of whom are uneducated and without any earlier knowledge of the Western world” Although Rhee’s own formal Western education was limited to his two years at Paichai, it is significant that even in his twenties he found himself preaching the gospel of independence to people willing to listen. He wrote:
“If your own heart is without patriotism, your heart is your enemy. You must struggle against your own feelings if they urge you to forgo the struggle for the common cause. Let us examine our hearts now, at this moment. If you find within yourself any single thought of abandoning the welfare of your country, tear it out. Do not wait for others to lead or to do what must be done, but arouse yourself. . . .
“As I have indicated before, to live in this nation is comparable to being a passenger on a ship in a cruel sea. How can you be so indifferent as not to be concerned with the affairs of your own nation, but to insist they are the business of high officials? . . .
“The relationship between you and your nation may seem so remote that you have little reason to love it or to make efforts to save it. Therefore, two enemies must be guarded against: first, the people who try to destroy the nation; and second, those who sit passively by, being without any hope or sense of responsibility.”7
Thus Rhee appears not to have been pressing a specific program of reform, but rather to have been attempting to awaken his countrymen to the peril from abroad. The Spirit of Independence has had none of the impact abroad of other prison-inspired volumes, but in Korea, where independence was itself a new concept to a people long used to Chinese suzerainty, the work was not without significance despite its small distribution.
There were other independence leaders in Seoul Prison besides Rhee, and several would be associated with Rhee at various times after their release. Lee Chung-hyuk would accompany him to the United States in 1904 to plead Korea’s cause in America. Park Young-man would become a rival of his among American-oriented Koreans in Hawaii. Hugh Cynn, a boyhood friend of Rhee’s, would oppose him for the South Korean presidency in 1952.
The beginning of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 stirred hopes among the prisoners that a political amnesty would follow Korea’s declaration of neutrality, but court reactionaries were not anxious to be troubled again by rabble-rousing young reformers. Some persons in government circles interpreted the United States—Korean friendship treaty of 1882 as guaranteeing American protection against aggression. Minister Allen had indeed assured the king as late as 1900 that “the treaty powers would assist Korea in time of distress, by their good offices, and recalled to his mind the fact that in 1894, at the time of the Sino-Japanese War, when he had asked the good offices of the United States, he had not asked in vain.”8 To the Koreans, accustomed to their earlier Confucian relationship with China, no “big brother” would allow niceties concerning the definition of good offices to prevent him from aiding “little brother.”
Even prior to the end of the Sino-Japanese War, Japan had all but assimilated the Hermit Kingdom. A protocol was signed pledging Korea to accept Japanese “improvements in administration.” This entering wedge was followed with demands for the abolition of Korea’s department of posts and telegraphs, for the placing of Japanese police in every province, for the recall of Korean legations abroad, and finally for indemnity for every Japanese killed by Koreans in the ten years before. When a declaration of amnesty brought Rhee’s release on August 9, 1904, his country was a Japanese protectorate in all but name.
One cannot help wondering if Rhee’s lifelong hatred of the Japanese does not stem in part from his realization of how skillfully they had made use of Korea’s fledgling independence movement to neutralize Russia and accomplish their own ends. But his time in prison had not tempered his zeal for Korean independence. Upon his release, Rhee contracted two progressive ministers of the court, Prince Min Yong-hwan and General Hahn Kyu-sul. He found both concerned over Japanese encroachments and anxious to make a personal appeal to the United States. With the emperor virtually immobilized by Japanese surveillance (the Yi king had assumed the imperial title in 1897 for reasons of prestige), there seemed little possibility of the appointment of an official delegation. It was therefore determined that Rhee would go to Washington, accompanied by his erstwhile prison colleague, Lee Chung-hyuk. Theirs would be one of several fruitless missions.
When Rhee left for America in November 1904, he left behind him much of his Korean heritage. His mother had died prior to his imprisonment, and his gradual Westernization had contributed to his estrangement from his Korean wife. Upon his departure he adopted the anglicized name of Syngman Rhee, never to revert to the Korean Lee Sung-man. Yet if his thinking was to be greatly influenced by the West, his lifelong goal had already been determined by the political struggles of his youth—by independence demonstrators waving banners in the streets of Seoul.
* Robert T. Oliver, Syngman Rhee: The Man behind the Myth (New York, 1954), pp. 52-53. According to Oliver, Rhee’s first wife was somewhat older than he but was “distinguished by unusual strength of intellect and character.” Oliver acknowledges that her fate is “uncertain” but states that she bore him a son who died in Philadelphia in 1908 after being sent to America to study. It has been periodically rumored that Rhee’s first wife is still alive, pensioned off in a province of southern Korea.
3 : The Common
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,
