The World полностью

This vast wave of voracious, risk-taking settlers was no longer ‘an act of desperation’ but, writes James Belich, ‘an act of hope’. Some 4.5 million Irish men and women, 3 million Italians, 2 million Poles, 2 million Germans^* and 1.5 million Scandinavians arrived. It was not just the US: altogether during the long nineteenth century, thirty-six million people arrived in Australia and North America, a movement of mainly English-speakers that should be seen alongside the Macedonian, Arab, Mongol and Spanish conquest-migrations.^* Most of these immigrants poured into cities. In 1830 there were fewer than a hundred people in Chicago; in 1890 there were a million; within the same span, Melbourne grew from zero to 378,000. New York had a million people by 1850; by 1900, it had 3.5 million, which had almost doubled by 1930. Over twenty million immigrants arrived in America between 1850 and 1920 – the greatest migration in history, which in a frenzy of righteous destruction and crusading creativity powered the rise of the USA – and a truly interconnected global market. But the new world market presented new risks too. The failure of a reckless British bank, Barings, sparked the first ever global economic crisis that inspired millions to turn to Marxism and anarchism. Starting with the assassination of the French president in 1894, anarchists killed a cavalcade of western leaders. A world depression encouraged what the poet Emma Lazarus in 1883 called ‘your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.’ America welcomed families like the Bavarian Drumpfs and the Jewish Wonskolasers.

Drumpf and the Wonskolasers were rough but just legal. When Teddy Roosevelt returned to ‘the arena’ in New York, he confronted the power both of immigrant criminals and of rich plutocrats. After losing a lot of capital and making some back with a bestseller, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, he married a childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow, with whom he had five sons. He then persuaded President Benjamin Harrison to appoint him to the Civil Service Commission in New York. In 1894, the pugnacious Roosevelt became NYC police commissioner, relishing raids on vice dens and clashes with city bosses. But after befriending the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, he also tried to improve the appalling conditions of the immigrants. ‘For two years,’ recalled Riis, ‘we were brothers in [Mafia-ridden] Mulberry Street.’ Thousands of immigrants were pouring into New York, first the Irish, then Italians, Germans, Jews. By 1901, New York was the biggest port on earth, but the hardscrabble fostered another quintessential American culture that is usually left out of world history: crime.

Not long after Roosevelt began patrolling Little Italy, a good-looking and flashy teenager, whose parents had just arrived from Sicily where his father had toiled in a sulphur mine, threatened a tiny, frail Jewish boy if he did not pay protection money of ten cents a week. The Jewish boy, who had just arrived from Grodno in the Russian empire, refused. Impressed, the Sicilian, Salvatore Lucania, invited the Jew, Meier Suchowlan´ski, to join his Five Points Gang. Lucania now called himself Lucky Luciano; Suchowlan´ski shortened his name to Meyer Lansky, and together they formed a partnership with Lansky’s violent, dapper friend, Benjamin Siegel, a psychotic killer with bright-blue eyes nicknamed Bugsy, who was already running a protection racket on Lafayette.

They were tiny street players, but Luciano knew that Sicily had a long history of criminal societies, developed among peasants, who, denied justice by aristocrats and kings, enforced their own rules, and created their own rituals that were pastiches of Catholicism, though the name Mafia may have originated from the Christian subjects of the Arab emirate who, claiming to be ma‘afı¯ or exempted, refused to pay the jizyah tax. In Roosevelt’s New York, Italian crime was ruled by Giuseppe ‘Clutchhand’ Morello, a ruffian from Corleone, who defeated the Neapolitan Camorra, stuffing his victims in barrels, but he was arrested and jailed, ultimately making way for the man who invented the US Mafia: Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria. For now the three boys, Luciano, Lansky and Siegel, made money in pimping, theft and protection, but ultimately the three would organize national crime in America, corrupt politics in New York City and Cuba, and create the casino and entertainment industry in Las Vegas.