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PEP Oct. 2003
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Public Employee Press

Media Beat
Book Review


Class and racial tensions erupt in bloodshed
on the streets of New York

Kevin Baker’s “Paradise Alley” is a historical novel about one of the bloodiest urban uprisings in U.S. history, the Civil War draft riots, when class and racial tensions fueled the fires as the streets of New York became the battlefront.

The novel is steeped in graphic, historical descriptions of New York City. In the summer of 1863, little was needed to ignite the smoldering populace. Residents already endured high inflation, scarce employment, corrupt city government, and the highest crime rate in the western world. The poor and working class lived in overcrowded tenements on streets strewn with garbage and dead horses.

New York City had “nearly one million souls, packed into the tail end of Manhattan,” writes Baker. Irish immigrants escaping famine flooded in, competing for refuge and work with other immigrants, free African Americans and escaped slaves. The Irish often replaced African Americans in “low jobs and hard ones ... for wages that will barely feed them.”

The campaign to abolish slavery was not widely popular among the white working class. Most local politicians were Confederate sympathizers. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued two decrees that sparked hatred among the diverse groups: The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the U.S., and the Conscription Act imposed the nation’s first military draft on white men from 20-45.

The price of a life
When most working men earned barely $300 a year and a slave could be purchased for $1,000, the rules of the new draft let a man pay $300 for a substitute to fight in his place.

White laborers feared that emancipated slaves would migrate north and take their jobs for lower wages while they fought what was popularly known as “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”

In some of the darkest, most regrettable days in our past, white mobs of thousands, protesting the draft, mauled police and army officers, looted businesses, and torched buildings. They turned their wrath toward African Americans, beating, burning, mutilating and lynching hundreds.

Baker relates this grim history through the life stories of realistic characters: Ruth Dove, an Irish rag picker; her husband Billy Dove, an escaped slave; Ruth’s criminal ex-husband, Dangerous Johnny Dolan; Irish immigrant Deirdre Dolan O’Kane, a maid; her husband Tom, a soldier; and Herbert Willis Robinson, a New York Tribune reporter who follows the development of the riot and the mobs.

The Draft Riots occurred in 1863, but when we read “Paradise Alley,” we cannot help comparing the screaming voices of that time with protests we have heard in contemporary times about immigrants and minorities “taking our jobs.”

— Susan Bailey,
Authors Talk Committee

 

 
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