From the Archives: Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai
Speaking of the Japanese invasion of China as the possible beginning of World War II, as I believe we were, allow me to share a post from 2020 about a book that introduced me to a very specific piece of that story.
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I will admit that I approached historian James Carter’s book Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai with seriously mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I spent some time last year reading about the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s while I was working on a piece on self-styled “girl reporter” Peggy Hull I was eager to learn more. I have always been interested in the times and places where two cultures meet and change each other. Shanghai was definitely such a place. The fact that the book is World War II adjacent was a plus.
On the other hand, horse racing does not spark my imagination. And I knew going in that horse racing and horse-racing people would play a big role in the book.
Champion's Day met my expectations on all counts.
In November 1941, the International Settlement in Shanghai had stood as a "Lone Island" within Japanese-controlled China for four years—surrounded by Japanese forces yet protected from invasion by Japan's relationships with the countries whose nationals controlled it. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Shanghai's protected status crumbled. In Champion's Day, Carter explores the history of the city through the lenses of a single cultural institution, the Shanghai Race Club, and the events of a single day, November 12, 1941, when the club held its last Champion's Day races.
Taking the position that the Shanghai Race Club was the social heart of the International Settlement, Carter introduces readers to the world of Chinese pony racing in Shanghai: the breed, the owners, the horses, the jockeys, the gambling and the races themselves. He uses the rules for membership in the club and for attendance at its races as tools for understanding Shanghai's history and cosmopolitan culture. He explores the complexities of racism and wealth in Shanghai, looking at the European population of the International Settlement (and its flexible definition of Europe), the role of interracial elites in constructing Shanghai's international culture, and the attempts of the city's Westernized Chinese elites to integrate themselves into that culture.
The result is a nuanced history of a complex, multicultural city, which was created as a compromise between European imperialism and Chinese isolationism, and developed into something that was both and neither.
I was fascinated by Carter’s depiction of the city as a cultural jumble,* including the role horse-racing played in providing a shaky link between disparate populations. However, I reached the point where I was skimping over the descriptions of horse races. They were well written and I just didn’t care. I suspect the failing is mine and not Mr. Carter’s
*I don’t think you can call it a melting pot when the different components obdurately resist melting into each other.
Road Trip Through History: The National Museum of the Pacific War
At the end of February, My Own True Love and I spent ten days in Austin, Texas. We were there several years ago for a wedding. Though we managed to squeeze in a little history nerdery,* there was more we wanted to see. We swore we would go back when we had more time. Almost twelve years later, we made it.
One of the things at the top of our must-do list, right under dancing the two-step every chance we got,** was the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, which we had by-passed with regrets on our previous trip.*** It was worth the wait.
The museum draws heavily on modern exhibit technology, and uses it well. It also uses the old-school tool of a timeline which weaves through the museum from room to room, settings events in the exhibit in the broader context of world history. (I was amused to note that the Republic of Texas had a place on the timeline but the American Civil War did not.)
The first room effectively uses all the AV bells and whistles to place the war in the Pacific within the larger scope of World War II—a useful introduction even for those of us who have spent a lot of time steeped in the history of the war.
The next section, titled Seeds of Conflict, looks at relationships between Japan, China, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, beginning in the early nineteenth century and ending with the fall of Shanghai, the Rape of Nanking, and the occupation of Manchuria in 1937. As far as I was concerned, this was the most powerful section of the museum, because it told the story of Japan’s transformation from “closed” world of the Shogunate to the militarization and expansionism that led to its invasion of China in 1931**** and ultimately to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The museum devotes a small exhibit to America’s political stance toward Japan in 1939 and 1940, which included cancelling trade agreements and embargoing the sale of high-grade scrap metal and gasoline. (New to me. And definitely not an act of neutrality.) It paints a picture of life in American in 1940, including but not limited to our lack of military preparedness.
Visitors move out of the small scale and quiet of the exhibit on peacetime America to a large dark room dedicated to a dramatic presentation on the attack on Pearl Harbor--the change in intensity in some ways echoes the shock of the actual event. From there, the museum follows the war in the Pacific campaign by campaign. (A few side rooms look at events in the United States, but that isn’t the main focus. ) Detailed descriptions of troop movements are accompanied by vignettes about individual participants and colorful details. The result is powerful and fascinating.
There are several additional exhibits on the museum campus: a gallery devoted to Admiral Nimitz’s life, several memorial gardens, an exhibit on aviation in the Pacific, and an immersive exhibit called The Rescue, based on a book of the same name by Steven Trent Smith. We didn’t get to most of the extra exhibits—the main museum was a full day event for us. But we started our day at The Rescue, and we were glad we did. It tells the real-life story how an American submarine rescued forty Americans, including 28 women and children and three Bataan survivors, who were stranded on Negros. (They incidentally rescued a box of top secret documents as well.) Led by one of the children, visitors creep through the jungle to the beach, board the submarine, and encounter a Japanese submarine. It was a surprisingly emotional experience, though I was distracted by how clean, coifed, and well dressed the women and children were.
Two thumbs up from each of us. Which would make four thumbs. But who’s counting?
*The Alamo! The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library! The Bullock State Historical Museum. (Why no exclamation mark? Because we totally forgot that we had been there. Even after spending a day in the museum on this trip, I had no memory of the visit until I searched in the History in the Margin archives for what I had written about the previous trip. I stand by the account I wrote then.)
**How many times did we get to a dance hall? None. Sandy got food poisoning (or perhaps the flu) which wiped him out for a couple of days,Then I came down with a nasty cold. Such are the hazards of road trips.
***Why is there a major museum about the Pacific theater of operations in Texas, we wondered. Because Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander of the Pacific Fleet and of all forces in the Pacific theater in WWII, was a Fredericksburg boy. He ended up in the navy by chance. Unable to get into West Point, he accepted a slot at the Naval Academy as his second choice.
****Arguably the true beginning of World War II.
Five Television Milestones We Owe to Irna Phillips, A Guest Post by Alina Adams
Everyone has watched a soap opera. Whether they did it faithfully for multiple decades, went through a phase in high school or college or when home with small children, or just on a sick day when they didn’t have the strength to lift a finger to change channels with their remote control, no one in America is unaware of programs like The Guiding Light, As the World Turns, General Hospital, All My Children or Days of Our Lives.
What very few people do know, however, is that the entire genre was invented by a women named Irna Phillips, and that, thanks to her, we have the following TV tropes that seem so obvious as to now be taken for granted:
Normalizing Single Mothers
Irna Phillips was born in 1901. At the age of 18, she found herself unmarried and pregnant. When her baby’s father refused to acknowledge paternity, Irna took him to court and, shockingly for the time, won! Her own son was stillborn, but, for the rest of her life and career, Irna would not only be sympathetic to the plight of single mothers, but she would champion them. One of her very first stories for the radio version of The Guiding Light (GL) in 1948, featured unmarried Meta Bauer first giving her child up for adoption, then going to court to win him back from his foster parents. One of her final stories for As the World Turns (ATWT) in 1973 featured Kim, another single mother who resolved to keep her baby no matter what. Irna said that she based Kim on herself, planning that Kim’s story would be what hers might have been if her son had lived. However, Procter & Gamble, ATWT’s sponsor, ended up firing Irna from the show she’d created, and the subsequent writers killed off Kim’s child. Irna died of a heart attack a few months later. (In a soapy postscript, in 1986, another set of writers penned a tale where Kim’s stillborn son was really a living daughter who’d been spirited away and raised in England, where she was now a fully grown Julianne Moore!)
Letting Fans Dictate the End of the Story
While Kim got her happy ending, poor Meta did not. Yes, she reclaimed custody of her son, Chuckie. But Chuckie’s biological father, Ted, then treacherously wed Meta so he could eventually have the boy for himself. Chuckie was sweet, sensitive and artistic. Ted didn’t like that. He forced Chuckie to take boxing lessons to keep him from being a “sissy.” Chuckie tripped over the ropes, hit his head and died. Meta blamed Ted. So she shot and killed him. When the grieving mother went on trial in 1950, Irna came up with the concept of letting listeners be the jury and decide Meta’s guilt or innocence. Over 75,000 fans sent letters and telegrams, acquitting Meta by a margin of one hundred to one. The next time you vote someone off an island or choose your “American Idol,” think of Irna Phillips!
Changing Mediums
The Guiding Light began on radio, where it was a runaway hit. But Irna thought it had the potential to be a success on television, as well. When Procter & Gamble didn’t agree, she spent her own money to produce a pilot and demonstrate how it would work. Guiding Light premiered on CBS in 1952 and remained on the air until 2009. Thanks to it, Days of Our Lives was able to transition from NBC, where it had aired since 1965, to Peacock in 2022, where it has been a streaming success ever since.
Women Led Shows
When GL transitioned from radio to television, it did so with Bertha (Bert) Bauer, played by Charita Bauer, front and center. When, in 1965, Our Private World became the only primetime show to spin off a daytime one, ATWT’s woman you love to hate, Lisa, played by Eileen Fulton, was the headliner and main draw.
Social Issues
In addition to single mothers, Irna wrote daytime’s first abortion story on Another World in 1964, as well as tackleing taboo topics like divorce, and the struggles of veterans coming home from World War II. In 1962, one of her protegees, Agnes Nixon, wrote a groundbreaking story where GL’s Bert went for her first pap smear, was diagnosed with early stage uterine cancer, and was successfully treated. Doctors from across the country reported thousands of women suddenly coming in for the screening. When asked why, they replied, “Because I saw it on Guiding Light!” In the same vein, in 1983, Nixon, who’d also created All My Children and One Life to Live, debuted her newest soap, Loving, which featured a story of a teenage girl being raped by her father. Six months later, ABC wanted to promote their primetime movie, Something About Amelia, as the first time any network had dared tackle such a sensitive subject. They were none too pleased to learn that they’d actually already been playing the story out daily, and ordered Loving to terminate the story line. Thanks to the legacy of Irna Phillips, ABC was tackling social issues before they even knew they were doing it!
Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap-opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her May 2025 historical novel, Go On Pretending, features Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon in supporting roles during the fraught days of radio soap operas transitioning to television, with secrets, scandals, and illicit romance a-plenty! Read more at: https://www.historythroughfiction.com/go-on-pretending
