Gangs: 1870-1940



3.c

1870 – 1940s: Rebirth and Expansion

The gangs revamped themselves again in the late 1800s. During this time period, they acquired strength in areas of Northeast, American West, and Midwest. In the state of New York, after the end of the civil war, the gang with utmost power was the Whyos. It was made up of reconstituted members of previous Five Points area gangs. Another gang, named Jewish Eastman Gang, operated in the late-nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants organized into tongs, which were highly structured gangs involved in gambling and drug trafficking. The strength of these tongs was matched by an emerging Italian organized crime network that became the American Mafia.

 Gangs first appeared in the Midwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Chicago. The Chicago gangs had the majority of Poles and Italians, who were immigrants from Europe. However, the blacks formed only one percent of these gangs. The gangs in the nineteenth century were frequently multiethnic, as neighborhoods lacked the social polarization as it is observed now in the postmodern cities. In the late nineteenth century, Chicago gangs were particularly powerful in the areas surrounding the Chicago Stockyards, engaging in robbery and violent crimes.

In the areas of New York and the northeastern gangs, the earliest policy to gain control was to establish links with the local political leaders. Colts and other gangs gained political clout in Chicago. Many gangs had established themselves to the extent of becoming organized crime groups in Chicago by the 1920s (for example, the Chicago Outfit under Al Capone), and gang warfare was very common among them. The activities of the street gangs continued along with these criminal organizations, and the contemporary estimates indicated that in the late 1920s, there were almost 1,300 gangs and 25,000 gang members operating in Chicago.

However, by the early 1930s, these immigrant-dominated gangs had largely died out. The American West, like the Midwest, experienced gang growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first Los Angeles gangs, known as "boy gangs," were formed in the 1920s and were established on earlier social groups of Chicano and Latino men known as Palomilla. The groups were largely constituted of Mexican immigrants after the arrival in the U.S. This culture's youth became known as the cholo subculture, and several gangs sprang up among them. By the 1920s, the cholo subculture and the Palomilla subculture had merged to form the foundation of the Los Angeles gangs.

In the 1930s and 1940s, gangs proliferated as adolescents banded together to fight the police and other authorities. The gangs operating in Los Angeles were very concerned about the geographical boundaries. As a result, graffiti became a symbol to identify a certain territory as belonging to a certain gang. The identity of a gang and the identity of a neighborhood merged in ways that other parts of the country did not; additionally, the gangs of the West were diverse in terms of ethnic makeup. Finally, they were distinct; unlike gangs in the Northeast and the Midwest, they arose from ethnic segregation and alienation rather than social problems such as poverty.