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The Root of the Tree

"I'm not particularly fond of Gotham. It's like someone built a nightmare out of metal and stone." - Clark Kent

An evil warlock slept beneath what became Gotham City for forty-thousand years.

So says Bobo T. Chimpanzee in his memoir recalling his exploits as a member of the Shadowpact, a now-defunct superhero team which specialized in combating occult menaces. In that memoir, the talking common chimpanzee, better known as Detective Chimp, maintains that an old nemesis of the team, a sorceress known as Strega, accidentally found her way into a cave system beneath Miagani Island, the centermost of the three rocky landmasses on which Gotham City is built.

Detective Chimp reports that Strega accidentally awakened a sleeping magic-user, a warlock who called himself "Doctor Gotham," from an eons-long rest in a hidden tomb. To summarize, Chimp and his colleagues were informed by "Doctor Gotham" that he, the warlock, was the root and cause of the Dark Deco City's perennial troubles with crime and corruption. Doctor Gotham's rationale for this extraordinary claim was that, as he slept in his tomb beneath Miagani Island for the alleged 40,000 years prior to his awakening, the evil magic which originated from his person radiated and spread throughout what later became Kane County. Thus, according to this individual, the entire area was polluted with the stench of pure evil, as an oil spill might pollute a large body of water.

There is certainly no reason to disregard the warlock's claim on the basis of it being outlandish. We live in a world where a man from another planet once flew about fighting evil monsters and robots, where Greek gods and their associates freely mingle with ordinary citizens, and where a handful other such citizens have been tapped to serve in a spacefaring police force. The fact that this report about an evil warlock comes from the mouth of a talking chimpanzee is more than enough to refute the staunchest anti-supernaturalist.

The real problem, however, is determining whether this Doctor Gotham character's claim was in fact true. If the claim is correct, then why didn't Gotham's difficulties with crime and corruption come to a halt upon the warlock's death, an event also reported in Chimp's memoir? If this claim is true, then how does one account for the periods of peace and prosperity which occurred in the city, such as in the majority of the nineteenth century? For that matter, how does one explain the high number of arguably good things which occurred in the larger area surrounding Miagani Island, such as Alan Wayne's invention of a revolutionary irrigation technique which helped pave the way for new agricultural expansion in southern New Jersey?

The answer to all of these questions is handily supplied by a declassified report from the Department of Extranormal Operations in which one Dr. Richard Occult (another member of the Shadowpact) was debriefed following a sort of "magic autopsy" he performed on the corpse of the malignant warlock by request of the DEO. The procedure which Dr. Occult conducted revealed that Doctor Gotham had almost entirely fabricated both the level of power at his disposal and the length of time in which he had been resting in his tomb. In all likelihood, Doctor Gotham was a magic-using con-artist who had a charming story which he was unable to back up when faced with critical examination, in this case after he died. To quote Detective Chimp's memoir, "Villains lie. That's why they're villains."

So, if Gotham City's notable (if relatively recent) history of crime, corruption, and mayhem is not rooted in the supernatural, then why and how did it originate? The answer lies in studying its past so as to inform our understanding of its present.

The contents of that past are as colorful and varied as the multitude of events which directly precede our own day. Gotham City has been a Scandinavian pirate den, a crucial strategic point during the American War for Independence, an early industrial powerhouse, a smog-choked machine town dominated by a small group of wealthy families, a breeding ground for organized crime, a healthy center of peace and prosperity, a crime-ridden dystopia with the country's highest murder rate, and most recently, the City of the Bat, reaping all of the benefits and consequences of the Caped Crusader's long career. Its proclivity for the extreme, supernatural or not, has existed to one degree or another in all these eras.

Gotham City has noticeably changed over the years, going through a long series of diverse epochs and changing fortunes, all while retaining its distinct character as a vibrant, flamboyant municipality where everything is raised to the maximum.

Gotham's early history is rooted in several factors, namely Swedish and Dutch colonization in the early seventeenth century at the expense of the Miagani Indians. A sizable group of transplanted New England Puritans led by Nathaniel Wayne, an ancestor of Bruce, later arrived with a new stream of British colonists, who mingled and mixed with both populations. During the Revolutionary period, Gotham provided a ready, secure haven for American privateers who disrupted British shipping and fed much-needed supplies to the Continental Army, which fought many battles in the north of New Jersey during that time.

During the antebellum period, Gotham City became an early beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution, its status as a major port town making it a logical spot to build new steel and textile mills. It was also during this period that Judge Solomon Wayne commissioned architect Cyrus Pinkney to design an extensive series of new buildings which now dot the city's financial district. These buildings were constructed thanks to Wayne's desire to influence the moral character of the city through specific modes of architecture. The bizarre products of the eccentric jurist's building campaign earned Gotham the nickname "the Dark Deco City." This derisive moniker continues to find relevance via the near universal criticism of Pinkney's architecture by the greater architectural establishment.

Though New Jersey, and by connection Gotham City, was relatively fenced off from the direct effects of the American Civil War, it was the location of a spate of draft riots. These riots were an oddball parallel to similar riots which occurred around the same time in New York City. They were strange because the riots were orchestrated by a group of five rival gangs, before the chaos was halted by a mysterious group of masked vigilantes. During the riots, Colonel Nathan Cobblepot, a more heroic ancestor of Oswald, led the New Jersey 39th Volunteer Regiment in assisting these vigilantes in their objective in the now legendary Battle of Gotham Heights. Colonel Cobblepot and the 39th were later dispatched by the Union high command to participate in the Siege of Petersburg, where the unit fought heroically and were personally honored by Abraham Lincoln.

After the war ended, Gotham City continued to slope upwards in terms of its economic fortunes. The political machine which sprang up under the tenure of the Wayne, Cobblepot, Kane, and Elliot families was concentrated in Harbor House, the Gotham equivalent to Tammany Hall. The Harbor House regime sometimes inhibited the city government's ability to operate justly. Cronyism and thuggery permeated many cities during that era, including Gotham. The city's vices were tempered by its more-or-less stable political and social environment. This stability occurred chiefly under the leadership of Mayor Theodore Cobblepot, a competent if opportunistic politician who unfortunately did not share most of the laudable qualities possessed by his father Nathan. It was also during this time that the four abovementioned families jointly sponsored the construction of a series of bridges connecting the Gotham archipelago to the New Jersey mainland.

The Golden Age of Immigration saw a tidal wave of change engulf Gotham City as legions of new immigrants arrived from eastern and southern Europe, including a huge population of Italians who helped import that people's notorious brand of organized crime. The Harbor House organization began to disintegrate during this period due to the actions of Progressive reformers, thus providing an opening for the ancestors of Alfredo Bertinelli and Leon "the Lion" Calabrese to fill the void. As a large percentage of rare, irreplaceable primary sources concerning this era were destroyed during No Man's Land, it is difficult to totally reconstruct precisely what was going on in the halls of power during this time, other than the political activity of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was the governor of New Jersey prior to his election to the Presidency, and he therefore required the aide of Harbor House to succeed politically.

It is known that during the time leading up to the aftermath of the Second World War, Gotham City's status as a hotbed of crime and vice began to fully take shape. The seeds for its transformation into what it became in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were planted in the period between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second. The era of Prohibition kicked off the growth of what became the Falcone and Maroni crime families. The illicit activities of such groups eventually mixed with the Great Depression to drive Gotham into a prolonged state of decline. Conditions were without doubt even more intolerable then than they were at even the peak of Gotham's misery in the early 1990s, if only because the day-to-day realities of that time and place were of a harsher nature than those of today. To quote one modern commentator, "In the old days, life sucked for everyone."

After the close of the Second World War, Gotham City was granted a brief respite from its decades of domestic strife. The booming American economy was, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, a rising tide which lifted all boats. Even a municipality as blighted as twentieth century Gotham had much to be thankful for during these years. This era saw the passing of the batons of power and influence among the Wayne, Kane, and Elliot families and the crumbling of that of the Cobblepots. Patrick Wayne handed the reins of his family's now preeminent business empire to his son, Thomas, and his lawyer, William Earle. The Cobblepots, led by Tucker Cobblepot, unfortunately failed to capitalize on the new lease on life granted by the Gotham economy, the consequences of Tucker's ineptitude proving wholly catastrophic for his entire family. But life for most ordinary Gothamites was relatively happy then.

Unfortunately, as is always the case, the good times did not last. The general period of social turmoil which began to foment in the mid-1960s struck Gotham especially hard. The situation grew bolder and deadlier in the 70s and 80s. The city's worst years since the end of the Great Depression came to a head in 1984, when Thomas and Martha Wayne were brutally murdered in a mugging gone wrong, while their eight-year-old son Bruce watched in horror. Public outrage at the killing of two-thirds of Gotham's first family engulfed the city for months. Then-Mayor Aubrey James, Sr. proved incapable of solving the problems of which the murder of the Waynes was a mere symptom. He lost re-election after one term and was followed by a long series of equally ineffective mayors, a chronic dilemma which would continue until John Linseed arrived in office in 2005.

In the meantime, the city continued to spiral into calamity and chaos, mostly due to extreme mismanagement of local government. There was no end to public works projects, city-sponsored publicity stunts meant to attract economic development, much-ballyhooed police raids which were often of little real consequence, and social welfare programs which only drained city coffers of funds that could have been used to improve the police force. But astoundingly, local politicians, businessmen, journalists, labor leaders, and city officials blithely ignored this disastrous state of affairs.

These persons, almost universally members of high society, were completely insulated from the harmful outcomes of the policies which they supported. There were a handful of voices crying out in the wilderness, namely the irrepressible Slam Bradley, a private detective who wrote a police-blotter column for an East End community newspaper. But these were hopelessly drowned out by the city's barely controlled miasma of crime and violence. With half the city council on the payroll of the Falcone crime family, and with the other half working for the Maronis, it's no wonder almost no progress was made in that "crooked little town," to quote one of Bradley's columns.

Gotham's fortunes mildly, imperceptibly reversed during the national economic boom in the mid-to-late 1990s. But no real change occurred in the Dark Deco City until the arrival of Alexander Knox's "Gray Trinity." It began when Jim Gordon, formerly of Chicago, was hired as a lieutenant in the Gotham City Police Department's homicide unit in 2002. In the same year, a mysterious, costumed figure began violently harassing petty thieves, drug traffickers, and dirty cops. This individual, who was first identified as "the Bat-Man," then began targeting high-level mobsters and their cronies in city government, the GCPD, and local labor unions. Finally, a new dawn arrived when Harvey Dent was elected to the office of Kane County District Attorney, also in 2002. His unmatched popularity, bold rhetoric, and superhuman imperviousness to bribery, blackmail, and intimidation drove the entire city to call for reform.

By-and-large, the efforts of the Gray Trinity succeeded, albeit in the midst of great tragedy. The Trinity was broken in the midst of their battle when Dent was transformed into the psychotic killer and crime boss known as "Two-Face." The ranks of the Falcones and Maronis were violently decimated thanks to the mad rampages of the Holiday Killer and the city's nascent supervillain element, the latter led by Two-Face. But despite these major catastrophes, Gotham City moved on. The chaotic details of the first three years of the Batman's crusade aside, the struggle of the fragmented triumvirate was not in vain. John Linseed, a reforming politician who had cut his teeth as U.S. Attorney, replaced Hamilton Hill as mayor in 2005. Under his and Commissioner Gordon's leadership, City Hall and the GCPD were made clean as driven snow.

The following ten years were mostly quiet in Gotham. The Batman remained active, having been joined by a handful of other costumed allies, chiefly Robin and Batgirl. Their efforts were mainly concentrated on dealing with Gotham's now ascendant supervillain population, who concentrated their mostly petty and ridiculous schemes on attracting the attention of the Bat. For the most part, he easily foiled their plans while the GCPD tackled more serious threats, such as the last, dying holdouts of traditional organized crime. It was during this period that the Batman became publicly affiliated with the Justice League of America, being prominently visible when that esteemed organization began to frequently draw the attention of the public eye. Indeed, this new, Silver Age of Gotham City, a term coined by local historian Jules Gardiner, proved to be a pleasant time to live there, despite the effects of the Great Recession.

This era of adventure, fun, and romance, however, was not to last. The sudden appearance of the supervillain known only as "Bane" rocked the city almost as hard as the earthquake which occurred in Gotham only two years later. Prior to that, the only major crisis the city had faced was cult leader Joseph Blackfire's reign of terror, a brief if frightening period which claimed the lives of three city councilmen and almost led to the deaths of Commissioner Gordon and the Batman. But Bane was different. His organized, methodical brand of chaos and criminality was later revealed to be motivated by the same reason as all the rest of Gotham's supervillains: An all-consuming hatred of the Bat. Though Bane momentarily drove the Batman from the scene, a new, darker Dark Knight soon arrived and publicly thrashed the new villain.

This series of events, dubbed "Knightfall" by local radio personality Jack Ryder, heralded a period of chaotic destruction in the city which would continue until the Batman's temporary retirement in 2022 after twenty years on the job. Though some authorities have linked the activity of the Batman to the new spike in almost-warlike violence the city experienced at the time, the fact of the matter is that without the presence of the Batman, the phenomenon of colorful supervillainy would only have been replaced by more of what the city was like before the arrival of the Bat. Notably, the earthquake which led to the No Man's Land year was quite obviously completely outside of the Batman's control. Indeed, if not for the tireless efforts of the Caped Crusader and his allies, that woeful period may never have ended.

This principle was on obvious display during the ten-year period after the Batman's official retirement. It was during that time that Gotham became plausibly worse than it had been in any other era. Jim Gordon, at age seventy, was forced to retire from his longtime role as GCPD commissioner. His replacement, Ellen Yindel, proved a valiant if unsuccessful substitute. City Hall, while not as corrupt as it had been in the last quarter of the previous century, was completely powerless to combat a new, ultraviolent gang called "the Mutants." Just as the situation reached its lowest point, the Batman returned to the scene. Known today to have then been at the time a recovering alcoholic who was pushing sixty, an older and cannier Dark Knight began a one-man war against the resurgent criminal population, almost singlehandedly subduing the Mutants and even turning them into an army of devoted, rehabilitated allies. The rebranded criminals styled themselves "The Sons of Batman," resolutely following the lead of their namesake.

The Batman's resurgence, however, was not exactly a bed of roses. His new, harsher brand of vigilantism drew the ire of all levels of government, even reaching the ears of the White House. Superman, who had been an ally of the Bat during their days as members of the Justice League, was dispatched by President Prez Rickard to return Gotham City, now effectively under the control of the Dark Knight, into the hands of legitimate city officials. A fight between Superman and the military and Batman, Green Arrow, and Robin resulted in the apparent death of the World's Greatest Detective from a heart attack. But this was but a ruse: Superman had been working with Batman the entire time, and thanks to the assistance of the Man of Steel, Batman's exposed identity as Bruce Wayne did not prevent him from returning to his vigilante activities in secret.

Three years later, the Batman (he almost never thought of himself as Bruce Wayne, said one member of his estate) had become a sort of enlightened despot, ruling over Gotham with an army of robot soldiers. Nearly all of his rogues' gallery had been wiped out when a gas-leak-generated explosion destroyed the infamous Arkham Asylum where most of them were housed. Though surviving adversaries Bane and Two-Face leveled Wayne Manor, the ancestral home of the eponymous family, this did not impede the Batman's new, more punishing vision: To cultivate Gotham City into an orderly, flawless utopia without a hint of crime and violence within its boundaries, by any means necessary. Once again, Gotham's penchant for the extreme had shown its face.

But in the incredible years leading up to our own time, the Batman proved that even the worst realities and the most entrenched, ugly personalities can be changed for the better. The events that rocked the world, now called "Kingdom Come," helped mellow the World's Greatest Detective and the Scourge of All Evil. Now, the Kingdom had arrived. At more than sixty years old, the Batman, or perhaps merely Bruce Wayne, stepped back from his long war and allowed more able hands to rebuild Gotham City in a more mundane fashion. While Wayne took up his father's profession as a physician, his former protégé and adopted son, Dick Grayson, was elected Mayor of Gotham City. The almost universally beloved Grayson has since ushered in a better, friendlier, lovelier city, a condition which in our own day shows no sign of stopping. Could it be that this good time we are in, unlike all that came before it but were still lesser than it, will not end?

The story summarized heretofore, and elucidated further in the following pages, is an incredible one. It started with a desolate island, inhabited by a proud yet peaceful people, and has perhaps ended in a new epoch of justice, peace, and love. It could almost be an imaginary story, an enthralling tale meant to cheer the hardest of hearts. The saga of Gotham City, in times good and bad, in times beautiful and ugly, in times past and times within the very memory of the youngest among us, has proven to be, if nothing else, a grand adventure. Even if the supernatural powers of a flimflamming warlock were not the source of Gotham's perennial troubles, could it be that some new, very real, heavenly and divine power has come down to God's green earth to save Gotham City from itself, for all eternity, and the whole world with it?

Perhaps by the end of this book, we will have found the answer to that question.

Now, read on!