age of gang members is 17, nearly half of all gang members range in age from 18 to 25 year.

The New York Police Department recently reported that the known gang members in the city increased from 11,000 to 15,000 in the past year. However, many researchers doubt the validity of such numbers.

"I've stayed away from New York statistics for years," said Malcolm Klein from the Center for Research for Crime and Social Control, who has been studying gangs for over two decades. Prior to 1976, New York City's Youth Services Administration kept more dependable gang statistics in the city, but in the fiscal problems of the city, the administration was disbanded and tracking was handed over to police.

While the ethnic make-up of gangs, the streets they call "turf," and the names they give themselves have changed over time, the common factor is social class. Most gang members come from lower or working-class backgrounds, looking for a way to gain power in the social order.

HISTORY OF GOTHAM STREETS

Youth gangs have always been part of New York City life.

In 1807, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in lower Manhattan complained to the city about the gangs of white, working class youths who harassed churchgoers, according to the book, "Gotham" by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace. By the 1820's, the authors explain, young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."

Until the mid-1900's, a majority of gangs in America were white, composed of boys from various European backgrounds.

The postwar gangs in the 1940's-1960's were primarily "turf" gangs who defended their areas against neighboring ethnic groups and new immigrants. In his recent book, "Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings," Eric Schneider presents Postwar gang life as a world of switchblades, zoot suits, slums, and bebop music. Young men took on brash names like Enchanters, Young Lords, Bishops, Greene Avenue Stompers, and the Latin Gents.

While youth gangs were often seen as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill seeking and immediate gratification," says Schneider, they provided a social structure for working-class boys that provided a sense of identity, place, and masculinity.

By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members were either African-American or Hispanic. And the late 1980's and early 1990's saw the growth of West Coast gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, although most experts dispute the notion that the gangs actually migrated across the country. Instead they are local, non-centralized gangs that go by the same names and wear the same identifying colors.

Today in New York, the most prominent New York City gangs are Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Nietas, Five Prisoners, Silenciosos, Matatones, Rat Hunters, and Zulu Nation. They are groups that span ethnicity, race, and neighborhoods.

FROM TURF TO DRUGS, FROM FISTS TO GUNS

Two major changes in recent years have transformed the nature of youth gangs.

First, the influx of illegal drugs--first heroin, then cocaine, and then crack cocaine--changed street gangs from social groups to economic enterprises. Instead of fighting over the geography of turf, gangs began to wage war over corners used to sell drugs. The institution of the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973 and stiffer prison penalties for adults, had a bitterly ironic result: Drug dealers began to recruit minors to do much of their selling on the streets.

While gangs have become a significant part of the drug trade (a recent study that gangs are involved in about a quarter of the drug arrests), most researchers argue that youth gangs are not major drug traffickers.

"Drug gangs separate themselves from street gangs," said Klein. "Drugs requires tight corporate-like structure that youth do not have."

The second and perhaps the most devastating change is the availability of guns. It is estimated that gang related homicides increased nearly five times between 1987 and 1994.

"Violence has always been around, usually concentrated amongst the poor," said Geoffrey Canada, who runs the non-profit Rheedlin Center for Children and Families in Harlem. "The difference is that we never had so many guns in our inner cities. The nature of the violent act has changed from the fist, stick, and knife to the gun."

THE RIKER'S ISLAND GANG MUSEUM

To visit the offices of the Gang Unit at Riker's Island is to visit a virtual museum of gang paraphernalia.

The walls are covered with photographs of gang member tattoos, red and blue bandanas from the Crips and the Bloods, and rosaries with black and yellow beads used by members of the Latin Kings. There is a display of home-made weaponry: knives made from pocket combs, razor blades fashioned from bottle caps, and even a small gun made from a toilet paper roll and rubber bands. And on the desk are computers used to enter the information into the city's gang database.

It is all part of the Corrections Department's "zero tolerance" policy on gangs and the city's attempt to enhance its gang intelligence.

At Riker's Island, gang members are stripped of any kind of identifying clothing or trinkets, forced to live in the same rooms with rival gangs, and any act of violence automatically adds time to their sentence. The Correction's Department says it is working. The incidence of violence in the city's jail is at the lowest in over a decade.

The School Safety and Prevention Service's division of the New York City operates under a similar notion. If any student exhibits gang behavior-wearing colors, using hand signals, graffiti, or any criminal activity-they are immediately removed from school.

Efforts to pass legislation to control gangs are generally more difficult. Most of the state legislation has to do with graffiti and tougher sentences for assault.

Last year in the city, Councilmembers John Sabini and Michel Abel introduced a bill that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners. The legislation drew criticism from civil rights groups and others who thought the law would lead to police abuse. Currently the proposed legislation is still sitting in committee.

FINDING SOLUTIONS

While legislators and police often take the credit for drops in gang related crime, the ebb and flow of gangs are more susceptible to other less tangible factors.

There are several theories of why New York City has less of a problem with gangs than cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

One is that today's gangs operate in an automobile culture that facilitates drive-by-shootings and drug dealing, and enables gangs to travel in greater anonymity. New York's mass transit system makes it more difficult for such activities. Another theory is that New York City has more opportunities for young people that fill the similar needs as a gang.

"In New York you can be part of a religious group, an arts club, a cultural group, you can even be part of a doo-wop group," said Councilmember Ken Fisher, who is Chair of the Youth Services Committee. "There are more opportunities for someone to belong to something."

There are also a host of non-profits that work with gang members on a one-to-one basis. The main challenge for these groups is to offer something that replaces the protection, identity, and money young people gain from being part of a gang.

Robert DeSena, a retired schoolteacher and founder of Council for Unity a group that works to bring rival gangs together says many of the gang members he meets are looking for a way out.

"Violence is exhausting and gangs realize they are unable to exterminate the opposition," said DeSena. DeSena works to build a network of protection and support that replaces gang life. The youth are responsible for running their own cultural events, support meetings, marketing the programs, soliciting members-using skills they had previously used on the street. The members are paired with alumni of the program who work as mentors, often hiring the youth to work at their companies.

"You get an ex-gang member who works for Price Waterhouse to take an interest in a kid," said DeSena, "and the kids will take notice."

OTHER LINKS:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year. We live in a criminal environment, said one expert....

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Greek playwright Aeschylus coined the term philanthropy in the 5th century BCE. It meant “love of humanity.” Today, philanthropy means generosity in all its forms and is often defined as giving gifts of “time, talent and treasure” to help make life better for other people.

I would be like Ford treat his people good and pay them well and make life easier for the workers.

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Origins of The Labor Movement

The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794 marks the beginning of sustained trade union organization among American workers.
WATCH: The Labor Movement
From that time on, local craft unions proliferated in the cities, publishing lists of "prices" for their work, defending their trades against diluted and cheap labor and, increasingly, demanding a shorter workday in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Thus a job-conscious orientation was quick to emerge, and in its wake there followed the key structural elements characterizing American trade unionism. First, with the formation in 1827 of the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia, central labor bodies began uniting craft unions within a single city, and then, with the creation of the International Typographical Union in 1852, national unions began bringing together local unions of the same trade from across the United States and Canada (hence the frequent union designation "international"). Although the factory system was springing up during these years, industrial workers played little part in the early trade union development. In the 19th century, trade unionism was mainly a movement of skilled workers.

Did you know? In 2009, 12 percent of American workers belonged to unions.

Early Labor Unions

The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship. The transforming economic changes of industrial capitalism ran counter to labor's vision. The result, as early labor leaders saw it, was to raise up "two distinct classes, the rich and the poor." Beginning with the workingmen's parties of the 1830s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century. Most notable were the National Labor Union, launched in 1866, and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880s.

On their face, these reform movements might have seemed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing broadly to all "producers" rather than strictly to wageworkers, and eschewing the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. But contemporaries saw no contradiction: trade unionism tended to the workers' immediate needs, labor reform to their higher hopes. The two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in a common working-class constituency and to some degree sharing a common leadership. But equally important, they were strands that had to be kept operationally separate and functionally distinct.
PHOTOS: These Appalling Images Exposed Child Labor in America
American Federation of Labor

During the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed labor reform purposes. When it refused, they joined in December 1886 to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The new federation marked a break with the past, for it denied to labor reform any further role in the struggles of American workers. In part, the assertion of trade union supremacy stemmed from an undeniable reality. As industrialism matured, labor reform lost its meaning-hence the confusion and ultimate failure of the Knights of Labor. Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution. The founders of theAFL translated this notion into the principle of "pure and simple" unionism: only by self-organization along occupational lines and by a concentration on job-conscious goals would the worker be "furnished with the weapons which shall secure his industrial emancipation."

That class formulation necessarily defined trade unionism as the movement of the entire working class. The AFL asserted as a formal policy that it represented all workers, irrespective of skill, race, religion, nationality or gender. But the national unions that had created the AFL in fact comprised only the skilled trades. Almost at once, therefore, the trade union movement encountered a dilemma: How to square ideological aspirations against contrary institutional realities?

Discrimination in The Labor Movement

As sweeping technological change began to undermine the craft system of production, some national unions did move toward an industrial structure, most notably in coal mining and the garment trades. But most craft unions either refused or, as in iron and steel and in meat-packing, failed to organize the less skilled. And since skill lines tended to conform to racial, ethnic and gender divisions, the trade union movement took on a racist and sexist coloration as well. For a short period, the AFL resisted that tendency. But in 1895, unable to launch an interracial machinists' union of its own, the Federation reversed an earlier principled decision and chartered the whites-only International Association of Machinists. Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement. In 1902, blacks made up scarcely 3 percent of total membership, most of them segregated in Jim Crow locals. In the case of women and eastern European immigrants, a similar devolution occurred-welcomed as equals in theory, excluded or segregated in practice. (Only the fate of Asian workers was unproblematic; their rights had never been asserted by the AFLin the first place.)

Samuel Gompers

Gompers justified the subordination of principle to organizational reality on the constitutional grounds of "trade autonomy," by which each national union was assured the right to regulate its own internal affairs. But the organizational dynamism of the labor movement was in fact located in the national unions. Only as they experienced inner change might the labor movement expand beyond the narrow limits-roughly 10 percent of the labor force-at which it stabilized before World War I.

In the political realm, the founding doctrine of pure-and-simple unionism meant an arm's-length relationship to the state and the least possible entanglement in partisan politics. A total separation had, of course, never been seriously contemplated; some objectives, such as immigration restriction, could be achieved only through state action, and the predecessor to the AFL, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (1881), had in fact been created to serve as labor's lobbying arm in Washington. Partly because of the lure of progressive labor legislation, even more in response to increasingly damaging court attacks on the trade unions, political activity quickened after 1900. With the enunciation of Labor's Bill of Grievances (1906), the AFL laid down a challenge to the major parties. Henceforth it would campaign for its friends and seek the defeat of its enemies.

This nonpartisan entry into electoral politics, paradoxically, undercut the left-wing advocates of an independent working-class politics. That question had been repeatedly debated within theAFL, first in 1890 over Socialist Labor party representation, then in 1893-1894 over an alliance with the Populist Party and after 1901 over affiliation with the Socialist party of America. Although Gompers prevailed each time, he never found it easy. Now, as labor's leverage with the major parties began to pay off, Gompers had an effective answer to his critics on the left: the labor movement could not afford to waste its political capital on socialist parties or independent politics. When that nonpartisan strategy failed, as it did in the reaction following World War I, an independent political strategy took hold, first through the robust campaigning of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, and in 1924 through labor's endorsement of Robert La Follette on the Progressive ticket. By then, however, the Republican administration was moderating its hard line, evident especially in Herbert Hoover's efforts to resolve the simmering crises in mining and on the railroads. In response, the trade unions abandoned the Progressive party, retreated to nonpartisanship, and, as their power waned, lapsed into inactivity.

The Labor Movement and The Great Depression
WATCH: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal
It took the Great Depression to knock the labor movement off dead center. The discontent of industrial workers, combined with New Deal collective bargaining legislation, at last brought the great mass production industries within striking distance. When the craft unions stymied the ALF's organizing efforts, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and his followers broke away in 1935 and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which crucially aided the emerging unions in auto, rubber, steel and other basic industries. In 1938 the CIO was formally established as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions and collective bargaining had taken hold throughout the industrial economy.

In politics, its enhanced power led the union movement not to a new departure but to a variant on the policy of nonpartisanship. As far back as the Progressive Era, organized labor had been drifting toward the Democratic party, partly because of the latter's greater programmatic appeal, perhaps even more because of its ethno-cultural basis of support within an increasingly "new" immigrant working class. With the coming of Roosevelt's New Deal, this incipient alliance solidified, and from 1936 onward the Democratic Party could count on-and came to rely on-the campaigning resources of the labor movement.

Collective Bargaining

That this alliance partook of the nonpartisan logic of Gompers's authorship-too much was at stake for organized labor to waste its political capital on third parties-became clear in the unsettled period of the early cold war. Not only did theCIO oppose the Progressive party of 1948, but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supported Henry Wallace for the presidency that year.

The formation of the AFL-CIOin 1955 visibly testified to the powerful continuities persisting through the age of industrial unionism. Above all, the central purpose remained what it had always been-to advance the economic and job interests of the union membership. Collective bargaining performed impressively after World War II, more than tripling weekly earnings in manufacturing between 1945 and 1970, gaining for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace. But if the benefits were greater and if they went to more people, the basic job-conscious thrust remained intact. Organized labor was still a sectional movement, covering at most only a third of America's wage earners and inaccessible to those cut off in the low-wage secondary labor market.

Women and Minorities in the Labor Movement

Nothing better captures the uneasy amalgam of old and new in the postwar labor movement than the treatment of minorities and women who flocked in, initially from the mass production industries, but after 1960 from the public and service sectors as well. Labor's historic commitment to racial and gender equality was thereby much strengthened, but not to the point of challenging the status quo within the labor movement itself. Thus the leadership structure remained largely closed to minorities-as did the skilled jobs that were historically the preserve of white male workers-notoriously so in the construction trades but in the industrial unions as well. Yet the AFL-CIOplayed a crucial role in the battle for civil rights legislation in 1964-1965. That this legislation might be directed against discriminatory trade union practices was anticipated (and quietly welcomed) by the more progressive labor leaders. But more significant was the meaning they found in championing this kind of reform: the chance to act on the broad ideals of the labor movement. And, so motivated, they deployed labor's power with great effect in the achievement of John F. Kennedy's and Lyndon B. Johnson 's domestic programs during the 1960s.

Decline in Unions

This was ultimately economic, not political power, however, and as organized labor's grip on the industrial sector began to weaken, so did its political capability. From the early 1970s onward, new competitive forces swept through the heavily unionized industries, set off by deregulation in communications and transportation, by industrial restructuring and by an unprecedented onslaught of foreign goods. As oligopolistic and regulated market structures broke down, nonunion competition spurted, concession bargaining became widespread and plant closings decimated union memberships. The once-celebrated National Labor Relations Act increasingly hamstrung the labor movement; an all-out reform campaign to get the law amended failed in 1978. And with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, there came to power an anti-union administration the likes of which had not been seen since the Harding era.

Between 1975 and 1985, union membership fell by 5 million. In manufacturing, the unionized portion of the labor force dropped below 25 percent, while mining and construction, once labor's flagship industries, were decimated. Only in the public sector did the unions hold their own. By the end of the 1980s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, half the proportion of the early 1950s.

The labor movement has never been swift to change. But if the new high-tech and service sectors seemed beyond its reach in 1989, so did the mass production industries in 1929. There is a silver lining: Compared to the old AFL, organized labor is today much more diverse and broadly based: In 2018, of the 14.7 million wage and salary workers who were part of a union (compared to 17.7 million in 1983), 25 percent are women and 28 percent are Black.

Sources

TED: The Economics Daily. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction.

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I would probably be like Ford he was a good person and he treated his workers good.I wouldnt want for my works to not want to come to work,they should want to come to work and not feel like they are being treated badly. Happy works = better product.

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Henry Ford cause he obviously cared about his workers and made sure they were doing alright just so they wouldnt have a reason to leave 

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Henry Ford cause he obviously cared about his workers and made sure they were doing alright just so they wouldnt have a reason to leave 

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As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2008, the last update, we have used $1.25 as the global line. As of October 2015, the new global line will be updated to $1.90.

When we want to identify how many people in the world live in extreme poverty, however, we cannot simply add up the national poverty rates of each country, because this would mean using a different yardstick to identify who is poor in each and every country. We therefore need a poverty line that measures poverty in all countries by the same standard.

In 1990, a group of independent researchers and the World Bank proposed to measure the world's poor using the standards of the poorest countries in the World. They examined national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the world, and converted the lines to a common currency by using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates. The PPP exchange rates are constructed to ensure that the same quantity of goods and services are priced equivalently across countries. Once converted into a common currency, they found that in six of these very poor countries the value of the national poverty line was about $1 per day per person, and this formed the basis for the first dollar-a-day international poverty line.

After a new round and larger volume of internationally comparable prices were collected in 2005, the international poverty line was revised based on 15 national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the World. The average of these 15 lines was $1.25 per person per day (again in PPP terms), and this became the revised international poverty line.

And again this year, we used the poverty lines of those same 15 poorest countries from 2005 (holding steady the yardstick against which we measure) to determine the new global poverty line of $1.90 in 2011 PPP.

PPP allows us put each country's income and consumption data in globally-comparable terms. The PPP is computed on the basis of price data from across the world, and the responsibility for determining a particular year's PPP rests with the International Comparison Program (ICP), an independent statistical program with a Global Office housed within the World Bank's Development Data Group.

Should I use this new poverty line to plan programs and policies in my country?

While the global extreme poverty rate may not be dramatically different after the adoption of the new PPP and poverty line, some regional and country rates may fluctuate considerably.

It is important to note, however, that the global poverty line is used primarily to track global extreme poverty, and to measure progress on global goals set by the World Bank, the United Nations, and other development partners. A country's national poverty line is far more appropriate for underpinning policy dialogue or targeting programs to reach the poorest. For example, in a middle-income country, where the national poverty line is at $4 a day, the global poverty threshold may be less relevant than in a poorer country where the national line is at $1.65 or similar.

The global poverty line does not currently take these multiple dimensions of poverty into account. However, the recently-established Commission on Global Poverty is currently assessing how we measure and understand poverty and how to improve this going forward. The World Bank expects their recommendations in April 2016.

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As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2008, the last update, we have used $1.25 as the global line. As of October 2015, the new global line will be updated to $1.90.

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1. The Forty Thieves

One of Gotham's earliest known criminal outfits, the Forty Thieves operated between the 1820s and 1850s in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. This band of Irish thugs, pickpockets and ne'er-do-wells first came together in a grocery store and dive bar owned by a woman named Rosanna Peers. Under the leadership of Edward Coleman-a notorious rogue who was later hanged for beating his wife to death-what started as a motley group of petty criminals soon blossomed into a feared street gang with its own rules and organizational structure. Members of the Forty Thieves reportedly had quotas that required them to steal a certain amount of goods each day or face expulsion. What's more, the gang even franchised itself in the form of the "Forty Little Thieves," a collection of juvenile apprentices who served as pickpockets and lookouts.

2. The Bowery Boys

One of the most storied gangs of New York, the Bowery Boys were a band of lower Manhattan toughs who clashed with the Irish Five Points gangs during the 1840s, 50s and 60s. Unlike some of their criminal counterparts, most of the Bowery Boys dressed in elegant clothing and held legitimate employment as printers, mechanics and other apprentice tradesmen. But when they weren't on the job, these young hoodlums haunted the saloons and back alleys of the Bowery and engaged in bloody turf wars with rival gangs like the Dead Rabbits.

The Bowery Boys often acted more as a political club than a mob, and many of their brawls were with supporters of rival politicians. The gang would sometimes even station its members at polling places to intimidate voters into supporting a particular candidate. In return, the gang's home district would receive money and preferential treatment once the politician was in office.

3. The Dead Rabbits

This crew of Irish immigrants was one of the most feared gangs to emerge from Five Points, so named for its location at the intersection of five crooked, narrow, downtown streets. For more than 60 years, Five Points (near modern-day Chinatown) was one of the city's most notorious-and dangerous-neighborhoods. Throughout the 1850s, the Dead Rabbits excelled at robbery, pick-pocketing and brawling-particularly with their sworn enemies, the Bowery Boys. The group was made up mostly of young men, but it wasn't unheard of for women to join in on the violence. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was "Hell-Cat Maggie," a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. While the Rabbits mostly dabbled in petty crime, they were also famous for the events of July 4, 1857, when one of their street fights with the Bowery Boys turned into a bloody riot that killed a dozen people.

The Dead Rabbits supposedly began as an offshoot of another gang called the Roach Guards, but some historians have suggested the two were actually one and the same. In fact, one popular theory argues that the term "dead rabbit" was simply a pejorative used by the Bowery Boys and the New York press in reference to members of the Roach Guards and other Five Points gangs.

4. The Daybreak Boys

New York's 19th-century gang activity wasn't limited to the rough and tumble streets of Manhattan-it also extended into the waters of the East River. The Daybreak Boys were one of the most ruthless crews of "river pirates" who preyed on the city's booming shipping industry during the late 1840s and 1850s. As their name suggests, the Daybreakers- whose leaders went by such colorful monikers as Cow-legged Sam McCarthy and Slobbery Jim -preferred to strike in the hours before dawn. Using small rowboats, these juvenile gangsters would silently row their way alongside anchored shipping vessels. Sneaking aboard, they would steal as much cargo as they could before returning to their dinghies and escaping to a rendezvous point at a gin mill in the Fourth Ward.

To prove their mettle, prospective members were reportedly required to have already killed at least once before joining the group, and the Daybreak Boys were supposedly responsible for more than 30 murders- it wasn't unusual for an unlucky watchman to end up with a slit throat or a fractured skull during one of their robberies. The gang reportedly fell apart in the late 1850s after a police crackdown, but not before they had claimed thousands of dollars in booty.

5. The Whyos

Formed from the remnants of several defunct Five Points outfits, the Whyos were one of the most dominant New York street gangs from the 1860s to the 1890s. The group started out as a loose collection of petty thugs, pickpockets and murderers, but by the 1880s they had graduated to more high-class crime like counterfeiting, prostitution and racketeering. As their grip on Manhattan tightened, many of the gang even opened legitimate side businesses such as casinos and saloons.

They may have masqueraded as upstanding citizens, but the Whyos were still notoriously tough customers. One hood by the name of "Dandy" Johnny Dolan supposedly carried a copper eye gouger and wore shoes outfitted with axe blades. Another Whyo called Piker Ryan was once caught with a detailed price list of all the gruesome deeds he could be hired to perform. A simple punch to the face was only two bucks, chewing off an ear cost $15 and a murder-which Ryan's catalogue described as "doing the big job"-went for the princely sum of $100.

6. The Five Points Gang

This legendary mob came together in the 1890s, when the Italian gangster Paul Kelly united the remaining members of the Dead Rabbits, Whyos and other Five Points gangs under his own banner. From his headquarters in the New Brighton Dance Hall, Kelly marshaled an army of 1,500 thugs in bloody turf wars with his archrivals, a Jewish gang run by the famed hood Monk Eastman. The two groups engaged in constant brawls and once even squared off in a massive gun battle under the Second Avenue elevated train line.

When they weren't participating in Wild West-style shootouts, the Five Pointers ran widespread robbery, racketeering and prostitution rings. They also dabbled in legitimate front businesses and worked as strong-arm men for the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. The gang's influence eventually waned in the 1910s, but not before they had helped train the next generation of mob bosses. Among others, the Five Pointers initiated thugs like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio into a life of organized crime.

7. The Eastman Gang

Led by the Jewish mobster Edward "Monk" Eastman, the Eastman Gang rose to become one of New York's most feared criminal organizations in the 1890s. As the kings of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the 1,200 "Eastmans" raked in huge profits running brothels, protection rackets, drug rings and even murder-for-hire operations. Like their rivals in the Five Points Gang, Eastman's boys also teamed with corrupt politicians in voter fraud. In return, the city's crooked lawmakers turned a blind eye to the gang's illicit activities.

A career criminal, Monk Eastman delighted in violence and was known to personally dish out beatings to his enemies. This hands-on approach proved to be his undoing in 1904, when he was arrested and jailed for a simple street mugging. With their leader behind bars, the Eastmans splintered into several smaller, less powerful factions in the 1910s. Monk Eastman later enlisted in the armed forces and forged a legendary reputation fighting in the trenches of World War I. But while he returned to New York a war hero, the former gang boss's old life ultimately caught up with him, and he was brutally gunned down on a city sidewalk in 1920.

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From river pirates to knife-wielding adolescents, get the facts on seven of 19th century New York's most notorious street gangs.

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I would be henry ford because he was really rich and generous. 

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I would be henry ford because he was really rich and generous. 

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I think I would be Henry Ford because he was a very successful and wealthy man but gave back to the community. he was generous, giving, and tried to help in many ways

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The Gilded Age, as Mark Twain enduringly described it, sticks out like a sore thumb on the American historical landscape. It is a symbol of corruption, greed, extravagance, and exploitation, of a country gone wild with excess. It also serves as a yardstick to measure the indiscretions and inequalities of subsequent times, not least our own. Still, the Gilded Age has never received the scholarly attention lavished on Reconstruction or the Progressive era-the periods before and after-though it is generally attached to the latter as a way of explaining the eventual swing toward a long period of reform.

Richard White takes another approach. In his impressive new book The Republic for Which It Stands, the latest volume in the ongoing "Oxford History of the United States," White links the Gilded Age with Reconstruction-the two "gestated together," he writes-and, in so doing, casts both in a different light while raising new questions about a nation born in the cauldron of civil war. Indeed, there's a sense in which White has the Gilded Age effectively encompass the Reconstruction era; both periods, he argues, were defined by ongoing, and often explosive, struggles over the fundamentals of society and state in postbellum America: Who would rule and be ruled, whose vision of political economy and social relations would prevail, and who would pay the price? White thus speaks of the "twins" that were conceived in 1865. The first was "the world [that Americans] anticipated emerging from the Civil War," which "died before being born"; the second "lived" but was "forever haunted by its sibling." The book's prologue, "Mourning Lincoln" (acknowledging an important study of the same name by Martha Hodes), makes the case for the larger social meaning of Lincoln's assassination and sets the tone for the many pages that follow. The Republic for Which It Stands offers a sobering and generally dispiriting view of the nation's contested road from the end of the Civil War to its emergence as an industrial-capitalist power by the turn of the 20th century.

There are no small challenges to reconceiving the three decades of American history that White covers in his book, especially given the demanding standards of comprehensiveness to which the Oxford series is devoted. Readers will find a veritable kaleidoscope of subject matter, from electoral politics, political economy, and industrial warfare to popular culture, literature, and sports. They will find figures of political and cultural prominence as well as those who are now relatively obscure, but who at the time were consequential for their ideas and activism. And they will find geopolitical breadth, as White-drawing on his expertise in Western US history-makes sure that the trans-Mississippi West and its racially and ethnically mixed denizens figure significantly in the unfolding story. Holding the more than 900 sprawling pages together is a framework in which party politics and national elections are set as the chronological markers for a developing battle between the forces of liberalism and anti-monopoly, all carried along by the commentary of the novelist, editor, and critic William Dean Howells, whose intellectual journey in many ways mirrored the political drift of the times.

White's early chapters on Reconstruction unspool many of the thematic threads that he then weaves together for the remainder of the book. On the one hand, Republicans in Congress looked to extend Lincoln's America-exemplified by Springfield, Illinois, a place in which artisan shops, small manufacturers, and family farms predominated-to both the West and the South. To that end, the federal government extended and expanded the power that it had accumulated during the Civil War into the postwar period and created new institutions to enact this vision. On the other hand, this newly powerful federal government still lacked the administrative capacity to see such projects through. The Freedmen's Bureau was to supervise the transition from slavery to freedom in the former Confederacy, ensuring that contract rather than coercion mediated new labor relations, but the bureau was understaffed and underfunded. The Reconstruction Acts, the high point of Republican Radicalism, enfranchised African-American men, but the rapidly shrinking US Army of Occupation was often unable to protect the exercise of their new rights. (In both of these cases, White draws on the important recent work of the writer and historian Gregory Downs.) The results predictably saw African Americans sink into the mire of a "coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either," dependent as it was on "extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor."

In the trans-Mississippi West, part of the "Greater Reconstruction" (a term that White borrows from the historian Elliott West), the federal government-acting as an "imperial state"-extended its reach and promoted railroad development at the expense of Native peoples, who fought back with ferocity and determination before being relegated to reservations. In effect, the government engaged in a form of land redistribution that it had refused to impose in the South, transferring lands from the control of Native Americans into the hands of aspiring white agricultural operators (through the Homestead Act) and railroad corporations (through the Pacific Railway Act and a raft of other incentives). As White portrays it, Reconstruction-in the South and the West-was largely an uneven process of state-building that advanced a highly repressive brand of capitalist development.

In this way, despite the gains of emancipation and of advancing the principles of civil and political equality, Reconstruction laid the groundwork for the Gilded Age, with its growing wage-labor force, expanding industries, swelling cities, massive population movements, and unprecedented consolidations of wealth and power. Reconstruction also threw a dominant liberal ideology into crisis, as the dramatic expansion of the federal state and the mobilizations of working people in the South, North, and West posed new questions about the world that the abolition of slavery appeared to make possible.

Here White turns to Howells, who seemed to put his finger on the political dilemma that most of his fellow liberals found themselves confronting. "The era's problem, as Howells saw it, was adjusting the ideal of liberty to the necessity of order," he writes; the solution "was to sever 'administration' from democracy" and, in Howells's words, "evolve order out of chaos, government out of anarchy." For Howells and other liberals of the era, this meant free trade, civil-service reform, a return to the gold standard, limitations on male suffrage, opposition to women's suffrage, and replacing elected government officials with appointed ones. The liberal sensibilities that had once nourished the antislavery movement were now fractured by the challenges of "free labor" and had given way to a deepening suspicion of democracy itself.

Current Issue

Liberalism's retreat into an antidemocratic search for order was not precipitated by the ambitions of Radical Reconstruction alone. It was also encouraged by one of Radicalism's offspring: anti-monopoly. As a movement and a set of ideas, anti-monopoly had its roots in the 1820s, when workingmen's parties and their intellectual allies pushed back against the market expansions of the era. But it was in the post-Civil War era that anti-monopoly developed a mass following and made its presence felt in American politics.

Anti-monopoly expressed the vision and aspirations of Lincoln's America in a world in which the prospects for its survival were rapidly eroding. Anti-monopoly sentiments took hold among urban workers, family farmers, and small-town merchants and retailers, fed by the traditions of Euro-American republicanism, free-labor ideology, and socialism. They would find a geographical base in the South and West, but especially in what White, channeling the writer Hamlin Garland, calls the "Middle Border" (effectively the Upper Plains and the Missouri River Valley). They would also find organized expression in the Grange, the Greenback-Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers' Alliance, and, eventually, the Populists.

Anti-monopolists bridled at the inequalities of wealth that surrounded them. They decried the voracious markets that enabled a small elite to monopolize society's most vital resources and undermine the independence of small producers in town and country. And they blamed the moneyed corruption of party politics for their collective plight. To readjust the balance in favor of small producers, they set their sights on the privately controlled national banking system and large railroad corporations; to restore the integrity of the political system, they rallied voters to the banners of independent political parties.

For anti-monopoly struggles, the so-called money question-how much currency should circulate, what it should consist of, and who should issue it-was key. White does an excellent job of explaining the complex manifestations involving gold, greenbacks (the paper currency first issued by the federal government during the Civil War), and silver. Coining silver as well as gold served inflationary ends and won the favor of many small producers whose debt burdens would be lightened; it also stoked the enmity of bankers and financiers, who were creditors and thus worshipped at the altar of gold. But it was greenbacks, not gold or silver, that became the center of anti-monopoly politics-both because they would increase the volume of currency in circulation and, especially, because they would put the federal government, rather than private banks, in charge of the money supply.

Still, anti-monopoly was far more than a single-issue movement. To attract farmers and industrial workers, it embraced a wide range of issues, from railroad regulation, cooperative purchasing and marketing, and the eight-hour workday to mechanics' lien laws, land reform, and progressive taxation. Henry George, one of the most formidable anti-monopoly theorists, saw land monopoly as the cause of economic impoverishment and catapulted to national and international fame after the publication of his immensely influential Progress and Poverty (1879). In 1886, George nearly won election as the mayor of New York City on a United Labor Party platform that included a land tax and a critique of wealthy landlords (garnering more votes than a young Republican named Theodore Roosevelt in the process). Meanwhile, anti-monopoly tickets-some associated with the Knights of Labor-emerged victorious in towns small and large across the country. William Dean Howells also came under George's (and anti-monopoly's) spell.

Yet George's politics also exposed the limits of anti-monopoly as a mass movement. Although some efforts were made by Greenbackers and the Knights of Labor to court the support of African Americans, these anti-monopoly groups, like George himself, were adamantly hostile to Chinese immigrants, whom they saw as symbols of heathenism and slavery (Chinese workers were often derided as "coolies"). "Look to the Midwest, East, and South," White observes, "and the Knights seemed the vanguard of at least a limited racial equality; look to the West and they appeared very different. At various times, the Knights distrusted Italians, Finns, Hungarians, and more, but the one racial or ethnic group they banned from the organization was the Chinese."

White's critique of the racism that anti-monopolists embraced, or at least failed to shake, frames his interpretation of the course of Gilded Age reform. On the one hand, his heart is very much with anti-monopolism and the related reform impulses of the period, and no one could be a sharper critic of the alliance between capital and the state that emerged out of the Civil War. Readers of Railroaded, White's 2011 book, will see much of what they admired there in this volume, including deft treatments of policy-making and corrupt bargains at all levels. Vivid chapters on the "Great Upheaval" of the 1880s and on "Dying for Progress" demonstrate the human costs that industrial development imposed on the country and many of its people.

On the other hand, White has serious misgivings about the era's radicals and reformers. Over the last half of the book, he shows us the expanse and depth of reform activity across the United States-though he tends to be dismissive of the socialists, who were crucial to the mobilization of the immigrant working class and eventually left their special mark on the country's midsection-and he reminds us of the remarkable spectrum of people reform attracted, including renegades from the liberal elite like Howells. For all of these reformers, whether workers and farmers who faced impoverishment and dependency or temperance advocates who attempted to tie the evils of drink to those of industrialization, the "home," and the dangers it faced in the Gilded Age, proved to be the animating image.

Yet, as White sees it, reform's very capaciousness was also its weakness. "Reformers pushed against the bonds of the status quo," he writes, "but when they broke those bonds their own lack of common purpose became all too apparent." They achieved piecemeal victories, but a larger reconstruction seemed elusive, especially given the juggernaut of centralization and industrial consolidation they were up against. White's treatment of Populism, the largest of these movements and the one best embodying the Greenback and anti-monopoly traditions, thus emphasizes both its "essential moderation" and its contradictory views of the state: simultaneously distrusting federal power and demanding federal intervention in the American economy to the benefit of small producers. If anything, the changing demographics of the country (especially the declining size of the rural population) and the reform currents already under way (including the achievement of some demands regarding taxation and farm legislation) marked Populism's effective irrelevance.

What is missing from White's nearly exhaustive book is a vision of the United States in the Gilded Age world-of its foreign relations and of how it emerged as a world power. White doesn't attempt to duck this matter: "Most of the changes examined in this volume took place on national and regional scales, not the transnational," he notes in the introduction. "Transnational developments mattered, but during the Gilded Age the nation took shape in response to these larger changes rather than as a simple reflection of them."

Perhaps. But America's imperial presence in the world was central to the capitalist society that came into being. After all, this was the period that saw the appearance of newly configured nation-states on the country's northern and southern borders (the Dominion of Canada in 1867 and the Porfiriato in Mexico in 1877, both overlapping with Reconstruction); massive new US investments in Mexico and the Caribbean Basin; the purchase of Alaska (in 1867) and the annexation of Hawaii (in 1898); and the crafting of a commercial imperialism that emphasized the Pacific and Asian markets. (William Seward, the Republican luminary and Lincoln's secretary of state, played a central role in this, while the anti-monopolist farmers, as William Appleman Williams long ago showed, bought into it readily.)

There were also the US invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (we call this the "Spanish-American War"), which give wider meaning to White's important points about the federal state during the Gilded Age. The West, he argues, "became the kindergarten of the American state." Indeed, in many ways the West became an imperial laboratory (White refers, correctly in my view, to the federal government of this period as an "imperial state"). The federal government created a number of large new territories in the trans-Mississippi West during the Civil War to secure its power and authority there. It then kept those territories under federal control for a lengthy period and established a number of substantial hurdles involving race, religion, family ("home"), and belonging that all had to be cleared before the territories could be admitted to the Union as states. The trans-Mississippi West, that is to say, served in many ways as a proving ground for the overseas occupations that followed.

The same holds true for the US Army, which not only served as the military wing of state authority and imperial reach; it also became an important vehicle for capitalist development. The Army suppressed Indian resistance to infrastructure-building and white settlement; broke labor strikes; and supported the work of industrialists in the trans-Mississippi regions. Many of the same soldiers and officers then served in the Philippines and the Caribbean during the Spanish-American War. The Jim Crow segregation that increasingly characterized the South in the 1890s and early 1900s needs to be considered in relation to the apartheid policy of reservations, while the escalating racism and anti-Catholicism of the period-both absorbed and reconfigured by reformers-fueled the imperial warfare of the late 1890s. Which is to say that the regional, national, and transnational were intricately connected and together made up the United States that emerged at the turn of the 20th century.

As was true of the earlier Railroaded, White seems quite mindful, in The Republic for Which It Stands, of the resonance between past and present. "I have written a book about a time of rapid and disorienting change and failed politics," he tells us at the very beginning of the book, "and now I finish it in a parallel universe." White's treatment of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age gives the lie to any argument about 19th-century "laissez-faire" as the progenitor of American capitalism, and helps us understand the historical depth of capital's dependence on the state and vice versa. ("Laissez-faire was planned," as Karl Polanyi once put it.) Without state action at many levels-defeating slaveholding antagonists, securing private property and commercial contracts, offering generous incentives to developmental entrepreneurs, repressing labor agitation, and sending Native peoples to isolated reservations through military means-capitalism's traction would have been shakier and more limited.

White also highlights the violent confrontations that Gilded Age capitalism provoked and the wide-ranging popular critique it nurtured. The proponents of anti-monopoly mounted a withering attack on the sources and nature of power in American society-a more fundamental attack, I believe, than White allows-that rallied millions of Americans to their side, whether through independent parties or a large variety of social movements. Progress and Poverty, a long and difficult work of political economy, outsold every other book in the 19th century except for the Bible and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Never before, or since, have national elections been more closely contested or "third" parties-Greenback-Labor, Knights, Readjusters, Populists-more successful in competing for power at the state and local levels. Although these parties were gone by the early 20th century, they would leave important social-democratic legacies for Progressivism and the New Deal, and for us to recognize and appreciate.

But not to emulate. Contemporary activists looking for inspirations from history-a "usable past"-often find this period rich in examples. And there can be little doubt that a commitment to democratic practice was most strongly embraced by those who marched under the banners of Radical Republicanism and anti-monopoly-especially African Americans, whose political struggles don't get the attention they deserve in this volume. There can also be little doubt about who led the charge against political democracy, not only in the South, where that effort had the most repressive effect, but in the Northeast, Midwest, and West as well: the businessmen, financiers, and liberals of the Gilded Age, along with the planters and other large-scale agricultural interests. Related Article

Yet while White may underestimate the radicalism of these popular movements and overestimate their fit within a reform mainstream (many of the policies they had earlier championed were enacted in pared-down form only after their own defeat), his disappointment and disenchantment are worth reflecting upon. The racism of these movements was endemic and cannot be explained away by reference to political overtures across the lines of race and ethnicity; it grew out of a deep hostility toward the propertyless poor and those who symbolized the slave and the abjectly dependent (thus the Chinese as well as African Americans). Only rarely was a new direction charted, and it usually required extraordinary leadership and a lengthy period of incubation.

Equally important, the economic analysis of the anti-monopoly movements, especially Populism, proved of less and less relevance as the "producers" these movements comprised increasingly fell into the ranks of the working class. Anti-monopoly identified exploitation mainly in the sphere of exchange; its focus was on control over the money supply (greenbacks), cooperative marketing (subtreasury), and the regulation of vital infrastructure, especially railroads. Anti-monopoly was far less concerned with relations of power in workshops, on farms, and in families, which often involved women as well as people of color; nor did it adequately address the challenges of industrial labor, aside from a commitment to the eight-hour workday. Thus the anti-monopolist Southern Farmers' Alliance (composed mainly of landowners) not only excluded African Americans (who were mostly farm laborers and sharecroppers) from membership, but also brutally crushed a black cotton-pickers' strike in 1891 that the Colored Farmers' Alliance had supported.

Populism, and anti-monopoly sensibilities more generally, lived on in a variety of forms, mostly veering left through the 1930s and veering right thereafter. That the "populist" label can be attached today to movements of the left and the right (though mostly of the right) is an indication of both its continued rhetorical salience and its limited usefulness as a way forward for progressives, despite the lift that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have given it. Democracy in the 19th century was widely understood in the gendered terms of masculinity and patriarchy, and could be imagined as a central component of populist and anti-monopoly movements whose social base was constituted by male household heads. Democracy today cannot possibly be imagined without including relations of power that 19th-century populism and anti-monopoly for the most part ignored or actively excluded: those involving racialized groups, stateless people, and women and men as well as the rich and poor, or the "people" and the "interests."

In The Republic for Which It Stands, Richard White re-creates the rich textures of a world that still speaks to ours and from which we have much to learn-a world that created forms of wealth and power that still bedevil us, while invigorating notions of economic justice that had emerged across the 19th century and would remain consequential well into the 20th. But from the 21st-century perspective of what many see as a second Gilded Age, it is clear that we need a language of struggle and a vision of the political future that the first Gilded Age simply did not provide.

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From Progress to Poverty: America's Long Gilded Age

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The Gilded Age, as Mark Twain enduringly described it, sticks out like a sore thumb on the American historical landscape. It is a symbol of corruption, greed, extravagance, and exploitation, of a country gone wild with excess. It also serves as a yardstick to measure the indiscretions and inequalities of subsequent times, not least our own.

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1. The Forty Thieves

One of Gotham's earliest known criminal outfits, the Forty Thieves operated between the 1820s and 1850s in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. This band of Irish thugs, pickpockets and ne'er-do-wells first came together in a grocery store and dive bar owned by a woman named Rosanna Peers. Under the leadership of Edward Coleman-a notorious rogue who was later hanged for beating his wife to death-what started as a motley group of petty criminals soon blossomed into a feared street gang with its own rules and organizational structure. Members of the Forty Thieves reportedly had quotas that required them to steal a certain amount of goods each day or face expulsion. What's more, the gang even franchised itself in the form of the "Forty Little Thieves," a collection of juvenile apprentices who served as pickpockets and lookouts.

2. The Bowery Boys

One of the most storied gangs of New York, the Bowery Boys were a band of lower Manhattan toughs who clashed with the Irish Five Points gangs during the 1840s, 50s and 60s. Unlike some of their criminal counterparts, most of the Bowery Boys dressed in elegant clothing and held legitimate employment as printers, mechanics and other apprentice tradesmen. But when they weren't on the job, these young hoodlums haunted the saloons and back alleys of the Bowery and engaged in bloody turf wars with rival gangs like the Dead Rabbits.

The Bowery Boys often acted more as a political club than a mob, and many of their brawls were with supporters of rival politicians. The gang would sometimes even station its members at polling places to intimidate voters into supporting a particular candidate. In return, the gang's home district would receive money and preferential treatment once the politician was in office.

3. The Dead Rabbits

This crew of Irish immigrants was one of the most feared gangs to emerge from Five Points, so named for its location at the intersection of five crooked, narrow, downtown streets. For more than 60 years, Five Points (near modern-day Chinatown) was one of the city's most notorious-and dangerous-neighborhoods. Throughout the 1850s, the Dead Rabbits excelled at robbery, pick-pocketing and brawling-particularly with their sworn enemies, the Bowery Boys. The group was made up mostly of young men, but it wasn't unheard of for women to join in on the violence. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was "Hell-Cat Maggie," a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. While the Rabbits mostly dabbled in petty crime, they were also famous for the events of July 4, 1857, when one of their street fights with the Bowery Boys turned into a bloody riot that killed a dozen people.

The Dead Rabbits supposedly began as an offshoot of another gang called the Roach Guards, but some historians have suggested the two were actually one and the same. In fact, one popular theory argues that the term "dead rabbit" was simply a pejorative used by the Bowery Boys and the New York press in reference to members of the Roach Guards and other Five Points gangs.

4. The Daybreak Boys

New York's 19th-century gang activity wasn't limited to the rough and tumble streets of Manhattan-it also extended into the waters of the East River. The Daybreak Boys were one of the most ruthless crews of "river pirates" who preyed on the city's booming shipping industry during the late 1840s and 1850s. As their name suggests, the Daybreakers- whose leaders went by such colorful monikers as Cow-legged Sam McCarthy and Slobbery Jim -preferred to strike in the hours before dawn. Using small rowboats, these juvenile gangsters would silently row their way alongside anchored shipping vessels. Sneaking aboard, they would steal as much cargo as they could before returning to their dinghies and escaping to a rendezvous point at a gin mill in the Fourth Ward.

To prove their mettle, prospective members were reportedly required to have already killed at least once before joining the group, and the Daybreak Boys were supposedly responsible for more than 30 murders- it wasn't unusual for an unlucky watchman to end up with a slit throat or a fractured skull during one of their robberies. The gang reportedly fell apart in the late 1850s after a police crackdown, but not before they had claimed thousands of dollars in booty.

5. The Whyos

Formed from the remnants of several defunct Five Points outfits, the Whyos were one of the most dominant New York street gangs from the 1860s to the 1890s. The group started out as a loose collection of petty thugs, pickpockets and murderers, but by the 1880s they had graduated to more high-class crime like counterfeiting, prostitution and racketeering. As their grip on Manhattan tightened, many of the gang even opened legitimate side businesses such as casinos and saloons.

They may have masqueraded as upstanding citizens, but the Whyos were still notoriously tough customers. One hood by the name of "Dandy" Johnny Dolan supposedly carried a copper eye gouger and wore shoes outfitted with axe blades. Another Whyo called Piker Ryan was once caught with a detailed price list of all the gruesome deeds he could be hired to perform. A simple punch to the face was only two bucks, chewing off an ear cost $15 and a murder-which Ryan's catalogue described as "doing the big job"-went for the princely sum of $100.

6. The Five Points Gang

This legendary mob came together in the 1890s, when the Italian gangster Paul Kelly united the remaining members of the Dead Rabbits, Whyos and other Five Points gangs under his own banner. From his headquarters in the New Brighton Dance Hall, Kelly marshaled an army of 1,500 thugs in bloody turf wars with his archrivals, a Jewish gang run by the famed hood Monk Eastman. The two groups engaged in constant brawls and once even squared off in a massive gun battle under the Second Avenue elevated train line.

When they weren't participating in Wild West-style shootouts, the Five Pointers ran widespread robbery, racketeering and prostitution rings. They also dabbled in legitimate front businesses and worked as strong-arm men for the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. The gang's influence eventually waned in the 1910s, but not before they had helped train the next generation of mob bosses. Among others, the Five Pointers initiated thugs like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio into a life of organized crime.

7. The Eastman Gang

Led by the Jewish mobster Edward "Monk" Eastman, the Eastman Gang rose to become one of New York's most feared criminal organizations in the 1890s. As the kings of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the 1,200 "Eastmans" raked in huge profits running brothels, protection rackets, drug rings and even murder-for-hire operations. Like their rivals in the Five Points Gang, Eastman's boys also teamed with corrupt politicians in voter fraud. In return, the city's crooked lawmakers turned a blind eye to the gang's illicit activities.

A career criminal, Monk Eastman delighted in violence and was known to personally dish out beatings to his enemies. This hands-on approach proved to be his undoing in 1904, when he was arrested and jailed for a simple street mugging. With their leader behind bars, the Eastmans splintered into several smaller, less powerful factions in the 1910s. Monk Eastman later enlisted in the armed forces and forged a legendary reputation fighting in the trenches of World War I. But while he returned to New York a war hero, the former gang boss's old life ultimately caught up with him, and he was brutally gunned down on a city sidewalk in 1920.

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From river pirates to knife-wielding adolescents, get the facts on seven of 19th century New York's most notorious street gangs.

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How American Inequality in the Gilded Age Compares to Today

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"Gilded is not golden..." explains historian Nell Irvin Painter. "It's the shiny exterior and the rot underneath."

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I would be Rockefeller because he was one of the richest men in history and even as a robber baron gave back to his community.

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https://allthatsinteresting.com/new-york-gangs

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From the Short Tail gang of the 1880s to the Black Spades of the 1970s Bronx, take a peek at New York gangs of the past through these unbelievable photos.

From Gangs of New York to The Godfather to The Warriors and beyond, almost every era of New York City gang life has gotten the silver screen treatment and cemented its place in the American imagination. In fact, surely no other city in the U.S. has a history more infamous for its organized bands of outlaws, marauders, killers, and thieves.

And while the ethnicities, motives, fashions, and weapons of these New York City gangs have evolved quite a bit over the last two centuries, the audacity, violence, and raw outlaw spirit have remained largely constant.

Wherever there are neglected areas of the city inhabited by the underprivileged and impoverished, crime will so often find a way to flourish. And where crimes flourishes, gangs are soon enough born.

See more of New York City's most notorious street gangs in the gallery above and discover more about their shocking stories below.

The Five Points, Bill The Butcher, And The Real-Life Gangs Of 19th-Century New York

The long, turbulent history of New York gangs can be traced all the way back to the city's Five Points slums of the early 19th century, an infamous cesspit of crime, poverty, and violence.

In their book , historians Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace write that the early seeds of street gangs in New York were planted in 1807 when bands of white, working-class youths began harassing African-American churchgoers who were patrons of Lower Manhattan's African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

By the 1820s, gangs of young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."

The first street gangs of New York City were typically divided among ethnic and economic lines, representing the growing animosity between those of Irish and non-Irish backgrounds in Lower Manhattan.

The area's Five Points district was defined by Canal Street to the north, Centre Street to the west, Park Row to the south, and the Bowery to the east, where a plethora of gangs like the Shirt Tails, the Plug Uglies, the Gopher Gang, the Montgomery Guards, and the Whyos called home. The most infamous among them were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, who were fierce rivals.

Each gang was easily distinguishable by their "uniforms." For the Bowery Boys that meant blood-red shirts paired with stovepipe hats and for the Dead Rabbits that meant a gruesome prop made out of a rabbit corpse nailed to a stick.

These gangs thieved and killed while controlling the Five Points, which received little attention from authorities because its residents were the poorest and most vulnerable population in the city. This meant that gang activities went unchecked and frequently erupted into bloody riots between rivals. The area was said to be one of the deadliest places on Earth with a homicide rate of one murder every night.

Responsible for much of this bloodshed were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, fierce rivals because the former's nativists hated no one more than the latter's newly-arrived Irish immigrants. In addition to the Irish, the Bowery Boys despised all immigrant communities who they believed were taking their jobs and threatening their livelihoods.

With such animosity in place, one of the most brutal fights between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits spiraled into a two-day city-wide gang war in July 1857, in which an estimated 1,000 gang members took to the streets. When the dust cleared, eight men were dead and up to 100 more were seriously injured. That gang fight - one of the biggest in New York's history - and others like it helped to inspire Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs Of New York.

However, the slums that birthed this era of New York gangs started to slowly turn a corner after photographer Jacob Riis laid their desolation bare in his famous 1890 book How The Other Half Lives, which exposed the living conditions in the city's worst areas like never before. The book ultimately helped prompt city officials to institute reforms intended to rid New York City of the "hot-bed of infamy" that areas like the Five Points had become due to decades of neglect.

The Five Points was soon systematically torn down and rebuilt, with the city introducing missionary houses throughout the area, the Bowery Mission being the most famous.

Slowly, the lawlessness that gripped the area evolved into more stable working-class immigrant neighborhoods -- places like Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. The types of gangs that used to run these streets slowly dissolved throughout the first decades of the 20th century as new types of outlaws began to dominate the city's streets.

The Mafia, Federal Crackdowns, And A New Era For Gang Life

As the 20th century came into its own, the relatively small and disorganized streets gangs that had once ruled New York were overshadowed by a criminal organization altogether larger, more organized, and more infamous than these prior gangs had ever been: the Mafia.

Built on a longstanding Sicilian tradition, the Mafia was established by Sicilian and Italian immigrants in New York in the late 1920s and early '30s with a large membership, strict codes of conduct, and police connections that allowed them to flourish in ways that prior gangs had not.

But despite Mafia dominance, pockets of small gangs persisted throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the century's first few decades, waves of Italian and Jewish immigrants across Brooklyn and Queens, to pick just two examples, settled into ethnic enclaves that gave rise to territorial gangs of youths set on protecting their turf.

By the 1950s, gangs like Brooklyn's appropriately-named Thrill Kill gang terrorized their corner of New York. Meanwhile, new bursts of immigration from places like Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean introduced new populations into the city -- and, sadly, created new opportunities for conflict between gangs informed by ethnic differences.

But by the late 1950s, the federal government decided to prioritize anti-gang intervention in urban areas like New York. This effort was focused on cutting off the source of disaffected young men and women that fueled the growth of these gangs in the first place through increased funding for social programs designed to attract the impoverished youths into job training and employment opportunities.

The gang intervention programs began to bear fruit in the 1960s as the city saw a decline in gang activity. This trend was also helped by the Vietnam War and the work of antiwar activists who connected with gang members to harness their anger over the injustices in their communities that were also being addressed by the broader social movements of the 1960s.

Rubble Kings: New York City Gangs In The 1960s, '70s, And '80s

Not everyone was up for "the Cause," however. In his book Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, Eric Schneider describes the New York City gangs of this period as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill-seeking and immediate gratification." In short, kids from deteriorating communities and struggling families sought refuge in the street gangs that gave them the structure and a sense of identity they lacked elsewhere.

By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members in the city were either African-American or Latino, two groups that had of course been long marginalized by society and particularly left behind by the white flight that had gutted New York. As a consequence, gang activity was concentrated in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Harlem where a majority of the residents were comprised of these demographic groups.

Street gangs like the Reapers, the Savage Skulls, the Black Spades, the Dragons, the Javelins, and the Tomahawks carried on the New York gang tradition of ethnic conflict among the impoverished that had once characterized the turf battles of the 19th century. The city was awash in gang colors - literally - as a way for members to clearly brandish their loyalties and intimidate rivals just as the "uniforms" of the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits had a century earlier.

"There were gangs literally at every corner. The violence was everywhere," said Lloyd "Topaz" Murphy, a former Ebony Dukes gang member, in the 2015 documentary Rubble Kings. "You could feel the tension in the air, you can see the fights across the street, you can hear the shouts in the night time."

Gang fights were endemic in these neighborhoods throughout the 1970s -- although one single death did change the course of this era's history. In 1971, Cornell Benjamin, a widely respected "peace counselor" of the Ghetto Brothers was killed while trying to break up a fight between rival gangs. Rather than seek revenge for the death of their leader as anticipated, the Ghetto Brothers called for a peace meeting among the warring gangs of the Bronx.

At least 39 gang members from 20 crews in the borough attended the peace treaty conference, now known as the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, and eventually led to a general truce in street violence across the entire borough.

The unprecedented act of good faith between the Bronx's gangs inspired the 1979 cult-classic film The Warriors and later became the focus of Rubble Kings.

While the gang truce didn't get rid of the city's street gangs completely, it did mark the beginning of intense efforts to combat gang activity across the boroughs. While larger socioeconomic woes and injustices continued to keep much of New York downtrodden and thus crime-ridden throughout the 1980s, several factors combined to change the city's fortunes in the early 1990s.

With more economic stability and much less crime, gang life in New York simply isn't what it once was.

Though New York gangs still exist today, they operate on a much different scale compared to their predecessors. What are known as "super gangs" - gangs like the Bloods and the Crips that have expansive territories and have withstood decades of anti-gang crackdowns - no longer reign supreme. Now, crops of smaller, independent gangs of mostly teenagers are scattered throughout the city.

"These kids operate off of emotion, and if someone in their group gets shot... it's eye for an eye," New York gang expert Ron Barrett explained of the gangs of today. "They used to have to get permission to retaliate and answer to someone, [but] not today... It's the wild, wild west."

But though it may be the wild west, it's likely that there are few rules because there are so relatively few gangs left. After two centuries, in fact, perhaps New York City gangs as we once knew them are slowly becoming a thing of the past -- for now.
After this look at the gangs of New York throughout history, check out these incredible photos from the city's dangerous subways of the 1980s. Then explore colorized photos that bring the streets of century-old New York to life.

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From Five Points To The Bronx, The Street Gangs Of New York Are Almost As Old As The City Itself

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From Gangs of New York to The Godfather to The Warriors and beyond, almost every era of New York City gang life has gotten the silver screen treatment and cemented its place in the American imagination. In fact, surely no other city in the U.S.

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Labor Movement - HISTORY

https://www.history.com › topics › labor

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https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/intejethi.9.1.2375096

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https://allthatsinteresting.com/new-york-gangs

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From the Short Tail gang of the 1880s to the Black Spades of the 1970s Bronx, take a peek at New York gangs of the past through these unbelievable photos.

From Gangs of New York to The Godfather to The Warriors and beyond, almost every era of New York City gang life has gotten the silver screen treatment and cemented its place in the American imagination. In fact, surely no other city in the U.S. has a history more infamous for its organized bands of outlaws, marauders, killers, and thieves.

And while the ethnicities, motives, fashions, and weapons of these New York City gangs have evolved quite a bit over the last two centuries, the audacity, violence, and raw outlaw spirit have remained largely constant.

Wherever there are neglected areas of the city inhabited by the underprivileged and impoverished, crime will so often find a way to flourish. And where crimes flourishes, gangs are soon enough born.

See more of New York City's most notorious street gangs in the gallery above and discover more about their shocking stories below.

The Five Points, Bill The Butcher, And The Real-Life Gangs Of 19th-Century New York

The long, turbulent history of New York gangs can be traced all the way back to the city's Five Points slums of the early 19th century, an infamous cesspit of crime, poverty, and violence.

In their book , historians Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace write that the early seeds of street gangs in New York were planted in 1807 when bands of white, working-class youths began harassing African-American churchgoers who were patrons of Lower Manhattan's African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

By the 1820s, gangs of young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."

The first street gangs of New York City were typically divided among ethnic and economic lines, representing the growing animosity between those of Irish and non-Irish backgrounds in Lower Manhattan.

The area's Five Points district was defined by Canal Street to the north, Centre Street to the west, Park Row to the south, and the Bowery to the east, where a plethora of gangs like the Shirt Tails, the Plug Uglies, the Gopher Gang, the Montgomery Guards, and the Whyos called home. The most infamous among them were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, who were fierce rivals.

Each gang was easily distinguishable by their "uniforms." For the Bowery Boys that meant blood-red shirts paired with stovepipe hats and for the Dead Rabbits that meant a gruesome prop made out of a rabbit corpse nailed to a stick.

These gangs thieved and killed while controlling the Five Points, which received little attention from authorities because its residents were the poorest and most vulnerable population in the city. This meant that gang activities went unchecked and frequently erupted into bloody riots between rivals. The area was said to be one of the deadliest places on Earth with a homicide rate of one murder every night.

Responsible for much of this bloodshed were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, fierce rivals because the former's nativists hated no one more than the latter's newly-arrived Irish immigrants. In addition to the Irish, the Bowery Boys despised all immigrant communities who they believed were taking their jobs and threatening their livelihoods.

With such animosity in place, one of the most brutal fights between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits spiraled into a two-day city-wide gang war in July 1857, in which an estimated 1,000 gang members took to the streets. When the dust cleared, eight men were dead and up to 100 more were seriously injured. That gang fight - one of the biggest in New York's history - and others like it helped to inspire Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs Of New York.

However, the slums that birthed this era of New York gangs started to slowly turn a corner after photographer Jacob Riis laid their desolation bare in his famous 1890 book How The Other Half Lives, which exposed the living conditions in the city's worst areas like never before. The book ultimately helped prompt city officials to institute reforms intended to rid New York City of the "hot-bed of infamy" that areas like the Five Points had become due to decades of neglect.

The Five Points was soon systematically torn down and rebuilt, with the city introducing missionary houses throughout the area, the Bowery Mission being the most famous.

Slowly, the lawlessness that gripped the area evolved into more stable working-class immigrant neighborhoods -- places like Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. The types of gangs that used to run these streets slowly dissolved throughout the first decades of the 20th century as new types of outlaws began to dominate the city's streets.

The Mafia, Federal Crackdowns, And A New Era For Gang Life

As the 20th century came into its own, the relatively small and disorganized streets gangs that had once ruled New York were overshadowed by a criminal organization altogether larger, more organized, and more infamous than these prior gangs had ever been: the Mafia.

Built on a longstanding Sicilian tradition, the Mafia was established by Sicilian and Italian immigrants in New York in the late 1920s and early '30s with a large membership, strict codes of conduct, and police connections that allowed them to flourish in ways that prior gangs had not.

But despite Mafia dominance, pockets of small gangs persisted throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the century's first few decades, waves of Italian and Jewish immigrants across Brooklyn and Queens, to pick just two examples, settled into ethnic enclaves that gave rise to territorial gangs of youths set on protecting their turf.

By the 1950s, gangs like Brooklyn's appropriately-named Thrill Kill gang terrorized their corner of New York. Meanwhile, new bursts of immigration from places like Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean introduced new populations into the city -- and, sadly, created new opportunities for conflict between gangs informed by ethnic differences.

But by the late 1950s, the federal government decided to prioritize anti-gang intervention in urban areas like New York. This effort was focused on cutting off the source of disaffected young men and women that fueled the growth of these gangs in the first place through increased funding for social programs designed to attract the impoverished youths into job training and employment opportunities.

The gang intervention programs began to bear fruit in the 1960s as the city saw a decline in gang activity. This trend was also helped by the Vietnam War and the work of antiwar activists who connected with gang members to harness their anger over the injustices in their communities that were also being addressed by the broader social movements of the 1960s.

Rubble Kings: New York City Gangs In The 1960s, '70s, And '80s

Not everyone was up for "the Cause," however. In his book Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, Eric Schneider describes the New York City gangs of this period as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill-seeking and immediate gratification." In short, kids from deteriorating communities and struggling families sought refuge in the street gangs that gave them the structure and a sense of identity they lacked elsewhere.

By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members in the city were either African-American or Latino, two groups that had of course been long marginalized by society and particularly left behind by the white flight that had gutted New York. As a consequence, gang activity was concentrated in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Harlem where a majority of the residents were comprised of these demographic groups.

Street gangs like the Reapers, the Savage Skulls, the Black Spades, the Dragons, the Javelins, and the Tomahawks carried on the New York gang tradition of ethnic conflict among the impoverished that had once characterized the turf battles of the 19th century. The city was awash in gang colors - literally - as a way for members to clearly brandish their loyalties and intimidate rivals just as the "uniforms" of the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits had a century earlier.

"There were gangs literally at every corner. The violence was everywhere," said Lloyd "Topaz" Murphy, a former Ebony Dukes gang member, in the 2015 documentary Rubble Kings. "You could feel the tension in the air, you can see the fights across the street, you can hear the shouts in the night time."

Gang fights were endemic in these neighborhoods throughout the 1970s -- although one single death did change the course of this era's history. In 1971, Cornell Benjamin, a widely respected "peace counselor" of the Ghetto Brothers was killed while trying to break up a fight between rival gangs. Rather than seek revenge for the death of their leader as anticipated, the Ghetto Brothers called for a peace meeting among the warring gangs of the Bronx.

At least 39 gang members from 20 crews in the borough attended the peace treaty conference, now known as the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, and eventually led to a general truce in street violence across the entire borough.

The unprecedented act of good faith between the Bronx's gangs inspired the 1979 cult-classic film The Warriors and later became the focus of Rubble Kings.

While the gang truce didn't get rid of the city's street gangs completely, it did mark the beginning of intense efforts to combat gang activity across the boroughs. While larger socioeconomic woes and injustices continued to keep much of New York downtrodden and thus crime-ridden throughout the 1980s, several factors combined to change the city's fortunes in the early 1990s.

With more economic stability and much less crime, gang life in New York simply isn't what it once was.

Though New York gangs still exist today, they operate on a much different scale compared to their predecessors. What are known as "super gangs" - gangs like the Bloods and the Crips that have expansive territories and have withstood decades of anti-gang crackdowns - no longer reign supreme. Now, crops of smaller, independent gangs of mostly teenagers are scattered throughout the city.

"These kids operate off of emotion, and if someone in their group gets shot... it's eye for an eye," New York gang expert Ron Barrett explained of the gangs of today. "They used to have to get permission to retaliate and answer to someone, [but] not today... It's the wild, wild west."

But though it may be the wild west, it's likely that there are few rules because there are so relatively few gangs left. After two centuries, in fact, perhaps New York City gangs as we once knew them are slowly becoming a thing of the past -- for now.
After this look at the gangs of New York throughout history, check out these incredible photos from the city's dangerous subways of the 1980s. Then explore colorized photos that bring the streets of century-old New York to life.

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From Five Points To The Bronx, The Street Gangs Of New York Are Almost As Old As The City Itself

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From Gangs of New York to The Godfather to The Warriors and beyond, almost every era of New York City gang life has gotten the silver screen treatment and cemented its place in the American imagination. In fact, surely no other city in the U.S.

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https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people

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As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2008, the last update, we have used $1.25 as the global line. As of October 2015, the new global line will be updated to $1.90.

When we want to identify how many people in the world live in extreme poverty, however, we cannot simply add up the national poverty rates of each country, because this would mean using a different yardstick to identify who is poor in each and every country. We therefore need a poverty line that measures poverty in all countries by the same standard.

In 1990, a group of independent researchers and the World Bank proposed to measure the world's poor using the standards of the poorest countries in the World. They examined national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the world, and converted the lines to a common currency by using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates. The PPP exchange rates are constructed to ensure that the same quantity of goods and services are priced equivalently across countries. Once converted into a common currency, they found that in six of these very poor countries the value of the national poverty line was about $1 per day per person, and this formed the basis for the first dollar-a-day international poverty line.

After a new round and larger volume of internationally comparable prices were collected in 2005, the international poverty line was revised based on 15 national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the World. The average of these 15 lines was $1.25 per person per day (again in PPP terms), and this became the revised international poverty line.

And again this year, we used the poverty lines of those same 15 poorest countries from 2005 (holding steady the yardstick against which we measure) to determine the new global poverty line of $1.90 in 2011 PPP.

PPP allows us put each country's income and consumption data in globally-comparable terms. The PPP is computed on the basis of price data from across the world, and the responsibility for determining a particular year's PPP rests with the International Comparison Program (ICP), an independent statistical program with a Global Office housed within the World Bank's Development Data Group.

Should I use this new poverty line to plan programs and policies in my country?

While the global extreme poverty rate may not be dramatically different after the adoption of the new PPP and poverty line, some regional and country rates may fluctuate considerably.

It is important to note, however, that the global poverty line is used primarily to track global extreme poverty, and to measure progress on global goals set by the World Bank, the United Nations, and other development partners. A country's national poverty line is far more appropriate for underpinning policy dialogue or targeting programs to reach the poorest. For example, in a middle-income country, where the national poverty line is at $4 a day, the global poverty threshold may be less relevant than in a poorer country where the national line is at $1.65 or similar.

The global poverty line does not currently take these multiple dimensions of poverty into account. However, the recently-established Commission on Global Poverty is currently assessing how we measure and understand poverty and how to improve this going forward. The World Bank expects their recommendations in April 2016.

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As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2008, the last update, we have used $1.25 as the global line. As of October 2015, the new global line will be updated to $1.90.

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ThinkProgress Staff

This Labor Day, while you're enjoying the three-day-weekend, take a moment to celebrate the heroes of the union movement. These noteworthy people left behind a legacy that we enjoy today, from the end of child labor to the more humane treatment of farm workers.

1. The Haymarket Martyrs, eight Chicago anarchists, May 4, 1886

What began as a rally for workers who went on strike for the 8-hour workday ended when someone threw a bomb, triggering open gunfire between the police and civilians. Seven people died and many more were injured.

Eight Anarchists were convicted of conspiracy. Some were later freed amid questions about the lack of physical evidence, while others lived out their days in prison.

At the time numerous rank-and-file workers believed that the Pinkertons - a notorious anti-union security agency who were used by factory owners to break labor unions by bringing in scabs, spying on organizers, and utilizing violence - were to blame for the bomb-throwing incident.

The aftermath of the Haymarket incident would be the first red-scare in U.S. history, with the government clamping down on organized labor.

2. Lucy Parsons, radical, anarchist, socialist

Lucy Parsons was charged in the Haymarket Affair leading to some of the largest May Day rallies in the United States, a labor holiday celebrated by the left around the world today. Outside of the United States, it is an international celebration of workplace power and unity, often seeing the largest strikes and protests.

In 1905, Parsons was one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union which can claim credit for many of the early 20th century organizing victories that we enjoy today. Its legacy includes the 1930s sit-down strikes and founding of unions, such as the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.

3. Mary Harris Jones a.k.a. 'Mother Jones,' activist, socialist, and radical

CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos/ThinkProgress

Mary Harris Jones was an activist and radical who helped win the end to child labor in America. In 1897, Jones addressed a union convention where the workers began to affectionately call her "Mother Jones."

Called the "Children's Crusade," Jones lead children on a march to Teddy Roosevelt's hometown to show the millionaires in New York the faces of child labor. Their banner said " we want to go to school, not mines!" This march paved the way to the end of child labor.

4. Cesar Chavez, Farm Workers of America, civil rights activist and labor leader

CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos/ThinkProgress

Cesar Chavez helped build a campaign that won better working conditions for Californian grape pickers by leading an international boycott of grapes that were picked in some of the harshest conditions in the U.S. The California grape pickers' strike led to a successful campaign to win recognition by the two largest growers of grapes in the Delano Area.

Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association and built solidarity that prevented grapes from being shipped to Europe, and ultimately showed the power of organized labor for even the most vulnerable people in the United States.

Chavez helped popularize Dolores Huerta's slogan, "Sí, se puede," which translates to "Yes, we can."

5. Howard Wallace, LGBT and union activist

CREDIT: HappeningHere.blogspot.com

According to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, "[Howard Wallace] was forced to drop out of college when his father saw some United World Federalist literature he'd brought home and told him to drop out of 'commie' politics."

"He put a couple of checks on the dining-room table - the checks for next year's tuition - and said, 'Get out [of activism] and you can have those checks.' I tore them up in his face, and that was the end of my college education," the article noted.

A few blue collar jobs later, Wallace came to organized labor.

Coors in the 1960s notoriously refused to hire black, Latino, LGBT people, and women workers; after breaking up their unionized staff. At that time, inspired by the success of the international boycott lead by the Farm Workers of America, Wallace labor unions and the LGBT community to boycott the beer. Howard Wallace, along with LGBT activist and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, enlisted the Teamsters to promote hiring openly gay truck drivers, allowing the boycott of Coors to go national.

6. Maida Springer‐Kemp, civil rights activist and union organizer

CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos/ThinkProgress

A women born in Panama, Maida Springer-Kemp struggled in the sweatshop conditions of the garment industry. Maida Springer-Kemp became one of the first black women to be sent around the world to build international solidarity for the AFL-CIO.

7. Woody Guthrie, musician and radical

Famous for writing "This Land is Your Land, This Land Is My Land" and numerous other radical songs, Guthrie's songs captured the history of the movement.

Posted In: Allied Approaches

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7 Union Heroes To Remember This Labor Day

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ThinkProgress Staff This Labor Day, while you're enjoying the three-day-weekend, take a moment to celebrate the heroes of the union movement. These noteworthy people left behind a legacy that we enjoy today, from the end of child labor to the more humane treatment of farm workers. 1.

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I would want to be Henry Ford because he was stupid rich and was generous with his money.

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If i was anyone i would Willam "boss" Tweed even though he's a robber baron he did a lot of things for New York which caused it to boom. Even though he was laundering money and he was charged for fraud he did a lot of bad which did not even out good but he still made New York a better place overall

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I think i would be like Henry Ford. I would defiantly worry about how my workers are doing. And make sure that they are getting paid enough for what they are doing so they don't want to leave.

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2375096.pdf

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year.

"We live in a criminal environment," said one expert. "There are cops in our schools, the mayor is obsessed with crime, innocent people are being shot 41 times. It creates a mentality of crime in young people."

This particular expert has first-hand experience with the question. She is 19 years old and a member of the Latin Queens, complete with the tattoo of a crown on her ankle.

The city has spent increased amount of money and energy in recent years trying to crack down on gangs that recruit young people like her.

In 1997, the mayor stepped up his effort to combat gangs, focusing on them as criminal enterprises, not just as groups of juvenile delinquents. In 1998, the Board of Education agreed to give school security over to the police department with officers patrolling some hallways. And last year, a bill was introduced that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners.

Despite such efforts, gangs and their crimes are a routine part of news headlines. Recently 18 members of The Mexican Boys gang were arrested for carrying knives and guns on their way to a party of a rival gang in Brooklyn. The Albany County jail had the highest rate of violence in its history this year, with many of the incidents occurring between New York City and upstate gangs. And last month, three teenagers were arrested in connection with the shooting death of a man in Central Park, the first homicide there in two years. The teens claimed affiliation with both the Bloods and the Crips, though police later determined that they were lying. Clearly, gangs still hold some appeal.

The 19-year-old member of the Latin Queens, who asked that only her last name, Vargas, be used, suggested some reasons why.

"There are no jobs, no programs for youth, our schools are falling apart," Vargas said. "Our youth bond together for protection and opportunity."

While not everybody would agree with her - New York offers more cultural opportunities and youth programs, some say, than many other cities with gang problems -- Councilmember Ken Fisher, chair of the Youth Services Committee, seemed to Agree with Vargas at least in part. "I find it troubling that the same day we hear the police testify to an increase in gang members the mayor proposes a 20 million dollar cut in funding for youth services," said Fisher.

Youth gangs have been a part of New York City life as long as young people have been hanging out on the streets looking for something to do. Unlike adult crimes, most juvenile crime is committed in groups. And gangs offer a sense of identity, camaraderie, and financial payoff for their loyalty.

Notable New York City Gang Movies

West Side Story (1961)
This Academy Award winning adaptation of the Broadway musical pits two rival street gangs-the Jets and the Sharks-against each other in a song-and-dance version of Romeo and Juliet.

The Cross and the Switchblade (1971)
Based on a true story, Pat Boone plays a small-town preacher who helps gang leader Nicky Cruz get off the streets and onto the "straight and narrow."

Mean Streets (1973)
Robert De Niro plays a wanna-be hood on the streets of Little Italy in Martin Scorsese's breakthrough film.

Lords of Flatbush (1974)
Starring a young Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, the movie tracks the action and ethos of 1950's teen leather-gang in Brooklyn.

Warriors (1979)
An action flick that reached cult status for its inner city kids with big-hair waging massive turf wars.

Year of the Dragon (1985)
A Polish cop's attempt to rid Chinatown of crime and drug cartels turns the neighborhood into a modern Dodge City.

New Jack City (1991)
New York City street thugs turn into a massive drug syndicate and make actors Ice-T, Wesley Snipes, and Chris Rock household names.

Gangs of New York (due out Fall 2001)
Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz star in an $80 million blockbuster about the rise of Irish and Italian youth gangs in the Bronx of the nineteenth century.

The difference is that today's gangs are more widespread and more dangerous. It is estimated that 94 percent of medium and large-cities in the U.S. have gang activity. And with easy access to guns and the drugs market, gangs present a more substantial criminal force.

"These kids are not afraid of death or jail," said Robert DeSena who has worked with Brooklyn gangs since 1975. "Once a kid reaches that mindset, you've got a hard-core challenge."

DEFINING IMAGE

Popular images of gang members range from Tony, who fell in love with a rival gang member's sister in West Side Story, to the violent gang-bangers who run the Los Angeles streets in the movie Boyz 'N the Hood. There are a wide range of perceptions, and misperceptions, of what youth gangs do and who is a part of them.

The New York Police Department defines a gang as a group that engages in criminal behavior and has a formal organizational structure, identifiable leadership, and territory. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are approximately 750,000 gang members in 28,000 gangs in the U.S., although no one really knows how many there are because accurate counts are nearly impossible to make. It is estimated that females make up approximately 20 percent of the national gang population. And while the average age of gang members is 17, nearly half of all gang members range in age from 18 to 25 year.

The New York Police Department recently reported that the known gang members in the city increased from 11,000 to 15,000 in the past year. However, many researchers doubt the validity of such numbers.

"I've stayed away from New York statistics for years," said Malcolm Klein from the Center for Research for Crime and Social Control, who has been studying gangs for over two decades. Prior to 1976, New York City's Youth Services Administration kept more dependable gang statistics in the city, but in the fiscal problems of the city, the administration was disbanded and tracking was handed over to police.

While the ethnic make-up of gangs, the streets they call "turf," and the names they give themselves have changed over time, the common factor is social class. Most gang members come from lower or working-class backgrounds, looking for a way to gain power in the social order.

HISTORY OF GOTHAM STREETS

Youth gangs have always been part of New York City life.

In 1807, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in lower Manhattan complained to the city about the gangs of white, working class youths who harassed churchgoers, according to the book, "Gotham" by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace. By the 1820's, the authors explain, young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."

Until the mid-1900's, a majority of gangs in America were white, composed of boys from various European backgrounds.

The postwar gangs in the 1940's-1960's were primarily "turf" gangs who defended their areas against neighboring ethnic groups and new immigrants. In his recent book, "Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings," Eric Schneider presents Postwar gang life as a world of switchblades, zoot suits, slums, and bebop music. Young men took on brash names like Enchanters, Young Lords, Bishops, Greene Avenue Stompers, and the Latin Gents.

While youth gangs were often seen as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill seeking and immediate gratification," says Schneider, they provided a social structure for working-class boys that provided a sense of identity, place, and masculinity.

By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members were either African-American or Hispanic. And the late 1980's and early 1990's saw the growth of West Coast gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, although most experts dispute the notion that the gangs actually migrated across the country. Instead they are local, non-centralized gangs that go by the same names and wear the same identifying colors.

Today in New York, the most prominent New York City gangs are Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Nietas, Five Prisoners, Silenciosos, Matatones, Rat Hunters, and Zulu Nation. They are groups that span ethnicity, race, and neighborhoods.

FROM TURF TO DRUGS, FROM FISTS TO GUNS

Two major changes in recent years have transformed the nature of youth gangs.

First, the influx of illegal drugs--first heroin, then cocaine, and then crack cocaine--changed street gangs from social groups to economic enterprises. Instead of fighting over the geography of turf, gangs began to wage war over corners used to sell drugs. The institution of the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973 and stiffer prison penalties for adults, had a bitterly ironic result: Drug dealers began to recruit minors to do much of their selling on the streets.

While gangs have become a significant part of the drug trade (a recent study that gangs are involved in about a quarter of the drug arrests), most researchers argue that youth gangs are not major drug traffickers.

"Drug gangs separate themselves from street gangs," said Klein. "Drugs requires tight corporate-like structure that youth do not have."

The second and perhaps the most devastating change is the availability of guns. It is estimated that gang related homicides increased nearly five times between 1987 and 1994.

"Violence has always been around, usually concentrated amongst the poor," said Geoffrey Canada, who runs the non-profit Rheedlin Center for Children and Families in Harlem. "The difference is that we never had so many guns in our inner cities. The nature of the violent act has changed from the fist, stick, and knife to the gun."

THE RIKER'S ISLAND GANG MUSEUM

To visit the offices of the Gang Unit at Riker's Island is to visit a virtual museum of gang paraphernalia.

The walls are covered with photographs of gang member tattoos, red and blue bandanas from the Crips and the Bloods, and rosaries with black and yellow beads used by members of the Latin Kings. There is a display of home-made weaponry: knives made from pocket combs, razor blades fashioned from bottle caps, and even a small gun made from a toilet paper roll and rubber bands. And on the desk are computers used to enter the information into the city's gang database.

It is all part of the Corrections Department's "zero tolerance" policy on gangs and the city's attempt to enhance its gang intelligence.

At Riker's Island, gang members are stripped of any kind of identifying clothing or trinkets, forced to live in the same rooms with rival gangs, and any act of violence automatically adds time to their sentence. The Correction's Department says it is working. The incidence of violence in the city's jail is at the lowest in over a decade.

The School Safety and Prevention Service's division of the New York City operates under a similar notion. If any student exhibits gang behavior-wearing colors, using hand signals, graffiti, or any criminal activity-they are immediately removed from school.

Efforts to pass legislation to control gangs are generally more difficult. Most of the state legislation has to do with graffiti and tougher sentences for assault.

Last year in the city, Councilmembers John Sabini and Michel Abel introduced a bill that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners. The legislation drew criticism from civil rights groups and others who thought the law would lead to police abuse. Currently the proposed legislation is still sitting in committee.

FINDING SOLUTIONS

While legislators and police often take the credit for drops in gang related crime, the ebb and flow of gangs are more susceptible to other less tangible factors.

There are several theories of why New York City has less of a problem with gangs than cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

One is that today's gangs operate in an automobile culture that facilitates drive-by-shootings and drug dealing, and enables gangs to travel in greater anonymity. New York's mass transit system makes it more difficult for such activities. Another theory is that New York City has more opportunities for young people that fill the similar needs as a gang.

"In New York you can be part of a religious group, an arts club, a cultural group, you can even be part of a doo-wop group," said Councilmember Ken Fisher, who is Chair of the Youth Services Committee. "There are more opportunities for someone to belong to something."

There are also a host of non-profits that work with gang members on a one-to-one basis. The main challenge for these groups is to offer something that replaces the protection, identity, and money young people gain from being part of a gang.

Robert DeSena, a retired schoolteacher and founder of Council for Unity a group that works to bring rival gangs together says many of the gang members he meets are looking for a way out.

"Violence is exhausting and gangs realize they are unable to exterminate the opposition," said DeSena. DeSena works to build a network of protection and support that replaces gang life. The youth are responsible for running their own cultural events, support meetings, marketing the programs, soliciting members-using skills they had previously used on the street. The members are paired with alumni of the program who work as mentors, often hiring the youth to work at their companies.

"You get an ex-gang member who works for Price Waterhouse to take an interest in a kid," said DeSena, "and the kids will take notice."

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At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year. We live in a criminal environment, said one expert....

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https://archive.thinkprogress.org/7-union-heroes-to-remember-this-labor-day-9e829948683e/

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7 Union Heroes To Remember This Labor Day

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This Labor Day, while you’re enjoying the three-day-weekend, take a moment to celebrate the heroes of the union movement. These noteworthy people left behind a legacy that we enjoy today, from the end of child labor to the more humane treatment of farm workers.

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https://allthatsinteresting.com/new-york-gangs

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From the Short Tail gang of the 1880s to the Black Spades of the 1970s Bronx, take a peek at New York gangs of the past through these unbelievable photos.

From Gangs of New York to The Godfather to The Warriors and beyond, almost every era of New York City gang life has gotten the silver screen treatment and cemented its place in the American imagination. In fact, surely no other city in the U.S. has a history more infamous for its organized bands of outlaws, marauders, killers, and thieves.

And while the ethnicities, motives, fashions, and weapons of these New York City gangs have evolved quite a bit over the last two centuries, the audacity, violence, and raw outlaw spirit have remained largely constant.

Wherever there are neglected areas of the city inhabited by the underprivileged and impoverished, crime will so often find a way to flourish. And where crimes flourishes, gangs are soon enough born.

See more of New York City's most notorious street gangs in the gallery above and discover more about their shocking stories below.

The Five Points, Bill The Butcher, And The Real-Life Gangs Of 19th-Century New York

The long, turbulent history of New York gangs can be traced all the way back to the city's Five Points slums of the early 19th century, an infamous cesspit of crime, poverty, and violence.

In their book , historians Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace write that the early seeds of street gangs in New York were planted in 1807 when bands of white, working-class youths began harassing African-American churchgoers who were patrons of Lower Manhattan's African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

By the 1820s, gangs of young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."

The first street gangs of New York City were typically divided among ethnic and economic lines, representing the growing animosity between those of Irish and non-Irish backgrounds in Lower Manhattan.

The area's Five Points district was defined by Canal Street to the north, Centre Street to the west, Park Row to the south, and the Bowery to the east, where a plethora of gangs like the Shirt Tails, the Plug Uglies, the Gopher Gang, the Montgomery Guards, and the Whyos called home. The most infamous among them were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, who were fierce rivals.

Each gang was easily distinguishable by their "uniforms." For the Bowery Boys that meant blood-red shirts paired with stovepipe hats and for the Dead Rabbits that meant a gruesome prop made out of a rabbit corpse nailed to a stick.

These gangs thieved and killed while controlling the Five Points, which received little attention from authorities because its residents were the poorest and most vulnerable population in the city. This meant that gang activities went unchecked and frequently erupted into bloody riots between rivals. The area was said to be one of the deadliest places on Earth with a homicide rate of one murder every night.

Responsible for much of this bloodshed were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, fierce rivals because the former's nativists hated no one more than the latter's newly-arrived Irish immigrants. In addition to the Irish, the Bowery Boys despised all immigrant communities who they believed were taking their jobs and threatening their livelihoods.

With such animosity in place, one of the most brutal fights between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits spiraled into a two-day city-wide gang war in July 1857, in which an estimated 1,000 gang members took to the streets. When the dust cleared, eight men were dead and up to 100 more were seriously injured. That gang fight - one of the biggest in New York's history - and others like it helped to inspire Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs Of New York.

However, the slums that birthed this era of New York gangs started to slowly turn a corner after photographer Jacob Riis laid their desolation bare in his famous 1890 book How The Other Half Lives, which exposed the living conditions in the city's worst areas like never before. The book ultimately helped prompt city officials to institute reforms intended to rid New York City of the "hot-bed of infamy" that areas like the Five Points had become due to decades of neglect.

The Five Points was soon systematically torn down and rebuilt, with the city introducing missionary houses throughout the area, the Bowery Mission being the most famous.

Slowly, the lawlessness that gripped the area evolved into more stable working-class immigrant neighborhoods -- places like Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. The types of gangs that used to run these streets slowly dissolved throughout the first decades of the 20th century as new types of outlaws began to dominate the city's streets.

The Mafia, Federal Crackdowns, And A New Era For Gang Life

As the 20th century came into its own, the relatively small and disorganized streets gangs that had once ruled New York were overshadowed by a criminal organization altogether larger, more organized, and more infamous than these prior gangs had ever been: the Mafia.

Built on a longstanding Sicilian tradition, the Mafia was established by Sicilian and Italian immigrants in New York in the late 1920s and early '30s with a large membership, strict codes of conduct, and police connections that allowed them to flourish in ways that prior gangs had not.

But despite Mafia dominance, pockets of small gangs persisted throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the century's first few decades, waves of Italian and Jewish immigrants across Brooklyn and Queens, to pick just two examples, settled into ethnic enclaves that gave rise to territorial gangs of youths set on protecting their turf.

By the 1950s, gangs like Brooklyn's appropriately-named Thrill Kill gang terrorized their corner of New York. Meanwhile, new bursts of immigration from places like Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean introduced new populations into the city -- and, sadly, created new opportunities for conflict between gangs informed by ethnic differences.

But by the late 1950s, the federal government decided to prioritize anti-gang intervention in urban areas like New York. This effort was focused on cutting off the source of disaffected young men and women that fueled the growth of these gangs in the first place through increased funding for social programs designed to attract the impoverished youths into job training and employment opportunities.

The gang intervention programs began to bear fruit in the 1960s as the city saw a decline in gang activity. This trend was also helped by the Vietnam War and the work of antiwar activists who connected with gang members to harness their anger over the injustices in their communities that were also being addressed by the broader social movements of the 1960s.

Rubble Kings: New York City Gangs In The 1960s, '70s, And '80s

Not everyone was up for "the Cause," however. In his book Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, Eric Schneider describes the New York City gangs of this period as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill-seeking and immediate gratification." In short, kids from deteriorating communities and struggling families sought refuge in the street gangs that gave them the structure and a sense of identity they lacked elsewhere.

By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members in the city were either African-American or Latino, two groups that had of course been long marginalized by society and particularly left behind by the white flight that had gutted New York. As a consequence, gang activity was concentrated in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Harlem where a majority of the residents were comprised of these demographic groups.

Street gangs like the Reapers, the Savage Skulls, the Black Spades, the Dragons, the Javelins, and the Tomahawks carried on the New York gang tradition of ethnic conflict among the impoverished that had once characterized the turf battles of the 19th century. The city was awash in gang colors - literally - as a way for members to clearly brandish their loyalties and intimidate rivals just as the "uniforms" of the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits had a century earlier.

"There were gangs literally at every corner. The violence was everywhere," said Lloyd "Topaz" Murphy, a former Ebony Dukes gang member, in the 2015 documentary Rubble Kings. "You could feel the tension in the air, you can see the fights across the street, you can hear the shouts in the night time."

Gang fights were endemic in these neighborhoods throughout the 1970s -- although one single death did change the course of this era's history. In 1971, Cornell Benjamin, a widely respected "peace counselor" of the Ghetto Brothers was killed while trying to break up a fight between rival gangs. Rather than seek revenge for the death of their leader as anticipated, the Ghetto Brothers called for a peace meeting among the warring gangs of the Bronx.

At least 39 gang members from 20 crews in the borough attended the peace treaty conference, now known as the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, and eventually led to a general truce in street violence across the entire borough.

The unprecedented act of good faith between the Bronx's gangs inspired the 1979 cult-classic film The Warriors and later became the focus of Rubble Kings.

While the gang truce didn't get rid of the city's street gangs completely, it did mark the beginning of intense efforts to combat gang activity across the boroughs. While larger socioeconomic woes and injustices continued to keep much of New York downtrodden and thus crime-ridden throughout the 1980s, several factors combined to change the city's fortunes in the early 1990s.

With more economic stability and much less crime, gang life in New York simply isn't what it once was.

Though New York gangs still exist today, they operate on a much different scale compared to their predecessors. What are known as "super gangs" - gangs like the Bloods and the Crips that have expansive territories and have withstood decades of anti-gang crackdowns - no longer reign supreme. Now, crops of smaller, independent gangs of mostly teenagers are scattered throughout the city.

"These kids operate off of emotion, and if someone in their group gets shot... it's eye for an eye," New York gang expert Ron Barrett explained of the gangs of today. "They used to have to get permission to retaliate and answer to someone, [but] not today... It's the wild, wild west."

But though it may be the wild west, it's likely that there are few rules because there are so relatively few gangs left. After two centuries, in fact, perhaps New York City gangs as we once knew them are slowly becoming a thing of the past -- for now.
After this look at the gangs of New York throughout history, check out these incredible photos from the city's dangerous subways of the 1980s. Then explore colorized photos that bring the streets of century-old New York to life.

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From Five Points To The Bronx, The Street Gangs Of New York Are Almost As Old As The City Itself

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From Gangs of New York to The Godfather to The Warriors and beyond, almost every era of New York City gang life has gotten the silver screen treatment and cemented its place in the American imagination. In fact, surely no other city in the U.S.

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https://www.history.com/news/7-infamous-gangs-of-new-york

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1. The Forty Thieves

One of Gotham's earliest known criminal outfits, the Forty Thieves operated between the 1820s and 1850s in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. This band of Irish thugs, pickpockets and ne'er-do-wells first came together in a grocery store and dive bar owned by a woman named Rosanna Peers. Under the leadership of Edward Coleman-a notorious rogue who was later hanged for beating his wife to death-what started as a motley group of petty criminals soon blossomed into a feared street gang with its own rules and organizational structure. Members of the Forty Thieves reportedly had quotas that required them to steal a certain amount of goods each day or face expulsion. What's more, the gang even franchised itself in the form of the "Forty Little Thieves," a collection of juvenile apprentices who served as pickpockets and lookouts.

2. The Bowery Boys

One of the most storied gangs of New York, the Bowery Boys were a band of lower Manhattan toughs who clashed with the Irish Five Points gangs during the 1840s, 50s and 60s. Unlike some of their criminal counterparts, most of the Bowery Boys dressed in elegant clothing and held legitimate employment as printers, mechanics and other apprentice tradesmen. But when they weren't on the job, these young hoodlums haunted the saloons and back alleys of the Bowery and engaged in bloody turf wars with rival gangs like the Dead Rabbits.

The Bowery Boys often acted more as a political club than a mob, and many of their brawls were with supporters of rival politicians. The gang would sometimes even station its members at polling places to intimidate voters into supporting a particular candidate. In return, the gang's home district would receive money and preferential treatment once the politician was in office.

3. The Dead Rabbits

This crew of Irish immigrants was one of the most feared gangs to emerge from Five Points, so named for its location at the intersection of five crooked, narrow, downtown streets. For more than 60 years, Five Points (near modern-day Chinatown) was one of the city's most notorious-and dangerous-neighborhoods. Throughout the 1850s, the Dead Rabbits excelled at robbery, pick-pocketing and brawling-particularly with their sworn enemies, the Bowery Boys. The group was made up mostly of young men, but it wasn't unheard of for women to join in on the violence. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was "Hell-Cat Maggie," a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. While the Rabbits mostly dabbled in petty crime, they were also famous for the events of July 4, 1857, when one of their street fights with the Bowery Boys turned into a bloody riot that killed a dozen people.

The Dead Rabbits supposedly began as an offshoot of another gang called the Roach Guards, but some historians have suggested the two were actually one and the same. In fact, one popular theory argues that the term "dead rabbit" was simply a pejorative used by the Bowery Boys and the New York press in reference to members of the Roach Guards and other Five Points gangs.

4. The Daybreak Boys

New York's 19th-century gang activity wasn't limited to the rough and tumble streets of Manhattan-it also extended into the waters of the East River. The Daybreak Boys were one of the most ruthless crews of "river pirates" who preyed on the city's booming shipping industry during the late 1840s and 1850s. As their name suggests, the Daybreakers- whose leaders went by such colorful monikers as Cow-legged Sam McCarthy and Slobbery Jim -preferred to strike in the hours before dawn. Using small rowboats, these juvenile gangsters would silently row their way alongside anchored shipping vessels. Sneaking aboard, they would steal as much cargo as they could before returning to their dinghies and escaping to a rendezvous point at a gin mill in the Fourth Ward.

To prove their mettle, prospective members were reportedly required to have already killed at least once before joining the group, and the Daybreak Boys were supposedly responsible for more than 30 murders- it wasn't unusual for an unlucky watchman to end up with a slit throat or a fractured skull during one of their robberies. The gang reportedly fell apart in the late 1850s after a police crackdown, but not before they had claimed thousands of dollars in booty.

5. The Whyos

Formed from the remnants of several defunct Five Points outfits, the Whyos were one of the most dominant New York street gangs from the 1860s to the 1890s. The group started out as a loose collection of petty thugs, pickpockets and murderers, but by the 1880s they had graduated to more high-class crime like counterfeiting, prostitution and racketeering. As their grip on Manhattan tightened, many of the gang even opened legitimate side businesses such as casinos and saloons.

They may have masqueraded as upstanding citizens, but the Whyos were still notoriously tough customers. One hood by the name of "Dandy" Johnny Dolan supposedly carried a copper eye gouger and wore shoes outfitted with axe blades. Another Whyo called Piker Ryan was once caught with a detailed price list of all the gruesome deeds he could be hired to perform. A simple punch to the face was only two bucks, chewing off an ear cost $15 and a murder-which Ryan's catalogue described as "doing the big job"-went for the princely sum of $100.

6. The Five Points Gang

This legendary mob came together in the 1890s, when the Italian gangster Paul Kelly united the remaining members of the Dead Rabbits, Whyos and other Five Points gangs under his own banner. From his headquarters in the New Brighton Dance Hall, Kelly marshaled an army of 1,500 thugs in bloody turf wars with his archrivals, a Jewish gang run by the famed hood Monk Eastman. The two groups engaged in constant brawls and once even squared off in a massive gun battle under the Second Avenue elevated train line.

When they weren't participating in Wild West-style shootouts, the Five Pointers ran widespread robbery, racketeering and prostitution rings. They also dabbled in legitimate front businesses and worked as strong-arm men for the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. The gang's influence eventually waned in the 1910s, but not before they had helped train the next generation of mob bosses. Among others, the Five Pointers initiated thugs like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio into a life of organized crime.

7. The Eastman Gang

Led by the Jewish mobster Edward "Monk" Eastman, the Eastman Gang rose to become one of New York's most feared criminal organizations in the 1890s. As the kings of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the 1,200 "Eastmans" raked in huge profits running brothels, protection rackets, drug rings and even murder-for-hire operations. Like their rivals in the Five Points Gang, Eastman's boys also teamed with corrupt politicians in voter fraud. In return, the city's crooked lawmakers turned a blind eye to the gang's illicit activities.

A career criminal, Monk Eastman delighted in violence and was known to personally dish out beatings to his enemies. This hands-on approach proved to be his undoing in 1904, when he was arrested and jailed for a simple street mugging. With their leader behind bars, the Eastmans splintered into several smaller, less powerful factions in the 1910s. Monk Eastman later enlisted in the armed forces and forged a legendary reputation fighting in the trenches of World War I. But while he returned to New York a war hero, the former gang boss's old life ultimately caught up with him, and he was brutally gunned down on a city sidewalk in 1920.

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From river pirates to knife-wielding adolescents, get the facts on seven of 19th century New York's most notorious street gangs.

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https://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/c.php?g=288393&p=1922652

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LibGuides: Organized Crime, Mafia and Gangsters: NYC Gangsters

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Guide for Library Research on Crime, Mafia, and Gangsters; Now Including Crime Fiction

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Union Plus benefits offered by the AFL-CIO's Union Privilege provides consumer savings, discounts, benefits, and education resources to active and retired labor union members.

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2018 Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

The percentage of people living in extreme poverty globally fell to a new low of 10 percent in 2015 - the latest number available - down from 11 percent in 2013, reflecting steady but slowing progress, World Bank data show. The number of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell during this period by 68 million to 736 million.

" Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history. This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time," World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. "But if we are going to end poverty by 2030, we need much more investment, particularly in building human capital, to help promote the inclusive growth it will take to reach the remaining poor. For their sake, we cannot fail."

Despite the tremendous progress in reducing extreme poverty, rates remain stubbornly high in low-income countries and those affected by conflict and political upheaval.

The estimates will be published in "Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle," a report to be released on Oct. 17, End Poverty Day.

About half of the world's countries now have poverty rates below 3 percent, but the report finds that the world as a whole is not on track to achieve the target of less than 3 percent of the world living in extreme poverty by 2030. In the 25 years from 1990 to 2015, the extreme poverty rate dropped an average of a percentage point per year - from nearly 36% to 10%. But the rate dropped only one percentage point in the two years from 2013 to 2015.

The deceleration in global numbers stems mainly from an increasing concentration of extreme poverty in regions where poverty reduction has lagged. A case in point is Sub-Saharan Africa, where, under all but the most optimistic scenarios, poverty will remain in double digits by 2030, absent significant shifts in policy. Slowing declines in poverty also reflect falling commodity prices, conflict, and other economic challenges for developing countries.

The World Bank's preliminary forecast is that extreme poverty has declined to 8.6 percent in 2018.

The table below summarizes poverty estimates in 2013 and 2015, globally and for all World Bank regions. The international poverty line is currently valued at $1.90 in terms of 2011 purchasing power parity, which equalizes its purchasing power across all countries and currencies.

Two regions, East Asia and Pacific and Europe and Central Asia, have reduced extreme poverty to below 3 percent. The Middle East and North Africa region had previously been below 3 percent in 2013, but conflict in Syria and Yemen raised its poverty rate in 2015.

The report will also provide data on the World Bank's other main goal: increasing shared prosperity, defined as raising the incomes of the bottom 40 percent in each country.

In addition, it will explore new ways of looking at and measuring poverty. The new measures will allow the World Bank to better monitor poverty in all countries, in multiple aspects of life, and for all individuals in every household.

The report launch event will be webcast on World Bank Live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 17.

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Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but Has Slowed: World Bank

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Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

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As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2008, the last update, we have used $1.25 as the global line. As of October 2015, the new global line will be updated to $1.90.

When we want to identify how many people in the world live in extreme poverty, however, we cannot simply add up the national poverty rates of each country, because this would mean using a different yardstick to identify who is poor in each and every country. We therefore need a poverty line that measures poverty in all countries by the same standard.

In 1990, a group of independent researchers and the World Bank proposed to measure the world's poor using the standards of the poorest countries in the World. They examined national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the world, and converted the lines to a common currency by using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates. The PPP exchange rates are constructed to ensure that the same quantity of goods and services are priced equivalently across countries. Once converted into a common currency, they found that in six of these very poor countries the value of the national poverty line was about $1 per day per person, and this formed the basis for the first dollar-a-day international poverty line.

After a new round and larger volume of internationally comparable prices were collected in 2005, the international poverty line was revised based on 15 national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the World. The average of these 15 lines was $1.25 per person per day (again in PPP terms), and this became the revised international poverty line.

And again this year, we used the poverty lines of those same 15 poorest countries from 2005 (holding steady the yardstick against which we measure) to determine the new global poverty line of $1.90 in 2011 PPP.

PPP allows us put each country's income and consumption data in globally-comparable terms. The PPP is computed on the basis of price data from across the world, and the responsibility for determining a particular year's PPP rests with the International Comparison Program (ICP), an independent statistical program with a Global Office housed within the World Bank's Development Data Group.

Should I use this new poverty line to plan programs and policies in my country?

While the global extreme poverty rate may not be dramatically different after the adoption of the new PPP and poverty line, some regional and country rates may fluctuate considerably.

It is important to note, however, that the global poverty line is used primarily to track global extreme poverty, and to measure progress on global goals set by the World Bank, the United Nations, and other development partners. A country's national poverty line is far more appropriate for underpinning policy dialogue or targeting programs to reach the poorest. For example, in a middle-income country, where the national poverty line is at $4 a day, the global poverty threshold may be less relevant than in a poorer country where the national line is at $1.65 or similar.

The global poverty line does not currently take these multiple dimensions of poverty into account. However, the recently-established Commission on Global Poverty is currently assessing how we measure and understand poverty and how to improve this going forward. The World Bank expects their recommendations in April 2016.

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As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2008, the last update, we have used $1.25 as the global line. As of October 2015, the new global line will be updated to $1.90.

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https://www.history.com/news/7-infamous-gangs-of-new-york

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I would be a Henery Ford becuase I wound't want to keep my money all to myself. I would want to help everyone in need.

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I would open many public schools, and hire well-educated people to teach. Public schools would be free and provide any necessary need of the students. I would work hard so that people are well-educated and able to protest the lack of good things in the society.