Читать книгу Korea's Syngman Rhee - Richard C. Allen - Страница 13

3 : The Common Enemy

AS SYNGMAN Rhee watched Korea’s west coast fade into the horizon from the deck of the S. S. Ohio he was hopeful that, away from the historic rivalries of north Asia, Korea might find an ally and protector in the United States. Was there not the treaty of 1882 pledging “amity and friendship” between the Korean and the American peoples? Had not Minister Allen included the United States among treaty powers who stood prepared to use good offices on behalf of Korea?

In fact, however, Rhee’s mission was foredoomed. In the United States the Roosevelt administration was actively interested in a settlement of the Russo-Japanese War, but largely in terms of the prestige which would accrue to the United States through the proffering of its good offices. In any case, President Roosevelt looked with favor on the Japanese, while the decadence of the Korean court encouraged a general belief that Japanese rule would benefit the Korean people.

Even apart from these extenuating circumstances, it was hardly realistic to expect that an America still shackled by nineteenth-century isolationism would be willing to guarantee the independence of a country unknown to most of its people and unrelated to its national interest. Syngman Rhee, however, knew little of either American diplomacy or popular attitudes. If there was any hope for Korea in 1904, it had to be the United States. Great Britain had recognized Japan’s “special interests” in north Asia the previous year. China had long since been eliminated as a guarantor of Korean independence, and now Russia was on the verge of a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese.

In Hawaii and Los Angeles, Rhee was welcomed by Korean nationalists, and various American missionaries lent encouragement. But the Roosevelt administration in Washington, assuming the role of peacemaker between Japan and Russia, had come to view Korea less as a sovereign state than as the legitimate spoils of victory, a factor capable of manipulation in the peace settlement. Into this situation Rhee brought a crusading zeal for his country and a single-minded belligerence that made it remarkable that he got as far as Oyster Bay.

Rhee arrived with letters of introduction to Senator Hugh A. Dinsmore of Arkansas, a one-time American minister in Seoul who had maintained an interest in Korea and who arranged an interview with Secretary of State John Hay. Characteristically, Rhee interpreted Hay’s assurances that the U.S. was mindful of its treaty as a guarantee of American support.

Rhee had left Lee Chung-hyuk in Los Angeles, but in Washington he was joined by Yoon Pyung-ku, a Honolulu minister who along with Rhee had been chosen by Koreans in Hawaii to petition Theodore Roosevelt on behalf of their country. After calling on Philip Jaisohn in Philadelphia, Rhee and Yoon journeyed to Oyster Bay, where they were received by Roosevelt on the eve of the Portsmouth conference. The president, effusing enthusiasm and protestations of friendship for Korea, saw them briefly. He declined to accept a written petition, however, on grounds that it should be sent through diplomatic channels.¹

As far as its having any effect on Korea’s fate was concerned. Rhee’s mission was a failure. Even before he saw Roosevelt, William Howard Taft was en route to Tokyo to sign an agreement acknowledging Japan’s interests in Korea. But Rhee did not know this.

In Washington, Rhee continued to receive backing from a number of Protestant clergymen, some of whom had heard favorable accounts of him from colleagues in Seoul. For a time, Rhee considered attending a theological seminary. He probably recognized, however, that full-time ministerial duties would allow little time for political activity. In addition, his academic interests were outside the range of the usual theological curriculum.

Although he entered George Washington University on a ministerial scholarship in February 1905, he continued to devote much of his time to agitation on behalf of Korea. Little is known of Rhee’s activities in this period, but that he was a source of annoyance to American officials is suggested by a comment from Minister Allen in Seoul, who wrote apologetically to Senator Dinsmore: “I refused to give Ye Sung Mahn a letter to a single person in America and tried to keep him from going.”²

At George Washington, Rhee’s subjects included English, European and American history, and philosophy. Although he had been admitted as a sophomore in recognition of his studies in Seoul, his marks were generally indifferent. The foreign student is recognized as often being at a disadvantage in an American university, but Rhee’s mediocre record is not without some significance. Although he would later earn a Ph.D. at Princeton, and at the height of his political career would prefer the title of “Doctor” to that of “President,” little in Rhee’s career shows him as a profound thinker. Rather, his early career is marked by singleminded devotion to an ideal—Korean independence—and hostility towards every peril, real or imagined, which threatened this ideal.

Rhee supported himself at George Washington through lectures on “Korea, Land of the Morning Calm.” But in his homeland the struggle to resist the Japanese was in its final throes. The Portsmouth treaty in September 1905 brought general recognition of Japan’s “paramount” interest in Korea. Horace Allen, lobbying for Korea in Washington since his replacement as American minister, regretfully returned his operating funds to the Yi emperor with the remark that the cause was hopeless. In November 1905, Tokyo spelled out its demands for a virtual protectorate over Korea. At first the emperor refused to consent, but when the palace was surrounded by Japanese soldiers, when government ministers were beaten, and when the emperor himself was threatened, the Japanese emerged with the imperial signature.

In a final gesture, the emperor sent a new appeal to the United States, telling Roosevelt that the protectorate had been agreed to under duress. To convey the message he chose Homer B. Hul-bert, a Seoul missionary and editor, who agreed to make a secret trip to Washington. In America, however, Hulbert was able to see neither the president nor the secretary of state; the American position was that since the protectorate had been established, the emperor could not make his own representations. The fact was that the last years of the Yi dynasty had been so ineffectual that few Americans, outside of court favorites such as Allen and Hulbert, were sympathetic to the emperor. Most foreigners in Seoul looked with favor on the protectorate, while international opinion had been conditioned by the reports of observers such as George Kennan:

“The Korean Government . . . [comprises] (a) the Emperor’s Cabinet, consisting of nine ministers; (b) the sorcerers, soothsayers, fortunetellers, and mudangs or spirit mediums, who influence and often control legislation; (c) the governors of the thirteen provinces; and (d) the magistrates or prefects of the 344 prefectures into which the provinces are divided. All the official positions in classes (c) and (d) are nominally filled by Imperial appointment, but the selection of appointees is subject to court influence, “pull,” or intrigue, and, as a rule, the offices are sold to the highest bidder. Provincial governors pay from ten thousand to forty thousand Korean dollars for their places, and then not only recoup themselves but amass fortunes by robbing the defenseless people whom they are sent to govern. As there are no independent law courts, and as every governor or prefect is a judge as well as an administrator, a Korean who is robbed must seek redress from the robber. . . .

“The activities and operations of the existing Korean Government may briefly be summarized as follows: it takes from the people, directly and indirectly, everything that they earn over and above a bare subsistence, and gives them in return practically nothing. It affords no adequate protection to life or property; it provides no educational facilities that deserve notice; it builds no roads; it does not improve its harbors; it does not light its coasts; it pays no attention whatever to streetcleaning or sanitation; it takes no measures to prevent or check epidemics; . . . it corrupts and demoralizes its subjects by setting them examples of untruthfulness, dishonesty, treachery, cruelty, and a cynical brutality in dealing with human rights that is almost without parallel in modern times.^*

As significant as Kennan’s excoriation of the Korean government was the fact that his judgment of the Korean people gave little hope of reform from within:

“The first impression that the Korean people make upon an impartial and unprejudiced newcomer is strongly and decidedly unfavorable. . . . The domestic environment and personal habits of the lower classes are filthy and repulsive in the extreme; the moony expressionless faces of the petty officials and gentlemen of leisure who saunter through the streets fanning themselves or smoking long-stemmed pipes show no signs of character or traces of experience; and the unemployed workingmen in dirty white cotton jackets and baggy trousers, who lie here and there on the ground with flies crawling over their closed eyelids, do not compare at all favorably with the neat, alert, industrious laborers of Japan. . . .

“As one’s field of observation widens, so as to take in country as well as town, and to include moral as well as physical and intellectual characteristics, one’s first impressions harden and one’s bad opinion of the people settles into a conviction. . . . They are the rotten product of a decayed Oriental civilization.”³

If Kennan was not an entirely impartial observer, articles such as his nonetheless made it difficult for Rhee to get much sympathy for his country in the United States. Moreover, it was true that when the Japanese resident-general arrived in Seoul in 1906, most foreigners there welcomed the change. Rhee graduated from George Washington in the spring of 1907, shaken by Korea’s fate and uncertain as to his own future. Although committed to the Methodist Mission Board to return to Korea on its behalf, he determined to do postgraduate work in the United States and was admitted to Harvard University.

At Harvard Rhee lived in seclusion, “forming no lasting friendships while there and entering not at all into the social life of the college.”⁴ His academic work improved, however, and he began to read extensively in international relations. When he received his master’s degree in the spring of 1908, unstable conditions in his homeland reinforced his new-found academic interests and prompted him to continue his education. At first Rhee decided to do graduate work at Columbia. At the last minute, however, a friend persuaded him to enroll at Princeton.

Rhee’s two years at Princeton appear to have influenced him more than any of his previous schooling. The president of Princeton at that time was Woodrow Wilson, whose later eloquence on behalf of national self-determination Rhee would often cite. As at Harvard, Rhee was withdrawn from the student body, but he became a faculty favorite. He attracted the attention of Wilson himself, who provided him with a letter of recommendation for speaking engagements which cited him as “a man of strong patriotic feeling and of great enthusiasm for his people.”⁵

Rhee received his doctorate in 1910, the year in which Japan formally annexed its Korean protectorate. By this time the Japanese were well on their way to making Korea a case study in the reprehensible aspects of colonialism. While humiliating the Korean people at every turn, they went about their plan to turn Korea into a major supplier of food and raw materials to their home islands. Physical improvements made by the Japanese were of little benefit to the Koreans; railroad construction was to facilitate the movement of exports to ports such as Inchon and Pusan, and sanitary measures were to make Seoul habitable for Japanese officials. As for the Koreans, it was already apparent that seldom had they ever been united for anything as they were united against the Japanese.

Even prior to annexation there were uprisings among the politically volatile Koreans. An insurrection by a partisan “Righteous Army” in 1906 was not brought under control for two months. The abdication of the emperor the following year brought riots and demonstrations in Seoul. In 1909, a young Korean nationalist assassinated the Japanese resident-general, Prince Ito, in Harbin. From July 1907 to the end of1908, according to Japanese figures, nearly 15,000 Korean insurgents were killed and nearly 9,000 taken prisoner.

Japan’s formal annexation of Korea came as something of an anticlimax. The Japanese made the abdicated emperor a prince in their own imperial household and bought off leading members of the Korean court with large monetary grants. But beneath the new trappings Korea was under the absolute control of a governor-general who was responsible only to the Japanese emperor and whose centralized control reached down to the smallest county and village.

Although Korea would have presented problems to the most skillful colonizer, so heavy-handed were the Japanese that they succeeded in unifying Korean nationalist sentiment after Korea’s own nationalists had failed. Japanese economic exploitation was so overt that it could be recognized as such by the simplest Korean peasant. The scheme of a group of officially backed Japanese financiers to monopolize Korea’s underdeveloped land came in for bitter criticism after a number of tracts of land had been turned over at a fraction of their actual value.

Measures aimed at destroying Korea as a national entity were an unnecessary aggravating factor. Under the Japanese the Korean language was dropped from the school curriculum. Koreans were forced to adopt not only Japanese citizenship but also Japanese names. When he became president of South Korea, one of Rhee’s major concerns would be measures to preserve the country as a cultural and national entity in the face of any future encroachments by the Japanese and the Russians.

In the period immediately following his graduation from Princeton, Rhee appears to have seriously considered abandoning his role as patriot-in-exile. With Korea’s political fortunes at a nadir, Rhee’s missionary friends urged him to devote himself to church work. Rhee himself, having enjoyed his years in America, found it difficult to dispute those who pictured the fruitlessness of agitating for a lost national cause.

With mixed emotions Rhee finally accepted a job with the Seoul Y.M.C.A., a step which required his returning to live under Japanese rule. On his return to Korea in the winter of 1910, via Europe and Russia, he moved into the Rhee family home with his father. Although presumably under surveillance by the Japanese, Rhee was not molested.

Rhee might have continued in social work in his homeland but for his fears in connection with Japanese harassment of Korean Christians. By the fall of 1911, rumors were rife that, as part of the Japanese campaign to stamp out foreign influence, Christian churches in Korea would have their charters revoked and be placed under Japanese administration. With little warning, 135 leading Korean Christians were arrested on charges of a “conspiracy” to assassinate the governor-general.

Pressure from Western church circles forced reduction of the severe sentences which had been meted out to the Korean churchmen, but Rhee, fearful that he might be next, determined to leave Korea for good. He left his homeland with probably little hope of seeing it again, but with recognition that as long as Korea remained under the Japanese he would be far better off in the West.

Not long after Woodrow Wilson reached the White House, his doctrines of self-determination became known in Korea, where the Fourteen Points served to remind the people of a national heritage dissipated by Korea’s own rulers. In addition, the death of the deposed emperor in January 1919 gave rise to a surge of patriotic feeling. Whatever the shortcomings of the Yi dynasty, it had at least meant rule of Korea by Koreans.

4. Syngman Rhee (right front) with a group of students at Princeton University in 1910, the year in which Rhee received his doctorate and Japan formally annexed Korea. It was at Princeton that Rhee became a faculty favorite and attracted the attention of Woodrow Wilson, who cited him as “a man of strong patriotic feeling and of great enthusiasm for his people.” (Pacific Stars and Stripes Photo)

On March 1, 1919, thirty-three leading Koreans met in the Bright Moon Cafe in Seoul, where they signed a declaration of Korean independence which was then read to crowds in the street. Demonstrations spread from Seoul to the countryside, with marching crowds waving long-concealed Korean flags and chanting: “Mansei!” (May Korea live ten thousand years!) To underscore the peaceful character of the demonstrations, and with the hope of bringing world opinion to bear on the Japanese, the signatories of the declaration immediately surrendered themselves to the Japanese. Although there were some cases of Korean-instigated violence, the peaceful character of the demonstrations was generally maintained.

The Japanese reaction to the Mansei uprising was swift and cruel. According to Japanese figures, 553 Koreans were killed, over 1,400 wounded, and over 10,000 flogged. In retrospect, prospects for outside intervention were so poor in 1919 that the uprising was clearly ill-timed. The armistice had taken its toll of the Wilsonian idealism which had marked the war years, while Japan had emerged from the war with sufficient prestige that none of the Allies were anxious to antagonize Tokyo. When Rhee had sought to lobby for Korea at Versailles in 1918, he had been refused an American passport lest his presence there embarrass the Japanese.^*

To the Koreans, the dignity which marked the nation-wide passive resistance has given it a special place in Korean history. In both its peaceful character and the popular backing it received, the Mansei uprising was a high point in the Korean independence movement. Henceforth the independence movement would be noteworthy not for its unity but for its factionalism. Foreign influences, particularly communism, would sap the movement of its purely nationalistic aspect. In the place of passive resistance, violence would become a hallmark of Korean exiles.

The aftermath of the uprising, however, was noteworthy for the formation of a provisional Korean government. A group of independence leaders, meeting in Seoul in April 1919, formed a Korean Provisional Government with Syngman Rhee as president. Although the Provisional Government had not in any sense been elected by the Korean people, appointment of Rhee as its president was recognition of his growing stature in the independence movement. His role in the new government provided a quasi-official basis for his diplomatic representations on behalf of Korea over the next three decades.

The Provisional Government began as essentially a triumvirate of Kim Koo, Ahn Chang-ho, and Rhee, although as time went on, others would play an increasing role. Kim, as premier, established close links with the Chinese Nationalists, and in the 1930’s strongly supported Sino-Korean guerrilla activities against the Japanese, while directing assassinations which made him, among the Japanese, the most feared of all Korean exiles. Ahn Chang-ho, leader of the Western-oriented Young Korea Academy (Hungsadan) faction, spent much of his time in Hawaii but was closely associated with underground activity in Korea itself until his death in 1939. Rhee, who was popularly regarded as being on friendly terms with President Wilson, operated largely in the United States. The Provisional Government was controlled from Shanghai, and tended to reflect more the leadership of Kim Koo than of Rhee.

Rhee had left Korea in the spring of 1912, with his nomination as Korean delegate to a Methodist convention in Minneapolis providing him passage. There he first manifested a lifelong penchant for using any available forum for political purposes by delivering a ringing denunciation of the Japanese, which drew severe criticism for endangering missionary activities which had to be carried on under the occupation.⁶

Rhee could not earn a living from his speeches, however, and in 1913 accepted a job as principal of a Korean-language school in Hawaii. The islands would be his home until shortly prior to World War II; they would also be the breeding ground for rivalries—both within and without the framework of the Provisional Government—which would largely dominate post-liberation politics in Korea. In Hawaii as well as in Washington, Rhee would earn his reputation as the stormy petrel of Korean independence.

* Andrew J. Grajdanzev, Modern Korea (New York, 1944), pp. 34-35. Kennan, a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, was the uncle of America’s erstwhile ambassador to the Soviet Union and was frequent contributor to Outlook, the magazine in which this article appeared.

* Although Rhee was in the United States at the time of the Mansei uprising and played no role in the events of 1919, spokesmen for the Rhee government encouraged references to him as a “leader” of the revolt. When Rhee was forced to abdicate in 1960, at least one wire service story characterized him as having led the 1919 uprising.