it's no wonder that Bill, the Butcher, leader of the Natives, is so violent. In the course of becoming a mentor to Amsterdam, he explains, "You stay alive with fear. Fear," he says, "preserves the order of things."
His gang wreaks most of its violence on the Irish whom they place at the bottom of the social scale along with blacks. Unlike Tweed who just wants their votes, Bill, the Butcher and his gang would like to kill all of them.
A great wave of Irish immigrants came to America during the 19th century. In the middle of that century a famine swept across Ireland, and Irish Catholics were severely impacted. In only three years, more than 500,000 people with nothing to eat died of starvation (Nickens, 2002). Those that lived migrated in large numbers. According to the movie,...
As the Butcher put it, "...they come off the boat crawling with lice and begging for soup." He referred to them as the "Mother whoring Irish niggers."
Irish Catholic immigrants often went to work on labor
gangs that built canals,
railroads, streets, sewers and other projects involving construction and were hated because they worked for lower wages. They were seen as "alien invaders." Irish Catholics who lived in urban tenement slums -- as they did in the
film -- in areas of overcrowded, filthy squalor, where
crime flourished and people struggled daily just to survive. Considerable prejudice was expressed against Irish immigrants. The Know Nothing Movement, for example, tried to oust Catholics from public office (Shannon, 2006). This was shown in the film when an Irishman was elected Sheriff and murdered
