AmCham Shanghai 100th Anniversary – A Few Extras #3 – AmCham to Carl Crow and Hallett Abend, “Shut Up”

The American Chamber of Commerce is celebrating its 100th anniversary and has been posting rather a lot of interesting articles on the glorious history of Americans in Shanghai. But they’ve been rather judiciously edited to prevent any talk of disagreements among the Americans in Shanghai. It seems worthwhile telling a few extra tales that somehow slipped off the official record! Journalists were a particular bête noire of the AmCham Big Cheeses (see their attempt to expel JB Powell yesterday).

And so talking of journalists running into trouble with the AmCham, today one of my Shanghai heroes Carl Crow, intrepid American Journalist and pioneering adman in the city – the article is here.

The AmCham are, of course, quite right to describe Crow as “One of our early celebrity members…” – he was indeed, as well as being a pioneering adman in China, hostage negotiator also….a lifelong friend of AmCham Shanghai Black Hats Target No.1 J.B. Powell. After the AmCham, then in the thrall of the corrupt businessman Frank Jay Raven, attempted, in contravention of their own constitution, to expel Powell, Crow, like Powell, had little-to-nothing more to do with the organisation and openly criticised it for being reactionary, anti-Chiang Kai-shek and against the Republic – all of which AmCham decidedly was. Crow, like Powell too, also felt that the Shanghai AmCham was too soft on Japan and failed to recognise the serious threat Tokyo offered to China’s liberty. Of course Powell and Crow were right and the AmCham wrong on that one – very, very right and very, very wrong respectively.

And so at the start of 1937 Crow was working on a book to be called The Chinese Are Like That, another attempt by him to win over American public opinion to the cause of China, the dangers of Japanese militarism and to try and engender additional respect for China in the US among mainstream readers. Though the book was not published until 1943 it does reflect how enthusiastic Crow was regarding China and Shanghai back in 1937 and how he understood clearly the threat Japan posed to China. But, when it came to the Shanghai AmCham, talking about Japan’s overt militarism and clear expansionist aims was still, as late as the summer of 1937, both unfashionable and considered unhelpful to American business interests and they set about trying to silence anyone who raised the issue.

In January Crow was rebuked in a letter from one of the founders of the American Chamber and the then US Commercial Attaché in Shanghai, Julean Arnold, requesting that he soften his public criticisms of Japan. Arnold claimed that Crow was being un-American (a term that would later come to instil fear in many China Watchers hearts when the arguments over ‘Who Lost China?’ appeared along with a certain Senator from Wisconsin) and that his patriotic duty was to soft peddle on Japan in the interests of, of course, American business. Crow refused but did keep the letter (dated 15 January 1937 from Arnold of the AmCham to Crow contained in the Carl Crow Archive, folder 133 – this archive can be accessed either at the University of Missouri’s Western Historical Manuscripts collection or, in replica form, in the Royal Asiatic Society’s Shanghai library). Another journalist (and a great American reporter), Hallett Abend of the New York Times, reported large and threatening Japanese troop build-ups in Korea and Manchuria around the same time and was chastised for his reporting by the American Chamber in Shanghai as being “alarmist”.

In July 1937 Japan launched attacks against Peking and Tientsin and captured those cities. On “Bloody Saturday” August 14th 1937 Japan began its attack against Shanghai and on December 13th began the six week terror of the Rape of Nanking….just months after AmCham asked Crow and Abend to keep quiet!

Crow – un-American?? We think no; AmCham shamefully thought yes

Hallett Abend – “alarmist” said AmCham; but more a prescient warning from a great reporter