Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  There was now a formal accord, blessed by the authorities and backed by surety bonds, to stop the violence in the Chinese quarter once and for all, as well as a tacit agreement to divide the turf. The First Tong War was officially over, and if there was a victor, it was surely the Hip Sing Tong. By any measure, the Hip Sings had won points at the expense of their formerly omnipotent rivals; this accounted for their victorious attitude.

  But even this was not terrible news for the On Leongs. The conflict had been costly and had sapped their treasury, and the closing of many gambling halls had depressed their revenues. Provided it could be done in a face-saving manner, it made good economic sense to cut the Hip Sings in if doing so would buy a measure of peace and quiet and boost profits at the same time.

  Optimists predicted it would produce some quiet, at least for a time. But only the optimists in Chinatown believed that permanent peace had been achieved.

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  Americans who read about the peace agreement surely wondered why law enforcement had failed so miserably at quelling the violence in Chinatown and why the authorities had to resort to mediation between what were essentially two criminal organizations to accomplish it. Years later, the New York Times fretted about the issue this way: “It is at once irritating and humiliating that the termination of hostilities has been brought about, not by the police and our courts, through stern enforcement of the law and equally stern penalties for its violation, but because certain high-placed officials in the two societies met . . . and, after long discussion, came to terms.” It went on, “The men who could issue such orders . . . showed themselves to constitute an imperium in imperio [literally, “a state within a state”], alien and isolated, possessing and exercising the power of life and death.”

  The Times was driving at a very basic truth: the Chinese in America seemed to be governed far less by American law than by their own rules, which stressed fealty to the orders of the bosses of their fraternal organizations over nearly everything else.

  This was true in part because the Chinese who came to America had little or no experience with disinterested government officials who dispensed justice strictly according to the rule of law. They were accustomed, in the old country, to rule by fiat: in the family, by the patriarch; in the village, by the headman; and in the district, by the magistrate, who adjudicated both criminal and civil matters. Although he represented the lowest rung in a civil administration that culminated with the emperor at its top, the village head was probably the highest-ranking person with whom the mostly rural Chinese who made it to America ever dealt, and most issues were resolved within the village itself.

  The China they left had never possessed a large body of laws, nor did the disputes these men were likely to encounter require an advanced legal system to resolve. Most quarrels had been arbitrated by the village head, according to his interpretation of justice and tradition, or by a committee of elders selected with the consent of the litigants. Few issues ever made it to court, and those that did were adjudicated by magistrates who were often highly corrupt themselves.

  Chinese immigrants naturally sought to replicate institutions they understood and to which they were accustomed and, if new ones were needed, to create them along familiar lines. Clan associations mediated issues within families in San Francisco and New York, just as they had in Taishan. Regional associations—the mutual aid societies organized according to the counties from which the emigrants had come—settled matters among their members. Although these had no antecedents in China, they proved very useful in America. Issues outside their jurisdiction could be resolved by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the umbrella organization that included the key regional associations. And at critical moments, Chinese diplomats—agents of the Chinese government in America—also intervened.

  Given their background and experience, the Chinese strongly preferred extrajudicial solutions to their conflicts, and so as a general practice what could be settled in Chinatown was settled there, without reference to courts or civil authorities if at all possible. But issues that involved non-Chinese had to be adjudicated by the government, as were some matters—such as smuggling, gambling, drugs, prostitution, assault, and murder—in which white America insisted on asserting its authority.

  Under normal circumstances, Chinese saw little benefit in bringing outsiders into intramural quarrels. But the police and the courts could be used strategically to improve one’s lot or gain leverage over an enemy, and both tongs resorted to this frequently. Tom Lee’s taxing of the gambling houses and paying police not to molest them was only one of the more egregious examples. Manipulating the police into molesting or arresting your enemies was a handy tactic. Lying to the authorities, fleeing from justice, suborning perjury through bribery and threats, and even murdering witnesses before they could testify—or afterward, in retaliation or as a warning to others—were also useful tools, employed with impunity when the situation required it.

  The Times’s point was well taken, as far as it went. The Chinese weren’t playing by American rules. But had the newspaper adopted a broader view, it might have apportioned blame more equitably. Whose fault was it that half a century after the Chinese began to arrive in New York in significant numbers, they remained—as the writer noted—“alien and isolated”?

  If there had ever been a welcome mat for the Chinese in America, it was withdrawn in several stages. The Page Act of 1875, the first restrictive immigration law in American history, was aimed at stemming the flow of Asian prostitutes, but as a practical matter it slowed the immigration of all Chinese women to a trickle, making virtual bachelor societies of America’s Chinatowns. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act not only precluded the entry of most Chinese; it made it clear that the presence of those already here would be tolerated only grudgingly: they would be ineligible for citizenship, and most would not be permitted to be joined by their families. The 1888 Scott Act prohibited Chinese laborers who left the country from returning; it also spitefully stranded thousands who had gone home temporarily with the understanding they could come back. And the renewal of the Exclusion Act through the Geary Act in 1892 and again through the Scott Act in 1902, when it became permanent, imposed onerous registration burdens on the Chinese who remained and relegated to the shadows those who could not prove they had entered lawfully.

  The law made it crystal clear that Chinese were not Americans, and—unlike all other immigrants—it gave them no hope of ever becoming Americans. It denied them representation at any level of government and any say in the laws that ruled them. It rendered their chief forms of recreation—including victimless crimes like gambling—illegal and punished offenders, sometimes severely. It marginalized the significant number who could not register because they could not prove legal entry, forcing them to live in fear that a chance encounter with a policeman could result in imprisonment or deportation. And it severely compromised any prospect they had of getting justice from the courts.

  And what American law did not do, American society did. Chinese were made to feel like unwelcome guests in someone else’s country. The fact that even many who were American-born could speak English only haltingly suggests they enjoyed little entrée into the broader society. Racial prejudice excluded them from many occupations. It wasn’t exactly apartheid, but nor was there much fraternization. Americans visited Chinatowns but mostly to gape at the “debased” lifestyle of opium-addled gamblers and prostitutes; they objectified rather than befriended Chinese.

  The Times’s editorial placed a great deal of faith in the police and the judicial system, but in practice Chinese could count on neither for a fair shake. The power New York police wielded over the Chinese in the Tammany era went mostly unchecked, and the officers—from the captains on down—were notoriously corrupt. Underpaid police shook down businesses and individuals with impunity and threatened dire consequences, including physical harm, if they were not paid. They w
ere also highly biased against the Chinese and saw them as a scourge. Nor could Chinese who were arrested count on sympathy from prosecutors or impartiality from the courts. As long as judges and juries routinely voiced their prejudice against Chinese and trusted the testimony of white witnesses over theirs, how could justice be served?

  None of this excused the brutality and murder that were going on in Chinatown, but it begins to tell the story of why so many Chinese failed to internalize American values or embrace a system whose rules were so blatantly stacked against them. It explains why any fealty they might have developed to an abstract system of justice and rule of law failed to supplant the loyalty owed to families and tong bosses. And it sheds some light on why they took a cynical approach to the courts and viewed them more as tools to accomplish their own ends than as temples in which they could rely on justice being dispensed.

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  The failure of Mock Duck to appear at the negotiations, the signing of the peace agreement, or the Hip Sing banquet was no accident. He had not been a peace advocate, and in any event several newspapers reported he was no longer on good terms even with the Hip Sings. February 13 then brought the startling news that he had allegedly organized a new tong. And allied with him in this new venture was none other than his old friend Wong Get.

  Much had changed in the ranks of the Hip Sing Tong in 1905. Mock Duck had spent most of the second half of the year in jail awaiting trial for the Chinese Theatre murders, and Wong Get had returned to China in late 1904 and stayed for most of the following year. During this time, the Hip Sings had elected a new slate of officers. When Wong returned from China and demanded his office back, he was rebuffed. And as a sign of bad blood between him and his former colleagues, he blamed his recent arrest for running a gambling house not on On Leongs but on Hip Sing informants.

  The news of a third warring tong was ominous. “Chinaman may cry ‘Peace, peace!’ but there is no peace in the bosom of Mock Duck, that handsome little Chinese person who looks like a choir boy and feels all the time like a bull terrier,” the New York Sun quipped, borrowing a line from Patrick Henry. And as the New York Times pointed out, the new, unnamed tong was not a party to the recently concluded peace treaty.

  Captain Schlottman, eager to make a mark during his first days on the job, staged several raids on Chinatown games on Sunday, February 18, 1906. He arrested seventeen Chinese for gambling. While the prisoners were being booked, Mock Duck entered the station house, introduced himself to the new captain, and paid $500 bond for each of the prisoners.

  But that is not all he did. As arrests were being made at a policy shop at 18 Pell, he offered $20 to one detective and $50 to another if they would release his cousin and a friend, who were among those being taken into custody. The officers not only refused; they arrested him on the spot and charged him with attempted bribery. He was arraigned on February 20 at the Court of Special Sessions and held on $5,000 bail. His attorney, Daniel O’Reilly, argued unsuccessfully for a reduction in bond by claiming no crime had been committed.

  “What? Do you say it is no crime for a man to offer money to a policeman to permit his prisoner to escape?” the judge demanded, incredulously.

  “Well, not for a Chinaman,” O’Reilly responded. “Chinks don’t call that criminal.”

  No bondsman appeared, not the Hip Sings, and not even the Parkhursts, who could have been counted on in the past to provide bail for Mock Duck. In fact, at the arraignment, one of his attorneys intimated that the arrest had been part of a plot against Mock Duck by Superintendent McClintock himself. If so, it was proof positive that the Parkhursts had finally seen through him and realized he was not—and never had been—the reformer they once thought him.

  If there ever was a third tong, it lacked the resources even to post bond for Mock Duck. In fact, it was never mentioned again, suggesting that it was an aborted effort or that the papers had gotten it wrong from the start. In any case, Mock Duck, who couldn’t come up with the cash for his own bail, was charged with attempted bribery and sent to the Tombs—again.

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  Although a peace accord had been signed, the New York World shared the general pessimism about its durability and value. Dismissing it quite accurately as “merely an agreement to divide the district on new lines” that would permit the tongs to “carry on their criminal trade without interfering with each other,” the paper put forth its own radical proposal to solve the problem once and for all: wipe Chinatown off the map entirely and turn the area into a park.

  Beginning in late February, in a series of articles and editorials—it was difficult to tell the difference—the World made the case for the destruction of “the worst slum in the city of New York,” a “municipal disfigurement” that was home to squalor, disease, and enslaved white women. Its overcrowded and dilapidated buildings housed debased people. Razing Chinatown would be, in the World’s words, “a work of civic purification.”

  Precedent could be found in the case of Mulberry Bend, formerly one of the worst sections of New York’s Five Points neighborhood and a notorious breeding ground for crime and disease. It had been leveled and converted into a park in 1897 at a cost of less than $1.5 million. The displaced people, if Mulberry Bend was a guide, would mostly find new homes in the immediate area, in new tenements, built according to updated building regulations. “It is better to clean out a centre of infection and make it wholesome,” the World concluded, “than it is to set guards about it and try to remedy and cure the evils that it breeds.”

  The specific proposal was to turn the area bounded by Bayard Street, the Bowery, Chatham Square, Park Row, Worth Street, and Mulberry Street into a public garden—an extension of Mulberry Bend Park. It would involve the demise of the most densely Chinese-populated blocks of Pell, Doyers, and Mott streets. The cost of acquiring the land was estimated at about $2 million. To build support, the paper sought the endorsement of Father Ernest Coppo of Mott Street’s Church of the Transfiguration, who claimed that “the instrumentalities of Christianity are unable to cope with the horrible conditions that have made Chinatown what it is.” Father Coppo was willing, if need be, to see his own church razed in the process.

  The government had the power to condemn small sections of the city to provide open public space. On March 1, the World presented the case to Mayor George B. McClellan, who immediately declared his support and ordered a full investigation of the plan. The idea also garnered backing from the president of the Board of Health and from the police commissioner, Bingham. In subsequent days, endorsements came from the Tenement House commissioner, the fire commissioner, the parks commissioner, and the city comptroller. Even Dr. Parkhurst weighed in in favor of the plan.

  Map drawn to support the New York World’s campaign to raze Chinatown and turn the area into a park.

  Consideration of the proposal moved quickly. A public hearing before the Board of Improvements was ordered for March 20 by the Manhattan borough president, and because no voices had been raised in opposition, it seemed certain to be adopted. But at city hall on that day, Chinatown’s landlords and merchants spoke up for the first time.

  James L. Conway, president of the Real Estate Owners’ Association, argued that there were better places for a public park. “The whole east side is more congested than Chinatown,” he observed. William C. Beecher, representing fifty-two Chinese merchants, maintained not only that Chinatown was no worse than other areas but that New York was home to no more law-abiding people than the Chinese. He estimated the project cost at $8 million. And Bartow S. Weeks, counsel for Chinatown property owners, argued that the law did not empower the city to condemn private property to suppress social evils or eliminate tenements. Cracking down on moral evil was the role of the police, and ameliorating unsanitary conditions that of the Tenement House Commission.

  The World dismissed the opposition as mere “rookery owners” and quoted the Rever
end Madison C. Peters, who testified on behalf of the ministers of the city: “Greed is the bottom of the opposition. Greed of the landlord, who would rent his property to the devil for a branch of hell if he could get enough ice to cool the rent money.”

  Even after opposition was voiced, the World declared the project a done deal. And after a second hearing, the Board of Improvements endorsed a trimmed-down version that was sent on to the Board of Estimate, which was responsible for budget and land-use decisions.

  Rumors about what would become of New York’s Chinese flew wildly. In April, residents of the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn—a tough section populated by Italian and Irish dockworkers where the Five Points Gang member Al Capone got his start—were alarmed by reports that a new Chinatown would be established on its waterfront. In July, the Bronx buzzed with the story that several wealthy Chinese merchants were negotiating to purchase property at 149th Street and Morris Avenue, also an ethnic enclave and home to many German and Irish immigrants. And in August, it was said that wealthy Chinese had already bought lots at another Brooklyn site, a heavily German and Jewish area at the end of the new Williamsburg Bridge.

  The Board of Estimate finally acted the following year, authorizing a park on a smaller parcel of land about an acre and a half in size, bounded by the Bowery, Pell, Doyers, and a portion of Mott Street and valued at $583,000. But predictions of Chinatown’s demise were premature. In the end, it was the attorney Daniel O’Reilly, a former congressman, friend of Tom Lee’s, and defender of Mock Duck in the recent bribery case, whom the Chinese had to thank. On behalf of his Chinese friends who had no wish to move—and perhaps of himself, because his Chinese clientele provided him with lucrative business—O’Reilly persuaded the Board of Estimate to revoke its approval, and by July 1907 the New York World’s idea was officially dead.