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

by Dillon, Richard

  Fong found that he had to answer the same charges which Loom is had answered a quarter century earlier. He pointed out that, while American and Chinese employers might contract for coolie labor, the Six Companies never handled such contracts. The See Yup Company had angrily repudiated this calumny as far back as 1855 when it stated that “our company has never employed men to work in the mines for their own profit, nor have they ever purchased any slaves or used them here.” Fong reiterated that the companies had no secret courts in which to try their supposed subjects either. The companies held meetings to settle disputes and to arrange for payment of debts, it was true. But the decisions of the Elders and Titled Scholars did not have to be accepted. If both parties did not accept the decree of the arbiters, the case was taken to the proper American legal agency.

  There was one occasion when the Six Companies did pressure the whole Chinese community; this was when the Geary Act was promulgated. The Six Companies levied a special $1 lawyers’ fee on each member and asked them not to register under the harassing act. In vain they were testing the constitutionality of the legislation which they were sure violated their civil rights. Public and government officials soon claimed that the Six Companies had ordered their “subjects” not to obey the law of the land.

  There is no doubt that when the Six Companies spoke all Chinatown listened. For 99 percent of all Chinese in California came from Kwangtung, and—to refine it further—from only 21 of its 72 districts. The handful of nonmembers in Chinatown, hardly more than one percent of the population, were natives of Shanghai, Ningpo, Fukien or North China. The reasons for this great preponderance of Cantonese were many. One was the convenience and accessibility of the port for the coolie clippers and later the steamship lines between San Francisco and Hong Kong. Another factor was the well-organized companies of Cantonese in the Crown Colony, which actively recruited immigrants from their close-at-hand province of Kwangtung.

  The reasons for the amalgamation of the six and more separate companies into one organization were several. In the first place it was easier for a single organization to protect the interests of Chinese in legal matters than for a scattering of small, independent societies to do so. No Chinese embassy existed in Washington during the early years of settlement, and no consulate in San Francisco. The heads of the Six Companies were forced to serve as spokesmen for the Imperial Government to its San Francisco subjects. A single voice had to be maintained. Another pressure to unite for strength was the rising threat of the antisocial organizations in the Chinese community—the fighting tongs.

  Fong mentioned the formation of the Kwong Duck tong in 1852 as the beginning of the fighting tongs, but singled out the Chee Kong tong as the secret society most responsible for those activities for which Americans carelessly blamed the Six Companies. This tong, whose original aim was the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty, had set itself up as a sort of sub rosa government and secret tribunal over the Chinese populace. All this was the case long before the 90s, Fong stressed, and neither tong—nor any of their rivals—had the slightest connection with the Six Companies.

  The Meeting Hall of the Chinese People, or Meeting Hall of the Middle Kingdom, the Chung Wah Kung, was jointly presided over by the chiefs of only five participating societies; the See Yups did not join. Delegates to it were elected according to the size of each company in members. The official name for the six united societies was the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, but Americans found this much too cumbersome and called it the Five Companies until 1862, and then the Six Companies. In 1901, the Six Companies incorporated under its proper name, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. In 1862 the meeting hall’s name was changed slightly, to Chung Wah Wui Kwoon, but it still meant the same thing. (Different words were used to signify meeting place or assembly hall.)

  At first an attempt was made to adhere to Chinese tradition by selecting a Chinese scholar—whenever possible—to head each district association. But scholars were so scarce in California that they had to be imported especially for the posts. Eventually the idea of scholar-presidents was abandoned in favor of merchant-presidents. They had the biggest voice and the biggest stake in Chinatown affairs. This change helped to create a sort of Chinese chamber-of-commerce image in the American mind in regard to the Six Companies. This still exists. The Six Companies is much more than that, of course, but this was the direction the district companies individually and jointly began to take. Ironically, they followed the lead of the weakest of the district companies, the See Yup Company. More and more, at least in relation to the American community, the Six Companies took on the tone of a mercantile association. It actually served as a chamber of commerce until 1910 when the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco was organized.

  The board of directors of the companies, composed of the company presidents, rotated the chairmanship. Each man served at least once during his term of office as head of his own company. From 1850 until 1880 there was an unwritten law that no member of a fighting tong could become a president of the Six Companies or of any of its half-dozen components. Unfortunately this rule broke down in the 1880s when the tongs usurped—from the Six Companies—the reins of control over the populace.

  The companies, like the gamblers and pimps, had special policemen as guards and watchmen over their members’ places of business. William Hoy discovered files of reports by these men attesting to their duties—mainly ejecting drunken sailors and soldiers from Chinatown when they became obstreperous in stores or annoyed pedestrians. The Six Companies also began a program of “publishing” (posting) the names of lawbreakers and offering rewards for information leading to their arrests and convictions. Eventually the highbinder tongs took over this practice themselves, arrogantly advertising for the heads of enemies c.o.d. on various blind walls of Chinatown buildings.

  For fifty years the Six Companies fought the tong hatchet men, attempting by peaceful and other means to persuade the one-time fraternal lodges to cease their flagrant, illegal enterprises and particularly to give up the use of violence for settling disputes. But their appeals to return to the traditional arbitration of quarrels fell on deaf ears in the tongs. The latter had replaced the rule of scholar-presidents with the rule of the hatchet and the Colt revolver. It was a strange campaign which was waged within Chinatown. From their humiliation in 1893-94, when their anti-Geary Act crusade backfired on them and caused them to lose great face, the Six Companies seemed to lose all the battles. But eventually they won the “war.” Part of this was because of its strong allies—a belatedly militant police force; a one-woman commando force in the person of Lo Mo—Donaldina Cameron; a Chinese community finally united against its criminal oppressors.

  In 1913 the tongs gave up. A Chinese Peace Society was formed with representatives from all the rival tongs; an armistice was brought about; and an uneasy peace at last settled on Chinatown. Time had run out on the tongs as early as 1906 when they were burned out by the April fire. The Quarter had really outgrown them and they were never able to make a powerful comeback. The juk sing, as the alien sojourner disdainfully called his American-born Chinese neighbor, began to assert himself. Soon he had secured hegemony in the community and broken through the invisible wall of bigotry and suspicion which separated Chinatown from the rest of the city. The Six Companies played a major role in this “fraternization” process.

  But before the Six Companies could emerge again as the unquestioned voice and leader of Chinatown it had to fight for its very life and for the populace whose de facto government it was. And it had to fight on two fronts. The tide of bigotry, “sand-lotism,” rolled in on Chinatown first in the ’70s. But shortly, within the Quarter itself, the Six Companies found a fifth column arising in the form of the lawless tongs. These were soon at the throat of the Six Companies as it tried to fend off Dennis Kearney and his sand-lot crusaders who were perennially marching—or threatening to march—on Chinato
wn with the avowed intention of burning it to the ground and driving the -Chinese into the sea.

  The fighting tongs were able to grow rapidly while the Six Companies was distracted by the onslaughts of the sand lotters. The latter accidentally played a major role in the rise of the criminal element to power within Chinatown, and thus helped bring about the tong wars themselves.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sand Lots And Pick Handles

  “So long as the Chinese are here, I shall give them the most complete protection which my official authority can control or create. The humblest individual who treads our soil, of whatever race descended and irrespective of the country of his birth or the language which he speaks, shall not appeal in vain for the protection of the law, which is no respecter of persons.”

  —Chief of Police Theodore G. Cockrill, 1874

  ONE OF the early attempts of California boosters to seduce travelers into a visit to San Francisco was a book called The Pacific Tourist. It described the people of Chinatown aptly and accurately for such an ephemeral publication. It called them “the hated of Paddy, the target of hoodlums, the field of the missionary, the bomb for the politician to explode, and the sinew for capital.” Equally observant and accurate was San Francisco old-timer John H. Swift when he said ironically in 1876 that, “In 1852 the Chinamen were allowed to turn out and celebrate the Fourth of July and it was considered a happy time. In 1862 they would have been mobbed. In 1872 they would have been burned at the stake.”

  It was during the ’70s that the Knights of Labor did their best to ignite the bomb mentioned by The Pacific Tourist. They marched about with banners which read THE CHINESE MUST GO! The demagoguery were quick to pick up this battle cry as a safe political crusade theme. After all, the target people were voteless. But not everyone was ready to join the hysterical crusade as yet. When the shoemakers of the city went militant, parading at anti-coolie rallies in uniform as the St. Crispin’s Guards, the Sacramento Union called them “shallow blatherskites” and “a convention of fools.”

  But bigotry in the ’70s was speedily transformed into violence and brutality. Chinese were vilified, run out of towns in the interior, and occasionally beaten. One so-called coolie died from the effects of a stoning in San Francisco itself in May, 1871. The Chinese in California found themselves occupying the traditional position of the Jews—the scapegoats of society. This was particularly true during times of economic stress, recession, depression or whatever westerners chose to call such hard times as those of 1873. The contributions of the Chinese in building the West as the “sinews of capital” in the mines, in the fields and on the railroads were quite forgotten. Nor were there distinctions drawn between good and bad Chinese. The law-abiding Chinese were ground between the hoodlums and bigots on one side and their own criminals and tong bullies on the other.

  Violence did not wait for the depression of 1873. During February of 1870, a gang of boys attacked a Chinese washhouse on Mission Street. They broke all the building’s windows and beat the workmen as they fled. Police Officer David Supple attempted to arrest the ringleader. They all turned on him, knocked him down, and kicked and beat him severely while a crowd of men stood around him, watching but not making a move to help the officer. By the time the hoodlums were finished a mob of 2,000 men had gathered to see the show. A riot seemed imminent. Chief of Police Patrick Crowley arrived on the scene and with his usual force and vigor—personally leading eighty officers in clearing the streets—he restored order.

  To make matters worse and to lend quite unnecessary fuel to the mobs who wanted to “clean up” Chinatown by tearing it down or burning it down, the first bloody internal riot in the Quarter’s history occurred on May 22. The trouble grew out of the rivalry among Chinese laundrymen. The protective association, or guild, of washermen met every Sunday in a joss house over gaming rooms on the corner of Sacramento Street and Oneida Place. Here, applications and complaints were heard and ruled upon. The case of the Was Yeup Company came up. The firm stood accused of violating the association’s districting rules by opening a new washhouse in a district already assigned to another company. The decision was against the interlopers. Soon there was a scuffle between partisans of the company and others in the assemblage. Cleavers, hatchets, knives and clubs were brandished and then freely used. The fight turned into a full-scale riot. The attention of outsiders was commanded when pistol shots echoed from the interior of the building.

  Down on Pike Street, John Meagber, a thirty-six-year-old Irish officer, heard the reports. He whistled for help, and five special officers joined him. They entered the fray after sending a citizen to get more aid. Captain Patrick R. Hanna and four of his men rushed to the scene of the presumed slaughter, inviting a number of citizens met en route to join them. Hanna had fought his way through the door when the chief of police arrived with a number of detectives.

  A Chinese stood at the top of the narrow stairs leading to the room now jammed with brawling laundrymen. He blazed away at the officers with a pistol, narrowly missing one and actually grazing his coat. When he ceased fire, Hanna ordered his men to charge and several bounded up the staircase while Hanna himself and a few others cut off the rioters’ retreat from the building. The officers who rushed upstairs met with a rough reception but flayed about mightily with their clubs. Although the escape of the rioters appeared to be cut off, they still tried desperately to get away, plunging downstairs and trying to burst through the ring of policemen blocking their exit. Few succeeded, yet only 16 men in all were seized, of whom 3 were wounded. This was a small percentage of the estimated 125 brawlers. The others had all fled by upstairs windows and the roof. The captives were tied together in pairs. An enormous crowd, probably 3,000 people, had been attracted. Chief Crowley, fearing the riot might spread, ordered Hanna to clear the streets. The captain did so with only 4 or 5 men but they had to swing their batons liberally. Crowley later said, “In five minutes more, nothing short of calling out the militia would have quelled the riot.”

  About twenty or thirty shots were fired in the melee upstairs but none of the scufflers were killed. The police had three wounded men in custody and apparently a number more were among the great majority of rioters who escaped. The officers found—either in the room or on the prisoners’ persons—four cleavers, two hatchets, one chisel and a solitary knife. Only two pistols were found—a six-shooter and a derringer. But some of the captives explained that the other pistols had been thrown from windows and picked up and hidden by the gunmen’s women, waiting in the street below. The meeting room was a shambles. Its walls were pierced with bullet holes. All the furniture was demolished, including glass vases, ornaments and the joss or idol (from the Portuguese deos, god) itself.

  The traditional violence of the city which surrounded the Chinese Quarter seemed finally to be reflected in Chinatown itself during the ’70s. A year and a month after the first riot another fracas exploded in which a Chinese shot and mortally wounded one of his countrymen. In February, 1872, several Chinese were wounded seriously in a cutting affray on Jackson Street, and in May a Chinese was murdered by two whites on Clay Street. The worried Six Companies asked Hong Kong to stop further emigration to San Francisco.

  These brutal attacks helped to cloud a horizon which was just beginning to clear a bit with the news that Judge Davis Louderback would receive Chinese evidence as fully admissible in his police court. Another offset to Louderback’s action was the campaign of the city’s supervisors to harass the Chinese. The ’70s would prove to be a decade of official investigations, harassments and attempted harassments. Typical of this campaign was the single day’s haul of forty-five Chinese arrested for sleeping in one room. This was a violation of the sanitary laws of the city in general and the Cubic Air Ordinance in particular.

  1873 was the year of the mysterious Queue Ordinance. There is perhaps more confusion about this piece of legislation than any other in San Francisco’s hi
story. Today most people who have heard of it at all believe it was a ruthless law which ordered all Chinese to cut off their queues. Not at all. Supervisor Robert Goodwin simply put before the Board of Supervisors an ordinance which demanded the cutting of the hair—to within one inch of the scalp—of all prisoners in the city jail. Ostensibly a health measure like the Cubic Air Ordinance, the Queue Ordinance fooled no one. It was transparently a legalized annoyance and embarrassment foisted on the Chinese though it technically applied to all prisoners in the county jail. Goodwin was the author of another of the so-called Pagan Ordinances—the Disinterment Ordinance, which prevented the shipping of remains of the dead to China upon penalty of a fine of from $100 to $150. This was a blow at the religious belief of the Chinese. Deprivation of his traditional queue was definitely an unusual punishment, but it was not an antireligious stroke, as was commonly believed by most Caucasians. The queue had been imposed on the Chinese by their Manchu conquerors centuries before as a symbol of their servitude. But this hirsute symbol of slavery was transformed by the Chinese into a badge of honor and worn proudly. It was imbedded in tradition, in national custom—but not in religion. When the time was ripe (1912) for the overthrow of the Manchu Empire and the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Chinese of San Francisco willingly and quickly cut off their queues and wore their hair in Caucasian style.

  Much to the credit of Mayor William Alvord, he vetoed the Queue Ordinance as being cruel and unusual punishment. Alvord stated that the ordinance was conceived in the spirit of persecution and was “a special and degrading punishment inflicted upon the Chinese residents for slight offenses and solely by reason of their alienage and race.”

  Supervisor A. B. Forbes lined up with Alvord to oppose vigorously the Pagan Ordinances. “I have unhesitatingly opposed all the so-called anti-Chinese resolutions introduced at our meetings,” he reminded his colleagues, “because I believe they originated in a spirit and temper unconstitutional, unworthy, reprehensible and calculated to stir up and incite a certain class of our population to acts of violence and bloodshed… The whole letter and spirit of these resolutions are illegal, narrow minded, contemptible and utterly unworthy of the sanction of this body.”