Carl Crow - A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times, and Adventures of an American in Shanghai

13. Back in the Newspaper Business

13 Back in the Newspaper Business 刃le depression caused a drop in club bar rece抄的 A Hack Again Briefly With Carl Crow Inc. a success, Carl felt secure enough to become invo1ved in a new newspaper venture. He was one of severa1 Americans who founded and edited the Shanghai Evening Post in 19291 with offices at 17-21 Avenue Edward VII. The paper was effective1y a reinvention of the former Shanghai Evening News that had been supported by the tycoon C. V. Sta汀. Crow founded the paper based on the princip1es he had 1eamt from Millard: essentially supportive of the Nationalist govemment and against Japanese militarism. The paper's major backer was Come1ius Vander Starr, or C. V. Starr, a 1eading life insurer in Asia. Originally from Fort Bragg on Califomia's Mendocino coast, after a period in the army Starr got a job with the Pacific Mai1 Steam Ship Company in Japan and arrived in Shanghai in 1919 as stenographer withjust 'Y'300 in his pocket. With Frank Jay Raven, another American who had come to Shanghai as an engineer in 1904, he founded American Asiatic Underwriters Federa1,2 which became extreme1y prosperous. Starr became wea1thy and was described by Fortune magazine as “Shanghai's most bullish Taipan,"3 investing heavi1y in the city through his Metropolitan Land Company (with offices close to Crow's own) and ho1ding the major share in Raven's Asia 172 CARL CROW - A TOUGH OLD CHINA HAND Realty Company. Starr lived with his maiden aunt on the eighth floor of the North-China Building (17 the Bund), where Asia Life and American Asiatic had offices. He was also something of a social reformer and gave equal working terms to his foreign and Chinese staff. Crow felt free to compete in the fiercely competitive Shanghai newspaper world. After Millard's departure and then financial difficulties under Chinese ownership, the China Press had come under the control of N. E. B.“Edward" Ezra, a prominent British Sephardi Jewish merchant and landowner who had accrued a fortune running the local Opium Monopoly until1917 and had a road named after him in Shanghai.4 Ezra knew something about newspapers as he had edited the locally-published Jewish paper Israel 's Messenger for many years.5 The Shanghai Evening Post continued to be a major evening paper in Shanghai through to the 1940s. The British soldier-tumed-joumalist Ralph Shaw who worked for the rival North-China Daily News described it as "a largecirculation evening newspaper ... whose editor-publisher Randall Chase Gould, was outspokenly anti-Japanese.叫 From the start the paper was strongly pro-Chinese though it looked thoroughly American and included agony aunt Dorothy Dix, crossword puzzles, Ripley's “Believe It or Not" and colurnns from half a dozen news syndicates. After briefly editing the paper himself, Crow had personally chosen his old acquaintance Randall Gould as editor. He had got to lmow Gould when the bulky Minnesotan had arrived in Beijing as a UP correspondent. Gould was a friend ofmany ofthe Missouri News Colony. He had worked as a news editor on the Japan Tim臼 in Tokyo in 1923-24 before becoming UP's roving bureau manager in Beiji嗯， Tianj妞， Shanghai and Manila in the late 192船， as well as the news editor of the Peking Dai鈔 News. Gould was hired in 1931 and stayed as editor ofthe paper for a decade as well as being a China correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. He eventually went on to write two books in the 1940s Chungking Today and China in the Sun. After Pearl Harbor, he retumed to America as the US editor ofthe Shanghai Evening Post (a paper that blatantly espoused America's wartime viewpoint in China), became President ofthe PostMercury Company in 1946 and th凹， in 1949, moved on to the editorial team at the Denver Post. Competition in the English language newspaper market in Shanghai remained s仕ong， given that there were just an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 potential native English readers plus a few thousand more who read English competently as a second or third language. The readership was growing with a new generation of English-speaking younger Chinese who had a greater interest in the outside world between the wars, but it was still a limited market. Crow estimated that BACK IN THE NEWSPAPER BUSINESS 173 a not inconsid巳rable portion of th巳 r巳ad巳rship w...