Many witnesses now began to be called, representing agriculture, the railroads, trades, the anti-coolie associations and even evangelists.
A most interesting exchange ensued when Benjamin S. Brooks testified that many of the anti-coolie men were bummers. Asked what a bummer was, he answered, “A bummer is a man who pretends to want something to do and does not want anything to do. He never begs, but borrows with no intention of repaying. He hangs around saloons with the expectation of somebody inviting him to take a drink. These are his principal characteristics. If there is a building being erected, or a dog fight, or a man falls down in a fit, or a drunken man is carried off, it is necessary for him to be there to see that it is done right.”
Pixley was no easy antagonist. He was a fanatic and he had marshaled a good deal of evidence to support his views. In the “Memorial” which he prepared with Eugene Casserly and Philip A. Roach, he used it to claim that the Chinese criminal classes were growing rapidly and breaking away from the restraint of the Six Companies. In this respect Pixley showed remarkable clarity of vision. Because of the wild accusations he was accustomed to make, this quite accurate evaluation of the Chinatown situation was either ignored or disparaged. This was so even though he cited the testimony of intelligent and law-abiding Chinese who also denounced these “most abandoned and dangerous of criminals.” He quoted them as saying, ‘This class is dangerous and a constant source of terror to their own people, embracing as it does gamblers, opium eaters, hangers-on upon dens of prostitution, men of abandoned and violent character who live upon their countrymen by levying blackmail and exacting tribute from all classes of Chinese society.”
Brooks answered Pixley partially by blaming the squalor of Chinatown on city authorities who made no attempt to clean the Quarter’s streets. (The corrupt Chinatown special police were supposed to have men to keep the streets clean but few of these dollars ever went to the street cleaners.)
Brooks cited the poll tax as primarily a harassment of the Chinese. He might as well have suggested the queue and laundry ordinances or the old (1861) ordinance which raised the taxes on street peddlers from $10 a quarter to $100 a quarter. This hit hard at the poor Chinese hucksters who hawked tea through San Francisco’s streets.
The attorney took Pixley’s figures apart. “There are no ten thousand criminals nor two thousand prostitutes nor anything like it. The proportion of criminals is not greater, if as great, as among other people. There are not over five hundred prostitutes—about the same proportion to the population as whites.” He then contrasted bitterly the treatment of white and Chinese trollops. Of the former he said, “No laws oppress them—they live in sumptuous luxury.”
Finally, Brooks did not think there was an alarming increase in the number and power of Chinese criminals in Chinatown. But the tragedy of the tong decades ahead would show how wrong the counselor was and how right journalist Pixley was when he intoned:
“This criminal [highbinder] class is beyond the control of the Six Companies, and by their number and desperation are becoming equally dangerous to the better Chinese as to the whites; [they] live off their countrymen by blackmailing, enforced by threats and violence, supplementing their indiscriminate thieving and pillaging.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Salaried Soldiers Of The Tongs
“The highbinder tongs hold secret sessions, the business of which is to arrange for the collection of tribute. Each long has its regularly appointed ‘soldiers’ who are commonly known as ‘Hatchet Men.’ It is the sworn duty of these Hatchet Men to murder all those who have invoked the displeasure of the tong.”
—Thomas F. Turner, Investigator, United States, Industrial Commission 1901
MARRIED men were a rarity in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the nineteenth century. There were only 1,385 Chinese women there in 1884, as compared to 30,360 males. Of the female population, perhaps 50 percent or more at that time were “singing girls,” as the brothel dwellers of the Quarter were euphemistically called.
The rootless young men of Chinatown, some with criminal records and all without families, became great joiners. They tended to form not only clan and provincial groupings, but also tongs. These were fraternal and mutual-aid societies supposedly patterned after the secret patriotic societies of the old country. The word tong, from the Mandarin or Pekinese t’ang, signified nothing more mysterious or notorious than association, hall, lodge or chamber, much as ui kun meant lodge or asylum.
There were, technically, laundry tongs or washermen’s guilds, medicine tongs (drugstores) and even “Sunday tongs”—churches. But there was no mistaking the direction which the so-called fraternal tongs took in the ’70s and ’80s, although they skilfully shielded their operations from the police, and indeed, from all whites. These highbinder or fighting tongs had no clan or birthplace requirements for admission. Members were drawn from all ranks and walks of Chinatown life. Reverend Frederic Masters aptly described the typical San Francisco tong as “a resort for all who are in distress, or in debt, or discontented.” Theoretically at least, anyone could join a tong, and they included in their ranks Caucasians, Japanese and Filipinos, though certainly not in large numbers. Some San Francisco Chinese tried to play it safe by joining more than one tong. Some were members of as many as six of the organizations, hoping thus to secure immunity from the street warfare of the roaming bands of or killers.
The tongs started out in life with a show of good intentions, like the similar patriotic societies of old China. They may have meant what they said at first. The Call thought so, describing the politically oriented Chee Kong tong as a benevolent society at its start, although “gradually hard characters crept in, absorbed the office, and for years past have used it as a weapon for the purpose of levying war.” It was difficult for a tong to turn down an appeal for help from a member; just being asked brought the tong prestige. Winning the appellant’s battle against an individual or a rival tong raised its stock in the community enormously. There was plenty of room for them to expand their power. They existed in what was, governmentally (the Six Companies notwithstanding) a near vacuum.
Perhaps the first recruits for these fighting tongs were men of small and weak clan associations who were either jealous or fearful of the power and prestige of such clans as the Wongs, Chins, Lees, Yees and the Four Brothers, all of whom tended to dominate Six Companies’ affairs. (The Four Brothers Clan was a multifamily association of long and close ties which acted like a single family unit.) According to New York tongman, Eng Ying (Eddie) Gong, the tongs were organized primarily by See Yup district men.
There was crime and murder in Chinatown before, during and after the heyday of the tongs—crime which was quite independent of their activities. The murders of Captain Charles Barbcouch, of the prostitute Celina Boudet, or of Officer John Coots, were crimes which could have occurred in any sector of the city. The murders in which both attacker and victim were Chinese were usually lumped, out of slovenly journalism, as “tong killings,” whereas a number were nothing of the sort. Thus the 1896 killing of Ah Foo by Sing Lin was done in the heat of a personal quarrel. The hatcheting of a Stockton Street Chinese woman in 1899, was done by her paramour, a professional thief, when she refused him money. The stalking and killing of young Jue Do Hong by Jue Lin Ong in 1901 was the culmination of a family feud which had begun in China but which was in no sense a tong vendetta.
But increasingly the tongs tended to corner the market on crime—at least crime that yielded any considerable profit—in the Quarter. And by the 1890s, the fighting tongs had secured a near monopoly on murder in Chinatown.
The tongs as militantly organized bands of criminals and killers are far from unique in the record of mankind. Among their historical antecedents the earliest were probably the Assassins of Persia. Their name was carried to Europe by the Crusaders as a new synonym for “murderers.” These hashish addicts of the Ismaili sect were terrori
sts who were convinced that their sacred duty lay in the murder of their enemies. They were wiped out by the Mamelukes in the thirteenth century. The Thugs of India were similar professional killers and they, too, contributed a new word to the dictionary. Like the Assassins of Persia—and the tongs of San Francisco—they were addicted to religious ritual, secret language and signs. Their weapon differed from that of the highbinders in that it was a pickax. The Thugs were crushed by the British in the mid-nineteenth century.
Most familiar to Americans of all the societies which resembled the deadly tongs was the Mafia. This brotherhood of evil erupted in Sicily in Napoleonic times to exercise despotic, criminal power. Much like the original tongs in China, the Mafia and the similar Camorra began as patriotic resistance movements against invaders and conquerors. Like the tongs, the Mafia emigrated to America, and long before entering into Chicago gangsterdom, murdered the New Orleans chief of police, David Hennessy (1890), and terrorized a jury into the acquittal of the killers. The people of New Orleans were not terrified, however. They stole a leaf from San Francisco’s book. A vigilance committee was formed, the jail was stormed, and all eleven Mafiusi lynched.
It did not take long for the tongs to show their true colors, although the public was slow to realize how deadly they were becoming. The Belgian forty-niner, Dr. Jean Joseph Francois Haine, sized them up accurately. He said, “Among the Chinese is to be found a body of assassins called Highbinders or Bravos which is always ready, for the sum of a few hundred piasters, to exterminate the poor wretches who are pointed out to them.”
Perhaps no more desperate breed of fighting men were developed in the Old West than the 20 percent or so of the tong membership who were “salaried soldiers” or boo how doy. These were the real highbinders—the professional hatchet men. Unlike the anarchical road agents, cattle thieves and brigands of the Hispano-American and Anglo-American frontier, the killers of this Sino-American frontier were fanatical and militarily disciplined. It was not mere bravado or vanity which led them to call themselves salaried soldiers; that is just the role they played. Their battlegrounds were the alleys off Jackson and Sacramento streets, and their enemy the rival tongs.
These hatchet men were not all of a kind, however. When the correspondent for Blackwood’s Magazine toured the San Francisco city jail before the earthquake he was shown two cells containing tong “soldiers” all of whom were likely to pay the extreme penalty of the law. The first cell contained 6 men; 4 were stoically playing cards while the other 2 kibitzed over their shoulders. The Englishman had never seen men who appeared more callous or indifferent to their fate. On the other hand, the second cell was part of Solitary. The lone man in it, a tong murderer, paced back and forth like a caged animal. To the correspondent his face reflected cunning, cruelty and ruthless brutality.
The hatchet men were usually fearless and were often fair to good shots. They frequently ate wildcat meat before a battle or an assassination in hopes of acquiring the keen vision of the bobcat. When Jack London was in grammar school in Oakland he heard of the large sums of money the San Francisco tong men paid for wildcat meat. He and a friend periodically armed themselves with slingshots to go trekking over the hills of Piedmont to try to make a fortune out of the demands created by tong troubles.
Before the tongs took root on the West Coast a journal like the Scientific American (1850) could write: “This [Chinese] population is the most orderly, industrious and prudent of any class in the city. You never catch any of the long queues in any of the haunts of dissipation, and per consequence, none of them in the police books.” By 1875, the Scientific American, thanks to the malevolence of the boo how day, was ready to eat its words; by 1885 it was thoroughly sickened by tong warfare.
The origins of Chinatown’s tongs are clearly discernible in China. There, the opposition of Chinese to the Tartar or Manchu Empire established in 1644 was solidified through the creation of patriotic and secret organizations. These tongs, for such they really were, dedicated themselves to the overthrow of the haughty Manchus who had humbled Ming Dynasty China and forced the Chinese to wear queues as a sign of servility. The queue resembled a horse’s tail and the Chinese, like horses, were slaves to the conquering northerners. The pigtails also made it easier for the always mounted Manchus to seize the Chinese.
The beginnings of the tong-like organizations in China are somewhat hazy but definitely predate the Manchu conquest. In the era of the Han Dynasty, about the time of Christ, there were such organizations as the Red Eyebrows (or the Carnation-Eyebrowed Rebels), the Copper Horses, the Yellow Turbans, and later the powerful White Lotus Society. The Red Spears started out as a farmers’ protective association, the White Lily and White Cloud Societies with religious, connotations, having been founded by Buddhist monks. But even the quasi-religious groups later went in for violence and plunder, imitating such organizations as the Ko Lao Hui, or Society of Brothers and Elders, which was not only responsible for anti-Tartar riots—its motto being Overthrow the Manchus, restore the Mings!—but also for personal revenge and banditry. This association and its close relative, the San Ho Hui or Triad Society, were formed after the massacre of Shui Lum monks by Tartar troops.
San Francisco tongs were founded by political refugees from such organizations as the Triad Society. This society was so called because its members venerated a trinity composed of Heaven, Earth and Man. Other names for this secret organization included the Heaven and Earth Society, the Hung Family, the Dagger Society and the Hung League. These refugees, mixed with some out-and-out criminals, entered San Francisco unnoticed among the hordes of coolie laborers. Members who fled to other parts of the world also set up tongs, and in Penang, Singapore and Malacca the British Government had to pass special legislation to protect the people of the Straits Settlements from the exactions of these secret societies. Membership alone was considered a penal offense for Chinese-British colonial subjects.
First to throw light on the tongs was a Reverend Dr. Milne of Malacca whose report of 1825 was read to the Royal Asiatic Society. It was titled “Some Account of the Secret Society in China called ‘the Triad Society.’” Milne accused the secret organizations of only posing as mutual-aid societies while they were really responsible for the many dead men found floating in the harbor with their arms and legs tied together in a peculiar way and their ears lopped off. Little more was known about them until 1840, when two British Army officers, Major General Wilson and Lieutenant Newbold, read another paper on the Triad Society to the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1863, Gustave Schlegel, a Dutch official, obtained documents seized in a police raid on a tong member’s house in Padang, Sumatra. The result was a book—the first work to compare the Triads with European Freemasons. Finally in 1900, a British detective in Hong Kong published another work which reported that the Triad Society “in California, where it is known by the name of Highbinders, has made itself notorious in consequence of numerous daring murders and other criminal offenses.”
In 1891, an Englishman named Charles Mason tried to make himself Emperor of China with the help of the Ko Lao Hui Society, of which he became a member. But Mason bungled his very first filibustering action—the attempted piracy of a river boat—and ended up in prison. Meanwhile in San Francisco the Triad Society had metamorphosed into a secret fraternal order, the Chee Kong tong, or the Chamber of High Justice. In the East, on Doyers Street and thereabouts in New York, it came to be known as the Yee Hung Oey or Society of Righteous Brothers.
The power of the tongs in San Francisco was dramatically demonstrated in March, 1888, with the funeral parade of Low Yet, one of the greatest processions in the city’s history—almost rivaling that of Little Pete, later the King of Chinatown. The streets of the Quarter were crowded with highbinders and curious, fearful or impressed Chinese townspeople. The former swaggered about in ceremonial dress of helmets and bucklers. Fully a thousand tong members marched in the parade or took part otherwise
in the funeral ceremonies. Starting at noon from the Chee Kong tong headquarters on Spofford Alley, the long procession wound its way through Chinatown. Those on foot soon climbed into waiting vehicles to accompany those already mounted for the long haul to the Chinese cemetery. The line of march extended for a full mile when the head of the procession entered the cemetery’s gates.
The men of the advance guard bore gaudy banners. After them came distinguished Chinese in carriages; next the Chee Kong tong members. Following them was the hearse, drawn by four black horses. Behind the hearse marched the professional mourners hired for the occasion. They wore what looked like linen dusters and had strips of red-and-white cloth wound around their heads. All the way to the cemetery they kept up an energetic (and doubtless well-rewarded) wailing of artfully simulated grief. Bringing up the rear of the parade was a company of Chinese “soldiers” armed with rifles and another equipped with cutlasses and shields. In the afterguard straggled a motley fleet of battered buggies, express wagons and vehicles of all kinds in all states of decrepitude. These were literally swarming with the common people of the Quarter. Here and there in the long queue were bands dispensing what to Western ears sounded like unremitting discord and cacophony but which were apparently Celestial dirges.
The chief feature of the procession was the dead man’s horse. The animal was saddled and bridled and led by an equerry. Although white, not black, is the color of mourning to the Chinese, the mount was covered with a mantle of black thoughtfully provided by a Caucasian undertaker.
At the cemetery the coffin, covered with a red pall edged in white, was placed on a catafalque in back of a shrine. The family of the deceased and the professional grievers approached the casket and knelt around it. Joss sticks and joss paper were lit, and offerings of roast fowl, tea and sam shu (Chinese brandy) were placed before the shrine. The Americans who watched the scene were amused when a flageolet squeaked out a flimsy fanfare. A priest, mounting a parapet to the right of the altar, wore gold vestments and a gilded head cover. He embarked on a monotonous chant which lasted for nearly an hour. From time to time he would punctuate his prayer with a clashing of the cymbals he carried. At intervals, too, an acolyte rang a bell, much as in the Catholic Mass, but it appeared to be merely a signal for the flute player to loose a series of ear-piercing blasts.
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Page 15