Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown
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While opium was growing into a major problem for Federal agents and police the latter found their hands increasingly full with anti-Chinese hoodlumism. Trouble broke out on this new front in 1865 with the first serious anti-coolie riot. A mob of laborers drove off a party of Chinese who were at work excavating a lot south of Market Street. The crowd swelled to some three or four hundred men, marched on Tubbs & Company’s ropewalk, and drove the firm’s Chinese workers away. Only two Chinese were hospitalized, luckily, after the mob stoned the workers. The most seriously injured person was the ropewalk’s foreman who had tried to protect his Chinese workers. He was knocked down, his lip and eye cut and his chest badly bruised. Chief Patrick Crowley led his men to the scene of the riot and personally dispersed the toughs. He arrested the mob’s leaders on charges of riot.
There was nothing funny about the riot to those law-abiding Chinese concerned, but one defendant brought a bit of humor to an otherwise grim courtroom when he hired J. P. Dameron as his attorney. The latter employed all the tear-jerking tricks of the shyster in his pleading. At one point he cried out oratorically, “Did not our forefathers destroy Chinese tea in Boston Harbor? Why, Sir-r-r, these Chinamen live on rice, and, Sir-r-r-, they eat it with sticks!” This was too much even for the culprit Burke. He forfeited his $50 bail and took off.
Judge Alfred Rix handed the ringleaders stiff fines of $500 and sentences of from 90 days to 11 months in jail. This swift punishment only served to spawn another anti-coolie meeting at the American Theatre and the formation of anti-coolie clubs in each of the city’s twelve wards. Worse, after the brave show of justice presided over by Judge Rix, the rioters were liberated by a decision of California Chief Justice John Currey on writs of habeas corpus based on legal defects in the commitment judgments. Most of the press stood by the Chinese, calling the Potrero district riot “a murderous and disgraceful onslaught.” Reporters pointed out that one of the laborers, supposedly driven to riot by starvation, had no trouble digging into his levi’s and coming up with $500 when his fine was pronounced. The Alta California blamed the miscarriage of justice on the inadmissibility of Chinese testimony in court—“the laws of California are such that the most intelligent Chinamen in the community could not testify against a white assailant, even if he were the vilest cutthroat who ever disgraced San Quentin with his presence.” Ironically, shortly after the Potrero riot, Chinese testimony was finally admitted, but only in the county court.
As the decade of the ’60s waned the Chinese population began to rise rapidly in numbers. The signal for the increase was Leland Stanford’s clumsy swing at the Golden Spike at Promontory Point. With the East Coast linked to the West Coast by rail, thousands of “Crocker’s Pets,” as the Chinese gandy dancers were called, began to drift down to San Francisco. Drifting with them were hundreds of unemployed Irishmen from the Union Pacific Railroad. Some of these Chinese newcomers sailed for home, some went to Texas and Massachusetts, but most stayed on in Chinatown. At the same time a new wave of immigration developed out of Hong Kong. On May 13, 1869, alone, 1,276 Chinese arrived on the Embarcadero from the S.S. Japan. The new, big steamers brought them in like cattle, jammed below-decks. The City Directory guessed there were 8,600 Chinese in San Francisco at the end of the ’60s. The Federal census figure was 11,817. Most accurate was the figure of the Chinese Protective Association (the Six Companies)—17,000.
Like a corollary to the increase in Chinese population, there was an increase in anti-Chinese incidents and riots. The people of Chinatown found themselves between the jaws of a vise: the growing tong underworld in Chinatown itself forming one jaw; the mounting pressure of hoodlums, labor and eventually a large segment of the city’s population, forming the other.
Thus it was no surprise that the decade went out violently. The year 1869 was one of turbulence. It really belonged to the bitter decade ahead rather than to the fairly peaceful ’60s. On January 24, Tong Moon Yun was shot dead on Dupont Street. On February 8, the corpse of a Chinese girl was found under a house on Cooper Alley. The 9th of April saw Ah Kow, sentenced to death for the murder of one of his countrymen, cheating the gallows by suicide in his cell. Eight days later a riot broke out among the Chinese population and many men were wounded. On May 20, Customs officials seized a cache of opium worth $15,000 on the S.S. China. On June 2, Werner Hoelscher was shot down by a Chinese. And so it went. The prestorm lull was over.
Violence was on the increase even though the Emperor of China himself, via an envoy Chi Tajen, warned the population of Chinatown through its quasi government, the Six Companies: “Be careful to obey the laws and regulations of the nation in which you reside. If you do so and at the same time pursue your callings in accordance with the principles of right and propriety, success cannot fail to attend your labors, while a contrary course will infallibly bring on you failure and misfortune.” The underworld laughed at His Majesty. Anarchy might have prevailed but for the calming influence of the Six Companies. They would preserve the peace for another decade. To understand Chinatown and its past, a knowledge of this organization—which kept the fighting tongs in check for so long—is necessary. The story of the Six Companies’ success is the story of Chinatown’s growth; the story of the Six Companies’ failure is the key to Chinatown’s shame—the tong wars.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Six Companies
“It is charged against us that the Six Companies have secretly established judicial tribunals, jails and prisons and secretly exercise judicial authority over the people. This charge has no foundation in fact. These Six Companies were originally organized for the purpose of mutual protection and care of our people coming and going from this country. The Six Companies do not claim, nor do they exercise, any judicial authority whatever, but are the same as any tradesmen’s or protective and benevolent societies.”
—“Memorial” of the Six Companies of President U. S. Grant, 1876
THE “GOVERNMENT” of Chinatown during the nineteenth century, de facto if not de jure, was a combination of the Chinese Consulate General and the Six Companies, particularly the latter. These agencies managed to protect the law-abiding people of Chinatown both from hostile outside pressure and from internal lawlessness, although the Six Companies’ organization was suspected and accused of heinous activities by Americans who did not understand its history and role in the Chinese community.
There was never any deliberate mystery about the Chinese Six Companies. Yet the American press and public, confusing tongs and companies, long insisted on investing the organization and its six member companies with a mystery. The bemused Knights of Labor called the Six Companies “a sort of tribal government.” But President Shong Gee of the Hop Wo Company made a clear-cut statement of the role of the Six Companies—which he termed, as a unit, “the Chinese Benevolent Association”—as early as 1870. He stated that the society’s object was simply to assist Chinese to come to California or return to China, to minister to the sick, to bury the dead, and to return their corpses to their native land.
Originally the Six Companies (separately) were agents of the Chinese firms in Hong Kong which established the coolie trade to San Francisco from the Crown Colony. The pioneers of this emigrant trade were two Hong Kong portrait painters, Hing Wa and Wo Hang. There was nothing new about such companies as they were set up in San Francisco. From time immemorial emigrants had tended to form clubs in Malaya and the Philippines. Each province’s group set up a ui kun or company house. It was as if the Californians in the Far East were to set up a chapter of the Native Sons of the Golden West, complete with lodge hall. The ui kun existed in China itself when Cantonese and Fukienese settled in Shanghai or Ningpo. In Canton, too, there were these halls for “strangers” from other parts of the empire. Since the Chinese were the most alien of aliens emigrating to California, they took special pains to band together for mutual aid and protection.
But the American public persisted in ascri
bing to the Six Companies all manner of evils, including the usurpation of American judicial processes among the Chinese people. The press, too, gave the companies mysterious and dictatorial (and nonexistent) powers. In later years newsmen continually confused the companies with the fighting tongs. The merchants who were being preyed upon by tong highbinders thus found themselves the targets of newspaper editorials, rather than the predators who waylaid them. To correct some of these misconceptions the Reverend A. W. Loomis wrote an article which was published in the first volume (1868) of the popular San Francisco magazine, the Overland Monthly. He listed the things which the Six Companies were not—plotting societies, despotic lawmakers, punitive organizations, hiring halls for coolies, slavers, or dreaded tribunals. In order to disabuse the public of its incorrect notions Loomis compared the Chinese companies to the Order of Hibernians or the Scandinavian Association. He tried to hammer home the point that they were simply the benevolent or mutual-aid societies of one particular group of the foreign born. Loomis reminded his readers that the poor bewildered immigrant in a strange land had to lay over somewhere upon arrival in port. He could not walk out of steerage into the trail to Hangtown or Copperopolis. He needed a caravansary or hostel. This the companies provided with their San Francisco ui kun, a combination hotel and Travelers’ Aid Society. Loomis reminded his audience that the Chinese were only temporary residents. This gave them all the more reason to stick together closely during their brief stay. Loomis emphasized that the Chinese never—or hardly ever—abandoned one home to go in search of another. When they went abroad, wives and children were always left behind to keep house until their return. Every man hoped to return home after having improved his worldly estate in foreign parts. Loomis could not know of the remarkable change that would take place. Around the time of the earthquake of 1906 or the fall of the Manchu Empire in 1912 the majority of Chinese temporarily resident in San Francisco decided to set down roots.
It was true, and Loomis readily admitted this, that the companies were not exactly models of democratic government. They were paternal. If despotic, their leaders were benevolent despots. These leaders—well-to-do merchants in almost all cases—set up the rules and regulations of the societies without vote or veto from the masses of the membership. They made assessments, not to enrich themselves but rather to acquire buildings for company headquarters and hostels. Governing of the group was left by common consent to a few leading businessmen or scholars, if any of the latter could be found among the immigrants. Nearly all newcomers joined their proper company but membership was optional. They wanted the security which the companies offered them. They wished to lodge with others of their own kind—men who spoke their language. In the ui kun they could sleep and cook until they got adjusted to the country of the Golden Mountains; until their plans could take shape. Then they were off to pick up the shining metal from the streams of the Sierra Nevada.
The single function of the Six Companies which led to more misunderstanding than any other was their arbitration of quarrels. They tried to settle disputes before they became too serious. If they could not successfully arbitrate the case it was taken to the American courts. A poor ignorant coolie would have been helpless in an American court in the 50s, so the better-educated, more socially acclimated and sophisticated businessmen acted—through the companies—as managers of the legal affairs of all Chinese settlers. This led to accusations by the press and public that secret and severe tribunals existed.
Another operation of the Six Companies which led to attacks was their issuance of what virtually amounted to exit visas for Chinese. To prevent the absconding of debtors, the Six Companies entered into agreements with shipowners. No tickets were sold to Chinese returning to their homeland unless they could present a certificate from the Six Companies. This certificate—actually a simple receipt—was their clean bill of (fiscal) health. This exit control was the one major area of power which the companies really did wield; therefore their motives in this area were particularly suspect. But among the merchant population, white and Chinese, this system was well liked. Creditors knew that bankrupts and thieves could not abscond. It made the Chinese live up to their reputation of being good financial risks. They had to pay their debts or they could not go home. The mass of the American public overestimated the extent of this control, however, and saw the company presidents as mandarins enslaving coolies.
Opposition to the Six Companies from the Chinese of California themselves was small. Little ever reached the ears of whites, although Loomis—who knew Chinatown very well—did report a few individuals who were disgruntled by the company system. The grumblers were men who found the assessments a hardship and who were convinced that they could do well without the shepherding of the Six Companies and its Meeting House of the Flowery Kingdom. Some alluded to the company presidents as “rice ladles,” meaning they cost a great deal and were of absolutely no use to anyone. A few inferred that all funds raised did not end up being put to the proper use. By and large it appears that dues were spent on proper activities—paying salaries of company officials, purchasing fuel, oil and candles, paying water bills, assisting the sick to return home, buying medicines, taking care of coffins and funeral expenses, repairing tombs, and taking on the expenses of drayage and lawsuits. There were a few temptable Six Companies men, of course. A gentleman named Wong, elected interpreter for his society, used his key office to sell the company’s house and to go home to retirement on the proceeds. He had been trusted thoroughly by both Americans and Chinese as the sole elected business agent of the company. The company repaid the money in full, got its property back, and made the Wong clan assume full responsibility for the individual’s crime.
There were joss chapels, or temples, in the headquarters’ houses but they were furnished by voluntary subscriptions. There were no priests in the company houses. The companies did some charity work, caring for the indigent, the sick and the disabled if they were not being helped by their relatives—the normal thing among the clannish Chinese. The gathering of the bones of the deceased for shipment home was not usually the responsibility of the companies. However, sometimes people from one district or another selected their company president to handle the business end of this transportation. These company heads, after all, had close ties with shipping firms. From time to time the Six Companies contributed funds to famine and flood relief in China. After the disastrous Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania in 1889 they sent $1,000 for relief work there.
In 1850, the Six Companies’ structure was begun with the formation of a single company to assist all newcomers to Chinatown. It rented a Sacramento Street room and called itself the Kong Chow Company. This catchall organization took in all the immigrants from 6 of the 72 districts of Kwangtung Province. These 6 districts contributed all but a fraction of the migrants to California. Probably 10,000 of the 12,000 Chinese in California in 1851 were members of the Kong Chow Company. The name was taken from that of the geographic area of China encompassed by the half-dozen districts.
The 62,000 Chinese who resided in California by 1868 were members, with very few exceptions, of one or another of the Six Companies which grew out of the Kong Chow Company. The 6 were the Sam Yup Company, the See Yup Company, the Ning Yuen Company, the Yeung Wo Company, the Hop Wo Company and the Hip Kat Company. Only two of them came to be known widely to the non-Chinese of the Pacific Coast: the See Yups and Sam Yups. But it was more of a case of euphony than importance gradients. Out of either laziness or bewilderment, Chinatown reporters for the dailies tended to place all Chinese into one or the other of these camps. When the tong wars erupted, the press often identified the combatants as See Yups versus Sam Yups, instead of naming the actual fighting tongs involved in the mayhem. It was also a convenient way of breaking down the many factions of Chinatown into two. The See Yups and Sam Yups did represent the two major dialect groupings of the immigrants. The See Yups spoke the common tongue of Dupont Gai; the Sam Yups, a
more courtly Cantonese.
The Sam Yup Company was organized in 1851 by those Chinese who did not fall into the six-district structure of the Kong Chow Company. The name Sam Yup means Three Districts and it welcomed people from Nam Hoi, Pun Yue and Shun Tak, which embraced the city of Canton and its immediate environs. By the 60s, this company owned a somewhat dilapidated company house or lodgings on Clay Street above Powell and another building on Sacramento Street, but its business headquarters was in a rented office on Commercial Street. Sam Yup dues were higher than those of most of the other companies. There was a $10 initiation fee; a $10 fee for removing the dead to China; a $2 assessment to pay off the Sacramento Street property; a $3.50 charge for miscellaneous costs incurred by the company; and a 50ft fee for the legal-proceedings fund. Officers were few and not particularly well paid. An assistant and a linguist or interpreter got $60—$80 each per month; a servant and a messenger were paid about $40 each. Rounding out the staff were the executive secretary, or tung see, and the treasurer. These officers each received from $80 to $100 a month.
The See Yup Company was known for some time as the Kong Chow Company as well, since it was the direct descendant of the original single company of 1850. The raison d’être of this sociobenevolent organization was spelled out in 1853 in a company statement translated by Reverend William Speer. “In China it is common to have councils and in foreign lands ui kun, company halls. The object is to improve the life of our members and to instruct them in principles of benevolence.” The See Yup Company was the Four Districts Company. It represented the area of Kong Chow which included the provincial districts of Yan Ping, Hoi Ping, Sun Ning (now called Toyshan) and Sun Wui. There were also some members from Hok Shan. See Yup fees were light. Only $5 in dues had to be paid if done immediately upon arrival. If payment was deferred the amount was $10. There was also a 50-cent assessment for the lawyers’ fund. No dues were collected from the aged, the sick or the disabled. When the See Yups set up shop they took all of the Kong Chow Company’s members except a handful from Hok Shan and part of Sun Wui.