The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo With Related Documents

by Gilfoyle, Timothy

• ISBN13: 9780312607623
• ISBN10: 0312607628
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-01-04
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

Through the colorful autobiography of pickpocket and con man George Appo, Timothy Gilfoyle brings to life the opium dens, organized criminals, and prisons that comprised the rapidly changing criminal underworld of late nineteenth-century America. The book's introduction and supporting documents, which include investigative reports and descriptions of Appo and his world, connect Appo's memoir to the larger story of urban New York and how and why crime changed during this period. It also explores factors of race and class that led some to a life of crime, the experience of criminal justice and incarceration, and the masculine codes of honor that marked the emergence of the nation's criminal subculture. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography offer additional pedagogical support.

Author Biography

Timothy J. Gilfoyle (Ph.D. Columbia University) is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Gilfoyle's research and teaching focuses on American urban and social history. His books include A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York; Millennium Park:Creating a Chicago Landmark; and City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. He is also the co-author with Patricia Cline Cohen and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz The Flash Press: Sporting Men's Weeklies in the 1840s. Gilfoyle has been a Minow Family Foundation Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a senior fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History, and an N.E.H./Lloyd Lewis Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

PART ONE. Introduction: Cultures of Crime

Who was George Appo?

The Rise of the Pickpocket

Drugs and Crime

Green Goods

Policing the Industrial City

Politics and Crime

The Penitentiary

Good Fellows

Progressive Criminology

The Criminal Memoir

Appo Transformed

Appo’s Memory

Conclusion

PART TWO. The Document: The Autobiography of George Appo

Childhood

The Penitentiary

Jack Collins, Tom Lee, and Fred Crage

Sing Sing Again

Philadelphia

Thomas Wilson

Green Goods

Poughkeepsie

Clinton Again

Stealing Guys

The Lexow Committee

In the Tenderloin

Violence

Matteawan

Reform

Good Fellows

Reflections

PART THREE. Related Documents

George Appo in His Words and Others

1. Louis Beck, New York’s Chinatown (1898)

2. George Appo, Letter to Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of New York, May 9, 1899

3. Dr. Henry E. Allison, Report on George Appo, 1899

4. Lewis Lawes, excerpt from Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (1932)

5. Bronx Home News, Obituary on George Appo, June 15, 1930

Subcultures of Crime

6. George W. Matsell, Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon (1859)

7. New York State Assembly, Report of the Select Committee Appointed by the Assembly of 1875 to Investigate the Causes of the Increase of Crime in the City of New York (1876)

8. New York State Senate, Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York (1895)

9. Thomas Byrnes, Methods of Professional Criminals of America, in Professional Criminals of America (1886)

10. Lincoln Steffens, The Underworld in The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931)

11. William T. Stead, King McNally and His Police, in Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, or, Despairing Democracy: A Study of Greater New York (1898)

The Criminal in Popular Culture

12. Review of In the Tenderloin in The Illustrated American (1895)

Appendixes

A George Appo Chronology (1856-1930)

Questions for Consideration

Selected Bibliography

Index