Book Review – New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Scandal that
New York City in the late 19th-century has been shown through scholarly research and historical investigation to be a den of vice, with police-sanctioned brothels and unchecked political graft taking place on a large, systemic level. This matrix of criminal protections and laissez-faire attitude toward criminality led to the origins of the New York mob, and is a considerably important subject for historical scholars. Daniel Czitrom’s latest account of this early corruption, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era, demonstrates the forces that began to identify the Gilded Age as one of untold vice and corruption, and paved the way for the Progressive Era of anti-crime legislation and social movements that would prove to become a formidable force against organized crime in major metropolitan areas like New York City. In doing so, Czitrom showcases both the origins of the Progressive Era and the relative lack of progress they made in actually combating the forces of corruption in New York City, filling in a more nuanced gap in typical Gilded/Progressive Age scholarship.
Czitrom’s account focuses primarily on the work surrounding the Lexow Committee, the first in a number of police investigations into the crime and corruption taking place under the tacit approval of the New York Police Department and the prosecutors who benefited from their looking the other way. Beginning with the tell-all incident on February 14, 1892, in which Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst delivered “the most politically explosive sermon in New York history,” claiming that the brothel on East 14th Street, ran by Billy McGlory, operated with the approval of the people who ran New York, Czitrom charts the progress of the Committee.
Czitrom’s central argument throughout his highly detailed and nuanced account of the Lexow Committee was that the corruptions uncovered in that realm helped to popularize the phrase “organized crime,” and led to an era in which mass media became ever more imbued in people’s lives, particularly as it related to crime and corruption. With the Progressive Era, Czitrom showed the fight against corruption becoming more and more of a public issue, and showcased the ways in which criminals used mass media to parlay their own allure and mystique to combat the simple immorality of what they did. For instance, Czitrom’s account of swindler George Appo and shady saloon owner Tom Gould’s debut at the People’s Theater on the Bowery, playing themselves, presaged the era of reality television and showed monstrous criminals as having a basic sense of sympathy that resonated with the public. Focusing on these macabre displays of darkly ironic resistance to progressive morality cements Czitrom’s central thesis of the unassailable power of media, marketing and sin to undermine even the most progressive of moral crusades.
New York Exposed fits very well into the overall scholarship of the Gilded and Progressive Ages, taking perhaps a more realistic (albeit more cynical) perspective on the problems of the Age and whether they persist. One close analog to Czitrom’s work is that of Mike Dash, who explicitly ties the birth of the American NY mob with the arrival of Giuseppe Morello’s arrival in New York in 1892, the same year Parkhurst gave his famous sermon. Czitrom also offers a similarly editorial slant on the history of organized New York Crime as Critchley, who explicitly tied the New York Mafia to Italian immigration and Gilded Age ostentatiousness. While the historiographical briefs of Dash and Critchley contributes greatly to the history and makeup of the mob in the early 20th century, Czitrom offers the other side of the struggle – the moral citizens who attempted to combat salacious behavior in New York City. By focusing on the surrounding effects on the mob in affecting American progressivism and mass media, Czitrom contributes greatly to the overall consequences of the rise of organized crime and its effect on New York city life.
Works Cited
David Critchley, The origin of organized crime in America: The New York city mafia, 1891–
1931. (Routledge, 2008).
Daniel Czitrom, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the
Progressive Era (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Mike Dash, The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the
American Mafia (Random House, 2009).
