Learning from the Astor Place Riot

Wat? What in the world was the Astor Place Riot of 1849? I'm glad you asked.

I only learned about the Astor Place Riot in New York City a couple of days ago while reading Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro, a Columbia English professor.

Did you know that about the only entertainment in 1850 America was the playhouse? And that all classes went? And that the Big Thing was Shakespeare, which all classes enjoyed. For instance, did you know that California gold miners liked to recite Shakespeare of an evening?

And the leading actors of the day were rock stars. And they had feuds with each other.

In the case of the Astor Place Riot there was a Brit actor and a Yank actor. La Wik:

Its ostensible genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

Macready's  Brit Macbeth was a mincing take. Forrest's All-American Macbeth was a rough tough hombre. Here's is La Wik's intro on the riot:

The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan and left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city's police and the state militia.

I get the impression, from La Wik and from Shapiro, that riots were a pretty normal feature of urban life in the 19th century.

But now I will get to the point.

The point is that, reading about New York City in the mid 19th century it seems pretty clear to me that it has a two-class politics. There was the lower-class, part native-born Americans -- e.g. "nativists"-- and part immigrant Irish and Germans. And then there was the middle and upper class.

Whereas in our time we have the over/under politics of the educated Gentry, with the educated elite successfully selling the lower class with the idea that they are their "allies." In its crudest form this over/under political formula is the Allyship notion of the Allies sticking up for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors.

And it made me think that maybe the staged riots of the present day, sponsored by the ruling class, are better than the unstaged, visceral riots of the 19th century.

In other words, I am saying that the "mostly peaceful protests" that are carried out by well-born products of our glorious universities should be regarded in the same light as the bear-baiting of olden times: boys will be boys and men like a bit of rough trade.

But when you have the nativist lower class and the immigrant lower class combining into a deadly riot -- ostensibly about Shakespeare but really as a way of thumbing their noses at the ruling class -- well, I think that I prefer the modern three-class culture and politics where the upper class struts and frets pompously and conceitedly around acting as though they were the best thing in the world for the oppressed peoples instead of a bunch of idiots that Literally Know Nothing and are Making Things Worse.

And really, what this country needs is a responsible and patriotic ordinary middle class sensibly organized into a nationalist and patriotic party of the middle class that sensibly balances the political scales against the poseurs of the educated upper class. And, needless to say, it is a middle class that gradually enrolls members of the lower class into the national community of the middle class as soon as they are ready to shed their subordinate status as victims and become ordinary responsible One Hundred Percent Americans.

So what I am saying is that we should not grumble about the vile and unjust gentry class that has split this country apart and Made Things Worse. We should go forward with joy and with a spring in our step, luxuriating in the glory of the America we know and love and the possibility of what America might become after the inevitable humiliation and defeat of the delta-minus morons that currently rule us.

We should laugh and sing at our liberal friends, pat them on the head and tell them that they can't help it, having been Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls that learned to hate and to fear as they were carefully taught from year to year in their dear little ear.

And every now and then we should speak to the Little Darlings of the liberals, the "oppressed peoples" of which you've heard tell. And we should ask them whether the liberals are really helping them, or whether they are Making Things Worse.

See, getting the Little Darlings to grow up into One Hundred Percent Americans takes time. Look at the white working class: the liberals abandoned them after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it has taken them fifty years to take down the FDR pictures on the wall and start organizing Trump Car Parades.

Why should it take blacks any longer to realize that they have been had?

Or ordinary women to realize that have been bamboozled into supporting the agenda of upper-class women snobs?

I think we can see that Hispanics are naturally moving out of the Democratic orbit as they move into the middle class.

But whatabout gays? And trans? And they/them? Well, they are all educated class twerps: we don't need to worry about them.

By the way, I was to a dinner with the neighborhood liberals lately, and boy, do they hate Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida.

And who, you may ask, taught my liberal neighbors to hate and to fear Ron DeSantis? I couldn't possibly say.