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

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    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