Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown

by Dillon, Richard

  The Story of the Tong Wars

  in San Francisco’s Chinatown

  The Story of the Tong Wars

  in San Francisco’s Chinatown

  by

  Sanger, California

  TheWriteThought.com

  To Dr. John E. Pomfret

  DIRECTOR, HENRY E. HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

  Copyright © 1962 by Richard H. Dillon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book—except for short passages for comment and review purposes—may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, digital or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher:

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  Kindle ISBN 978-1-61809-049-2

  ePub ISBN 978-1-61809-050-8

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-61809-051-5

  Library of Congress Control Number 2005925025

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to many people for aid and comfort in the writing of this account, including Librarians Allan R. Ottley of the California State Library, James Abajian of the California Historical Society, and book critic William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Columbia University Press was kind enough to grant me permission to quote from pages 247-248 of Henryk Sienkiwicz’s Portrait of America, edited and translated by Charles Morley and published by that press in 1959.

  My greatest debt, however, is to Dr. John E. Pomfret to whom this volume is dedicated, and to the Huntington Library which he heads. Thanks to a research grant from that library, I was able in 1960 to lay the foundations of the present study in that outstanding historical research institution.

  RICHARD H. DILLON

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD: The Golden Mountains

  CHAPTER ONE The Era Of Good Feeling

  CHAPTER TWO The Honeymoon Ends

  CHAPTER THREE Pipes Of Peace

  CHAPTER FOUR The Six Companies

  CHAPTER FIVE Sand Lots And Pick Handles

  CHAPTER SIX The Inquisition

  CHAPTER SEVEN Salaried Soldiers Of The Tongs

  CHAPTER EIGHT Crusader Farwell

  CHAPTER NINE Slave Girls

  CHAPTER TEN The Terror Of Chinatown

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Gray ’90s

  CHAPTER TWELVE Little Pete: King Of Chinatown

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Aftermath: Chinatown In Ruins

  FOREWORD:

  The Golden Mountains

  “The Chinese are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare and a lazy one does not exist.”

  —Roughing It, Mark Twain

  KIPLING was right—at least, temporarily. East was East, West was West, and the twain did not really meet, as equals, in San Francisco for some twenty-five years after his now invalidated pronouncement of 1889.

  For although some 30,000 Chinese resided in the environs of San Francisco’s Dupont Gai, as the Chinese called Grant Avenue (old Dupont Street), and although they constituted a whole city within a city, they were never fully accepted during the entire nineteenth century. Indeed it was not until after World War I that first-class citizenship was extended to San Franciscans of Chinese extraction.

  Much of this apartheid is to the discredit of San Francisco, of course. The general lack of such antisocial diseases as Jim Crowism and anti-Semitism in its history has unfortunately been cancelled out by a long and unpleasant era of anti-Chinese feeling. This campaign was carried on for decades by rabble-rousing demagogues for the most part, but not entirely. The more respectable politicians, members of the public in general, civic leaders, the pulpit and even the usually enlightened press were all guilty of bigotry and oppression. Of course there were many exceptions to this tendency, ranging from Reverend Otis Gibson to irreverent Mark Twain.

  But the blame for the apartness of the Chinese in Gum San Ta Fow (Big City in the Land of the Golden Hills) of some 75 or even 50 years ago does not rest entirely with the host community. For 50 years after the Gold Rush, Chinatown was the Celestial Empire’s most far-flung political and cultural outpost. Chinatown was run, not by the Mayor of San Francisco, but by the Consul General of Imperial China and the Six Companies. (This was so until the fighting tongs moved in with a rule of terror.) The Quarter was not merely an ethnic enclave in the city, like the Italian sector of North Beach. It was truly China in San Francisco.

  Much of the fault for the misunderstanding, the suspicion, and the lack of cooperation which existed between the two peoples and which kept them apart so long was due to the unwillingness of the Chinese to integrate—to even acclimate to the extent of modifying their dress or diet in their new environment. The reason was not, as Hinton Helper and others suggested, an outright hostility to Caucasians and their customs, based on a superiority complex. Rather, it was simply that the average Oriental did not—could not—pick up the language and customs of his new home, and frankly saw little reason to do so. He preferred to live with his own kind. He did not intend to stay. John would have remained an alien even had citizenship been thrust upon him at this stage of San Francisco’s history. He might go so far as to trade his split-bamboo basket hat or skullcap for a wide-brimmed, black felt fedora, but he kept his old ideas and philosophies. Inwardly he refused to change. The so-called coolie was the alien par excellence. The term coolie gained wide acceptance as a synonym for Chinaman in the vocabulary of Americans. It was an Anglo-Indian word, not a Chinese term at all, and came from the Bengali or Tamil word kuli which signified “burden bearer” and which originally meant “bitter work.” For a coolie it was much easier to form his own little China in the midst of bustling, confusing Fah-lan-sze-ko (San Francisco) than to undergo the psychological wrenching necessitated by the passage from one culture to the other. The typical Chinese immigrant of the 1850s wanted to remain in Ka-la-fo-ne-a no longer than necessary. When he had made his pile—perhaps $500—he would return home to his patient wife and family for a life of relative ease in Kwangtung. The typical Chinese in the Big City of the Golden Mountains was what the sociologists describe as a sojourner—here today and gone (home) tomorrow. John was just passing through. He did not want to be assimilated; on the contrary he preferred to be insulated from the fan kwei (foreign devils) all around him. He had one foot in Frisco but the other was still firmly planted in Canton. His great ambition was to make a lot of money and become a Gum San Hock—a returnee from the Golden Hills. While he was in San Francisco his one pressing desire was to be left alone.

  The English traveler, Mrs. Algernon St. Maur, determined the real cause of the strained relations between Chinese and Caucasian San Franciscans early. She said: “The only real difficulty is that the Chinese do not make citizens. America wants citizens.”

  Police Chief George W. Walling of New York not only described the attitude of withdrawal practiced by Chinese immigrants, but also unconsciously betrayed the prevailing bias of Americans of that day against the puzzling newcomers. Walling said of the Chinese: “Suspicious as a man who finds himself in a den of thieves, he is ever on the watch, while he works, for some new manifestation of that American temperament which his own mind, dense with the superstition of many
thousand years, can never quite understand.”

  The posters of Hong Kong which had led to his sailing to the Embarcadero in the first place had told John that California was a nice country without Mandarins or soldiers. Leery of these two elements of mankind, he steered clear of the few Yankee Mandarins (officials) and soldiers (policemen) he saw. He did his best to blend into the landscape, like a chameleon. But the Chinese was so outré because of his costume, coiffure and habits, that even in as diversified a city as San Francisco he stood out starkly.

  In the last 50 years the people of San Francisco have tried to make up for the shoddy treatment meted out to the city’s great minority group during the first 50 years of its existence. There is no doubt that the city has taken Chinatown to its heart, and the affection is sincere. But more important to the metamorphosis of Chinatown since 1850, or the bloody tong-war days of 1880, is the fact that somewhere along the way—at some unknown day and hour, at some invisible line in time—the majority of the residents of Chinatown decided to stay; to become Americans. The sojourners became a minority. Slowly and surely San Francisco began to win over the larger segment of its Oriental population. It was as simple as that—and as complicated. No one can put his finger on any particular individual who took the lead, any more than one can ascribe the change of attitude to a given year. It was a gradual process of change—of unwitting acclimatization. But acceptance and integration were not easy decisions to make for those involved. Even after death the ties with China were strong in the Chinese. Hence the shiploads of bones and ashes of the dead which year after year left the Embarcadero bound for Hong Kong. For example, when the French ship Asia sailed in January, 1858, she bore the embalmed bodies of 321 Chinese. When the great American clipper Flying Cloud followed her in February it was with the bulk of her cargo consisting of the corpses of 200 Chinese Argonauts. There were no older or stronger family, clan and homeland ties on the face of the earth than those in Chinese society.

  The tragedy of the mutual suspicion and misunderstanding which developed between the two groups, each so aloof from the other, was not immediately evident. It came particularly in the 1880s and 1890s as a last spasm of the symptoms of apartheid, just before the belated trend to Americanization on the part of the Chinese and to tolerance and acceptance on the part of the Americans. Misunderstanding created a social vacuum between the two peoples. This void between Little China and Frisco remained unfilled for a singularly and inexplicably long period of time; when it was filled by inrushing elements they were the forces of evil. The criminal class in Chinatown was small in the 1860s, just as it is today in the 1960s. But suddenly about 1880 it burgeoned and fattened and multiplied like some ugly cellular disturbance of the body politic. Held in check by the overweening prestige of the Six Companies, it burst its bonds when the Six Companies suffered a severe loss of face (mien tzu) in the ’90s. The leaders of respectable Chinatown gambled—and the Chinese are a nation of gamblers—on the unconstitutionality of the Geary Act. Under the leadership of Chin Ti Chu, president of the Sam Yup Company, the people of Chinatown were told not to sign the registration documents instigated by the provisions of the act. The Six Companies’ leadership was humiliated when the plan of peaceful resistance crashed down around their queues. The Geary Act was held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court. Thanks to Chin and the companies, thousands of law abiding Chinese had become technical law violators by their boycott of the alien registration offices. The Six Companies’ officers found their prestige and moral strength crumbling with their loss of face. The fighting tongs, biding their time until just such an opening should occur, exploited it and seized control of the Chinese community.

  The result was the shocking phenomenon in American history of internecine war in a racial ghetto—the bloody tong wars of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese preyed upon Chinese solely. It was a weird class of civil war; a struggle for power among bad men with the good people of Chinatown the pawns and the prey. Only Chinese suffered from the violent depredations of the hatchet men—the hired killers of the fighting tongs. They sized the police and city up correctly; kept “a family affair,” the police would not interfere too positively. A policy of laissez faire had worked well in Chinatown since 1850. There was little reason to change it.

  The good people of Chinatown, who were the great majority, found themselves bullied and terrified by a handful of well-organized criminals who aped the very white hoodlums who oppressed them. This new Chinese criminal element borrowed the worst features of the two civilizations which collided on Dupont Gai. From old China they took the code of an eye for an eye and familial responsibility for the actions of an individual. Thus the feud and vendetta code of China and the importance of saving face—at all costs—was transplanted to San Francisco. The boo how doy (literally “hatchet sons”) distorted old traditions to their own ends. From the Americans they took hoodlumism, as gangsterism was called a century ago. But the hoodlum-inspired riots and head crackings of the 1870s were child’s play compared to the deadly guerrilla warfare of the tongs. From city hall the hatchet men picked up American style crooked politics, long popular in the city by the Golden Gate. The elements of blackmail and graft were available to them from both cultures. Conditioned to violence by almost three decades of hoodlumism and anti-coolie crusading, the boo how doy took violence as a way of life.

  The typical law-abiding Chinese of San Francisco was also well adjusted to a climate of violence, thanks to the mob bigotry and hoodlumism which surrounded him. But to make matters even worse he had a built-in susceptibility to gangster rule because of certain weaknesses of his philosophical makeup. These frailties—thousands of years old and inbred—invited attack by such antisocial forces as the fighting tongs. The Chinese was subtle, reticent and stoic. He had an elaborate defense mechanism for the swallowing of insults and abuse. A qualitative analysis of the Chinese immigrant would have revealed a blend of positive Confucianism, with its respect for law and order and authority, and negative Taoism, with its “old roguery,” as Lin Yutang has termed the tendency to take the line of least resistance. It was a precarious balance at best, with the latter philosophy’s cynicism and skepticism usually winning out over any individual’s reform ideas.

  It was only the Confucianism which Reverend Otis Gibson saw when he too quickly praised the Chinese newcomers for “the natural docility of their character… [and] respect for superiors; for all those who occupy positions of honor and power.”

  John was no idealist or reformer. Idealism belonged to youth, and China was old—centuries old by 1850. Taoism served the Cantonese émigré like a morphia. This opiate philosophy benumbed his outraged sense of decency and helped him to survive during crises; to endure—but never to overcome—misrule. He did not try to remake life or even to reshape it a little, but rather to bend with it.

  The emigrating Chinese brought to San Francisco his traditional distrust of courts, officials and lawyers. In the Old Country 95 percent of all legal troubles were settled out of court. The clerk’s office in China was handed down from father to son or else bought and sold. It was far more than a mere sinecure. It was an opportunity to practice what the Spaniards call el mordido—the bite. This bite, graft or squeeze was practiced also by the police, by officials, judges and witnesses in China. The immigrant fully expected the same conditions to prevail in Fah-lan-sze-ko. (He was often right.)

  John was devoid of what Caucasians called public spirit. His outlook was self-centered and family-centered. Teamwork did not exist in his vocabulary. The new immigrant brought many virtues—pacifism, tolerance, industry, contentment—but he did not bring personal courage in the Western sense. He did not battle for his rights. Used to the bandits and war lords of China, he was not surprised when the goon squads of the tongs took over Chinatown. He did his best to make no enemies, to turn the other cheek, to dodge the ruffians as best he could.

  For all his joining of societie
s, John did not tend to band his friends together to protect the weak or the law-abiding. Though the Chinese was supposedly a humanist of a high order by long tradition, to Americans he seemed to lack completely the virtue of compassion. He seemed to accept the murder of his neighbors as predestined—not something to fight. He was family-minded and club-oriented, but he was in no sense social-minded. His civic consciousness was nil. Civil rights were an unfathomed mystery to John. He was used only to a world ruled by Face (not the same as honor, alas), Fate and Favor. This trio came to rule Chinatown, deadening justice, law and democracy. It was more pernicious than tyrannical, being in a great measure self-imposed because of habit and tradition. With even his virtues working against him, it is no wonder that the San Francisco Chinese, under the pressure of the fighting tongs, made self-preservationand not progress or freedom the keystone of his philosophy.

  With the partial collapse of the Six Companies in the mid-’90s, the cult of detachment or disaffiliation in Chinatown became more pronounced. John virtually hid in his warren. He bowed down and waited for the storm to rage and die. His attitude can be called selfishness, cowardice, pacificism or stoicism; whatever it was it embodied a surrender to the old Chinese proverb—“It is better to be a dog in peaceful times than a man in times of unrest.” A child of the most misruled nation on earth, his instinct and tradition would not allow him to act otherwise.

  Only the Chinese Native Sons (later the Chinese-American Citizens’ Alliance) tried to adjust to the new rhythm of living found in San Francisco. These new short-haired, Americanized Chinese abandoned their old way of life—or at least much of it—in order to create a new life. It turned out to be an amalgam of the two—something like the Spanish and Indian admixture which has become Latin American civilization. These men had a choice of old Imperial China, new Republican China—still in the offing—or America. Overwhelmingly they chose America. The hatchet men, the exceptions to the rule, broke all Chinese tradition as it pleased them and borrowed only what was convenient from Taoism. They were the most extreme examples of the Cantonese—quick-tempered, pugnacious and adventurous. From the Northerners of China they scavenged a contempt for fair play. Since many, probably most, of the hatchet men were from the Chinese lower or criminal class, they were uneducated and less inclined to follow the old dictates of obedience, gentility of behavior and abhorrence of violence, even if they were aware of such civilized deportment. Among the Cantonese the tong men were the rugged individualists, yet paradoxically they banded together the tightest of all. They got things done, and ironically they were often better liked by Americans than law-abiding Chinese because of their cultural mobility. Little Pete, the well-known rackets’ boss of Chinatown in the ’90s, was a case in point. Dr. Rose Hum Lee pointed out that Kwangtung has not only been noted above all Chinese provinces for its progressive and adventurous people but also for its troublesome folk. There was no shortage of the latter in Chinatown and none more deadly—even on the Barbary Coast or the docks of the Embarcadero—than the swaggering bullies of the fighting tongs.