There is no record of any action by the grand jury, but on August 17 the predictable truce was declared, even though both tong men insisted there was not, and had never been, a war. Koliang Yih, the new Chinese consul general, announced the accord, which was brief and to the point. In translation, it read,
AGREEMENT.
On Leong Tong and Hip Sing Tong.
Aug. 16, 1933.
We the authorized representatives of the above named tongs do hereby and unqualifiedly pledge our respective tongs to maintain peace and quiet and to engage in no acts of lawlessness from this day on.
We solemnly agree that the settlement of any disputes of whatever nature or of whatever origin which may arise between us shall be submitted to the Chinese Consul General, the Chinese Benevolent Association and the local authorities for arbitration.
(SIGNED FOR THE HIP SING TONG)
Eddie Gong
George Howe
(SIGNED FOR THE ON LEONG TONG)
Howard Lee
Sing Kee
In describing the pact, the consul general maintained that the tongs were burying the hatchet “to hasten the prosperity of recovery.” It wasn’t true, but it made for a good sound bite. The police had a different view that was less patriotic. They believed the pressure brought to bear by the federal government by hauling the leaders before a grand jury and examining their records—even though no indictments followed—had prompted the accord. “This was many degrees more unwelcome to the tongs than the simple deportation proceedings that had imposed law and order in the past,” the New York Times observed.
Leong Gor Yun, in his 1936 book, Chinatown Inside Out, had an even simpler take on the truce that might have been closest to the truth. The conflict was short-lived, he wrote, “because the Hip Sing was short of funds, and the On Leong short of hatchet men. Both tongs consequently were eager to make concessions.”
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Despite all the odds, this round turned out not to be just another chapter in the unending cycle of conflict, punctuated by peace agreements of varying and uncertain duration. It marked the end of the Fourth Tong War. Wing Gin would be the last victim of New York’s celebrated tong wars. But it was far more than enhanced federal scrutiny of their archives or the sanctity of the perfunctory, two-paragraph accord their leaders signed that finally accomplished what armies of policemen, prosecutors, judges, and diplomats working assiduously for decades had utterly failed to do: cause the tongs to lay their guns down and put their decades-long conflict behind them.
Anyone who was keeping score might have noted that with the possible exception of the On Leong–Tung On conflict over a drug deal gone bad in 1930, there actually had not been a single declared tong war for nearly a decade, when Chin Jack Lem set off the On Leongs with his decision to seek Hip Sing membership. To be sure, there had been plenty of killing since then, but most of the time the impetus had been a personal quarrel, or at least nothing demonstrably tong-driven, even though the tongs usually got drawn in. Longtime resentments and hostilities had made Chinatowns tinderboxes that ignited far too easily when Chinese men clashed over vice, court testimony, turf, or “face,” but in no case since the mid-1920s had tong leaders actually made an affirmative decision to do battle.
Then, too, the Chinatown of the 1930s was a dramatically different place from that of the 1880s, when Tom Lee came, or the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, when the problems had begun. Back then, the lion’s share of New York’s Chinese ate, slept, worked, and played in the tiny triangle formed by Mott and Pell streets and the Bowery. Those who did not usually visited the area in the course of a typical week to purchase foodstuffs or supplies for their laundries, to relieve the drudgery of the workweek with opium or female companionship, or to gamble away a week’s earnings.
Although America’s overall Chinese population diminished in the decades following the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the number of Chinese inhabitants in the East generally grew during this period. New York City’s Chinese population dipped slightly in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it rebounded, reaching just over five thousand in 1920, eighty-four hundred by 1930, and more than ten thousand by 1933. Some of this was due to relocation from the West. Some was the result of the natural growth of families, because more Chinese were marrying and having children in America. And some was caused by undocumented Chinese smuggled in via Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and elsewhere—some of the same people the federal government sought to deport in the mid-1920s as a means of suppressing the wars.
Only a minority of the eighty-four hundred Chinese counted in New York City in the 1930 census actually lived in the Chinese enclave; most resided elsewhere, and that didn’t count those in upstate towns or across the river in New Jersey. Even those in the city proper had spread out; Chinese restaurants, more and more dependent on non-Chinese patrons, had followed their customers to the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked, where competition was not as fierce as in Chinatown. As early as the late teens, more than half of New York’s Chinese restaurants were located outside the quarter.
So, too, had Chinese laundries sprung up throughout the five boroughs. It was convenient to live near work—or even at work, because Chinese laundrymen worked late and generally bunked in the rear of their establishments. This meant Chinatown was no longer the pressure cooker it had once been. Although it was still the nerve center of the Chinese community, most Chinese spent far less time there than had once been the case. Nor was Chinatown the vice mecca it had been. Fan tan and opium smoking still went on, but the constant police raids had had a profound effect. Most of the action had moved across the Hudson and had not returned, and in any event there was a lot less disposable income available for wagering.
Another cause was the decline of Tammany Hall. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had tolerated Tammany during his term as governor of New York, took action to strip the machine of political power after he became president in 1933. That same year, Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor on an anticorruption and antiracketeering platform, and he, too, endeavored to weaken Tammany’s grip on New York politics. The organization did not disappear, but it never regained the vigor it had possessed in earlier days, and it ceased to be a potent player in regulating whatever vice remained in Chinatown.
Yet another factor was the changing nature of the Chinese population. By 1930, fully 41 percent of America’s Chinese were born in the United States. This, of course, was mostly a function of the exclusion laws, which had imposed draconian limits on immigration, but one of its effects, intended or not, was acculturation. More and more Chinese were growing up outside Chinatown and going to American schools. They spoke English natively and had far more contact with non-Chinese than earlier generations. Despite continued prejudice, Chinese were becoming more American as each year passed, more apt to marry in America and to lead more normal family lives than earlier immigrants. They were consequently less subject to traditional Chinatown rivalries and less likely to see a need to join tongs.
The Depression also made its mark. During prosperous times, the tongs had been able to collect as much as $500 in a day just from tribute paid by gambling halls, but this revenue had diminished drastically by the 1930s. Although the On Leong Tong, which represented the merchants, was always in a stronger financial position than the Hip Sing Tong, both experienced extraordinary economic pressure. The On Leong Tong even filed a petition with the New York State Supreme Court in 1931 to mortgage its decade-old headquarters building at 41 Mott Street for $45,000 to raise funds to help its needy members, many of whom struggled to afford even their membership dues.
Then there were China’s needs. Most of the Chinese in America—unwelcome to naturalize in their adopted country—considered themselves patriotic citizens of the Chinese Republic. And they were infuriated at the incursions Japan was making in their homeland. Reports of Japanese terror bombings pro
vided strong incentive to support their embattled countrymen, and Chinatowns throughout North America pulled together to do what they could. Working together against a common enemy, the tongs began to see their differences as of decidedly secondary importance.
Tong wars were expensive propositions. Weapons had to be purchased in quantity, and guns, explosives, and tear gas were far more costly than hatchets and cleavers had been. Gunmen had to be recruited and paid, and their escape—or their legal defense, should they be apprehended—had to be underwritten. For these reasons, even though they frequently found themselves fighting, neither tong had shown much appetite for full-blown war for more than a decade.
The Hip Sings had long since established themselves in former On Leong territory, and the tong wars had become less about tangibles and more about an eye for an eye. The high cost of saving face, however, was measured in the killing and the maiming not only of tong soldiers but also of innocents, and over time it had a terrible effect on the Chinese population at large. It took a horrible toll on the local economy when tourists and frightened Chinese stayed away in droves.
Then, too, the titans who had declared and directed the early wars had mostly faded into history. Although Mock Duck, after a long period in eclipse, once again held sway at the Hip Sing Tong, he lacked the vigor of his youth and had been remarkably quiet. Wong Get had gone home to China, and other warriors like Tom Lee, Gin Gum, Charlie Boston, and James Wang had passed from the scene. The men whose word had been law within their tongs were gone, and the generation that followed lacked the stature and the power to see that their will was always carried out, especially by the far-flung branches of their tongs. They also had other, more pressing matters on their minds than a dance of death with the rival tong.
In the run-up to World War II, labor and political movements would take center stage in Chinatown. New, left-wing organizations, like the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, formed in 1933 to oppose a new city law aimed at driving Chinese out of the laundry business, and the Anti-imperialist Alliance, which opposed Japanese incursion into Chinese territory and Chiang Kai-shek’s anemic response to it, would become major forces that occupied people’s time and attention.
The tongs wouldn’t cease to exist, nor even entirely change their ways, but they would turn a corner. In 1936, Leong Gor Yun tentatively noted a transformation that, he believed, looked “salutary for their future.” He wrote,
With the sharp decrease in their income, fighting has almost ceased, and most of their professional fighters have been forced to take up a trade. Public opinion, too, has had its part in bringing the tongs to their senses. They have gradually disarmed, and have participated in patriotic movements to help China in her fight against Japan. . . . The reformation of the Tongs does not seem entirely hopeless, though it is too early to predict their future.
In fact, it wasn’t hopeless at all. The tongs would persevere, even though the graft that had sustained them in early years had largely disappeared with most of Chinatown’s vice dens. Over time, Hip Sing and On Leong tong men would move into more legitimate businesses and their tongs morph into more conservative, mainstream organizations. Having finally laid down their arms, they would become more respected, and Chinatown more willing to forgive their occasional forays into extralegal businesses like drug trafficking, prostitution, and smuggling.
On February 14, 1934—Chinese New Year—both tongs paraded their dragons through the streets of Chinatown as hundreds stood on the sidelines and cheered. The two processions began simultaneously at precisely noon, the Hip Sings from their Pell Street headquarters and the On Leongs from theirs on Mott. Men wore red sashes and beat gongs and drums. Each parade was led by youths carrying colorful banners, with a large tong flag behind them. But an experienced squad of police made sure the parades were always kept at least a block apart.
Rivalry between the On Leongs and the Hip Sings would continue to be a fact of life, but the two tongs had finally learned to live with each other.
Epilogue
The body of Tom Lee, buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn on January 14, 1918, was disinterred three months later. As Lee had wished, his remains were sent back to China. A hearse and two taxicabs carried his exhumed casket and a few family members back to Mott Street and then on to Grand Central Terminal, where it proceeded by rail to Utica, Montreal, and Vancouver and then to Hong Kong by steamer. From there it was transferred, under the supervision of his son Frank, to a final resting place in his ancestral village in Guangdong Province.
Frank William Lee, Tom Lee’s second son and an ordained Baptist preacher, returned to the native land of his father to work as a missionary. He allied himself with Dr. Sun Yat-sen and served as the latter’s secretary in 1917, chief of the political department in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1918 to 1920, representative of the Republic of China to the United States in the late 1920s, and eventually acting foreign minister in the early 1930s. He also served as China’s minister to Mexico, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Portugal. He died in 1956.
Chin Jack Lem, who single-handedly caused the 1924 tong war, had been sentenced to fifteen years in the Ohio Penitentiary for extortion but served less than half that time. Despite “unruly” and even “rebellious” behavior on his part while behind bars, his sentence was commuted in 1931 by the governor against the recommendation of the warden and the parole board. The condition was that he leave Cleveland forever. Chin met a bloody end in 1937 when an assassin fired four shots into his chest at close range outside a Chicago chop suey house. The proximate cause of his murder was his alleged theft of $600 donated by his Hip Sing colleagues for war relief in China.
Sue Sing, condemned to life in prison after pleading guilty to the 1900 murder of Ah Fee, did hard time at Sing Sing until he contracted tuberculosis, whereupon he was transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. In several petitions to the governor of New York for clemency, he proclaimed his innocence, fingered Mock Duck as Ah Fee’s true killer, and blamed Wong Get for threatening him with death if he did not take the fall.
Chin Lem, who had brought Bow Kum to New York, joined her at Cypress Hills Cemetery in February 1914. Eleven carriages and three automobiles paid for by his brother On Leongs were required to transport the thirty-six-year-old’s mourners from Mott Street to Brooklyn, where police stood guard lest his final rites ignite a new tong clash. His send-off, to the music of an Italian band and the banging of gongs, included flowers, incense, roast pig, and the burning of faux paper money to see to his needs in the next world.
The indefatigable Frank Moss, associated with most of New York’s celebrated anticorruption efforts during his long career, never saw through his Hip Sing friends, even after joining the district attorney’s office. His visceral distaste for the On Leongs put him on the side of their sworn enemies well after the rest of New York had concluded they were anything but the reformers they portrayed themselves to be. Moss died in 1920 at the age of sixty.
William McAdoo, asked to resign as commissioner of police in 1905, returned to the private practice of law until he was appointed by Mayor William Jay Gaynor as chief of the city magistrates’ courts, first division. He served until his death in 1930. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
After serving for eight years, District Attorney William T. Jerome, a staunch anti-Tammany figure, gave up politics and went into private practice. But he came out of political retirement to stump for reform candidates during the Depression, noting that the only difference between 1901 and 1933 was that “the stealing is more refined.” He made a fortune by investing in Technicolor, then a new technology, and died of pneumonia in 1934.
Wong Aloy, the Hip Sing interpreter who guided a Committee of Fifteen investigator through Chinatown’s brothels, opium dens, and gambling houses in 1900–1901, was named special assistant to the district attorney of New York County and went on to serve as a Chinese inter
preter for the U.S. Immigration Service. In 1922, however, at the age of fifty-four, he was shot and killed in a Chicago poolroom in what was rumored to be an On Leong hit.
Chinatown had proven too much for Captain Michael J. Galvin, who was transferred to Coney Island for health reasons after heading up the Sixth Precinct for only about a year. But he continued working overtime there, determined to crack down on tight-fitting bathing suits and dance halls. Within five months, he succumbed to chronic kidney disease, leaving behind a widow and five children.
Meihong Soohoo, longtime national president of the On Leong Tong who signed off on the 1925 peace accord, allied himself with Dr. Sun Yat-sen and was instrumental in raising money for Sun’s revolution and the anti-Japanese war. In the 1940s, he attempted to convert the Chee Kung Tong into a political party and was offered a seat in the Guomindang’s National Assembly. He opted instead for the rival Communists’ United Front, however, and was ultimately appointed to China’s National People’s Congress.
Rhinelander Waldo, New York police commissioner until the end of 1913, took issue with the statement that he had been “removed” from office and successfully appealed to the state supreme court to have the word changed to “resigned,” because he had tendered his resignation before he was replaced. He remained politically active and, in 1924, renounced Tammany Hall and joined the Republican Party. He died at age fifty of septic poisoning and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York’s Westchester County.
Ha Oi, the half-Chinese, half-Caucasian child removed from the custody of Mock Duck and Tai Yow Chin at age six in the spring of 1907, was given the new name of Helen Francis. Due to the wide publicity given her case, the Gerry Society received many offers of adoption from white couples across the country eager to give her a proper Christian upbringing. She was presumably placed with one such couple, but her records remain sealed to this day.
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