Tong Wars
Page 1
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2016 by Scott D. Seligman
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, Library of Congress: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Library of Congress: here, here, here, here; Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library: here, here; Museum of the City of New York: here; National Archives and Records Administration: here, here, here; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress: here; © Bettmann/Corbis: here; Detroit Publishing Company, courtesy of Shorpy.com: here; Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress: here, here; George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress: here, here, here, here, here; Wikimedia Commons: here; courtesy of Scott D. Seligman: here, here; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 12, 1899: here; New York World, March 6, 1906: here; Russel Crouse, Murder Won’t Out (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932): here, here; Annual Report of the Police Department, City of New York, 1922: here; © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis: here
ISBN 9780399562273 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780399562297 (e-book)
Map by Daniel Lagin
Version_1
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
A NOTE ON ROMANIZATION AND CHINESE NAMES
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Chapter 1 ◆ An “Army of Almond-Eyed Exiles”
Chapter 2 ◆ The Gamblers’ Union
Chapter 3 ◆ “A Clear Case of Corruption”
Chapter 4 ◆ The Chinese Parkhursts
Chapter 5 ◆ The War Begins
Chapter 6 ◆ “A Regular Highbinder, Six-Shooter War Dance on the Bowery”
Chapter 7 ◆ A Price on Tom Lee’s Head
Chapter 8 ◆ The Chinese Theatre Massacre
Chapter 9 ◆ Profit Sharing
Chapter 10 ◆ Have Gun, Will Travel
Chapter 11 ◆ The Four Brothers’ War
Chapter 12 ◆ Mock Duck’s Luck Runs Out
Chapter 13 ◆ Chinatown: Renovated, Disinfected, and Evacuated
Chapter 14 ◆ The Defection of Chin Jack Lem
Chapter 15 ◆ Coexistence
Epilogue
KEY LOCATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHRONOLOGY
GLOSSARY AND GAZETTEER
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Nothing had worked. Not threats, not negotiations. Not shutting down Chinatown’s gambling halls and opium dens nor exiling its unmarried white women. Not house-to-house searches for weapons nor arrests. Not throwing Chinese offenders into prison nor even executing them. The situation seemed hopeless and out of control, and the New York County district attorney, Joab H. Banton, was running out of ideas.
Despite his best efforts, tong men in New York were still killing one another.
There had been reason for hope. The most recent treaty, signed five months earlier in March 1925 by the tong kingpins, was supposed to have provided “for lasting peace between the On Leongs and Hip Sings in all parts of the United States.” Senior tong men not seen in public for months had emerged from their hiding places, newly confident they would not be mown down on the streets of the Chinese quarter by an enemy gunman. But like the seemingly endless series of peace accords negotiated over the three decades in which the tongs had been at each other’s throats, this one hadn’t lasted.
Distrust ran so high that any incident could prove incendiary. When a Boston On Leong decided a Hip Sing had been too attentive to his wife, he picked up his gun, and so did tong men throughout the East and the Midwest. Dozens of Chinese were slaughtered.
Banton’s predecessors had been able to sit the heads of the New York tongs down together and read them the riot act with some expectation that calm would be restored if and when they willed it. But over the previous couple of decades, the organizations had spread out to dozens of cities, most of the founders had passed from the scene, and lesser men had filled their shoes. Because the bosses had not authorized the most recent outbreak, it was far from clear that they had the stature or the clout to stop it. And the stakes had never been higher: more people were dying as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs.
On September 8, Banton assembled the leaders of the warring factions to deliver a “final ultimatum.” If the killing didn’t cease, he warned, he was prepared to call in the federal government. It was no empty threat: Federal officials had already vowed to deport imprisoned tong men after their sentences were up. They were now poised to up the ante. And so when two Hip Sings were brutally assassinated the very next day—one shot, another bashed in the skull—Washington decided it was time for drastic action.
The U.S. attorney Emory R. Buckner announced that four federal departments would cooperate to deport every Chinese in New York who lacked a certificate permitting him or her to remain in America. Because securing certificates hinged on one’s ability to demonstrate that one had entered the country legally, Buckner knew that many couldn’t qualify; they were out of status and vulnerable. Never mind that there was no evidence that these were the people who were wielding the guns or that their expulsion would do much of anything to bring peace to Chinatown.
In raids carried out over several days, local police imposed a dragnet as federal agents swooped in on Chinatown. They rounded up everyone they could find who looked Chinese, some of whom were citizens and most of whom were legal residents. Without warrants, they raided restaurants, gambling houses, laundries, theaters, tenements, and shops. They dragged people from their beds. If wiping out the scourge meant running roughshod over individual rights and playing fast and loose with the law, they proved alarmingly eager to step up.
Detainees by the hundreds were ferried by paddy wagon to the Federal Building, where they were herded into a large room and examined through interpreters, one by one, by immigration officers in impromptu hearings. Those with papers were released. Those without documents were placed under arrest, arraigned, and sent to the Tombs—lower Manhattan’s jail—or to Ellis Island. Men who had never brandished a weapon in their lives wept as they were held without bail to await certain deportation.
No other immigrant group had ever been targeted the way the authorities were going after the Chinese. Italian and Irish émigrés had fought their share of brutal gang wars, but nobody had ever rounded them up for wholesale expulsion. Yet this time, the government was acting as if the only way to bring peace to Chinatown was to get rid of its Chinese, through whatever means necessary.
How it came to this is the story of four bloody wars and countless skirmishes fought intermittently over more than three decades in New York’s Chinatown and the Chinese quarters of several other cities in America’s East and Midwest, with their attendant casualties, peace parleys, and treaties. It is the story of a clash of mismatched cultures, of misunderstandings, naïveté, and bigotry. It tells of stubborn men willing to fight and die not only for concrete rewards like money and property but als
o for intangibles like loyalty and “face”—that Asian notion so closely tied to reputation, dignity, and prestige. And it is the story of a veritable army of precinct captains, detectives, and uniformed officers bound and determined to stop them.
Or at least to line their pockets.
The warriors were men from south China, most of whom had come to the West Coast to seek their fortunes and eventually headed east, but who planned to return home at some future date. Most were manual laborers, but some built businesses, amassed substantial wealth, and planted roots in America. The tongs were their secret, sworn brotherhoods organized ostensibly for social purposes but very much involved in criminal activity. (The Chinese term carries no negative connotation and can be used to describe any of a variety of organizations, but for clarity’s sake its use in this book will generally be limited to those secret societies.) Their weapons were cleavers and knives, then guns, and eventually explosives. And their primary battleground in New York was a triangular parcel of land not much larger than an acre adjoining the seedy Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan. Bounded by Mott and Pell streets, Chatham Square, and the Bowery, and including the whole of crooked Doyers Street, it was then—and remains today—the heart of New York’s Chinatown.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
In my many years of living and working in China, studying the Chinese language, and doing research on early Chinese American history, I had heard frequent mention of the tong wars, but most of what I had read about the tongs was highly sensationalized, as indeed was much of what was written about all Chinese in America before about thirty years ago. Many writers were more interested in conjuring up Oriental mystery and lurid intrigue than presenting real history, because that is what most people wanted and expected to read.
I also knew that many Chinese Americans simply wished to forget about the tong wars, because they don’t reflect well on early residents of Chinatown, but I wanted to know the truth. I was reasonably sure there was more to the story than simply bad, greedy men slaughtering other bad, greedy men for lucre. Surely the clash of cultures and the way in which the Chinese were treated in America—disenfranchised, marginalized, objectified, and often denied justice—had had something to do with it. So I set out to understand what had happened and why, to demystify the stories, and to look at them in the broader context of the early Chinese experience in America, and especially in Tammany-era New York.
This book is the result. The characters depicted in it have not in any way been fictionalized. The events really occurred at the times indicated. All dialogue that appears between quotation marks was recorded at the time. And no thoughts have been placed into the heads of people who left neither diaries nor letters behind, nor have emotions or motives been ascribed to them that were not made explicit or at least strongly suggested by their actions.
All that being said, the sources that survive are far from unimpeachable, and there are gaps in the record. Most of our knowledge of early Chinatown comes from the major New York newspapers, which covered the goings-on there in surprising detail and never more intensively than when the battles among the On Leongs, the Hip Sings, and the Four Brothers, a third combatant, were in full throttle. They provide a serviceable chronology, but their coverage was mostly the work of white journalists whose observations were sometimes astute, often superficial or naive, and more than occasionally demonstrably false. Because none spoke Chinese, they had to rely on Chinese informants for many of their stories, but they couldn’t always distinguish fact from fiction and could be oblivious when they were being played by one faction or another.
The early residents left few written records in any language, but I have had the benefit of other contemporary sources. Massive digitization has made thousands of old newspapers keyword searchable, which has permitted a truly comprehensive inventory of available articles from New York and beyond. Extensive indexing of federal and state census records, passenger manifests, and conscription and vital records now permits researchers to verify facts about individuals. Court records, though mostly not digitized, can often be obtained with a little effort. And the Chinese exclusion era case files in the National Archives, collected long ago by the government for questionable purposes but tremendously helpful and enlightening to researchers today, provide rich detail about many of the figures mentioned in the text. They have been of immeasurable help in creating a fresh assessment that confirms some popular impressions, discredits others, and brings some new, compelling stories to light.
Two English-language books written by Chinese authors in the 1930s deserve special mention: Tong War! by Eng Ying “Eddie” Gong and Bruce Grant and Chinatown Inside Out by Leong Gor Yun. The former is an as-told-to memoir of a Hip Sing kingpin who witnessed much of the later action of the book and was written shortly before the end of the conflict. The latter is an account of Chinatown life with a section on the tong wars attributed to Y. K. Chu, the editor of a liberal Chinatown newspaper called the Chinese Journal, who teamed up with an unnamed American journalist. The pseudonym used is likely a pun, “Leong Gor Yun” being a plausible rendering in Cantonese of a phrase meaning “two people.” Both books tend toward the anecdotal and, in places, the sensational. But they were useful for insights and character descriptions.
Lack of understanding and abject prejudice characterized some of the writing, so I occasionally had to take what I read with a grain, and sometimes a lump, of salt. I dismissed articles in which reporters made patently ridiculous claims about Chinese customs and practices. For example, in 1904, the New York Telegram related the ostensible cause of a tong feud this way:
About 6000 B.C., when Confucius’ great-grandfather had just perfected the dish of chow mein, the feud may have started. The Hep Sing Tong in those historic days wanted chow mein to be declared the national dish, but the conservatives, the Gon Sing Tong, clung to chop suey. There was a clash. Armed from head to foot, the Hep Sing Tong and the Gon Sing Tong made deserts of Shanghai and Canton, and even Pekin felt the effects of the unrelenting warfare.
Or this absurdity on the same subject, from a New York World columnist, a quarter of a century later:
Two Chinamen were shot in Newark, N.J., for drinking Lipton’s tea instead of Formosa-Oolong. One thing led to another and another Chink bit the cobblestones in San Francisco for wearing rubber heels on his sandals. . . . Things have quieted down a little now, but you will notice every Chinaman always wear [sic] a black silk suit so he will be shot down in his mourning clothes.
Such drivel, unfortunately, often passed for journalism, even in respected newspapers.
I also had to reject some very appealing tales much favored by other writers that either did not appear in primary sources or struck me as improbable. For example, Herbert Asbury, in his famous 1928 Gangs of New York, recounted that the On Leong comedian Ah Hoon was shot in his bed through the window of his fourth-floor room by a Hip Sing gunman lowered in a chair by a hoist from the roof of the building. It was a compelling image, but I found no corroborating evidence for it and much to contradict it. The newspapers agreed he had died in the hallway outside his room; there was no mention of a hoist. And his assassin was probably not even a Hip Sing.
A persistent and baffling stereotype that appeared in the press was that Chinese desperadoes were terrible shots and that in gun battles they typically crouched down, shut their eyes tightly, and fired in all directions until they ran out of bullets. This struck me as ludicrous, and the relatively small number of innocent bystanders shot during the years the tongs preferred guns over hatchets suggests its fallaciousness. I also rejected a press account of Mock Duck’s wife angrily dragging her husband by his hair queue from the apartment of a mistress. The anecdote was catnip to writers eager to suffuse contemporary Chinatown women with the spirit of the suffragettes and make the dreaded Mock Duck appear henpecked, but I don’t believe many Chinese American females dared behave that way in 1908, still less Mock Duck’s w
ife, who was treated as little more than chattel and whose favors were apparently offered up to other men on more than one occasion.
Sorting out who was who was a major challenge. There was no standard romanization system for Chinese names during this period. They were spelled haphazardly and often differently over time, even in the same publications. Was the Joe Gong who was treasurer of the On Leong Tong in 1897 the same person as the Chu Gong who testified as a witness in a 1904 trial? Was he also the Ji Gong who was attacked on Mott Street in 1905? I concluded that he was and have harmonized the spellings accordingly. On the other hand, I satisfied myself that the Lee Sing who shot Mock Duck in 1904 couldn’t have been the same Lee Sing who beat Tom Lee up in a street brawl in 1880, because census records proved that he would have been only nine years old at the time of the earlier incident.
The exact Chinese characters for these names, if they were known, might have provided clarity, but unless documents were signed in Chinese or people were mentioned in the few Chinese-language sources that do survive, these are impossible to discern a century later. To add to the problem, many Chinese went by more than one name or were known by nicknames, truncated versions of their given names, or even the names of their business establishments. Reporters often couldn’t tell surnames from given names, and some Chinese actually reversed the order of their Chinese names to follow the American convention of putting the surname last. So it’s easy to see that parsing spellings might have introduced some inadvertent errors. To aid the reader, a Dramatis Personae section to help sort through the most important characters can be found on page xvii.
I undertook this project mindful of the danger of reinforcing prejudices and stereotypes that go back more than a century. Chinatowns have long suffered from tabloid-style coverage that portrays them as dangerous places run by inscrutable, all-powerful villains, their streets washed in the blood of the victims of the evil tongs. But the Fu Manchu stereotype belies the reality that most of the restaurateurs, laundrymen, cooks, grocers, cigar makers, street peddlers, and other Chinese in New York at the turn of the twentieth century were decent, law-abiding people trying to make their way in a society that might have offered them a living but leavened it with a large measure of discrimination and abuse. It was also a highly corrupt culture in which the power that police and other government officials exercised over them went mostly unchecked and in which Chinese could not count on fair treatment, even from the courts.