Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  The following day, Buckner asserted that not even the signing of a new peace pact would stop additional federal raids. “If the Hip Sings and the On Leongs are going to get along without killing, well and good,” he said, “but the immigration law is the immigration law . . . whether there is or is not a tong war in progress. Those found unlawfully here will be deported,” he vowed.

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  Chinatown didn’t stay subdued for long, because whatever the government was doing had no effect on the continued enmity between the tongs. On September 18, 1925, a thirty-year-old Hip Sing tailor was killed instantly as he emerged from his shop. His murderer, a thirty-two-year-old On Leong cook, had been hiding in a doorway on the border of Little Italy. He was grabbed by an Italian real estate agent who worked nearby. He struggled mightily, but the man restrained him as several bystanders who had witnessed the shooting yelled, “Lynch him!” Finally, a policeman arrived and pacified him with a sharp blow to the jaw. It had been an act of retaliation; several hours earlier, the man’s cousin, an On Leong laundryman, had been shot, killed, and mutilated by three assassins in his laundry in a Pittsburgh suburb.

  On the same day, the newspapers reported that the two tongs were continuing to negotiate because declaration of the new treaty had been premature. Although a document had apparently been signed, the Hip Sings now balked at revealing the names of their members who had deserted the On Leong Tong. As many as three hundred men would have been on such a list, and the Hip Sings had concluded that releasing it would violate their charter, which guaranteed secrecy. A meeting adjourned without resolving the issue.

  Raids by federal agents and police continued unabated, and that evening, in addition to business establishments and tenements, the Hip Sing and On Leong buildings and even the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association were searched. At Hip Sing headquarters, someone hurled a hatchet at the officers, but it lodged in a door frame, narrowly missing them. Arsenals of revolvers, daggers, hatchets, and cleavers were seized in several locations. Patrol wagons carried 352 more Chinese to the Federal Building, the On Leong heads Henry Moy and Charlie Boston among them. Of that number, 72 were held for deportation. The 352 did not include 200 more who were able to produce their credentials on the spot. Assistant U.S. attorneys had actually conducted impromptu status hearings on the sidewalks of Chinatown.

  Although there was no outright resistance, there was an unmistakable air of hostility on the part of the Chinese. Federal agents also faced protests by several angry white women whose husbands were among the detainees. Some were able to prove the men were legal or at least that they were their lawful spouses; several Chinese men secured release this way. Objections also came from the owners of Chinese restaurants and laundries and importers who saw a huge threat to their businesses in the possible wholesale loss of their workforce.

  Detainees were held on the third floor of the Federal Building until the police could spare wagons to transport them to lockup. Some slept, others smoked, and while some seemed unperturbed, many wept. All the detainees were to be held for ten days to give them the opportunity to seek writs of habeas corpus, but federal officials predicted few would qualify. They pledged to continue the raids, the New York Post wrote, “until every undesirable Chinese in the city is in custody and started back to China.”

  On September 21, the Chinese consul, Ziang-Ling Chang, and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association president, Chang Lee Kee, presided over the signing of an “eternal peace pact” at the Waldorf Astoria. Lee Gee Min signed for the On Leongs and Wong Get for the Hip Sings. Then the men shook hands—in American fashion—as a police captain looked on.

  New York would now be quiet for a while, although altercations would continue in other cities. But only the naive took the “eternal” nature of the pact at face value.

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  In the 1890s, when the Hip Sings failed in their attempts to horn in on the On Leongs’ lucrative shakedowns of Chinatown’s gambling halls, Mock Duck, Wong Get, and their colleagues had cleverly conned the Parkhurst Society into carrying water for them. They had tried the same tactic in 1900–1901 with the Committee of Fifteen. Appealing to the white establishment had worked brilliantly in the past, and given the new peace agreement and the government’s crackdown, returning to the old strategy seemed worth a try. This time, however, there would be a new twist: they would try to get the federal government—which, by the latest count, had slated 264 New York Chinese for deportation—to go after the On Leongs, and the On Leongs alone.

  The U.S. attorney’s office had been working hand in glove with federal labor, narcotics, and immigration officials in a coordinated effort to eliminate New York’s undocumented Chinese population. The Hip Sings, however, decided to appeal to a different department: the Federal Trade Commission. The imaginative strategy they hatched was to accuse the On Leong Tong of unfair competition.

  On September 24, 1925, two enterprising attorneys for the national Hip Sing Tong appeared before the commission and charged the On Leong Tong with specific acts of conspiracy, intimidation, and violence in interstate and foreign commerce against nine Hip Sing importers and retail merchants in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle. According to the Hip Sings, the On Leongs had raised $1.5 million to force them out of business.

  The action took not only the On Leongs but even the Hip Sings’ New York chapter by surprise. The latter’s attorney, Charles W. Gould, asserted that none of the local tong members had been informed of the action and even speculated that “some smart lawyer has invented a new way of earning a fee.”

  The On Leongs’ attorney pointed out the absurdity of the charges. “It’s preposterous and unthinkable that the Hip Sing group should bring the Federal Trade Commission into this,” he held. “Our group is strictly a fraternal, social organization. The On Leong members, though they are all merchants, are not banded together for business purposes and they do not, as a group, carry on an interstate business. They are incorporated under the laws of New York as a social club.”

  The claim, while creative, was clearly without merit, and the commission declined to pursue an investigation.

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  Police joined two hundred tong men at the inevitable peace banquet on October 14, 1925. In general, however, Chinatown took news of the latest treaty with a grain of salt. Most saw it as a signal not that war was over but that there would be at least some respite from the bullets.

  Though there was quiet, it was punctuated by occasional jitters, and by early 1927 peace was again a memory. The first blood was shed in Brooklyn, when two kitchen workers, one of whom was a Hip Sing, were gunned down at King’s Tea Room on March 24. Then the horror spread quickly. Before the end of the day, killings were recorded in Newark, Chicago, and Manchester, Connecticut, and shootings in Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

  Some two hundred Hip Sings who had gone to Newark the night before to smoke and gamble found themselves stranded after the trouble broke out. It was a Boston Hip Sing who had been killed there, shot twenty-nine times. After that, the rest were terrified to show their faces. New York Hip Sing leaders had to hire a private detective to organize a fleet of automobiles to ferry the frightened men back to Manhattan in safety.

  The first question on everyone’s mind was whether the outbreak had anything to do with what was going on in China. The newspapers were full of headlines about the military arm of the nationalist Guomindang Party, then in the process of capturing the city of Nanjing. Soldiers and civilians had looted the homes and businesses of alien residents, and several foreigners, including one American, had been killed on the very day the shooting began in America. But there was no evidence to link events on the two continents.

  In Chicago, where two more men were assassinated the next day, Frank Moy, the local On Leong head, gave his own analysis of the situation: “The On Leongs are the wea
lthy organization. . . . The Hip Sings . . . are made up largely of small merchants, laundrymen and waiters, at whose head are a group of men little removed from blackmailers. Although the On Leongs are numerically stronger, because of their holdings and business interests, they will not go to the lengths the Hip Sings will. Hence they have often been forced to purchase peace.” He went on to reveal that the previous war had ended only when the On Leongs paid the Hip Sings somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 in gold. “Now that the Hip Sings have spent this money, they have adjourned the truce and the guns have started to blaze.”

  Back in New York, an exasperated District Attorney Banton warned that he would send tong men “back to China by the shipload” if the killing didn’t stop. Late on March 25, 1927, after more Chinese lost their lives in Washington and Cambridge, Massachusetts, the chieftains of both tongs, who continued to deny that war had been declared, signed a letter affirming that the 1925 truce was still in effect and urging all tong men to respect it. And for his part, Banton stated that he believed the tong leaders innocent of responsibility for the outbreak.

  No doubt they were. It came out later that one of the Brooklyn restaurant workers who were the first to die was a cousin of Chin Jack Lem, who was so radioactive a figure that it had simply been assumed that the killing of his kinsman had been tong related. The man had actually been murdered for other reasons, and the On Leongs had had nothing to do with it. But the peace was so fragile that many lives were lost as a result of the misunderstanding.

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  Tranquillity more or less reigned for the next year and a half, though enmity from the defections festered and the atmosphere remained uneasy. The New York columnist O. O. McIntyre noted of Chinatown that “even the children play with a listless half-heartedness in the gutters.” Nobody felt that the last shoe had dropped.

  Suddenly, on the evening of October 14, 1928, six men were murdered in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington. Several others were wounded. A few days later, a fifty-three-year-old Hip Sing was shot in his Eighth Avenue laundry. Because this outbreak, like the last one, had not been authorized by either tong, it was relatively easily adjudicated. Dr. Samuel Sung Young, the new Chinese consul in New York, issued a statement that the violence had stemmed from a personal feud. The document urged Chinese in America “not to be swayed by alarming rumors” and promised that “peaceful pursuit of everyone’s business will be continued as before.”

  Peaceful pursuits did continue for another nine months. It wasn’t until early August 1929 that more murders occurred, first in Chicago, Newark, and Boston and then in New York. The same day, the U.S. attorney Charles H. Tuttle had the police round up the rival tong leaders and, in the presence of Dr. Young, took a page from his predecessor’s book and warned that if shooting continued, federal agents would raid Chinatown, including the headquarters of the tongs, and deport every Chinese unable to produce credentials. The tong leaders protested once again that the conflicts were unauthorized and that no war had been declared.

  But less than two hours after Tuttle’s warning, another New York Chinese was assassinated, and two Hip Sing deaths were reported in Boston. The authorities were now plainly worried. It appeared as if the kingpins themselves had lost control of the situation and were unable to rein in the shooters. To stave off more police roundups of undocumented Chinese, the leaders agreed on a truce until 10:00 that evening, at which time they sat down to negotiate a peace pact. Most of Chinatown had closed down anyway, because few Chinese dared venture onto the streets for fear of a police dragnet. By the following morning, thanks to arbitration by Consul Young, an accord was struck, and tong leaders signed it in Tuttle’s presence.

  The accompanying announcement blamed the troubles on “misunderstandings” and ordered all tong branches to abstain from violence. The actual pact contained much language borrowed from previous agreements but differed from them all in one fundamental way: it committed the tongs to binding arbitration by the Chinese consul general in any future conflict.

  Initially, it was unclear whether this was a true armistice. It was by no means certain every branch, or every tong member, would feel bound by the new accord. In Chicago, a Hip Sing was critically wounded by an On Leong well after negotiations were under way. A knife battle took place in Newark soon after. And in Boston, the locals defied both the police and their leaders and refused to affirm a cease-fire at all, although there was no immediate renewal of conflict.

  In the end, the truce held. For a while. With the onset of the Depression, the Chinese, like everybody else, had other things on their minds. But the antagonism between the tongs had not abated, and in no way was the Fourth Tong War over.

  Chapter 15

  Coexistence

  The Great Depression delivered a body blow to America’s Chinese community, and New York’s Chinese were no exception. It wasn’t the October 1929 stock market crash per se that did it; few Chinese had invested in equities. But the businesses they ran and worked in were ultimately dependent on those who had. Before long, customers stopped coming, and by one estimate more than 150 Chinese restaurants, in and out of Chinatown, were forced to close in 1930 alone. By the next year, as many as 25 percent of all the Chinese in America were jobless, and by the middle of 1932 fully four thousand of those in New York had lost their livelihoods.

  Many were hungry, but even so, more than one observer remarked that Chinese did not patronize the soup kitchens organized by white charities, even when these facilities were established in Chinatown. The Christian Science Monitor noted admiringly that although an uptown emergency relief organization had opened a station on Doyers Street, only white and black people from the Bowery had appeared in line—not a single Chinese. And a Pell Street kitchen set up to service the Chinese community closed after less than a week for want of patrons.

  Local Chinese looked instead to their mutual aid organizations—which included not only the family circles and the regional associations but also the tongs—for aid, which in some cases meant food and shelter. The tongs began to feel the strain. This was no time for battle. “The warring tongs,” the Presbyterian reverend I. S. Caldwell wrote in 1932, “ceased their rivalry and devoted themselves to the common tasks of mercy.” This was an overstatement, however; although there was cooperation and temporary quiet, in no way had rivalry truly ended.

  Charlie Boston didn’t have to worry about the Depression; 1930 brought the death of the On Leong Tong’s last remaining éminence grise. A member since the 1890s, he had assumed leadership of the New York branch—and some said the honorific of “mayor of Chinatown”—following Tom Lee’s death in 1918 but had recently been in ill health. The body of the rotund boss lay in state for a week in a handsome bronze casket to give relatives and friends time to arrive for the funeral. Chinatown wondered what sort of send-off Boston would be given—Christian or traditional Chinese. And his son ruminated about whether to send his body back to China, speculating that because Boston had become so acculturated, “perhaps he would prefer to stay in America.”

  In the end, the affair, underwritten in part by his family and in part by the On Leong Tong, was a Presbyterian rite with some Chinese touches. Local Chinese organizations and On Leong branches from around the country were represented, although there was no mention of the Hip Sings, who had hated him. After the service, a cortege of more than a hundred cars, led by marchers carrying his portrait and innumerable floral wreaths, made its way to Brooklyn in the drizzling rain. There Boston was interred at Cypress Hills Cemetery, his grave piled high with offerings of chicken, rice cakes, and wine, as firecrackers were set off to ward off evil spirits.

  Even before Boston’s passing, however, a generational shift in the leadership of the tongs had occurred. Tom Lee and Gin Gum were gone. The Hip Sings, too, had seen a changing of the guard. Wong Get had returned to China in 1927, and Mock Duck was nowhere to be seen.

  Both tongs marc
hed peacefully in the 1930 Chinese New Year parade, but any altercation in just about any Chinatown in which there were branches of both tongs threatened to bring them back at each other’s throats, and it wasn’t always easy to distinguish personal grudge killings from tong hits. Two Chinese were arrested for the murder of a Hip Sing in mid-February; the On Leongs denied responsibility. In early June, a Hip Sing warrior was gunned down in his fourth-floor room on Allen Street. The next day, Cheong Fook was fatally slashed in the abdomen with a bread knife in front of 104 Hester Street by twenty-one-year-old Tei Get, and forty-three-year-old Lui Sing, shot five times, was found dead in the rear of his Brooklyn laundry.

  The newly appointed police commissioner, Edward P. Mulrooney, a thirty-four-year veteran who had most recently headed the detective division, wasn’t sure what was causing the killings or even if the tongs were responsible for them. He called on New York County’s new district attorney, none other than Thomas C. T. Crain, who had been the judge in the murder case against the executed Hip Sings, Eng Hing and Lee Dock. The two men decided to summon the heads of the tongs the next morning in what was becoming an all-too-familiar ritual. The Chinese consul also paid a predictable visit to U.S. Attorney Tuttle to discuss yet another peace conference.

  Mulrooney, who had picked up pidgin Cantonese during his years as a lieutenant in the Sixth Precinct, was wise in the ways of the tongs. After the meeting, he was frank with the press. “Whatever caused this outbreak,” he declared, “we are treating it as a tong war. These things are like fires. Unless they are checked at once they are apt to spread. We hope to get a peace agreement between the heads of On Leong Tong and Hip Sing Tong. Evidently On Leong is on the defensive with Hip Sing taking the provocative attitude. We don’t know yet what the grievance is: gambling propensities and high play, desertion of one tong for another and betrayal of secrets, blackmail and, nowadays, a little racketeering, white man style.”