University Place

How Korea Was Divided and Why It Matters

– 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]