Shanghai – First Impressions No.13 – Carroll Alcott Arrives to Annoy the Japanese, 1928

Posted: September 1st, 2013 | No Comments »

Cosmopolis on a Raft – Carroll Alcott – 1928

The station’s star was Carroll Alcott, originally from South Dakota and a former journalist on the Sioux City Tribune and the Denver Post before working his way around Asia for 15 years as the New York Herald Tribune’s Philippines correspondent and a reporter for the Manila Bulletin before finally moving to Shanghai in 1928. He freelanced breaking some good stories, notably about the opium business, German gunrunners, Japanese aggression in China and had once famously dined with a warlord in Chefoo (Yantai) while the blood of his recently executed enemies dripped from the floor above into his noodles and shredded beef. Alfred Meyer, the Managing Editor of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury had snapped him up to cover the Shanghai crime beat, a job Alcott revelled in noting that a typical day involved, ‘…as many as three murder trials, a gang shooting, half a dozen armed robberies, a jewel theft, and a couple of kidnappings.’ (14) In 1933, and by now one of the most widely read journalists on the China coast, he moved over to the China Press as their Cable Editor.

 

In 1938 Jack Horton, who ran the RCA-Victor factory in China suggested to Alcott he might like to replace XHMA’s former announcer Acheson Lucey, who had also been a print journalist on the Post and Mercury before trying his hand at radio. It hadn’t really worked out with Lucey who was heading back to America so a vacancy had occurred. XHMA’s manager Mike Healey thought Alcott would fit right in and all agreed that it was time for Americans to respond to Japanese propaganda broadcasts on the radio. As soon as Alcott arrived at XHMA the old China press corps network kicked in and corps members were regular guests on his radio shows. His reach was substantial through XHMA as both Shanghailanders and Chinese listened while cafes, shops, bars, hotels and casinos all kept the radio on all day for news of the deteriorating situation. The station’s signal reached across China and as far as Japan causing no end of annoyance to the Japanese authorities.

 

Alcott was modestly popular at first when he started broadcasting in July 1938 though as the situation wrosened he became a must listen to radio journalist and one of the greatest enemies of the Japanese in Shanghai. He also attracted a rather large and loyal following among women listeners (receiving 500 letters a month from fans) due to his charm (though he was actually quite fat and not particulaly attractive – a “great face for radio” as they say) and his shows were entirely funded by advertising from brands like Jell-O, Ovaltine and Maxwell House Coffee despite Japanese threats to punish those companies for sponsporing his broadcasts, which they regularly tried to jam. He managed to particularly annoy the sinister Mr Suzuki, who had vowed to run him out of town, with an advert declaring, ‘This broadcast is brought to you courtesy of the Bakerite Company, Shanghai’s leading bakers and makers of better bread. The jam tonight is courtesy of Mr Suzuki and the Japanese Army.’ (15) He was also well regarded by listeners for ignoring the official Japanese press releases but obviously, for the same reason, disliked by the Japanese military command. For the four years Alcott stayed on the air at XHMA he was extremely popular but also lived in fear of assassination the entire time. Indeed it didn’t start well. As Alcott was a well-known Shanghai print journalist his debut on XHMA was advertised widely around town but he was also well known for being anti-Japanese and pro the nationalist government. Three days before he was scheduled to debut on air a bomb was hurled at the studio that didn’t do much damage but did send a message that Alcott’s appointment was controversial with somebody.

Different From Any Other Section Of Time Or Space

Originally I had planned to stay a few weeks in Shanghai, spend a month or two touring China, and then return to the United States to write and talk about what I had seen. Instead, I made the trip and saw so much that I remained almost fourteen years. Old residents of the great metropolis will be able to understand why I did not go home. Others may not. It is enough to say that Shanghai, in the days when I first set foot on that city’s waterfront, was different from any other section of time or space.

It was the most cosmopolitan city on earth. More than sixty nationalities were represented in its population of five million people. Concentrated in an area of less than one hundred square miles was all the adventure, intrigue and novelty a newsman needed to make living a delight. Besides, living was cheap. Even a family in moderate circumstances could and did employ a retinue of servants for the wages of a single maid in New York or London, and perhaps less. During my last few years in the city, for instance, I kept a cook, a chauffeur, a houseboy, and an amah for the equivalent of less than thirty American dollars, and I paid as good wages as any other foreigner there.

But it was not by any means the attraction of cheap living, the idea of being waited upon by cooks, amahs, houseboys and coolies, that caused many of us to miss a lot of homeward-bound boats. It was the city itself.

Many volumes have already been written about Shanghai. Many more thousands of words on the same subject will be written in years to come. Much of this material will be new to the Occident, and all of it will be interesting, for no one man can adequately present in a single book, or even a dozen books, the story of Cosmopolis on the Whangpoo. Many writers have tried, and I think they have all failed. The best I can hope to do in a few chapters is to offer a handful of impressions.

 

To begin with, the scene in Shanghai changed from day to day, and though there were times when I found the city depressing, and even boring, that was because of my own mental condition. It wasn’t Shanghai’s fault. The very constitution of its people – its thousands of exiles from all parts of the world-the complex variations of its structure – the foreign and Chinese courts; crime and political terrorism; British, French, Japanese, Annamite, Indian and Chinese policemen; great wealth and extreme poverty; gaiety and hunger-presented an almost endless stream of human interest stories and new aspects to the business of living. Here you could see the struggle for existence stripped of all pretense and social niceties. Hunger dispenses with such matters, and there was always hunger in Shanghai. Yet there was a life of pretense, too, and great display of riches. This contrast was forever present. It was impossible to walk a block without seeing it.

My first day ashore in the city drove home to my mind the great importance of the rice bowl in Asia. I learned during the course of a few hours’ stroll that all the other problems of the Orient, even war, floods, earthquakes and every other calamity, fade into insignificance beside the business of eating. This fundamental human condition was not so apparent in the Philippines, where the natives’ standard of living has been raised as one result of the American occupation. The Filipinos drew larger wages and lived better than other Orientals. You had to visit the mainland of Asia to find out what real hunger meant.

 

On that memorable June day of my arrival, I paused on the sidewalk for a moment to enjoy my first sight of crowded Shanghai going home from work. It was a study in traffic jams, labor and ease, rags and fine silks. The streets were congested with all sorts of vehicles: automobiles, wheelbarrows, rickshaws, handcarts, bicycles, motorcycles, buses, trams, and ancient Victorian carriages drawn by Mongolian ponies. The latter conveyances were called “brokers’ hacks,” a nickname derived from the fact that they were used largely by the foreign financial leaders of the city. To ride about in such a contraption was a sign of affluence.

As Shanghai was a city of jaywalkers, native pedestrians gave scant attention to the crowded pavements and left the sidewalks to cross the streets at any point that suited their fancy. Old men and women, schoolgirls and children, darted in and out of traffic, crossing in front of automobiles and speeding bicycles. They blocked the way of handcarts and wheelbarrows and shouted curses at sweating coolies who refused to stop for them.

Because of this disregard for traffic regulations, casualty lists in street accidents in the larger cities of China mounted to terrific levels when automobiles appeared in the Orient. But even this fact failed to make much of an impression on the peasant and coolie classes. At least, I could notice little improvement even at the end of my fourteen years in the country. There were few days during that long period when I did not personally witness some accident in which a Chinese man or woman was killed by a truck or automobile. And such incidents were seldom the fault of the drivers.

 

The first of these tragedies that 1 saw was at the corner of Peking Road and the Bund, on my first day in the city. An aged Chinese woman was the victim. Carrying a large bowl of rice sprinkled with slices of pork, probably her evening meal, she stumbled and fell. The bowl broke and its contents were spilled on the pavement. Crying as though she had lost everything she owned in this world (and that might well have been the case), she struggled to her hands and knees. Then followed a sight 1 shall never forget, though I have seen it repeated many times since.

Using her cupped hands, the old woman proceeded to scoop up from the macadam pavement all she could salvage of the rice and pork, and with it came a good deal of coal dust, horse dung, and other filth. The whole of this foul mess she placed in a dirty cap removed from her head.

This was the first time 1 had ever seen real hunger, hunger so intense that it caused a human being to scrape up the filth of the pavement for a dinner. Giving no heed to the big limousine bearing down upon her, the old woman carried on with her task, tears streaming down her face. The meal had been ruined but she would eat it anyway. She wouldn’t go to bed hungry.

She was destined not to go to bed at all. The driver of the limousine saw her too late to stop. He shoved on the brakes, but the car slid ahead and over the body of the woman on the street. She was dead when they picked her up. Her back had been broken.

At the time, I thought it was one of the most horrible accidents I had ever seen. To my fellow witnesses, however, it seemed to bring no unusual amount of excitement or pity. I did not know then that such tragedies were commonplace in Shanghai, and I rather expected to see a reporter and photographer appear. I could picture the headline: “MILLIONAIRE’S CAR KILLS AGED WOMAN AS SHE SCOOPS DINNER FROM THE STREET.” Later I learned that Shanghai newspapers were not deeply interested in events of that sort. They had a dozen or more traffic accidents to cover every day, and unless the victims were people of prominence, a small roundup story stating the number of persons killed and injured was about all that got into print.

After several minutes a Chinese constable appeared on the scene, took the number of the car and the name of the chauffeur. Another Chinese, apparently the owner of the limousine, poked his head out of a rear-door window and wanted to know what had happened. Upon being told, he identified himself and settled back on the cushions. Neither his face nor his manner betrayed any evidence of concern. A few minutes later, not a sign of what had happened remained in the street. The body of the old woman had been removed to the morgue, and the limousine had disappeared into traffic.

In the moments following that accident, I was not sure that I was going to like Shanghai. You have to be callous, and perhaps just a trifle cruel, to stand the sort of thing I had just witnessed. I wondered whether I was tough enough to become accustomed to such incidents and take them in my stride. I found the answer to that query the same afternoon, only a few minutes later.

With my appetite for dinner completely gone, I continued my stroll, turned down the Bund, and walked across that picturesque thoroughfare to the customs jetty. I wanted a leisurely look at the Whangpoo River. It might, I thought, help to erase from my mind the picture of the old woman and her ruined dinner.

There was much to see on the river. Battleship Row with its warships of all nations was directly to the right. The men-of-war were there to protect foreign trade and shipping, by right of treaty with the Chinese Government of another day. Across the stream was Pootung, with its British cotton mills and busy docks. Downstream, the waterfront was lined with more docks, British, Japanese and American. The German, American and Japanese Consulates stood back from the foreshore just beyond the bend in the river.

The stream itself was crowded with traffic. Chugging tugboats hauled an almost endless procession of heavily laden barges. Big ocean-going liners and freighters, some headed out to sea, others just coming into port, gave evidence of the great importance of Shanghai as a commercial center. Here was industry and trade on a scale almost unparalleled elsewhere in the Orient. In the great activity of the waterfront and the river, the pitiful traffic accident that I had just seen lost its importance. I was beginning to feel hungry. My appetite had returned.

While I was pondering over the greatness of this metropolis in which I had just arrived, my attention was suddenly diverted to an old woman squatting on the river bank at the edge of the jetty. She seemed to be washing something, and it wasn’t clothing. It appeared to be some sort of stringy substance. Curious, I walked forward for a better look.

At her side was a small basket filled with what at first glance looked like small cords covered with coal dust. In front of her was a large bowl. Dipping a hand into the basket, she removed some strings and washed them in the dirty water of the Whangpoo. Then she placed them in the bowI. I noticed that when she had finished each operation the strings were a sort of muddy yellow color.

But they were not strings. Closer examination revealed that the old woman was scrubbing her dinner. The strings were noodles, covered with coal dust and filth. An American member of the Whangpoo River Police was standing nearby and I approached him for an explanation.

“The old girl is washing noodles she picked up from the streets and alleys,” came the casual reply. “Don’t let it turn your stomach, mister. She does it every day. That’s the way she lives. What she doesn’t eat she sells to street urchins for a few coppers.”

I wanted to know if such practice was general in the city, or elsewhere in China.

“I don’t know about the rest of the country,” he said, “but you’ll find many more along the Whangpoo about this time doing the same thing. Food hawkers drop the noodles in the streets while they’re hustling for business, and they get black because the coal trucks run over them. Not very good eating, I suppose, but in this country lots of folks eat what they can get and like it.”

I thanked the officer and started to walk away. He stopped me to volunteer a bit of added information:

“We pulled a corpse out of the river just a few yards from where the hag is washing her chow,” he said. “That was about an hour ago. We get about seven or eight dead bodies from this stream every day and the sewage and refuse of the whole area is dumped into it. Not a clean place to wash a meal.”

I took another look at the Whangpoo. It was a dirty stream; filthy, as a matter of fact. A few feet from shore a sampan coolie, squatting on the stem platform of his bobbing little boat, was brushing his teeth. Some missionary, perhaps, had taught him the habit, but it was difficult to understand how Whangpoo River water could be much of a cleansing agent.

I left the jetty and returned to the sidewalks of the Bund. To my surprise I was still hungry. It was then that I knew I was going to like Shanghai.

Carroll Alcott, My War With Japan (Henry Holt & Co., 1943, New York)

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