Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2000 by David Wolcott

Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. By Eric C. Schneider (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. xx plus 334pp. $29.95).

Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, youth gangs divided the streets of New York City into distinct territories, battling one another to establish and maintain their turf and honor. In Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, Eric Schneider seeks to explain the historical experiences of gang members, distinguishing them from their cultural images created by agencies as diverse as the press, academics, law enforcement officials, and Broadway musicals. He shows how the social history of post-war New York shaped the options available to working-class youth and how youth found ways of asserting a masculine identity in response.

This book makes a number of significant intellectual contributions. First, it helps to fill a gap in the historical literature on juvenile delinquency, which too often focuses on institutional responses to youth crime rather than on youths themselves. Using a variety of sources including published accounts, archival documents generated by social workers, and oral interviews with former gang members, Schneider successfully recreates the experiences and lives of gang members. In addition, while histories of juvenile delinquency usually conclude in the Progressive era, this study extends our knowledge forward chronologically into the post-war years. It also bridges the theoretical chasm between historical studies and the extensive sociological and criminological literature on delinquency.

Second, this book explains gangs by showing how social historical factors impacted cultural characteristics of working-class youth such as ethnicity and masculinity. Schneider presents gangs as a logical adaptation to social circumstances. They arose in the context of a changing World War II-era New York economy that offered fewer and fewer opportunities for youths to support themselves through unskilled or semi-skilled labor. At the same time, the large-scale immigration of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans changed the ethnic mix of New York City's neighborhoods. Furthermore, competition among these groups for space was exacerbated by the destruction of older residential districts to make way for urban renewal, highway construction, and public housing. Under these conditions, the concentration of adolescents from hostile ethnic groups in a limited geographic area passed a "tipping point." Youths organized into gangs to defend their neighborhoods against change and to protect themselves from outsiders.

In contrast to the image that gangs were defined by ethnicity (propagated by West Side Story), Schneider shows they were mainly territorial entities; their ethnic affiliations were as much symbolic as real. Although gangs often fought to resist ethnic succession, they accepted members from other ethnic groups if they lived within the gang's neighborhood. For example, in the 1950s, a nominally Irish gang from Washington Heights regularly fought African-American youth from nearby Harlem who threatened their territory. The Jesters, however, included African-Americans who lived in the neighborhood, while the Harlem gangs they fought included whites. Gangs, Schneider argues, were in fact multi-ethnic organizations that identified with the reported ethnicity of the neighborhood rather than that of individual members.

Gangs also provided working-class youth with a means of generating honor and defining their masculinity. Conventional socializing institutions such as schools and the labor market demanded a degree of subservience that many adolescents rejected. They often dropped out of school and worked only sporadically in the available dead-end, service-oriented jobs. Instead, youths often identified themselves through the peer-oriented culture of gangs. They achieved manhood in the eyes of other gang members by fighting and by sexually dominating girls. Rumbles, raiding parties, and ritualized rapes, according to Schneider, represented "alternative measures of masculinity" (136). This culture of violence, however, was confined to the gangs. They did not attack adults or non-gang boys intentionally, nor did they commit robberies as a gang activity.

Schneider challenges the widespread characterization of gangs as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill-seeking and immediate gratification" (137). Instead, he suggests that gang members acted in ways that made sense, given the limited social options available to working-class youth. Even leaving a gang involved a conscious decision, rather than just "maturing out" (164-165). Getting a job or getting married required youths to find ways to support themselves and to adopt a more conventional understanding of what it meant to be a man.

This book's third major contribution is that it offers an important comparative perspective on contemporary questions about gangs and adolescent crime. Much of this book's appeal is rooted in its connections to current issues such as youthful alienation, access to weapons and, more generally, youth violence. Schneider argues that modem gangs, however, are fundamentally different from those of mid-century. The involvement of contemporary gangs in the illegal drug trade has redefined "turf" from a territorial concept to an economic one, and gang membership has become a means of securing employment in the underground economy. As a result, gang violence has also become more calculated and businesslike. Nonetheless, analysis of the historical roots of gang violence and the reasons for the expansion and decline of gangs between the 1940s and 1960s implicitly suggests models for addressing contemporary problems.