How Syngman Rhee's success led to Korea's division

The cover of "Foreign Friends ― Syngman Rhee: American Exceptionalism and the Division of Korea" by David Fields

By Matt VanVolkenburg

As implied in the title of David P. Fields' book "Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea," it offers a new interpretation of one of the most controversial topics in the study of modern Korean history: the division of Korea in 1945.

In addition to serving as a biography of Syngman Rhee's life before 1945 and narrating a history of the Korean independence movement in the U.S., the book also highlights the ways in which Rhee invoked the idea of the American mission in front of American audiences in order to gain their support.

Rhee himself was a beneficiary of American missionary work in Korea. He was saved from blindness as a child by Western medicine and educated at the missionary-run Pai Chai Mission School. There he was converted to political liberalism which led him to participate in a campaign to reform the monarchy. As a result of this agitation he was arrested and tortured for months. He later converted to Christianity.

After his release in 1904, he went to study in the U.S. armed with letters of introduction from missionaries. While there he met with President Roosevelt and, invoking the "good offices" clause of the 1882 treaty between the U.S. and Korea, asked Roosevelt to lodge a complaint on Korea's behalf at the Portsmouth Peace Conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Roosevelt's failure to do so helped pave the way for the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, and would later be cited by Rhee as the first act of appeasing Japan that led to Pearl Harbor.

The book documents how Rhee began using church networks in the U.S. to give speeches during this period, but it was after the March 1 Movement in 1919 that Rhee was pushed into a flurry of activity as the first president of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Through newspaper coverage and lectures which brought the issue of Korean independence to the attention of perhaps half a million Americans, Rhee and other activists were able to build a constituency of American supporters, including senators and congressmen.

Rhee helped establish the Korean Commission to America and Europe on Aug. 25, 1919, in Washington, D.C. This lobbying group successfully inserted Japanese brutality in Korea into the debate over U.S. entry into the League of Nations and unsuccessfully sought Korean representation at the 1921 Washington Naval Conference. In 1933 Rhee traveled to Geneva, where he tried to lobby the League of Nations after Japan's invasion of Manchuria. Though he was politically unsuccessful there (and in Moscow, from where he was almost immediately deported), his efforts made Japanese barbarity in Korea part of the public record.

The Korean independence movement may not have led directly to the liberation of Korea in 1945, but in addition to highlighting a number of forgotten successes, Fields clearly lays out the challenges faced by the movement due to its members being dispersed across several countries, which made it difficult to stay in touch with each other, let alone the masses in Korea.

In 1941, Rhee published the book "Japan Inside Out" that predicted an attack by Japan on the U.S., and Rhee was soon proven right. In his public lectures and lobbying after Pearl Harbor, Rhee claimed it was Americans' moral responsibility to make up for the past by recognizing the Korean Provisional Government, which could provide manpower to fight the Japanese in Korea. This message garnered support from the public, but the State Department, worried about how allies like China and Soviet Union might react and wishing to avoid a possible post-war entanglement, balked at the idea.

Pushing for official action, Rhee went on the offensive in 1945 and claimed that the U.S. had agreed at the Yalta Conference to turn Korea over to the USSR after the war. The ruse worked, and in the following months a number of senators and congressmen, wanting to make sure the U.S. did not betray Korea again, made it clear that abandoning Korea to the USSR would have political consequences. Thus it was the success of Rhee and the independence movement, Fields argues, that caused the State Department to decide to keep at least part of Korea out of Soviet hands. As Dean Rusk, who was tasked with choosing the dividing line, put it, Korea was divided for "symbolic purposes," not strategic ones.

Mixing biography with diplomatic history and writing with a transnational focus, Fields compellingly places both the Korean independence movement and the division of the Korean Peninsula in a new light. While complaints can be made with the way the epilogue peters out at the end, this is an otherwise concisely written, well-researched, and persuasively argued book that is recommended to anyone interested in 20th century Korean history.

Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr.