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

by Dillon, Richard

  Supervisor Stewart Menzies leaped to his feet and retorted hotly that Forbes was an idealist with no common sense in anything he said. Menzies asserted that California was fast becoming a province of China.

  Supervisor Charles Story agreed with Forbes. He said, “It is idle for this board to pass an order that on its very face is unconstitutional.” But the ordinances were passed. Alvord immediately vetoed them, saying in his veto message that: “In my opinion, minor offenses which do not belong to the class of crimes called ‘infamous’ should not be punished by penalties which inflict disgrace upon the person of the offender.”

  An attempt was made to pass the Queue Ordinance (called the Bobtail Order and the Pigtail Ordinance) over the mayor’s veto. This maneuver failed when five supervisors supported Alvord’s stand.

  The Alta California warmly applauded Alvord, pointing to the many papers from all over the country which had approved editorially and had commended the mayor for his sense of decency and his pluck in following the dictates of his conscience. But this victory of Alvord’s was short lived. The Queue Ordinance was revived in the summer of 1876; this time it was voted through.

  A rabid fan of the Bobtail Order was the Sacramento Record-Union’s anonymous Chinatown correspondent. He almost immediately claimed the Bobtail Order to be a great deterrent to crime in Chinatown and produced figures from somewhere to show a rapid 33 1/3 -percent decrease in Chinatown arrests. His paper, however, disavowed his attitude that Chinese toughs were “far more concerned at the loss of their tails than deprivation of liberty,” and attacked the practice as a disgraceful act of low demagoguery and an appeal to the prejudice of hoodlums.

  The Record-Union reminded its readers that no other paper had set itself more strongly against Chinese immigration. But it had never sanctioned, and never would sanction, any unjust or dishonorable treatment of the Chinese. The editor moralized, “We cannot afford to disgrace ourselves by stooping to the perpetration of petty persecution or by soiling our hands with any of those weapons of old-world bigotry and intolerance whose employment has already darkened the pages of history.”

  The viciousness of the Pigtail Ordinance was related to the great numbers of Chinese arrested. They were rounded up wholesale and jailed—and thereby were liable to have their heads shaved—for violating the cubic air rule. Most were criminals in no sense. Others were hauled in for licensing violations of which they were unaware. Blatantly anti-Chinese was the laundry license ordinance, since the fee was set at only $2 for washermen who could afford a horse (mostly Caucasians) but at $15 for those (mostly Chinese) who could not.

  By September, 1878, there were four $10,000 damage suits filed by de-queued Chinese and fifteen more being prepared. Honorable Lorenzo Sawyer, United States circuit court judge, thought that the amputation of queues was clearly unconstitutional. He was right. In the test case of Ho Ah Kow, originally arrested for violation of the Cubic Air Ordinance, versus Sheriff Matthew Nunan, the Chinese won. The act was invalidated in 1879, and the practice abandoned although an attempt was made to restore it at the state level when Assemblyman Thomas J. Pinder tried to get a bill through to effect such a penalty for arrested Chinese.

  Two great scares of the 1870s—used to great profit by anti-Chinese politicians in whipping up crowds—were the rumors of smallpox and leprosy epidemics in Chinatown. Writer J. P. Buel, for example, was so frightened by the tales told him of the Quarter that he labeled it “a world’s fair of festering rottenness.” The first giant-sized rumor of Chinatown pestilence got its start when two smallpox cases were found in a Clay Street lodginghouse. The horrifying rumor which resulted grew in horror on April 16 when the corpse of a Chinese was found in a basket at the foot of Pacific Street. The rumors continued, but no epidemic came except an epidemic of crime.

  In March, 1873, Reverend Otis Gibson read an appeal from the Chinese of San Francisco to the Board of Supervisors. It deplored the growing invective of the press and the exaggeration of any evil or misery existing among the Chinese people. (The Sacramento Record-Union went much further than the appellants. It accused San Francisco reporters of putting down every sore nose or chin wart in Chinatown as “scriptural leprosy.”) The Chinese reminded the city fathers that China was opened to the West by the West and by violence. The signers ended the appeal by suggesting that all Chinese-American treaties be abrogated, that all Chinese leave the United States, and that all Americans leave China. But before they wound up their statement they reiterated the fact that their people were good Californians and for the most part peaceable and industrious. “We have kept no whisky saloons, have had no drunken brawls resulting in manslaughter or murder.” For his own part, Gibson took a parting shot at the white protectors of Oriental pimps. He pointed sarcastically to the reputation of the Chinese as good debt risks by saying, “It is a matter of common report that Chinese villains have always paid pretty well for not being molested in their favorite pursuit.”

  As the situation continued to deteriorate—a Chinese was killed by hoodlums on May 22—the Sacramento Union (the former Record-Union) which had defended the Chinese in 1867 and even in the opening of the ’70s, now did a complete switch and denounced not only Chinese immigration but Oriental settlers already in California. The paper attacked sanitary conditions in Chinatown—such as the constant rubbish in the street—and wrung its editorial hands over the threat of smallpox, leprosy and cholera morbus. It charged the Chinese with governing themselves by their own code, defying the police, and practicing crime, profligacy and ‘”heathenism.”

  Anti-coolie organizations mushroomed so rapidly that a People’s Protective Alliance had to be formed in order to tell one crusader from another. It tied all the associations of bigots together in one huge Ku Klux Klan-like structure for more effective action. Both city and State authorities had now sidled over to open alliances with these growing groups. Not content with the barbarous Queue Ordinance, city hall got the chief of police to crack down hard on violations of the Cubic Air Ordinance. There were 75 arrests in May, 1873; 152 in July; and 95 in August. The Chinese did not pay their fines. They simply continued to violate the ordinance while in custody; they were jammed into jail cells. An additional harassment of the Chinese was an amending act (struck down three years later by the Federal courts) which empowered the State Commissioner to require a $500-in-gold bond of any female Chinese immigrant he thought might possibly be a “lewd or debauched woman.”

  The clergy split completely on the Chinese question. Father James M. Bouchard, who should have taken a liberal or humanitarian view (he was part Delaware Indian Jesuit) instead denounced the Chinese immigration as ruinous in a speech entitled “Chinamen or White Men—Which?” The Protestant Gibson gave a stirring “Reply to Father Bouchard” in Platt’s Hall on March 14, 1873, and made a fine defense of the Chinese; one which was marred only by certain anti-Catholic asides which the good minister simply could not resist. It was such a fine speech that the Chinese not only sent him a letter of thanks but offered to pay all the expenses of publishing the talk.

  Writers, too, split on the question. Most of the press went along with the anti-coolie crowd. Henryk Sienkiewicz, the young Pole to whom fame would come when he wrote Quo Vadis, was rather hard on the Chinese in San Francisco. But his author’s inquisitive mind at least led him to locate and indicate certain mitigating factors in regard to Chinatown’s evils. When he warned people against visiting the Chinese theatre alone because of the pickpockets, he did state that a second reason was that white hoodlums gathered there. “Quarrels and fights frequently occur between the Chinese and the hoodlums, sometimes ending with the thrust of a knife,” he warned. He also called attention to the widespread gambling of the Chinese and explained the prevalent prostitution by the fact that 9 out of 10 of Chinatown’s inhabitants were men. (The 1880 census actually showed 71,244 Chinese men and only 3,888 Chinese women in California.) Sienkiewicz reported cases of
polyandry in the interior but he saw that the solution for the social problem of the disparate number of men and women in Chinatown itself was resolved by prostitution rather than by polyandry.

  Ironically, at the very time in the mid-’70s that xenophobia and hysteria reached a peak, the Chinese Quarter began to “arrive” as a tourist attraction. Chinatown fascinated Sienkiewicz, Sam Clemens, Mrs. Frank Leslie, Albert Deane Richardson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Horace Greeley and other famous travelers and writers. Only three years after the visit of the Polish novelist a tourist guide prepared for railroad travelers devoted thirteen pages to Chinatown. Its description, however, could not compare with that of Sienkiewicz:

  The north side of the city of San Francisco, beginning with Clay Street is occupied by the Chinese district. Were it not for the brick buildings built in the European style, it might appear to the visitor in this part of town that he had, by some miracle, been transported to Canton or Shanghai. A strange impression is made by these noisy, nimble people, dressed in uniform costumes with their yellow complexions, slanted eyes, and long pigtails braided of hair and black silk reaching almost to the ground… On the street corners stand serious looking policemen in grey overcoats with silver stars on their chests. Perhaps the only other evidences of American civilization are the omnibuses which are drawn over the hills that cover the district neither by horses nor steam but by hidden chains [cable cars].

  During the ’70s a much more powerful voice than that of Sienkiewicz spoke out in favor of the Chinese. It was that of Samuel Clemens. When Mark Twain spoke people listened. In Roughing It, Twain thundered:

  They [the Chinese] are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare and a lazy one does not exist... He is a great convenience to everybody—even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man… They are a kindly-disposed, well-meaning race and are respected and well treated by the upper classes all over the Pacific Coast. No California gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it—they and their children; they, and naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum there as well as elsewhere in America.

  The Pacific Tourist, that pioneer of the long line of California promotional propaganda, tried to scold the Chinese Quarter for its evils—such as addicts curled up like withered leaves in dingy opium dens—while at the same time it attempted to “sell” Chinatown to the curious traveler. This involved nimble journalistic feats. The editor pointed to the foul habitations of the Quarter, but then cited the personal cleanliness of the people. He also admitted their lack of pestilence and relatively low death rate. He settled on a forbidding but tempting picture of a squalid yet fascinating coin of San Francisco. He warned that only three to five years of the opium habit would wreck the strongest constitution and the noblest manhood, but then said that “exaggerated are the stories told of visits to these dens by youths and women of American descent for indulging in this vice… They are rare, and only of the lowest classes of the women.” This image of a mysterious Chinatown both assaulted and captured tourist imagination from that day forward. The stereotyped picture remains to this day in the minds of many people who visit San Francisco for the first time. As they timidly advance into the heart of Chinatown by night they expect to see an opium den in the shadows, if not a bloody hatchet on the cobbles of a dark alley. Perhaps because their grandfathers read in the 1879 Pacific Tourist that “streets and alleys and labyrinthine windings not only such as we tread are theirs; they live and travel under ground and over roofs, up and down, until the cunning policeman is outwitted in following them.” The editor, in his ambivalence, attempted to be reassuring, which only made matters worse: “A visit to the Chinese quarter may be made in daylight or by night and with or without a policeman. The writer has frequently passed through the alleys and streets of Chinatown without the protection of policemen, and never experienced the slightest indignity.” Though he added, as if in haste, “but those desiring the protection of a policemen can secure the services of one by applying to the chief of police in the city hall. Compensation should be made privately. Two dollars and a half is a sufficient fee.” Like the dailies, The Pacific Tourist unfortunately confused the tongs with the Six Companies and described the latter as settling their controversies by the use of hired assassins. As a final reassuring note, the editor suggested that in the office of the chief of police or any Chinatown pawnbroker’s shop they could see the implements of murder of the hatchet men. He might also have added the police clerk’s office—a combination lost-and-found department and petty arsenal—where among the small change and pocket knives abandoned by felons were such interesting tools as Chinese dirks, opium pipes, and the coat of armor left behind by highbinder Ah Chung.

  G. B. Densmore singled out a particular Chinatown hock shop for scrutiny. In this establishment, on the east side of Washington Alley, he saw—just as the editor had predicted he would—all kinds of highbinder weapons: double-bladed and two-edged knives, pistols, and slung shots (blackjacks).

  Helen Hunt, the Helen Hunt Jackson who later wrote Ramona, was another who tiptoed through Chinatown with great foreboding. She chose to make her safari in broad daylight but even on a noonday expedition she thought it wise to ask a local policeman whether danger lurked in the alleys. “Not at all, m’am, not at all,” answered the officer. “At this hour of the day you can go with perfect safety through all these streets.” Charles Nordhoff advised tourists that even ladies and children could walk safely in the main streets of the Chinese Quarter by day. But he urged those who wished to investigate farther after dark to get a policeman—one of the Chinatown specials—as combined guide and guard.

  The sinister and mysterious aspects of Chinatown have always fascinated people. When the smoke of chimneys and braziers mixed with the night fogs to make the Quarter into an eerie Limehouse tourists huddled together in shuddering delight. A small army of Chinatown guides—a species now entirely vanished—did nothing to diminish the mystery.

  It was a fearful correspondent who covered the Quarter for the English publication The Gentleman’s Magazine. He wrote that “there are certain parts which, at his own risk, the white man is free to traverse, though in no case is it prudent to visit even these without the escort of a properly armed police officer well-known on the Chinatown beat.” Another Britisher who toured Chinatown before the quake, W. H. Gleadhill, was horrified by an entire street occupied by what he termed delicately “merchandeuses [sic] d’amour,” underground gambling hells which he called “tripots,” and opium dens filled with “white, sickly faces and glassy eyes.” Probably his guide escorted him to the labyrinth under the trap doors of Bartlett Alley. This subterranean haunt was so noisome with mold and seeping sewage that it was dubbed the Dog Kennel by the press. Gleadhill returned from Chinatown almost in a state of shock.

  The problem of Chinatown crime was complicated by the fact that for most of the nineteenth century, San Francisco was badly underpoliced. In 1863 there were still only 54 men in uniform. (They were outnumbered by the mignons Chinoises de nuit alone.) Yet the force made 5,422 (citywide) arrests. In 1871, Chief Crowley complained to the Board of Supervisors that New York had 3 times as many policemen per capita as San Francisco; that London had 3 1/2 times as many; and that Dublin had (and doubtless needed) 5 times as many. Pat Crowley had to make do with 4 captains and only 100 men. The combination of tong troubles, continuing hoodlumism and anti-coolieism taxed the law-and-order power of the city to the breaking point.

  The co
lorful Crowley cast about for alternatives when he was not given the extra men he needed for Chinatown details. He strongly urged more drastic methods, even to the abolition of firecrackers and the prohibition of shooting galleries near Chinatown. He felt that the latter were too attractive to the tong hatchet men. “Nearly every Chinaman in the city,” he said, “is the owner of a pistol, and we all know how handy he is in its use.”

  In 1874, when the strength of the force was brought into line with a realistic policy, it was Theodore Cockrill who was chief of police. Cockrill was a Kentuckian who had not really sought the office, but had allowed friends to place his name in nomination. As a Democrat he had not had the slightest hope of winning, but though the general Republican ticket swept the field Cockrill won the office of Chief by a 4,000-vote margin. He proved to be an effective leader but the problems of Chinatown were too much for him and persuaded him to flatly refuse renomination for a second term. Cockrill felt the growing tension in the air as the anti-coolie agitators voiced loud threats. He was determined that no harm would come to the 25,000 Chinese for whose safety he was responsible; he promised them full protection and he gave it to them.

  Chief Cockrill struck out at Chinatown crime, as so many of his predecessors had done, with an attack on the bagnios. An ordinance was passed which made it unlawful to sell any human being, such as a slave girl, or even to be in, enter into, remain in or dwell in any brothel. But Benjamin Brooks, attorney for the San Francisco Chinese, told Congressmen that this ordinance was used by San Francisco police strictly for blackmail purposes. One wonders how many of the 13,007 arrests of 1873-1874 can be chalked up to this practice. In any case, Cockrill was proud that, thanks to his energetic activity, no Chinese brothels remained on main thoroughfares.