Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown

by Dillon, Richard

  The blood brotherhood of the tongs ruled Chinatown from the 1880s until the earthquake of 1906. During this period the highbinders or hatchet men took over control of the tongs from the more peaceful membership. It required a motley, chaotic and disorganized alliance of forces to finally eradicate them. These forces came mainly from the Chinese community. The police and the courts were in a great measure responsible for the crushing of the tongs, but it was the long-abused Chinese people themselves who really won the battle. They began to fight back quietly by identifying themselves as Americans, by participating in government, and by respecting and obeying Yankee notions of law, order and justice rather than their own extra-legal codes. The courts gave them an opportunity to seek justice before American juries and to place their trust in the American bench and bar. The police offered protection. Although it was hard to forget the old system of corruption, the humble people of Chinatown began to place confidence in the police department. Before, they had always viewed the patrolman on his beat with suspicion; he was a potential oppressor rather than a protector.

  If the Chinese were going to stay and raise their families as Americans, they had to abandon the old codes of life which conflicted with American law and which made possible—even necessary—the constant series of vendettas which in turn bred highbinders and murder. The people of Chinatown finally realized this. They made their decision, and the hold of the tongs on the quarter was forced to slacken.

  The American community, on the other hand, offered the Chinese more respect and understanding as it outgrew its stupid bigotry. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, not exactly a model piece of legislation in toto, was a powerful third force which cut down on the importation of fresh highbinders and which banished gunmen, and kept them out as undesirable aliens unless they were smuggled in.

  As the hatchet men killed one another off or were jailed, the older men began to regain control of the tongs. There were more family men in Chinatown too. The san doy, bachelor, no longer ran the town. The Six Companies—the welfare organization based on the immigrants’ provinces of origin—regained the powerful position it had long held. The family associations began a renaissance. The Chinese-American Citizens’ Alliance began to grow in numbers and strength. Many members were Christians and not just “rice Christians” (converts who embraced Christianity only because of mission handouts), and they were appalled by the bloodletting in Chinatown. Many lived outside the Quarter and felt about the tong wars as any other horrified San Franciscan felt. The Chinese-Americans were not subjects of either the Consul General or the illegal tongs. They were Americans and their numbers had leaped from but one percent of the country’s Chinese population in 1870 to 10 percent in 1900—some 15,000 individuals ready to rally against the dead hand of tradition as represented by the killer tongs.

  Finally, the tongs themselves had had enough. In 1913 they created a Peace committee which secured an armistice. Their power was declining as that of the mercantile class, Chinatown’s quasi elders, rose. Chinatown was eventually united against the hatchet men as implements of the old way—the wrong way—of settling disputes. But the Americanization process had to grow out of a blood bath of two or three decades before the old customs were thrown off.

  The tong wars continued sporadically until as late as the 1920s. But the heyday of the boo how doy was over. In that last era they took on some of the coloration of Chicago gangsterism. They died out later on New York’s Pell, Mott and Doyers Streets than on Dupont Gai. There are still tongs in San Francisco and other American cities—the On Leongs, Hip Sings, Ying Ons, Chee Kongs, Bins Kongs and Suey Yings—but most are benevolent or merchants’ associations now. Their vendettas are political and bloodless. Some people, like Dr. Rose Hum Lee, caution that the tongs may try a comeback in two areas—narcotics and Communist subversion. A revival seems unlikely, but wary eyes are always kept on them by law-enforcement agencies.

  The manner in which the American-Chinese community has integrated into our society so fully, bringing us so much to enrich it, is a testimony to the worthiness of these people to full citizenship. They had to overcome enormous obstacles in order to reach the position to which they are now welcomed.

  From the 1880s until the earthquake and fire of 1906 wiped out ghetto Chinatown, San Francisco paid heavily for its sins of commission and omission. This book attempts to tell the story of the high cost of bigotry and intolerance. It is no condemnation of San Francisco’s Chinatown nor of its citizens, past or present; it is a condemnation of the criminal classes which flourished there. And it is, I hope, a very thorough condemnation of intolerance.

  Richard H. Dillon

  San Francisco

  False Spring, 1962

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Era Of Good Feeling

  “The Chinese have invariably proved to be, as a people, docile, sober and orderly, thus exhibiting the proper traits of good citizenship… However, they are becoming more civilized (sic!) and refined by constant intercourse with the white population and many have added drinking and gambling to their accomplishments.”

  —San Francisco City Directory, 1852-53

  SAN FRANCISCANS were horrified on Tuesday, March 6, 1900, at the callous attitude displayed by one of the city’s leading newspapers, the Call. In reporting on the current tong war in Chinatown the newspaper cast the account in the form of a sports story complete with a box score of dead and wounded, as if the deadly vendetta were a soccer match. The Call’s gruesome tally revealed that in the three-months-old war, 7 men had died and 8 had been seriously wounded. (The other team in this macabre and murderous three-cornered game—the police—had gone “hitless” with not one murderer captured during the Hop Sing vs. Suey Sing war.) How could such a shocking event have taken place in San Francisco only sixty-two years ago? San Francisco was a world port and a metropolis, not a grubby cowtown or mining camp. Yet gunmen roamed her streets, or at least the streets of Chinatown. And what had gotten into the hard-working, docile Chinese that such open warfare could rage in the streets of the quarter?

  This state of affairs did not erupt overnight. It was the product of almost fifty years of erosion of law and order in the Chinese Quarter. Almost from the moment the first Chinese alighted on the Embarcadero there had been within Chinatown a drift contrary to the trend in the city at large. In the city as a whole there was a steady tide setting on toward order and peace. It was a taming process with murders, duels and vigilance committees eventually becoming passé. But in Chinatown there was a cultural eddy and the reverse was taking place. Criminality was increasing like a cancerous growth. The tong wars came later to Chinatown than most people imagine, but the state of affairs which led the Call to run its cold-blooded box score was the product of many years of deterioration. To trace this course which led to the tong wars one must go back to the very beginnings of Chinese settlement in San Francisco.

  Early San Francisco was not afflicted with tong troubles. This is not to say that Dupont Gai was crime free for the first several decades following the Gold Rush. Far from it. For where, in what Utopia, is there a city of up to 30,000 inhabitants without a crime problem? But compared to the ’80s and ’90s, the 1850s were at a time of a Pax Sinica. The immediate reasons for crime in Chinatown then were the obvious ones—human nature, opportunity and an oversupply of single men who were rootless males, without family ties, in a foreign land. They were ignorant of local language, customs and laws. To cap it, Chinatown did not have a police force of its own as an American city of comparable size would have had. True, the police on Chinatown beats tried to preserve law and order just as did those in Happy Valley, on the wicked Embarcadero, or the wickeder Barbary Coast. But many of the officers, particularly the “specials,” or “locals”—the auxiliary police—had their paws out. And it was not for friendly handshakes but for cumshaw—tips.

  The petty grafting of the police—at times not so petty—tended
to shake the Chinese newcomer’s confidence in the force. And if the cops on the Chinatown beat were honest, and most were tolerably so, who was to say what their lieutenants or captains—or perhaps the chiefs—were up to? As for the politicos hanging around city hall, the graft prosecutions and other scandals of late nineteenth and early twentieth century San Francisco speak volumes. There was no use looking to them for help.

  Small wonder, too, that it took decades for the American-Chinese to accept the proffered protection of even an honest policeman. In nine cases out of ten be would be an Irishman whose family was of “the Chinese Must Go!” persuasion, influenced by Dennis Kearney or some similar agitator. If the cop on the corner turned out to be a special, he was almost sure to be in the employ of the criminal element and not likely to defend the decent people of Chinatown.

  The wonder is that the officer on the beat did as good a job as he did. He was torn internally by the temptation of payoffs versus the desire to do his duty. At the same time he might be wholeheartedly in sympathy with the ostensible aims of a mob marching on Chinatown “to save American labor.” Nevertheless he comported himself pretty well under the circumstances, even during the crisis of the summer of 1877. Graft and kickbacks or not—noncooperation by the oppressed people be hanged—he still did his job and saw to it, at the expense of more than one bloody nose of his own, that the hoodlums and self-styled saviors of the laboring classes did not get a chance to crack innocent beads, even if they wore queues. Credit is long overdue the Irish members who pounded Chinatown’s steep streets where they were fair game for clubs of hoodlums and knives of highbinders. The common people made no outward show of gratitude toward their protectors. They almost seemed to wish to thwart the apprehension of the human leeches who fed upon them. On the other hand, the criminal classes tried to flatter the harness bulls, to make friends with them, and to buy them off.

  Chinese and Americans were still uneasy strangers during the 1850s. Sino-American contacts prior to the Gold Rush were few. In 1800 the first Chinese had been brought to the United States to learn English. Eight years later a young Chinese performed on horseback in New York, and in the 1830s the first Chinese woman, Ah Foy, came to America. A juggler of 1842, Chong Fong was upstaged by another immigrant of the gentler sex who was exhibited as a freak on Broadway. In 1847 the junk Keying arrived and posed in New York Harbor for Currier and Ives, but only a handful of Chinese had ever seen the States before Jim Marshall spied gold dust in Sutter’s millrace. That year of 1848, P.T. Barnum opened his Chinese Museum in New York, and California received its first Chinese settlers—two men and a woman landed from the brig Eagle. From this beginning a colony of 300 had grown in San Francisco by December 1849, when they met in the Canton Restaurant on Jackson Street and chose Selim Woodworth as adviser, arbiter, protector and quasi consul for the Chinese in America. By the end of 1852, the 300 had become 25,000.

  In the years immediately following 1849, the Chinese were welcomed to San Francisco as a quaint segment of society. They were considered colorful and docile and quite law abiding. When roughly handled in the mines or persecuted by the Foreign Miners’ License Law, they often drifted down to San Francisco from the Mother Lode, to swell the population of Little China, as Chinatown was first called.

  Little China was adjacent to Little Chile which became Sydney Town and later the Barbary Coast. A second Little China existed for a time at the foot of Frémont Street where Chinese wreckers squatted on the beach and broke up old hulks like the Loo Choo, which had brought Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson’s regiment of brawlers to Yerba Buena. A village of 150 Chinese fishermen huddled in the lee of Rincon Point not far from the mouth of Mission Creek. With their twenty-five boats they took 3,000 pounds of sturgeon, shark and herring each day, most of which they dried. Other colonies were located on Hunter’s Point, in the South Bay, on the contra costa, and at China Camp in Mann County. But these were fish or shrimp camps where the men anchored their homemade junks, and merely satellites of Chinatown.

  Dupont Gai became and remained the nucleus of Chinatown. Strangely, for a ghetto, old Chinatown grew up not across the tracks or as an outskirts shanty town. It blossomed in the heart of the city on high ground adjacent to Portsmouth Square—San Francisco’s first civic center. The heavily crowded but substantial buildings occupied the very site of the founding of Yerba Buena, the parent village of San Francisco, if we except Captain William Richardson’s temporary structure on the beach itself. The second building erected, that of Jacob P. Leese, was located on the corner of Dupont and Clay in 1836. Dupont was then called calle de la Fundacion, Street of the Founding. When Port Captain Richardson constructed his second building, in 1838, the adobe La Casa Grande, it was on a lot on the west side of Dupont between Washington and Clay Streets. The great fires of May and September 1850 swept over the area of Chinatown, and when people returned to live in the ashes more and more of them were Chinese.

  With little crime or disorder in Chinatown, John and Brother Jonathan got along well in these early years. Evidence of the great affection—however short lived—of San Franciscans for their new Oriental neighbors was the celebration of August 28, 1850, in Portsmouth Plaza. Mayor John Geary, Reverend Albert Williams and Frederick A. Woodworth—like his brother Selim a sort of quasi consul for the Chinese community—gathered on a platform erected in the square. There they orated and then presented a number of religious tracts, papers and books printed in Chinese characters. The crowd listened in rapt attention to their speeches, translated into Cantonese by the interpreter Ah Sing. The mayor wound up the program by inviting the Chinese to take part in the funeral procession for President Zachary Taylor scheduled for the following day. They accepted with alacrity and gratitude. They were much honored by the gesture.

  The next day the China Boys, as they were fondly called, formed up and marched in a procession to Portsmouth Square to hear Mayor Geary orate once again. The 1850 City Directory noted the appearance in the parade of the large body of the Chinese in their curious national costume as the most remarkable feature of the ceremony. The Directory ventured the opinion that this was the first procession in the limits of Christendom in which Chinese had formed such a prominent part. The next morning the China Boys presented Mayor Geary with an elaborate document in ornate Chinese calligraphy which read in translation:

  August 30, 1850

  To HONORABLE JOHN W. GEARY

  MAYOR OF THE CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

  SIR: The China Boys wish to thank you for the kind mark of attention you bestowed upon them in extending to them an invitation to join with the citizens of San Francisco in doing honor to the memory of the late President of the United States, General Zachary Taylor. The China Boys feel proud of the distinction you have shown them and will always endeavor to merit your good opinion and the good opinion of the citizens of their adopted country. The China Boys are fully sensible of the great loss this country has sustained in the death of its chieftain and ruler, and mourn with you in sorrow. Strangers as they are among you, they kindly appreciate the many kindnesses received at your hands and, again, beg with grateful hearts to thank you.

  The memorial was signed by Ah Sing and Ah He in behalf of all the China Boys.

  Who would have dreamed that the sentiments pronounced by Justice Nathaniel Bennett that day would raise the curtain on a half century of intolerance and lawlessness? He said: “Born and reared under different governments and speaking different tongues, we nevertheless meet here today as brothers… You stand among us in all respects as equals… Henceforth we have one country, one hope, one destiny.”

  From that day on the Chinese took great interest and pride in participating in public affairs. They marched in various celebrations such as that of Admission Day in 1850. An ex-Philadelphian described their delegation in the Washington’s Birthday parade of 1852 as the city’s most orderly and industrious citizens.

  In the sa
me year Governor John McDougal urged that land grants be given the Chinese, since they were among the most worthy of all California’s newly adopted citizens. H. H. Haight offered a resolution of welcome to them which stated that California took pleasure in their presence in such great numbers. The Alta California confidently predicted that the China Boys would yet vote at the same polls, study in the same schools, and even bow at the same altar as the rest of the city’s citizens. Hinton Helper, the writer who did not like the Chinese because of their aloofness, was disgusted with the way the China Boys were “petted,” as he put it, by the fond—almost doting—populace.