The exact number of dead in the 28,000 structures destroyed in San Francisco’s four days of tribulation is not known but is estimated to have totaled 450. Undoubtedly a good number of these were Chinese trapped in their tenements and warrens.
Chinatown would have been wiped out no matter what steps might have been taken, but its actual destruction on the first night of the four days of fire was accidental. In an attempt to stop the blaze from spreading west of Kearny Street—one of several thoroughfares vainly designated as firebreaks—a demolition crew planted a charge of black powder in a drugstore on the corner of Kearny and Clay Streets when they ran out of dynamite. When the charge was ignited the blast sent burning grains of powder and shredded, blazing bedding flying across Kearny Street from the windows of an upstairs room. The far side of the street was quickly aflame and Chinatown was doomed. It was a tinder-dry wooden city. The heat was so intense across Kearny from Chinatown that a group of prominent citizens who gathered in the Hall of Justice to offer their help in the emergency had to leave the oppressive, stifling building and make their way via Portsmouth Square to Chinatown and then to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. There they perfected their plans for the Relief Committee of Fifty which was to do yeoman work during the days of crisis.
Witnesses to the fire’s leapfrogging across Kearny were Frank W. Aitken and Edward Hilton, who described the scene: “Quickly it crossed from Kearny to the little arm of Chinatown that reached down the hill beside Portsmouth Square, and beyond Chinatown with its huddled houses and narrow passages and overhanging porches… During the evening, too, the fire from the wholesale district, having thrust out an arm into Chinatown, stretched down along Montgomery Street… Before the night was far advanced Chinatown was in the grasp of the destroying flames and the Chinese joined the throng. It was a motley procession, sprung from many places, its ranks filling with homeless, footsore legions, orderly and nearly silent... By midnight a solid wall of fire stretching from Market Street to Chinatown was working steadily out toward Powell Street and Nob Hill.”
Charles Keeler recalled that “Chinatown was ablaze early in the evening and had burned throughout the night, the fire sweeping fiercely through the flimsy Oriental city, scattering the inhabitants... in helpless bands. Out of the narrow alleyways and streets they swarmed like processions of black ants. With bundles swung on poles across their shoulders, they retreated, their helpless little women in pantaloons following with the children, all passive and uncomplaining… [though] in every quarter the night was full of terror. The mighty column of smoke rose thousands of feet in the air, crimsoned by the wild sea of flame below it.”
Exhausted after trudging about the city all day, James B. Stetson had gone to bed at 1 A.M. on the first night of the fire; but he could only sleep until 2:30. He got up, pulled on his clothes again, and went out to see what was left of his city. He stood at the corner of California and Mason Streets. “From there I could see that Old St. Mary’s Church and Grace Cathedral were on fire. To the north, Chinatown was in a whirlpool of fire.”
California author Mary Hunter Austin wrote: “I remember the sigh of the wind through windows of desolate walls, and the screech and clack of ruined cornices in the red, noisy night, and the cheerful banging of pianos in the camps, the burials in trenches and the little, bluish, grave-long heaps of burning among the ruins of Chinatown.”
Before midnight of that terror-filled first day 10,000 Chinese had fled the Quarter. Soon the remainder would follow, Donaldina Cameron saw sharp-eyed highbinders watching for their prey among the refugees driven from hiding, even in the midst of the confusion and chaos. They fled to Washington Square in North Beach, to Fort Point, to the Ferry Building and across the bay to Oakland. A special camp was set up for Chinese at Fort Winfield Scott and most of the refugees ended up there. The Chinese Minister came from Washington to tour the camp with agents of the Six Companies and was completely satisfied with the care and help being given his nationals. Major General Adolphus W. Greeley, in a special report to Washington on relief operations, said, “It is gratifying to report that neither in San Francisco nor in Oakland has any relief committee showed discrimination against the Chinese, and this line of action of the civilian organization has been consistently followed by the Army.” Another observer also remarked on this point. Edward Livingstone, a San Francisco businessman wiped out by the fire, said, “I was impressed by the fact that caste and creed were thrown to the winds. There were no rich, no poor, no capitalists and laborers, no oppressed and oppressors. All facing a common peril, men and women who had lived in elegance stood in the breadline with Chinese and colored people.”
Many of the Chinese servants who lived in Chinatown rushed to rejoin their white households out of loyalty. They proved of great aid in salvaging valuables, bedding and clothing. Twenty years later James W. Byrne recalled that “Chinese servants rose nobly to the exigencies’ of the catastrophe. We had no vehicle, no means of transporting the mattresses and commissariat otherwise than in our arms or on our backs until the Chinese boys solved the difficulty. They went out foraging in their own quiet way and presently returned to the house with a couple of children’s four-wheeled wagons… [which] we piled with mattresses, bedding, hams and other essentials, and then we started out with the convoy, up and down hill to the Presidio, as the Chinamen pulled....”
On the second day anything that had escaped the earlier flames was destroyed as the fire fanned back over the skeleton of Chinatown again. Aitken and Hilton wrote, “Soon the flames were racing down the western slope of Nob Hill, racing across California Street to meet the fire on the south, racing pellmell beyond Sacramento Street and back to the purlieus of the destroyed Chinatown. There was no wind to drive them [back], and no man there to stay them….” By the fourth day the Quarter was a blackened ruin. The two men wrote: “The bright lanterns, the little grated windows, the balconies that whispered of romance, the flaring dragons, were gone. Gone, too, the ill-smelling fish markets and cellar shops, the bazaars, the gambling dens, the places where opium was smoked in guarded secrecy. Everything that had made the little foreign section a tradition throughout the world had disappeared.”
Amidst the general sorrowing, the erasure of Chinatown was hailed as a blessing. In the Overland Monthly a writer exclaimed: “Fire has reclaimed to civilization and cleanliness the Chinese ghetto, and no Chinatown will be permitted in the borders of the city. Some provision will be made for the caring of the Orientals.” The Independent thought that they would be settled at Hunter’s Point. In Britain Blackwood’s Magazine, in commenting upon what it called the purification of San Francisco, applauded Chinatown’s disappearance: “...a sink and sewer of the city, tainted in every vein and vessel, a relic of a former existence nourished solely on the evil traditions of the past… The maze of ramshackle tenements, lean-to joss houses, gaudy brothels and disgusting dives is no more.”
True. Gone were the houses of the singsong girls, the opium dens, the fan-tan parlors, the packed tenements and the moldy Globe Hotel and decaying Mansion House. The headquarters of every tong were completely demolished too. Most of them never came back. It is said of the Kwong Duck tong, for example, that it boasted only one member after the earthquake and fire—Wong Sing, a man who guarded the tong seal, the society’s flag and its book of oaths, and held all offices. The ranks of the hatchet men, already thinned by old age, extradition, voluntary return to China, and death, scattered after 1906. Some went to Oakland; others to Portland and Seattle. Many went to San Jose or south to Los Angeles, and a considerable number went on East to Chicago or New York to cause trouble there. Many never returned to plague San Francisco again. When the San Francisco police force had to be reduced by one-fifth as an economy measure after the disaster (most of the taxable property had been destroyed) there was a crime wave, but not in Chinatown. It was the quietest sector in the city. The slate had been wiped clean and a fresh start made possible.
The Chinese drifted back to Dupont Gai and its smoking rubble. They shrugged off the demands that they move to the periphery of the city. The Overland Monthly recognized the inevitable and predicted a better Chinatown. “It may lack the familiar holes, corners and smells… but it will be more agreeable to the eye if not so piquant to the nose… Possibly the new San Francisco will not be so joyous a place to the unregenerate nor so painful a spot to the pious as formerly....”
Fine, handsome buildings of Oriental design, many with pagoda-like roofs, were designed by men like T. Patterson Ross and A. W. Burgren and built along what was coming to be called Grant Avenue (old Dupont Street). The structure at Grant and California, kitty-cornered from Old St. Mary’s, for example, was constructed at a cost of $135,000 and leased to the Sing Fat Company. At 32 Spofford Alley, Charles M. Rousseau designed a new $25,000 home for the Chinese Society of Free Masons, the Chee Kong tong, with much Oriental detail and Chinese tile. Apartments and hotels sprang up and the population crowded back into the Quarter. With the tong ranks thinned, many people lost their fear and the population began to curve upward again until it would reach 25,000 in 1950 and 36,445 in 1960.
But the tongs and tong violence were not completely dead. A Suey Sing vs. Bing Kong war flared up; then a two-year struggle between the Hop Sings and Bing Kongs. As late as 1914, the Hop Sings and Suey Sings were even using motor cars and a machine gun to try to settle their quarrel. But these were the last spams of dying organisms. By 1909, the Chinese League of Justice in America was taking up problems of concern to the Chinese and settling them via legal means. The days of the tongs were numbered. The formation of the Chinese Republic in 1912, World War I and America’s entry into it in 1917, all speeded up the integration process. These factors finally forced the citizens of Chinatown to make up their minds whether to return to China or to become Americans. Most chose the latter course, abandoned their queues and Oriental costumes and habits to a large degree, and acclimatized. They turned their backs on the old vendetta codes. The heads of the tongs—older men now—saw the handwriting on the walls of Chinatown, and in 1913 the tong chiefs themselves formed a Peace Association—the Wo Ping Woey—to end intertong strife.
It can almost be said that from this time on the tongs became poker, pai gow and pinochle societies. Families became the rule rather than the exception in Chinatown. Americanized Chinese were displacing the old-timers in positions of influence, as well as in sheer numbers. By 1910, American-born Chinese numbered 14,935—a thousand more than the entire population of Chinatown of 1900. They were now the distinct majority in Chinatown and they asserted their rights. Merchants no longer felt it necessary to become (grudging) members of tongs for reason of “protection.” The tongs had to be content with the leavings of their former illegal empire—largely do far (lottery), fan-tan and pai gow parlors.
As early as 1909 the Six Companies began to foster tourism in the new Quarter. During the city’s Portola Festival of that year their guidebook, San Francisco’s Chinatown, was published. The editors assured travelers of their personal safety. “Visitors in Chinatown need fear no harm from members of the Chinese race. As to members of other races who often haunt Chinatown’s streets, the visitor must use ordinary prudence.” Tourists were urged to see (and smell) Fish Alley, off Washington Street just below Grant, but were warned, “Visit this part only in the daytime, as white ‘sporting women’ live on this street in considerable numbers.” Although the Six Companies had to admit that some tongs had come back, it was no longer afraid of them—“There are some highbinder societies, which the better class of Chinese regret.” The editors boasted of how clean Chinatown had become. “San Francisco’s reconstructed Chinatown is composed of modern sanitary and attractive buildings. A Chinese lodging house recently constructed by Chinese owners on Clay Street has bathtubs on each floor—something novel in Chinatown.” The editors added, “There are no underground opium dens in Chinatown—haven’t been any since the fire.” Opium had been practically taxed and priced out of existence by the time of the Opium Act of 1923. The State Legislature’s Red Light Abatement Act of 1914 was practically the death blow for the singsong girl industry, although the last slave-girl raids were not made until 1925.
After the fire all of the major newspapers ran articles urging the resettlement of the city’s Chinese elsewhere than in their old area along the Street of a Thousand Lanterns (Dupont). But nothing came of this idea. The Chinese were obstinate in their desire to return to their old precincts and they did so. Students of Chinatown like Hartwell Davis soon noted that: “Since the great San Francisco fire, a change has come over the Chinese in San Francisco. The merchant, realizing that this fire has removed much of the filth incidental to the Chinese section, has turned his face against the re-establishment of the sinister and crime-breeding conditions.”
The coup de grace was administered to the fighting tongs by a now legendary figure—Inspector Jack Manion, who died in 1959 at the age of eighty-two years. Born in Ross, Marin County, he moved to San Francisco, joined the force in 1907, and served in the police department until his retirement in 1946. From the moment he took over the Chinatown squad on March 28, 1921, he became the unofficial chief of police of Chinatown. The last six tongs—the Hop Sings, Suey Sings, Suey Dongs, Sen Suey Yings, Jun Yings and Bing Kongs—were trying to turn back the clock to a time when assassinations, slave girls and gambling were the rule. But Manion would have none of it. “No more killings; no more shakedowns; no more opium or slave girls.” These were his orders. But six men were killed. Manion put pressure on the tongs. He got their heads to meet together in an unwilling peace conference and bulldozed them into signing a treaty pledging peace. He threatened them with deportation if they did not sign. Manion’s firm but fair methods worked and it was he who finally pacified Chinatown. There were no more tong killings after 1922 (and few murders or manslaughter cases of any kind), although in the rare crimes of violence in later years the newspapers could be counted on to rush a headline on the streets reading TONG KILLING! no matter how far from the truth it might be. (This was even the case in 1961.)
Manion won the nickname Mau Yee, the Cat, because of his cunning and apparent knowledge of everything that went on in the Quarter. The last of the hatchet men were convinced that he not only had eyes in the back of his head but that he never slept. He used to fool them by standing in a crowd, reading the Chinese newspapers posted on the walls, apparently studying and digesting the calligraphic information. Actually he could read hardly a word of Chinese, but the highbinders did not know this. All of his psychology was simple but effective. When a show of force was needed he had only to march into a tong headquarters, listen silently and intently to what was but gibberish to him (though never showing this), then violently whip out his handcuffs and slam them on the table in front of the startled tong officers. Manion had a temper too. More than once he returned the thinly veiled bribes of costly presents by flinging them at the donors before kicking them out of Chinatown. One such gift was a complete dinner set in gold plate—the cups and bowls stuffed with currency.
But he was liked, even loved, by the common people of Chinatown, the merchants, and especially by the children. They did not call him Mau Yee but Min Bok, Old Uncle. The Americanized children liked him for the kindness beneath his rough exterior. Small Orientals would cry out as he passed. “Hello, Daddy!” He was repeatedly asked to be a best man or a godfather. For twenty-five years he headed the Chinatown squad and only once asked for a transfer to other duty. When the word got around, a large crowd of Chinese gathered with petitions demanding that “Sergeant Jack” stay on where he belonged. Although no braggart, Jack Manion did allow himself one boast in the beginning: “Ours will be the cleanest Chinatown in the United States.” He was right, because he saw to it himself.
By 1925, when the last slave-girl raids were made in Portola Alley (renamed Cameron Alley, renamed Old Chinatown
Lane), Manion’s firm policing had paid off. He could explain why there were no more tong wars: “You see, there can’t very well be any tong killings unless there are tong gunmen on hand to make them. The first thing I did when I took over the Chinatown detail was to make it hot for gunmen. All those without visible means of support I arrested on charges of vagrancy. The gunmen had social clubs and hang-outs. I arrested them for loitering around these clubrooms. I wasn’t always able to secure convictions or sentences that amounted to very much. But I kept on arresting them and I gave them to understand that things would continue to be hot for them in San Francisco indefinitely. I succeeded in driving them out of the city and I’ve kept them out. I closed up the hang-out places and I’ve kept them closed.”
By suppressing gambling and prostitution, Sergeant (later Inspector) Manion deprived the tongs of their last sources of revenue and power. This crippled them. He put the fear of God into the boo how doy by telling them, face to face, when he heard a rumor of a war between tongs, that he would try every one of them for conspiracy in murder should a single man be killed. He thought nothing of dropping through skylights or shinnying down ventilator shafts to rescue slave girls or seize hatchet men. Donaldina Cameron, his firm friend, said of him, “He has the support of the better elements in Chinatown and I think he has the respect of the worse elements.”
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Page 33