Word: hatchetmen
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Chinese. Only in curio-shops and such tourist centres do the sightseers glimpse a tawdry replica of the surroundings in which mandarins once paraded their gorgeous costumes on Chinese festival-days, in which painted, gold-spangled girls were sold for hundreds of dollars, in which wide-sleeved, colorful hatchetmen fought slyly for the sake of their Tongs...
...organized in San Francisco's Chinatown several years before the Civil War to protect its members from the invasion of competitors in business, from legal injustice (or justice). So effective was it that rival or imitative tongs were soon found wherever there were Chinese colonies. Tong leaders began employing hatchetmen (boo how doy), gun- men who managed the affairs of brainier tong leaders, terrorized respectable citizens, puzzled the constabulary. Gory, clever, macabre, the tong wars of the early twentieth century had much the same effect on the U. S. public as Chicago's gang-battles; they turned harmless laundrymen into...