Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (12 page)

G. B. Densmore singled out a particular Chinatown hock shop for scrutiny. In this establishment, on the east side of Washington Alley, he saw—just as the editor had predicted he would—all kinds of highbinder weapons: double-bladed and two-edged knives, pistols, and slung shots (blackjacks).

Helen Hunt, the Helen Hunt Jackson who later wrote
Ramona,
was another who tiptoed through Chinatown with great foreboding. She chose to make her safari in broad daylight but even on a noonday expedition she thought it wise to ask a local policeman whether danger lurked in the alleys. “Not at all, m’am, not at all,” answered the officer. “At
this
hour of the day you can go with perfect safety through all these streets.” Charles Nordhoff advised tourists that even ladies and children could walk safely in the main streets of the Chinese Quarter by day. But he urged those who wished to investigate farther after dark to get a policeman—one of the Chinatown specials—as combined guide and guard.

The sinister and mysterious aspects of Chinatown have always fascinated people. When the smoke of chimneys and braziers mixed with the night fogs to make the Quarter into an eerie Limehouse tourists huddled together in shuddering delight. A small army of Chinatown guides—a species now entirely vanished—did nothing to diminish the mystery.

It was a fearful correspondent who covered the Quarter for the English publication
The Gentleman’s Magazine.
He wrote that “there are certain parts which, at his own risk, the white man is free to traverse, though in no case is it prudent to visit even these without the escort of a properly armed police officer well-known on the Chinatown beat.” Another Britisher who toured Chinatown before the quake, W. H. Gleadhill, was horrified by an entire street occupied by what he termed delicately
“merchandeuses
[sic]
d’amour,”
underground gambling hells which he called
“tripots,”
and opium dens filled with “white, sickly faces and glassy eyes.” Probably his guide escorted him to the labyrinth under the trap doors of Bartlett Alley. This subterranean haunt was so noisome with mold and seeping sewage that it was dubbed the Dog Kennel by the press. Gleadhill returned from Chinatown almost in a state of shock.

The problem of Chinatown crime was complicated by the fact that for most of the nineteenth century, San Francisco was badly underpoliced. In 1863 there were still only 54 men in uniform. (They were outnumbered by the
mignons Chinoises de nuit
alone.) Yet the force made 5,422 (citywide) arrests. In 1871, Chief Crowley complained to the Board of Supervisors that New York had 3 times as many policemen per capita as San Francisco; that London had 3 1/2 times as many; and that Dublin had (and doubtless needed) 5 times as many. Pat Crowley had to make do with 4 captains and only 100 men. The combination of tong troubles, continuing hoodlumism and anti-coolieism taxed the law-and-order power of the city to the breaking point.

The colorful Crowley cast about for alternatives when he was not given the extra men he needed for Chinatown details. He strongly urged more drastic methods, even to the abolition of firecrackers and the prohibition of shooting galleries near Chinatown. He felt that the latter were too attractive to the tong hatchet men. “Nearly every Chinaman in the city,” he said, “is the owner of a pistol, and we all know how handy he is in its use.”

In 1874, when the strength of the force was brought into line with a realistic policy, it was Theodore Cockrill who was chief of police. Cockrill was a Kentuckian who had not really sought the office, but had allowed friends to place his name in nomination. As a Democrat he had not had the slightest hope of winning, but though the general Republican ticket swept the field Cockrill won the office of Chief by a 4,000-vote margin. He proved to be an effective leader but the problems of Chinatown were too much for him and persuaded him to flatly refuse renomination for a second term. Cockrill felt the growing tension in the air as the anti-coolie agitators voiced loud threats. He was determined that no harm would come to the 25,000 Chinese for whose safety he was responsible; he promised them full protection and he gave it to them.

Chief Cockrill struck out at Chinatown crime, as so many of his predecessors had done, with an attack on the bagnios. An ordinance was passed which made it unlawful to sell any human being, such as a slave girl, or even to be in, enter into, remain in or dwell in any brothel. But Benjamin Brooks, attorney for the San Francisco Chinese, told Congressmen that this ordinance was used by San Francisco police strictly for blackmail purposes. One wonders how many of the 13,007 arrests of 1873-1874 can be chalked up to this practice. In any case, Cockrill was proud that, thanks to his energetic activity, no Chinese brothels remained on main thoroughfares.

The chief had less success with gambling, since fan-tan players switched from brass “cash” (Chinese coins) and American silver to beans or buttons to fool his raiders. Either Cockrill was of excellent character or he was an able politician. Since he served only one term as chief, deliberately, the former is the more likely. His flowery pronouncement in regard to fan-tan was laudable enough. In his opinion it was far better for a few fan-tan operators to go unpunished for a misdemeanor than to have the police assuming unauthorized and arbitrary powers. A decade or so later this policy would be exactly reversed. City hall, in desperation at the number of tong killings, adopted a “get-tough” policy in Chinatown which infringed on many honest Chinese people’s rights but which paid off in terms of affecting the tongs.

Tense as the situation was in the mid-’70s, it would have been much worse but for the restraining influence of men like Cockrill and Governor William Irwin. The latter, when he addressed a great anti-Chinese meeting in 1876, cautioned his listeners against violence. Of course to Cockrill an order was an order and an ordinance was an ordinance. While he stood ready to protect the Chinese from violence he also continued the enforcing of hazing legislation, such as the Cubic Air Ordinance. He arrested 518 Chinese for this offense in April, 1876, alone. Ambivalence came to be an occupational disease with police patrolling Chinatown eighty and ninety years ago.

In the spring of 1876, the new chief of police, Henry H. Ellis, had his hands full with the anti-coolie crowd and was also presented with one of the first major tong outbursts. Several Chinese witnesses against murderer Muck Son were violently assaulted in St. Louis Alley by 15 to 20 highbinders. The intimidation attempt failed because of prompt police action. The officers seized 4 or 5 of the hatchet men and locked them up. In all probability the attack was Muck Son’s idea; he had learned how to deal with witnesses in the past. He had committed burglaries in Spanishtown, San Mateo County, in 1866, but incredibly the local authorities had locked him up with the sole witness against him. Not only did Muck Son make his escape but he closed the mouth of the witness forever by killing him.

So grave was the situation in 1876, that General John W. McComb notified the chief of police that the militia was ready to turn out to help him to preserve order on the shortest notice should the anti-coolie men resort to mob violence. Luckily the police department’s strength had again been raised and the chief could now rely on a force of 325 without calling on the state troops. Ellis was a firm and resolute man. He neither panicked nor hid behind the militia’s skirts. This New Englander was a veteran of the vigilance committee and had served as Deputy United States Marshall during the Civil War. (He would eventually spend twenty-two years on the force.) He was a professional peace officer.

Despite all of Ellis’s watchfulness the Centennial Year and the one which followed it were the highwater marks of the shameful period of anti-Chinese agitation in San Francisco. Prejudice, selfishness, ignorance and bigotry were handmaidens of the sand-lot demagogues. In March, 1876, Mayor A. J. Bryant appointed a committee of twelve to report on Chinese immigration. The Anti-Chinese Union was formed that year and the eventually discredited but then widely read document, “Chinese Immigration, its Social, Moral and Political Effect,” was sent to the United States Congress from San Francisco. Reverend Gibson accused Mayor Bryant of being an out-and-out sand lotter himself, probably for his allowing the Board of Supervisors to revive the despicable Queue Ordinance. The uneasy presidents of the Six Companies again requested the Government of China to stop further emigration to America of its nationals, fearing mob violence on the Embarcadero when so-called coolie ships arrived. The officials also wrote Bryant: they listed the abuses the Chinese had suffered, including unprovoked and unpunished acts of violence, and asked him for protection. And they called his attention to the widespread rumors of an imminent attack upon Chinatown—rumors which were causing much anxiety among the Chinese people.

In 1876 and 1877 there were times when Chinatown looked like a ghost town. A reporter described a walk through the Quarter on one such occasion:

At nine o’clock last night the streets in the Chinese quarter were almost deserted and nearly all the stores closed. Special policemen were stationed at each corner and the place had decidedly the appearance of a town under martial law… The dozen Chinamen stationed on Dupont and Jackson Streets were probably members of the noble Highbinder Association or pickets ready to warn their countrymen of any approaching danger. The hoodlumistic element was lightly represented but restrained from acts and even words of violence by the presence of the police who were stationed at nearly every corner and who guarded the entrance of every alley. Never in the last fifteen years have the streets of this great part of San Francisco been so free of Chinamen as they were last evening.

Mass meetings still peddled the myth sociologists called the “coolie fiction”—that the immigrants were all enslaved coolies kept in debt bondage to the Six Companies. The latter continued to be confused with tongs and were described as “secret organizations, more powerful than the courts.” At first the speakers urged full protection and the guarantee of rights to the Chinese already settled in California. What was wanted, they said, was an immediate cessation of the immigration of coolies. But the listeners were of neither the mentality nor temperament to draw fine distinctions. In any case, the Anti-Chinese Union was soon openly boasting that it would not only secure a complete stop to Chinese immigration but would also obtain the forced repatriation of every Chinese on the Coast. Little wonder the board of presidents was a worried body of men.

The Six Companies sent a “Memorial” to President Grant at this time, having President Lee Tong Hay of the Chinese Y.M.C.A. sign it. The document reminded the President of how industrious and law abiding the Chinese people had always been in America—never interfering with the established order of politics or religion. It proudly stated that the Chinese had opened “no whiskey saloons for the purpose of dealing out poison and degrading their fellow men.”

In their manifesto the Six Companies actually put themselves on record as supporting the prohibition of further Chinese immigration. They did this so that troubled American minds would be relieved of worry over excess labor and resultant depression. They also suggested the repeal of the Burlingame treaty but reminded the American people that it was the white capitalists who were calling for cheap Chinese labor, and getting it.

Whether true or not, stories began to appear in the press at this time to indicate that Chinatown was preparing for a siege by becoming an armed camp. The newspapers reported a run on pawnbrokers’ shops for revolvers and bowie knives. One dealer alone was said to have sold sixty pistols to Chinese in one day.

On April 1 the Six Companies sent a letter to Chief Ellis accusing him of setting up a double standard of justice—of making few arrests when the victims of assaults were Chinese. This was published in the daily
Aha California.
The
American Missionary
then attacked the police force and “the policeman who, for a consideration, has known how to shut his eyes or be somewhere else when Chinese gambling and prostitution come too clearly into view on his beat.” Partly as a result of such attacks as these, Chinatown’s special force of police was discontinued in 1877. These watchmen and auxiliary police had won a reputation, probably well deserved, of being bribetakers and bribegivers rather than law officers. For “protection” service some of these specials earned up to $1,000 a month. They were not related to the police department’s regular Chinatown squad.

On April 5, 1876, a riot seemed imminent and the Six Companies’ presidents again appealed to Mayor Bryant. He gave orders to the police to protect the Chinese Quarter at all costs. He swore in 200 extra men, but there was no riot. On May 17 the Six Companies received a threatening letter purportedly from an organization calling itself the San Francisco Anti-Coolie Secret Society. If they did not clear San Francisco of coolies within twenty-one days the society would clear them out by force of arms. It was all bluff, or a hoax. One of the Six Companies’ presidents turned the letter over to the chief of police but nothing more was heard from the society, if it actually existed in fact.

During April and May the police closed down Chinatown’s gambling houses as potential trouble spots during that riotous period. They were booming again by August—probably after a June or July payoff to politicians.

The hearings of the State Senate’s investigating committee on the Chinese question did not help matters any. The committee heard mostly biased, anti-Chinese witnesses, some of whose testimony was so wild it had to be stricken from the record. F. L. Gordon was one such muted star witness. He claimed that a Protestant missionary (Reverend Gibson?) was engaged in the business of selling Chinese women for the purpose of prostitution.

Civic leader Sam Brannan, the apostate Mormon Saint turned millionaire and a man who should have known better, advocated violence against the Chinese in May while the State Sunday school convention, perhaps eager for a crack at heathen souls, rose up in support of the Chinese against their persecutors. The Marin
Journal
did its bit to keep trouble brewing by crying out that the Chinese of San Francisco, “by a secret machinery of their own, defy the law and keep up the manners and customs of China and utterly disregard all the laws….” Police Judge Davis Louderback made a public statement that he thought the Chinese mendacious, but doubted very much that they had secret tribunals in the city.