- Good afternoon, my name is Joe D'Amato,
Engagement Program Specialist
at the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association.
On behalf of the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
the International Division, and PLATO,
it's my pleasure to welcome you to our third and final
Global Hot Spots lecture of the fall semester.
This afternoon, our speaker is the Associate Director
of UW-Madison's Center for East Asian Studies.
He earned his PhD in History
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017.
Today, we'll hear about why North Korea
was divided and why it matters.
Please join me in welcoming David Fields.
[audience applauding]
- Thank you very much everybody for coming out tonight.
There were two occasions this summer
where I lectured to audiences of less than six people.
Which is fun in itself, in its own way,
but it's a lot more fun
to have a big room of engaged people.
So as Joe said, I'm the Associate Director
of the Center for East Asian Studies.
And if you're here at this event,
it's quite possible that we do a lot of other events
that you might be interested in as well.
We do a lot of public events that are all free,
so please visit our website, eastasia.wisc.edu
or like us on Facebook at facebook.com/uwceas.
We're just finalizing our spring lecture series right now,
but we do a lot of public events just like this.
So what I'm gonna talk to you about today
is the origins of the division of Korea and why it matters.
Now, this is a very long and complicated story.
In fact, it's so long and complicated
that I wrote an entire book just about this question,
and it took about 10 years.
And coincidentally, this book will be on sale
in the hallway out afterwards, [audience laughing]
we have a very limited number of copies
that we're selling at a reduced rate,
so if you're interested in what I have to say tonight,
I encourage you to buy the book because in the time I have,
I'm not gonna be able to tell you
the whole story of the division of Korea.
It's a long and complicated story,
but I've boiled it down to just three main points
for the lecture today, okay?
So just three points.
And those are the 1882 Korean-American Treaty,
the growth of Christianity in Korea,
and how Korean independence activists
used these things, okay?
The treaty, the growth of Christianity,
and how activists used these three things.
If I can communicate these three points to you,
you'll walk out of the room
with a very, very good understanding
of why there are two Koreas on the map today
instead of just one, all right?
So to begin with the 1882 Korean-American Treaty,
it's absolutely essential that we understand
that the origins--
that U.S.-Korean relations do not begin in June of 1950,
or even in August of 1945.
They began in 1882, when the United States
and what is then known as the Kingdom of Joseon,
established diplomatic relations via this treaty.
Now, Article One of this treaty read,
"If other powers deal unjustly
"or oppressively with either government,
"the other will exert their good offices
"on being informed of the case
"to bring about an amicable arrangement,
"thus showing their friendly feelings."
All right?
Now, what does that mean, okay?
Only a lawyer could write something
that is so obtuse, okay?
But the main point that you need to understand
is that term good offices.
Now, what good offices referred to
at this time is mediation.
So if Korea gets into difficulties
with one of its neighbors
and informs the United States,
the United States is obligated to mediate that dispute
or rather to offer to mediate, all right?
If both parties don't accept the mediation,
they don't have to mediate,
but it's obligated to offer that.
Now, the problem was there was no term
in Korean for good offices,
and there was no similar concept
in Korean jurisprudence to good offices.
So when this treaty was translated into Korean,
instead of good offices, it just read "must help."
So if Korea got into difficulties with its neighbors,
the United States must help.
This was not an alliance between the United States
and the Kingdom of Joseon,
but many in the court of Joseon
chose to interpret it as an alliance.
And in fact, it wouldn't be too long before Korea
would get into great difficulties
with one of its neighbors.
So in 1905, Russia here and Japan go to war.
And they go to war over whose interests
will predominate in Manchuria and also in Korea.
And as the war is beginning,
the Japanese military tells the court of Joseon,
"If you let us transit troops
"through Korea to fight the Russians,
"we will respect your independence
"and we will leave when the war is over."
Now, many in the Kingdom of Joseon were very, very dubious,
but they figured that this was an offer that it was probably
more dangerous to turn--
more dangerous to turn down than to accept,
so they agreed to let Japanese troops transit through Korea.
After the Japanese defeat the Russians in 1905,
they announce that they're not leaving,
but they start a five-year process
of colonizing and annexing Korea, all right?
Now, the military of the Kingdom of Joseon
is almost nonexistent at this point,
so the best hope they have is to try to get an outside power
to intervene in this situation.
And what the court of Joseon does
is it dispatches a number of envoys to the United States
to try to get some help from America
under their understanding of the 1882 treaty.
And one of these envoys is someone named Syngman Rhee,
who you might recognize as the first President
of the Republic of Korea from 1948 to 1960.
That's way in the future at this point.
He is quite a young man,
and we're gonna hear a lot about Rhee today;
he's one of the most consequential figures
of 20th century Korean history.
And Rhee is chosen for this mission
because he's been educated in American schools.
He actually spent seven years in prison being tortured
as a radical reformer against the Joseon state.
And in prison, he learns to speak English very well,
and he converts to Christianity.
So he is seen as someone who can articulate
a Korean appeal to the United States.
And so he is sent to the U.S.
to try to get some help from the Americans.
And Rhee is actually, more than anyone thought,
surprisingly successful at this,
and he actually secures an audience
with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905
at his summer house in Oyster Bay.
And he asked Roosevelt to help, to intervene
in this situation to try to restore Korea's independence
based on the Korean understanding of the treaty.
Now, what he doesn't know is that Roosevelt
has already thought about this,
and Roosevelt has already decided
that he supports the Japanese colonization of Korea.
And he supports this because he believes that the Koreans
are less civilized than the Japanese,
and he believes that Korea
is a chronic source of instability in East Asia.
China and Japan went to war over Korea in 1895,
Russia and Japan went to war over Korea in 1905.
And he thinks until another power has control over Korea,
it's gonna continue to be a source of instability.
But what Roosevelt does, is he doesn't say no to Rhee,
instead, what he says is, "I would really like to help,
"but the problem is you're not a proper diplomat.
"You don't have the right credentials.
"So if you can please just route this request for assistance
"through the Korean Foreign Ministry
"and through the embassy in Washington,
"we would be happy to consider it."
Now, what Roosevelt knows is that the Japanese
already have control over the Korean Foreign Ministry,
they've already taken control
over the Korean embassy in Washington,
and that there's no way that this request
is going to get through.
And that's exactly what happens.
So Roosevelt does not make any sort of response
to this request from Syngman Rhee and from others
for these technical diplomatic reasons.
And that probably would have been
the end of the story right there,
except later, he offers an entirely
different justification for not acting,
and he does this in print in the New York Review .
And he writes, it wasn't for technical reasons
that we rejected this plea,
but quote, "It was out of question to suppose
"that any other nation with no interest of its own at stake
"would attempt to do for the Koreans
"what they were utterly unable to do for themselves."
All right?
So rather than offering a technical
legal justification for inaction,
he basically says, "It just didn't make sense
"for us to do this."
And when he justified his action in those terms,
he opened up the United States to the charge
that they had technically violated
the 1882 Korean-American Treaty.
And this, he handed Korean independence activists
like Rhee and others a grievance
that they would use against the United States
and against United States government
for the next 40 years, as we will see.
Now, when Roosevelt made this decision in 1905,
it was not news at all.
It did not cause any outcry whatsoever,
'cause very few Americans knew where Korea was.
Very few Americans knew anything about Korea.
And those Americans who were familiar
with East Asia and Korea
generally sympathized with Theodore Roosevelt's views,
that the Koreans in fact, were less civilized
and in fact, the colonization of Korea
would bring stability to East Asia.
So it made no splash in United States whatsoever.
But all this began to change in 1907
when one of the great Christian revivals of the 20th century
breaks out in the city of Pyongyang
and quickly spreads to the rest of Korea.
And overnight, Korea goes from really being
a backwater of American missionary activity
to one of the fastest-growing mission fields
for American Christian missionaries
anywhere in the world.
In just a few years, they go from
a few hundred converts to about 50,000.
And American missionaries began realizing
that perhaps in Korea, for the first time,
they have the possibility of converting
a nation in East Asia to becoming
a majority Christian nation, okay?
And there's a lot of excitement about this.
And all the sudden, Korea goes from a place
that Americans don't care about at all
to one that Americans want to hear more about, okay?
They wanna hear about this revival in Korea.
Now, Syngman Rhee, after his mission to Roosevelt,
ends up staying in the United States
and ends up being educated in American institutions
with the help of missionary scholarships.
And he is the individual who is best place
to explain to Americans what is going on in Korea,
because he was a product of missionary schools,
he's a convert to Christianity himself.
And from 1907 on, he begins touring
up and down the United States explaining this revival,
and also encouraging Americans to do more,
to send more missionaries to Korea,
to send more money to support missions work in Korea.
And he's doing this both because he's a devout Christian,
but also because he's a staunch advocate
of Korea's independence.
And he understands that Americans
don't care at all about Korea politically,
they don't care about Korean independence,
but they do care about Christianity.
And what he's hoping to do
is he's hoping to create connections
between Korean Christians and American Christians,
because he believes that Korean Christianity
and Japanese colonialism are incompatible,
and sooner or later they're going
to come into conflict with each other.
And when that happens,
he is really hoping that American Christians
are gonna take the side of the Koreans and not the Japanese.
So he is advocating for Korean independence at this time,
but in a very sophisticated way.
He knows Americans don't care about the politics,
but they care very much
about the religious changes going on in Korea.
Between 1907 and 1912,
he records giving 184 lectures in his diary.
And when you consider that during the same period,
he also did a BA at George Washington,
an MA at Harvard, and a PhD at Princeton,
you can see just what a busy person he was
and how committed he was to this cause.
And in fact, it takes a while,
but the clash that he was hoping would come
comes about in March of 1919, in what the Koreans called
the March First Movement or the Samil Undong.
And what this movement is
is it's a nationwide nonviolent protest
in which Koreans go out in the street
and demand their independence from the Japanese, okay?
Now, this is not solely a Christian movement,
although many of the leaders and many of the participants
in this movement were Christians.
And they peacefully demand their independence,
and they are not under any illusions whatsoever
that the Japanese will give them their independence,
but rather what they're hoping is that they will spark
a backlash that is so terrible and so violent
that the world will not be able to ignore it.
Particularly, that the leaders of the great powers
meeting in Versailles at that exact same time
will not be able to ignore it.
If you remember, after World War I,
all of the great powers come together in Versailles
to try to establish the League of Nations.
And one of the things that they're gonna talk about
is how do we deal with the plight of colonized peoples?
And the Koreans are desperate
to get on the agenda at Versailles.
And so they're hoping for a Japanese backlash
that will get them on the agenda.
The Japanese oblige them,
and within a week of this movement,
they have killed almost 7,000 unarmed Koreans
for peacefully protesting,
and in the next few months, they will imprison
and torture tens of thousands of Korean activists.
And they tried to keep the news sequestered,
but it's only a matter of time before images
like this one here start getting out
and actually, images much more graphic than these ones.
And these images are being sent from Korea
to the United States by American missionaries,
many of whom are medical missionaries
who are treating the wounds, the terrible wounds
that these independence activists are suffering.
And while they don't wanna be political,
their motto is, "There can be no neutrality
"on brutality," okay?
That Koreans and especially Korean Christians
are being exterminated by the Japanese,
and we cannot stand by and do nothing about this.
One of the things that comes out of this movement
is the Koreans create for themselves
a provisional government, or a government in exile
'cause they realize their lobbying opportunities
will be very limited
if they don't have someone representing them.
And this movement elects Syngman Rhee
to be the first president
of the Korean Provisional Government.
So at this time, he becomes
both the spokesman for Korean Christianity
and the spokesman for a new independence movement.
And he continues his lobbying work in the United States,
trying to interest Americans in Korean Christianity.
But he's got a new argument that he uses now as well,
and that is he brings up the 1882 Korean-American Treaty
and says, "You Americans had a treaty with Korea,
"and you did not abide by that treaty,
"and this is the result of this."
This was actually rhetorically
a very, very strong position to be in
'cause if you remember anything
about the American reasons for entering World War I,
one of the key reasons
was the German violation of Belgium neutrality.
And Americans accused the Germans
of regarding treaties as, quote, "mere scraps of paper."
So Syngman Rhee could go around the United States
to churches and universities
and say, "Yes, the Germans are guilty
"of regarding treaties as mere scraps of paper,
"but guess who else is guilty of this?
"You are guilty of this.
"Your own government had a treaty with Korea
"that Theodore Roosevelt regarded
"as a mere scrap of paper."
This is a very emotive argument,
and he convinces many Americans that this is the case.
And between 1919 and 1922, over 8,000 newspaper articles
are published on Korea in the United States,
and I have not seen one of them yet that was negative.
The Presbyterian publication, the national publication,
The Interior , wrote in October 1919,
"The future course of Christian enlightenment
"in the Far East is at stake.
"Korea has virtually forced the hand of Western civilization
"and we must decide what we're going to do about it."
During this period, dozens of Korean activists
and American missionaries
go on what's called the Chautauqua circuit.
And if you don't know what
the Chautauqua circuit is,
imagine TED Talks in the era before radio, okay?
The Chautauqua would choose what it thought
was the best speakers speaking on the best events,
the most interesting events of the day,
and they would come into a place like Madison,
they would pitch a big tent, and you would pay your nickel,
and you would go in, and you would get to hear about it.
And they didn't choose speakers for the Chautauqua series
that they thought couldn't fill the tent, okay?
So the fact that so many Korean speakers got on this series
tells you what an emotive
and important issue this had become.
And my research indicates that in this period,
as many as 200,000 Americans, mainly in the Midwest,
heard a Chautauqua lecture on Korea.
Americans also responded by founding
a number of grassroots organizations,
the most important one being the League of Friends of Korea.
And this was a grassroots lobbying organization
that by 1922, claimed 25,000 members
in 14 branches across the United States.
And almost all of these branches
were headed by a local Presbyterian, Baptist,
or Methodist missionary, or Methodist pastor,
and were headquartered in local Presbyterian,
Methodist, or Baptist churches.
And if you understand early 20th century
American religious history,
if you have the Methodists, the Baptists,
and the Presbyterians on your side,
you have won a large portion of the population.
One example of how successful this lobbying was,
is Korea actually becomes involved in the debate
over the Versailles Treaty in the United States.
The Versailles Treaty
that was to create the League of Nations.
This was an incredibly contentious issue,
and the Koreans were actually opposed to the treaty,
which is different from what you might expect,
but they're opposed to the treaty
because they believe that there's language in the treaty
which would force the United States
to forever recognized Korea as an integral part of Japan.
So they're opposed to the treaty,
and they make a surprising alliance
with the block of senators called the Irreconcilables
who are also opposed to the treaty, okay?
And what the Irreconcilables are trying to do here
is they're being labeled as isolationist
across the United States, and they wanna combat that,
so they make an alliance with the Koreans,
and the Koreans give them the Korean issue
as something that they can argue that say,
"We're not opposed to this treaty
"only for domestic reasons,
"we're opposed to this treaty because of what it would mean
"to the United States' relationship with Korea.
"It would forever cement that wrong
"that Theodore Roosevelt committed."
And I wanna give you just a taste of the rhetoric
that these senators are using.
So this is George Norris of Nebraska.
He said on the floor of the Senate,
"I wish all the Christian people of America would note
"that all the sacrifices which they made in Korea,
"and now if this treaty goes through,
"all that they have made in China,
"and every missionary that has gone there
"to set up a church and preach the doctrine
"of Christianity, are all in jeopardy."
Senator William France says, or Joseph France says,
"We cannot sign this treaty," that's the Versailles Treaty,
"without an utter disregard for our moral and treaty,"
that's the 1882 treaty,
"obligations towards the Korean people."
Senator William Borah,
"Having made the treaty," the 1882 Treaty, "which we made,
"I think we are under obligations
"to exercise our friendly offices in preventing
"the amalgamation or incorporation
"of Korea with Japan."
All right, this issue becomes so integral in the debate
over the Versailles Treaty that in March of 1920,
a reservation is proposed to the treaty which would obligate
the United States to recognize Korean independence,
and that reservation falls just seven votes short
of passing in the U.S. Senate.
Now, ultimately, that would have made
no difference whatsoever, because as you know,
ultimately, the Versailles Treaty is not ratified,
but it's a very important barometer
of just how emotive this issue had become.
So what are all the effects of this lobbying?
So I argue that by 1922, the Koreans had essentially
flipped public opinion in the United States.
In 1922, there's not a single American politician
who will stand up as Theodore Roosevelt did and said,
"It's unreasonable that we do for the Koreans
"what they are utterly incapable of doing for themselves."
The Koreans, by this point, had won
the battle for hearts and minds, okay?
There are more people who are sympathetic
towards Korean Christianity
than they are towards Japanese colonialism.
The problem is though, they can't change American policy.
In the 1920s, the United States is not a superpower.
It is incapable of projecting hard power into Northeast Asia,
and so Americans are not willing
to confront Japan over Korea.
But sympathies have definitely changed,
and I think it's best summed up by the journalist,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Cyril Player in 1921,
when he wrote, quote, "Everybody knows that Korea has a case.
"The American people are by no means
"unsympathetic towards the Koreans.
"If there is apathy, it is the apathy of regret,
"tinged with weariness and impregnated
"by a miserable feeling of impotence to put matters right."
All right?
The Koreans had won the argument,
but they can't change American policy.
And now we're gonna have to skip the next 18 years;
there's a lot of interesting stuff
that goes on during this period,
but we're gonna have to skip right to the 1940s
if we're gonna get to--
if we're gonna get up to the division of Korea.
So in 1939, the Japanese have used their base in Korea
to attack Manchuria and to go down into China.
And many Americans and Koreans are like, are convinced
that the Japanese and United States
are on a collision course, okay?
And that conflict will eventually result,
and Syngman Rhee is one of these.
And so he takes most of the year of 1940 off,
and he writes a remarkable book called Japan Inside Out .
In this book, he argues that the United States
is basically the cause of everything
that has gone wrong in East Asia since 1905.
And he says, "If only you would have stood up
"to the Japanese in 1905,
"if only you would have kept them off the peninsula,
"none of this ever would have happened.
"If only you had stood up to the Japanese in 1919,
"none of this would have ever happened, okay?
"This is all your fault."
And he does something even better,
and he cuts right to the heart of American exceptionalism,
and he says, "This current generation of Americans
"is not the same generation
"that sent American missionaries to Korea.
"It's not the same generation as the founding generation.
"These generations recognize
"that the liberties Americans enjoy at home
"entail an obligation to defend liberty abroad.
"And you generation of Americans
"have become very self-centered,
"and you've become very materialistic,
"and what are you going to do about it," okay?
Rhee was a great student of the American jeremiad,
and he delivers a great jeremiad in Japan Inside Out .
But he also says something else,
and he says, "Don't think that by appeasing the Japanese,
"you're gonna get away with it.
"Sooner or later, the Japanese are gonna come for you.
"You cannot appease them by selling out Korea,
"by selling out China.
"Sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost."
So this book was published in the summer of 1941,
and it did quite well.
It went into a second printing in October of 1941.
So what happens on December 7th of 1941?
Pearl Harbor happens, right?
And immediately after Pearl Harbor,
Rhee is transformed from a Korean voice
crying out into the wilderness
to the mainstream of American society.
And he is more than happy
to play the role of spurned prophet.
So three weeks after Pearl Harbor,
he gives a lecture at George Washington University in D.C.,
which he began this way.
He says, "We Koreans,
"the first victims of Japan's insane march of conquest,
"do not wish to say in any recriminatory way
"that we told you so, but we did."
[audience laughing]
And he begins every lecture
for the next six months in this way.
And he ramps up his lobbying activities
in the United States, and he has a concrete political goal.
And that is to get the United States government
to recognize the KPG, the Korean Provisional Government,
of which he is de facto foreign minister, okay?
And so he lobbies Americans
to pressure their government to do this.
He continues talking about Korean Christianity,
he continues talking about the 1882 Korean-American Treaty,
but he also talks about the potential
of using Korean allies in the war.
And so he says, "Recognizing Korea will provide
"22 million new allies into the war against Japan."
And you can imagine what an emotive issue this is
for American parents whose sons are fighting in the Pacific,
when Rhee shows up in your church and says,
"Why are you shedding American blood fighting the Japanese
"when, if you give the Koreans the weapons,
"we will happily shed our own blood for you?"
This is very effective.
Now the problem was, he actually couldn't provide
22 million Korean allies in the war
because almost all the Koreans are on the Korean peninsula,
and there's no way to actually mobilize them,
but it made for very good rhetoric and very good lobbying.
He also at this time continues to target religious people.
And he refounds the League of Friends of Korea
as the Christian Friends of Korea.
And on its board is this man here named Peter Marshall,
who you've probably never heard of,
but he is the Rick Warren
or the Joel Osteen of his day, okay?
This is America's celebrity Protestant pastor,
he'll have an Oscar-winning biopic
made of him in just a few years.
Rhee is a very pragmatic and ecumenical guy,
so if you're gonna have a Protestant organization
for Koreans, you also need a Catholic one,
so he establishes the Catholic Friends of Korea,
and on this board sits Bing Crosby,
easily the most famous pop singer of this time.
And what Rhee does over the war
is actually transforms himself
into a minor American celebrity.
So he's hobnobbing with these kinds of people,
he gets invited to the White House to meet Eleanor Roosevelt.
She writes about him the next day
in her nationally syndicated "My Day" column,
talks about American obligations
to Korea under the 1882 treaty.
He gets to meet people like Albert Einstein,
Wendell Willkie, and many others.
He gets invited to the red carpet premiere
of the film Wilson , which is the Best Picture of 1944.
He's having all these successes,
but you cannot change American policy still,
because the United States refuses to recognize
the Korean Provisional Government, okay?
And the reason they refuse to recognize the government
is they understand that the Soviets
already have their own group of exiled Koreans
that they're hoping to use
to influence the postwar situation in Korea,
and that Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader of China,
has his own group of exiled Koreans that he's hoping
to get into the Korean Peninsula at the end of the war.
And so they worry that if the United States
recognizes the KPG,
what in fact will happen is they'll start a war for Korea
before the war against Japan is even over.
And that is the last thing that they want, okay?
So they tried to explain this to Rhee and they say,
"It's not that we're not sympathetic,
"we're very sympathetic,
"but we have to focus on defeating Japan
"before we can do anything else."
And Rhee understands this,
but he has a single-minded goal; he's a very driven person,
and he wants the KPG recognized,
'cause he believes if the KPG is recognized,
all these other groups won't matter,
all Koreans will rally behind him, okay?
And the State Department has a real problem
'cause although they tell this to Rhee,
they can't explain this to the American public in general.
Right, 'cause to talk about this situation
is to air all the dirty laundry of all the areas of conflict
between the allies that are fighting Japan.
So they can't explain why they won't recognize the KPG,
and in the meantime, Rhee keeps pushing his own agenda.
And in the spring of 1945, after Franklin Roosevelt dies,
Rhee lets loose with a bombshell.
And that's that he alleges in March of 1945
that FDR and Joseph Stalin made a secret deal at Yalta,
trading Korea to the Soviet Union for an early entry,
an early Soviet entry into the war against Japan, okay?
Essentially that FDR has sold out the Koreans to communism
just like Theodore Roosevelt
sold out the Koreans to the Japanese in 1905.
Now, this is not true at all.
There is no historical evidence
that any secret deal like this happens,
but nobody knows this at the time, okay?
And so you can see this makes front page news
across the United States, this is the Chicago Daily Tribune ,
and The New York Times , this is front page above the fold.
And Americans are outraged.
They're outraged that Christian Korea
would be sold to communism, okay?
And they began flooding Truman's office with letters;
now I wanna read just a few of them to you.
One is from a woman named Alice Butz,
who writes President Truman and says that
she's praying with him-- she's praying for him
along with thousands of Koreans that, quote,
"God would guide the president in this matter,
"and that he would realize that he was best placed
"to see that Korea was treated right
"and given her sovereignty."
Latya B. McLeans wrote Truman
and said that American Christians were, quote,
"much concerned to hear that Christian Korea
"had been traded to Russia."
She was praying that Truman would receive divine guidance
and that heeding this guidance, the United States of America
will again shine forth as a great Christian nation.
Christian leader William LaRoe wrote Truman in June of 1945,
warning him of what a row he will have
with the church people if the rumors
of Korea being sold to the Soviet Union are true.
And these Christians and these Americans interested in Korea
began putting a lot of pressure on their congressmen,
and in June and July of 1945,
several congressmen give impassioned speeches
about Korea on the floor of the U.S. Congress.
William Shafer says, "Are we for a second time this century
"going to betray the Korean people?
"Are we going to forsake them
"and shatter their dream of democracy?
"Are we going to sell them down the river to communism?"
William Langer blamed the State Department's
appeasement of Japan for World War II and claimed, quote,
"we are now wiping out with the blood of our heroes
"upon Pacific battlefields, the blunders of our diplomats."
And even worse, Langer argued that the State Department
had learned nothing from its appeasement of Japan,
but now was appeasing the Soviet Union.
And the United States had let a situation occur
where the Soviet Union
could unilaterally occupy all of Korea.
Wayne Morris wrote that if the United States
stood up boldly for Korean independence,
it would be acting in the long term interest
of not only Korea and the United States,
but also the Soviet Union.
In Morris's mind, Korea had become a test case
of America's commitment to an international postworld order
that would be able to restore
the peace in East Asia after the war.
So there's tremendous pressure
under the Truman administration in June, July,
and August of 1945 to do something for Korea, all right?
Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped over Wayne Morris here.
But now there's a real problem, okay?
In August of 1945, the Red Army is already here,
and they're already marching into Korea.
The nearest American forces are here in Okinawa,
six weeks away.
And there's no way that the United States
can get there before the Soviet Union.
And so the military leaders of the United States
say, "There's nothing that can be done," okay?
"We can't get to Korea in time,
"Korea is not strategically important,
"we don't want Korea and in fact, we have no plan for Korea.
"We have no plan for an occupation of Korea."
And they were right; they had no plan whatsoever.
And the Truman administration and the State Department
were saying, "But we must do something for Korea."
And so before the 38th parallel was a compromise
between the Soviet Union and the United States,
it was actually a compromise between
the War Department and the State Department.
The War Department saying, "We want none of Korea at all,"
the State Department saying, "We want it all."
And they decided to suggest the compromise
of the 38th parallel to the Soviets.
And the War Department, I think quite honestly
was hoping that the Soviets would turn the Americans down
and would say, "No, we are going to occupy all of Korea."
And had they done so, there was nothing
the United States could have done about it.
And Truman could have washed his hands and said, "We tried,
"we tried to do something for the Koreans, but we couldn't."
But perhaps to their dismay and surprise,
they don't say no, they say yes.
And then the next day, ask for half of Japan,
ask if they can occupy half of Japan.
And the Truman administration turns them down
and immediately, Soviet-U.S. relations
on the Korean peninsula
get off to a very, very bad start, okay?
Now, I want to get us up very quickly to 1950.
The occupation of Korea that happens in 1945 goes terribly,
and it goes terribly because just as they said,
the military leaders of the United States
had no plans to occupy Korea,
they had no trained Korean personnel.
And so what they do in October of 1945,
is they fly back Syngman Rhee
and they hope that he is gonna be the miracle man
that will work things out
between Koreans and the Americans.
And instead of helping, what Rhee does in 1945,
the minute he gets off the plane,
he calls a press conference and says, "Whose idea was this?
"Whose idea was this Yalta decision?"
And immediately, Rhee becomes a persona non grata
to both American diplomats and American military leaders.
And American military leaders want to get out of Korea
as quickly as possible,
because they see it as a hopeless situation.
And in July of 1949,
the United States does withdraw from Korea.
You often read that the United States
has been in Korea since 1945; it's not true,
we withdraw in July of 1949 over the strenuous objections
of Syngman Rhee, now president,
and every member of the Korean government.
Because they say, "If you leave, the North will invade," okay?
They're quite blunt about this.
And we leave, and you all know what happens in June of 1950.
The North Koreans invade,
and we have to send in the calvary to save South Korea,
and Americans have been there ever since.
So why does this matter?
Why does this history matter for today?
Because after all, whether you know this history or not,
it doesn't matter because Korea's divided, okay?
And a divided Korea is an issue that we have to deal with
regardless of whether you know this.
Well, it matters a great deal.
Because what happens is this history
shapes Korean views of the United States, okay?
Too many Americans think that U.S.-Korean relations
began in 1950 when the calvary shows up
to save the Republic of Korea, okay?
And that the United States
has been subsidizing Korea's defense ever since then.
And if you think U.S.-Korean relations begin in 1950,
there's a path where you can get from there to believe
that Koreans are free riding on American security, okay?
And right now, there's a group of American negotiators
in Seoul trying to negotiate a new cost sharing agreement
with the Republic of Korea,
and they're demanding the Republic of Korea pay $5 billion
to offset the cost of hosting U.S. troops.
This is five times what the Koreans paid last year, okay?
So not only is this economically very, very hard to swallow,
but it's also very insulting,
because from the Korean perspective,
relations don't start in 1950, they start in 1882.
And from the Korean perspective,
you can see how the United States
was involved in the three great traumas
of the Korean 20th century, right?
The colonization of Korea by Japan in 1905,
the division of Korea in 1945, and the Korean War in 1950.
And it's not that Koreans are ungrateful
for the American presence, they are,
and they're willing to express that,
and their government is willing to officially express that
because if it wasn't for the United States,
there would be no South Korea today.
But they're also painfully cognizant of the fact
that if it wasn't for decisions made in Washington,
this problem wouldn't exist in the first place, okay?
The division of Korea was first suggested by the Americans,
and it's not totally the Americans' fault
that this division became permanent;
they never intended it to be permanent,
but there's no doubt whose idea it was
in the first case, okay?
So this history shapes Korean views of the United States
in ways that we really need to understand
to understand the dynamics of U.S- Korean relations.
And lastly, and this is a much, much broader point,
but this gets to why I'm so interested in history
and why I think we should all be interested in history.
In that it reveals the complexity of historical actors.
And I think it's very important for us when we go to history,
and all of us are historians, right?
I mean, I make my living as a historian,
but we're all historians,
we all look at the past
and try to make sense of it for ourselves.
And it's very important that we don't go to the past
looking for evil people, looking for greedy people
to blame for problems in the world today.
Because the fact is,
that Korea was not divided by greedy people,
it was not divided by ideologues who were determined
to have a capitalist outpost in East Asia,
it was not divided by people who were militaristic,
who wanted a toehold for the American Empire
on the mainland of Asia.
Korea was actually divided by people
just like you and me, right?
People who have a sense of morality and a sense of justice,
who looked out at the global situation around the world
and said, "You know what?
"That doesn't look right, and it seems
"that our country is somehow involved in that,
"and we wanna do something to try to make matters right."
And these are all very, very good things.
It's very positive to engage in this kind of activism,
but we need to do it with a real sense of humility, okay?
Because no one can know what the collective outcome
of thousands of right actions is going to be, right?
Just because you have the right motives,
just because you want to accomplish something
does not mean that your actions are not gonna result
in a problem that has persisted for the last 70 years
and will probably persist well into the future.
Thank you very much, you've been a wonderful audience.
[audience applauding]
- Woman: So Lizzie and I will walk around
and if you could raise your hand
if you have some questions for David,
that would be wonderful.
- Man: Yeah, you're absolutely correct
about the success of the Protestant missionaries
in Korea.
My question is this, why was that success
almost entirely shared between Presbyterians and Methodists?
Almost all Koreans who are Christian
are in either one denomination or the other.
Why did those two denominations
have so much success there, thanks.
- Those two denominations sent
the largest number of missionaries at the beginning.
And there are Korean Baptists as well,
but those are the denominations
that get there right at the beginning,
that invest a lot in it,
and that have continued to grow since then.
So I think that's the most basic explanation.
And also if you visit Korean churches,
you'll realize that Korean Methodists
and Korean Presbyterians are in fact very, very Korean.
And if you're an American Methodist or Presbyterian,
you visit a Korean or Methodist church,
a Korean Presbyterian or Methodist Church,
you might not recognize it
as being part of your tradition, okay?
So even though these are denominations
that were transplanted from America,
they have really taken on their own sort of culture, yeah.
- Woman: Actually, I spent a lot of time
in Korea in the last few years,
and Catholics make up about a third
of Christians now in Korea.
I know Catholic nuns there who work there,
and they're still actually
growing as part of the Christians,
so I'm not sure exactly what the origins of that was,
but because they're not as famous missionaries
as the earlier ones, but they are very large,
substantial part of the Christian population.
- That's true.
And actually, Catholicism in Korea
has grown a lot in the last 20 years.
And one of the explanations is,
and I'm not an expert like this,
but there's been a lot of excesses
of the Korean Protestant churches,
especially in development of megachurches
and in celebrity pastors,
and it has caused many Koreans
to become turned off by Protestantism
and actually to admire the more asceticism
and vows of poverty of a lot of Catholic clergy.
So that's one part of the explanation, yeah.
- Man: How do South Koreans and the South Korean government
right now feel about Trump's policy
towards them in the North?
- So that's a very complicated question.
And Korea, like so many societies today,
is a society that is starkly divided
along political lines, okay?
And it's divided between liberals and conservatives,
although those terms mean nothing
compared to what they mean in America.
Generally, if you're a liberal,
you prefer a more accommodating
or a more open stance towards North Korea.
You wanna try to get North Korea to develop
through things like the Sunshine Policy, through direct aid.
And if you're more conservative,
then you want to see a much harsher policy on North Korea.
You wanna see a more aggressive stance towards the North.
So, but about Donald Trump, things are really complicated
'cause in 2017, when we were in the middle
of the fire and fury rhetoric,
that actually scared a lot of Koreans
of all sorts of political stripes.
They did not want to see the United States and Korea,
North Korea, engaging in that sort of rhetoric.
So I think it actually, a lot of them were quite relieved
when he backed away from that,
but generally, I think it's Koreans more on the liberal side
that are more or less supportive of Donald Trump,
and those on the conservative side
who are a little bit more skeptical.
But now with this new negotiation
going on over the SMA,
this is going to throw all Korean perspectives
on U.S.-Korean relationship off a little bit.
The increase, asking the Koreans to pay 500% more this year
than they did last year is pretty shocking,
and upsets Koreans of almost every political stripe.
So I would say that opinions are very, very fluid.
- Man: I had thought, without reading your book
or other things, is that the military importance
and capitalism being based in South Korea
was why we were there.
Why wasn't that important earlier on
at the end of World War II?
And has the U.S. since embraced that?
As long as we're there, we might as well make the most of it,
or how does the U.S. feel about it now?
- So capitalism was never a big motivation because Korea
is one of the smaller countries in Northeast Asia, right?
Right between China, which is huge,
and Japan, which is quite large.
And there's always been American interest
in trading with those societies,
but traditionally, Korea was quite small,
and it was also quite poor.
So it was never a really big draw for American capitalism.
And it was never a big draw to the American military either.
Throughout the 20th century and even today,
the American military in East Asia
has a primarily maritime strategy, right?
Going all the way back to Alfred Thayer Mahan,
that we don't need to control territory
on the mainland of Asia, okay?
We need to make sure that we can control sea lanes,
and so Japan is very important to that,
but it's also convenient to the Americans
that Japan is also an island, okay?
So the American military leaders
saw the strategic importance of Japan going way back,
but that was never an issue for Korea.
In fact, American military leaders
passionately did not want anything to do with Korea.
Now, of course, when the United States occupies Korea
and began trying to establish a government,
of course they are going to implement capitalist structures.
But it's important to understand that actually Syngman Rhee,
and I've written about this somewhere else
if you care to read it,
Syngman Rhee was actually a socialist
as far as his economic policies.
And if you read the first constitution
of the Republic of Korea, it is a very socialist document.
Rhee was not a capitalist ideologue by any means.
And part of the reason he was able
to get away with all this during the Cold War
was the peculiar security relationship
that had developed between the United States and Korea,
where Rhee could be a very strong ally
of the United States,
but would in fact enact policies for the Republic of Korea
that drove capitalist ideologues
in the United States absolutely crazy.
- Man: Regarding Syngman Rhee,
didn't he become quite viruently anti-communist
in his later years, even wanting to do things
like obstructing the repatriation
of political prisoners or prisoners of war,
unless it was done on his terms?
And then ultimately,
what was the reason why he was finally overthrown?
I've heard that that was due to corruption
and also this very rabid anti-communism.
- That is absolutely true.
Rhee, after 1945, will become rabidly anti-communist, okay?
But that was not a position
that he had held for his entire life.
In fact, in 1933, he took a trip to Moscow
seeking Soviet support for the Korean independence movement
because he wasn't getting the support
he wanted from the United States.
But it wasn't until after Korea was divided
that he becomes anti-communist
because he views communism at that point as a Soviet tool
that is trying to exert influence on Korea, all right?
Rhee actually in the 1950s,
will undertake a major land reform in South Korea,
breaking up large land holdings, giving land to the tiller
that really fundamentally remade Korean society.
And this is really one of the ways
that Rhee is able to survive the Korean War, okay?
Because he actually gets a lot of the people
who would have been communists on his side
by giving them the very thing that they wanted, okay?
They wanted land, they wanted more socialistic type policies,
and he was willing to give them that,
but he was at the same time,
very, very anti-Soviet communism,
and he would make that distinction, okay?
Especially early on, he would say,
"You like communist economic policies?
"I'm probably not going to go all that way,
"but I'm sympathetic towards.
"But what we can't have is we can't have communism
"being used as a tool for the Soviet Union to control us."
And it's true that Rhee will actually become
very, very authoritarian in his life,
and if there's one criticism I've gotten from this book,
is that this book ends in 1945 with Rhee returning to Korea,
which is a little bit similar to writing
a biography of O.J. Simpson and ending it in 1989, okay?
[audience laughing]
And that is absolutely true,
and that's why I'm working on the second book,
which will then take Rhee from 1945
all the way to at the end of his life.
And I had to make that choice for two reasons.
One, as a first time author,
you do not get any more than 115,000 words,
that's all you get.
And secondly, I didn't want the story
of the division of Korea to be buried, okay?
Frankly, this is a story
that has never been told in these terms before.
And the reason it's never been told
is as soon as Korea got divided,
everyone who had played any sort of role
in that decision at all did not wanna talk about it at all.
No one wanted to claim that my activism
had contributed to the division of Korea,
because it was seen immediately as such a mistake, okay?
So no one wanted to tell the story,
and actually Rhee's papers,
access to them are very, very complicated.
And so I was the first non-Korean scholar
to get access to them, and as I began to read his diary,
I understood that there was a whole story here
that we had overlooked, all right?
Thank you for the question.
- Man: Given everything happening
on the world stage today,
in your opinion, what would it take in all this history
to reunite North and South Korea?
[audience laughing and murmuring]
- The reunification of Korea is gonna be one of the--
one of the greatest challenges the world will ever face.
And we focus a lot on the economics of it, okay?
And the economics of it would be
very, very complicated, right?
Because people often compare East and West Germany,
well, East and West Germany were actually
economically very similar to each other
in terms of development,
compared to North and South Korea.
So you have that whole set of challenges right there.
But then there's another set of challenges
that often gets overlooked,
and that is the ideological challenges, okay?
So you have an entire population of about 20 million people
who I'm not afraid to use the term brainwashed, okay?
And it's not that they're automatons
and it's not that they don't have any control whatsoever,
but they have been raised from the time that they're young
to review their leaders almost as a god,
they've been raised from the time that they're young,
that foreign forces like the United States
are bent on their own destruction
and want to destroy them;
they have been brainwashed from the time they're young
to believe that when foreigners speak,
they're always telling lies, all right?
And when you compare that
to what happens in South Korea today,
the ideological gulf between
those two populations is just immense.
And it's not the kind of thing
that you can bridge in a couple of years,
it's not even the kind of thing
that I think can be bridged through education.
So I think the ideological unification of the two Koreas
is something that would take decades, all right?
And it may even take generations.
You might have to start with just the next generation
and educate them in a different way.
But unfortunately, for better or worse,
I don't think the unification of Korea is something
that we're gonna have to worry about for some time
because unfortunately, I think North Korea
is quite stable, all right?
It has a leader who's quite young.
Now, I think a good way to think about North Korea
is kind of a tower made of iron.
It's very, very strong, and it's very stable,
but it's not flexible, all right?
And just the right kind of shock
could cause the whole thing to come collapsing down.
But it also could be with us
for many, many generations to come.
So unfortunately, I don't think that that's a problem
that we're gonna have to deal with.
- Joe: Thank you again to David Fields for being here.
Thank you all for being here as well.
[audience applauding]