Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (23 page)

“Yes.”

“In a general way, will you state why the Federal and municipal authorities are unable to break up these organizations or to detect the offenders when a crime is committed?”

“Because the highbinders furnish witnesses and terrify witnesses that the State may rely upon.”

“What would be the result if some honest Chinaman would take the stand and give testimony against them?”

“He would be liable to forfeit his life.”

Thomas F. Turner therefore asked Congress to employ the strongest measures against the hatchet men. He reminded the legislators that 95 percent of them were either aliens or criminals of the worst type. According to Gardner, these 1,500 to 2,000 men constituted the entire criminal population of Chinatown and were responsible for at least 75 percent of all frauds against the Exclusion Act in addition to a whole catalogue of other crimes. “The thing which they fear above all others, holding it in greater dread than all of our laws, our courts and jails,” said Turner, “is deportation to China. The purpose of the highbinder, of the highbinder organizations, is vicious and criminal. Therefore,” he concluded, “they should be suppressed by law of Congress, and membership therein or in any society having for its purpose the commission of crime or the violation of our laws on the part of aliens residing in this country should render such aliens liable to deportation.”

While Turner urged these strong measures to put an end to the fighting tongs he was not sanguine of success. “The power of the highbinder tongs among the Chinese population is almost absolute,” he warned. “So great is the dread inspired among the Chinese by these societies that few have the courage to resist their criminal demands. The State and municipal authorities have been powerless to suppress the crimes of the highbinders for the reason that no Chinese witness has the courage to appear and give testimony against a highbinder. Every witness who should so appear and testify would be marked for death.”

Since this was indeed the case, San Francisco had to fumble along, depending on rumor and white witnesses and “experts” to fill them in on Chinatown’s underground tensions. However, there was still time for one more investigation—one more inquisition. This one was the most thorough job yet, and when it was over the police had a house-by-house map of Chinatown crime and vice to pore over and to base their raids upon. The last of the Chinatown crusaders was Willard B. Farwell. And it was he who became cartographer extraordinary to the San Francisco police department.

Farwell was an oldtimer in California, a pioneer with an adventurous and successful career in the State already behind him when he became a supervisor. Of English descent, his family had arrived in America about 1635. Among his antecedents were doughty Indian fighters. Doubtless this lineage contributed something of the drive and pugnacity which characterized him. Farwell was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, in 1829. Family financial conditions prevented his going to Harvard; instead he worked as a bookkeeper in Boston. But there he organized the first New England stock company of goldseekers after the California Gold Rush. He brought the members of the Boston and California Stock Mining and Trading Company to San Francisco on the
Edward Everett
in July, 1849, and tried his hand at mining, shipping, business and farming before going to San Francisco in 1852.

There he joined Frank Pixley and three other men in publishing the
Daily Whig.
While still in journalism he entered a career in politics by being elected an assemblyman on the Native American party ticket. His New England heritage was soon in evidence with his first crusade—a successful one—against gambling. In 1856, the Whig party nominated him for State Senator but he was defeated by the Democratic nominee. Farwell was bitter about this setback, claiming his Irish opponent had won solely because of “the foreign vote.” He turned back to journalism, founding a paper called the
Citizen,
but was soon made editor of the powerful and respected San Francisco Daily
Alta California.
The trend of the
Alta
toward conservatism and an anti-Chinese policy picked up speed with Farwell in the editorial chair.

He reentered politics and his star began to rise again. He went to Washington, D. C. in 1860, as Colonel E. D. Baker’s private secretary when Baker was elected senator from Oregon. In 1861, President Lincoln appointed him to the post of Naval Officer, United States Customs House, San Francisco. In this post Farwell was so diligent and efficient in uncovering revenue frauds that the Government ordered him to Europe to represent the United States in condemnation suits. He proved to Washington that he could smell out corruption in these Customs cases, and all of them were prosecuted safely, thanks to him. When his term of office expired he was appointed Resident Agent of the United States Treasury Department in Europe.

After five years in Europe on this roving commission, Farwell returned to the United States. He plunged into business and did not reenter politics until the ’80s when he was named chairman of the Republican County Committee in San Francisco and a member of the party’s State Central Committee. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1884 and quickly became the commonly acknowledged leader of that body of men both because of his drive and his wide and varied background in Government service. Although he was the most influential member of the board—particularly after his Chinatown report and map—he chose not to run again, but instead tried his hand at writing. He was successful in this and his articles appeared in
Forum, Overland Monthly, Century, Popular Science Monthly
and other major periodicals.

A serious, dedicated man, Farwell was generally liked. G. W. Sullivan described him as “cultured, and refined. His society is greatly enjoyed by his host of friends. Charming as a conversationalist, he nevertheless is unobtrusive both in speech and manner.” The only jarring note in the estimations of this civic figure came from Frederick Marriott, editor of the San Francisco
Newsletter.
In describing what must be considered Farwell’s masterpiece—the Board of Supervisor’s report of 1885 on Chinatown, master minded by him—Marriott not only denounced it as sensational and misleading but called many of Farwell’s charges “mastodon falsehoods.”

Just what did Farwell turn up in his ruthless expose? What was this special report which ripped the lid off Chinatown; which made Farwell briefly famous; and which—with its remarkable crime map of Chinatown—is still remembered by local historians?

The attention of the supervisors had been called frequently to the unsanitary, lawless firetrap which was Chinatown. Under Farwell’s rigorous prodding they determined to discover why the district’s evils were permitted to exist. They would also seek a course of action to correct these evils. By a board resolution of February 2, 1885, introduced by Farwell and adopted on his motion, a three-man committee was set up, headed by him. He quickly turned the committee into a one-man show. He went far beyond the main concern of the board (rattled by frequent scare rumors of plague) which was to survey “the foul and filthy condition of the premises in that quarter.” Farwell was more concerned with Chinese crime than with the Quarter’s lack of sanitation, although he, too, felt it was a serious menace to the health of the community at large. The wording of his resolutions was as follows:

Resolved,
That a committee of three be appointed whose duty it shall be to visit, thoroughly inspect and report upon that portion of the city commonly known as “Chinatown,” with a view of ascertaining so far as possible whether a condition of things exist in such quarter injurious to the public health or public morals, and what measures it may be necessary to adopt, if any, to correct abuses and abate public nuisances commonly supposed to exist in such district.

Resolved,
That the Chief of Police be, and hereby is, requested to aid and assist such committee in their labors to the utmost extent of his power, and to detail such officers as the committee may require to aid them in their labors.

Not all members of the Board of Supervisors were impressed with the importance and size of Farwell’s investigatory task. They first made a motion to call the Special Chinatown Committee to report on progress or completion of the investigation at the board’s May meeting. A second motion, to repeal the enabling or empowering resolutions, threatened to kill Farwell’s crusade before it was begun. But the tenacious Yankee fought for his plan and had the new resolution postponed indefinitely. He worked feverishly, and to be on the safe side, had his progress report in for the May 11th meeting.

At that time the board learned that the committee had made several visits to Chinatown, and more important, with hired special assistants had made a building-by-building survey of the twelve blocks which constituted Chinatown in 1885. The information was translated into a map which is now a classic of California. By using different colored inks in the printing of it, Farwell was able to show the board and the chief of police the geography of crime in Chinatown. There, in black and white and color were diagrammed the complexes of white and Oriental brothels, gambling dens, opium hang-outs and other features of Chinatown
criminalis.

Farwell and his colleagues first sought some way to reduce the much-protested health menace of the Quarter short of removing the people altogether, which was not deemed feasible by the chairman. Farwell may have been a fanatic but he was not bereft of common sense. He disclaimed any sympathy with the rabid portion of the populace which cried out against the Chinese and threatened physical force to eject them. The health threat was not entirely a straw bogy. In twelve years there were 72 cases of either leprosy or elephantiasis, most of whom were shipped home to China. But 9 of them died in the city’s smallpox hospital on Twenty-sixth Street.

The population of Chinatown was already spilling over the old boundaries of Broadway, California, Kearny and Stockton Streets, but the heart of the Quarter was the same dozen blocks as of old. Every room of every floor of every building of every block in the heart of Chinatown was visited by Farwell, his two colleagues, or the surveyors he employed. (The finished map showed only the character of the first-floor occupants.)

One of the by-products of the tours of inspection was the cleaning up of the district. The first visit by Farwell was an over-all survey of houses and shops. He reported streets and buildings to be “filthy in the extreme” and he worried in print about the precipitation of virulent epidemics upon the city from the litter and rubbish which caked the alleys, streets and courtyards. On subsequent visits he was surprised and pleased to see that many of the Chinese had cleared up their areas of garbage and debris, probably on the theory of an ounce of prevention, a pound of city hall cure. Farwell’s crusade had a salutatory effect on Chinatown immediately, but he predicted a speedy relapse. At the end of his crusade he described the area as still “the filthiest spot inhabited by men, women and children on the American continent.” (More than a decade later, with deputized wrecking crews, the Department of Health began to pull down the most rotten buildings of the area. The job was finished by the earthquake and fire in 1906.)

The squalor of Chinatown so depressed Farwell that he claimed officially in a municipal document that some humans—by which he meant San Francisco’s Chinese—lived in such degradation that they were scarcely a degree above the level of the rats of the Embarcadero.

Chinatown’s denizens proved far too slippery for an accurate census, so Farwell hit upon the expedient of counting every bunk in the district (beds were almost unknown) and multiplying them by two. He estimated that each pallet or bunk was occupied by at least two persons, sleeping in shifts. There is a good chance here that he underestimated, for there were probably frequent “relays” during the daylight hours. He was undoubtedly right when he ventured that there was not an hour of the day or night that all of crowded Chinatown’s bunks were not occupied by someone. Based on a tally of 15,180 bunks, Farwell came up with a figure of 30,360 Chinese in Chinatown as of 1885. For such a strangely arrived at figure this has the ring of accuracy, although Farwell himself feared he might have underestimated by as much as 20 percent. For one thing, there were many uncounted bedrolls in the buildings. In any case, Farwell flatly stated, in regard to his 30,360 figure, “Your committee believes this is the lowest possible estimate that can fairly be made.”

There was no shortage of prostitutes. Farwell came up with a figure of 567. With them were 87 unfortunate children. In one house alone, on Sullivan’s Alley, he found 19 prostitutes jammed in with 16 children. It was one of the most wretched tenements he saw.

Farwell went back to the two investigating committees of 1876 for added ammunition, but his report—though sprinkled with quoted passages from the earlier documents—was largely the result of his own diligence and zeal.

A “disgusting and surprising feature” of his tours of the streets of the singsong girls was the discovery that Chinatown was ringed by white prostitution. He did not attempt to enumerate the number of degraded Caucasian women in this line of business, but he confessed his shock at finding that “their mode of life seems to be modeled after that of the Mongolians to a larger extent than after the manners and customs of the race to which they belong.” (On the other hand, some. Oriental slave girls, as early as the ’70s, affected the hoops and crinolines of their white co-workers, although few abandoned the traditional gown and trousers of silk, and none the elaborate Chinese chignon.) Farwell lumped mistresses, concubines and common-law wives with prostitutes—for convenience’s sake and to doubly damn the handful of white women (11 in all) living permanently with Chinese, mostly on Commercial Street.