Syngman Rhee

President of the Republic of Korea (1948-1960)

• Born: March 26, 1875
• Birthplace: P'yongsan, Whanghae, Korea
• Died: July 19, 1965
• Place of death: Honolulu, Hawaii

Rhee began his career as a student movement leader in the 1890’s. In exile, he became the leader of an overseas movement to liberate Korea from Japanese rule between 1913 and 1945. He later became president of South Korea, holding that position throughout the Korean War.

Early Life

Syngman Rhee (SIHNG-muhn ree) was the only son of Yi Kyŏng-sŏn, a descendant of King T’aejong. Though impoverished by the passage of generations, Rhee’s aristocratic family helped shape his character and endowed him with certain lifelong traits: a lonely devotion to principle over practicality, a fierce pride that demanded complete loyalty from others, and a surpassing ambition to lead, whether as a student in Seoul, an exiled Korean nationalist in the West, or president of the Republic of Korea (1948 to 1960).

As a boy, Rhee was schooled in the traditional way, learning the Chinese classics. In 1894, however, he entered Paejae Boys School, run by missionaries of the American Methodist Episcopal Church in Seoul. There he became a Christian. He also achieved notoriety as a student demonstrator in the Korean reform movement and as a member of the reformist Independence Club, for which he was arrested in 1898 and imprisoned by the Korean government for six years. In 1904 when he was released, American friends arranged for him to pursue his studies in the United States. He was enrolled at George Washington University, where he earned a B.A. He earned an M.A. at Harvard and went on to Princeton for a Ph.D. in political science. The distinction of being the first Korean to earn a doctorate in the West created an enormous fund of respect for him among the education-conscious Koreans, both in their homeland and in exile.

Life’s Work

In 1910, Korea was annexed to Japan and remained a colony for thirty-five years, until it was liberated by the Allied victory in 1945. Rhee spent most of this period in exile. He did return to Korea briefly after finishing his doctoral studies at Princeton and worked with the Young Men’s Christian Association, but he was arrested again, this time by the Japanese during a roundup of Christian leaders who were thought to be involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the Japanese governor-general. He was soon released, but because he was a marked man his missionary associates had him sent back to the United States as a delegate to a church convention. Once in the United States he stayed there, moving to Hawaii to establish himself as a Korean community leader. He founded a school, an association (the Tongji-hoe, one of the main Korean associations in America), and a magazine (the Pacific Weekly, in Korean). Though he was respected for his attainments, he was also a controversial figure who fell out with rivals and found it difficult to rise above the status of faction leader.

One of Rhee’s main contributions was as a representative of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), an exiled body formed in 1919 and headquartered in Shanghai. Because of his wide reputation, Rhee was elected the KPG’s first president, in 1919. He remained, however, in Washington for nearly two years, urging the case for Korean independence on the United States Congress and various international bodies. When he finally arrived in Shanghai to assume the presidency of the provisional government, he found it very difficult to work with his compatriots and left after seventeen frustrating months. In 1921, he returned to his base in Hawaii, from which he ventured often on speaking tours to other parts of the United States, trying to influence American policy in favor of the cause of Korean independence from Japan. His campaign to get the United States government to recognize Korea in effect by treating him as an official representative was tireless and resourceful. His methods included offering to have Korean guerrillas fight the Japanese during World War II and demanding diplomatic immunity for himself when he was stopped for speeding by the District of Columbia police. Although he aroused considerable sympathy among American audiences who heard him speak, he came to be regarded as a nuisance by many in the diplomatic and policymaking establishment.

With the end of World War II and the American occupation of South Korea, however, Rhee became useful to General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Tokyo. He obtained MacArthur’s help in returning to Korea in October, 1945, and arrived back in Seoul as if to claim his destiny as leader of the independent Korean republic. Like most Koreans, Rhee was frustrated and upset by the fact that his homeland had been liberated from Japan only to be divided at the thirty-eighth parallel and reoccupied by the United States and the Soviet Union. He helped lead the fight against a short-lived proposal to put Korea under an international trusteeship. Then, as American and Soviet negotiators failed to agree on a slate of Korean leaders to form a combined Korean government, Rhee maneuvered himself into a commanding position for leadership in the south.

Rhee’s rise was far from automatic. After his return in 1945, he was forced to overcome challenges from leaders of the China-based KPG and from Korean nationalist leaders who had spent the years of the Japanese occupation within Korea. He enjoyed surpassing advantages, however, in dealing with the American occupation authorities. His American training and command of English were key assets as he positioned himself. So was his political conservatism as the Americans suppressed the Left in South Korea and turned increasingly to right-wing interests to form the new government in their zone. In 1948, when a United Nations-sponsored election failed to unite Korea, separate republics were formed in the two zones. In August, Rhee was elected president by the newly formed National Assembly of the Republic of Korea (South Korea). In the same year in North Korea, the Soviet-sponsored Kim Il Sung became president of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. By 1949, most of the American and Soviet forces had withdrawn, leaving the peninsula to the Rhee and Kim regimes.

As president of the Republic of Korea from 1948 to 1960, Syngman Rhee faced successive trials. The first was the quest for legitimacy: to be recognized as more than a factional leader domestically and an American client internationally, a quest in which he was never entirely successful. His greatest test was the Korean War (1950-1953), the direct result of the Allies’ division of Korea in 1945 and Kim Il Sung’s disastrous attempt to reunite the peninsula by force. The economic situation in Korea, already desperate because of the isolation of the developed north from the agricultural south, was rendered incomparably worse by the war’s destruction, which flattened large areas of Seoul and the other cities (as it also destroyed the major cities in the north) and took the lives of an estimated two million Korean people. When the war ended in stalemate, again roughly along the thirty-eighth parallel, Rhee was confronted with the forbidding task of reconstruction. Although large amounts of American and international aid poured into South Korea in the 1950’s, it took many years to show results. With the populace demoralized, it proved to be a very poor climate in which to develop new political traditions. Corruption flourished, and as Rhee aged and grew more isolated, his political organization became more obsessed with power and its privileges. The Rhee years were marked by stolen elections, constitutional amendments to perpetuate his party in power, repression by police, and organized youth gangs that mocked the government’s proclaimed ideals. In 1959, the forcible passage of a series of laws including a National Security Law that was plainly intended to punish political opponents in the name of national defense led to a wave of popular revulsion against the Rhee regime.

The quadrennial presidential election of 1960 pitted Rhee against an opposition candidate who died of natural causes during the campaign. Rhee, at age eighty-four, therefore won a fourth term by default. The election of his vice presidential running mate, however, required widespread fraud and voter intimidation. There was so much irregularity in the voting that demonstrations broke out demanding a new election. The demonstrations turned into student-led riots in April, 1960. These were answered by police bullets and heavy loss of life on April 19. Martial law was declared, and, after attempting to bargain with the demonstrators and the National Assembly, Rhee finally was persuaded to resign the presidency. Within weeks he left Seoul for the last time and flew with his wife to Hawaii. In Honolulu, he spent his last years and died at the age of ninety, on July 19, 1965.

Significance

Despite his flaws Syngman Rhee is remembered by Koreans with a special kind of reverence. His fiery nationalism was always a source of pride in a country so victimized by foreigners. He is admired for the years he spent in exile working in the nearly hopeless cause of Korean independence, for his leadership in the Korean American community, and for bringing South Korea through the war. Rhee believed that the division of Korea was a great injustice. Once the Korean War began, he thought it should be won decisively. He wanted his American and United Nations allies to press the counterattack and make the sacrifice worthwhile. The decision to settle for a stalemate was a bitter blow to Rhee, and his angry rhetoric at the time expressed what many Koreans believed.

During the truce negotiations that ended the Korean War, Rhee displayed a talent for manipulating his American and United Nations allies. Though the war accomplished little but destruction in Korea, Rhee at least was able to wrest from the United States a mutual security treaty under which American forces were positioned to prevent a recurrence of the war. That guarantee enabled South Korea to develop the capability to defend itself and assured a long enough peace to begin a spectacular economic growth that Rhee did not live to see.

Rhee left Koreans with a certain cynicism about democracy. His regime was followed by a year of constitutional government under a cabinet-responsible system that was overthrown by a military coup in May, 1961, a predictable development in view of the militarization of Korea that followed the Korean War and the failure of Rhee’s government to create a viable civilian tradition. Military-led dictatorships then ruled South Korea from 1961 until 1987. Only with the beginning of the presidency of former general Roh Tae Woo in 1988 was there any visible movement back to basic freedom and a reduction of the military’s role in politics.

Bibliography

Allen, Richard C. Korea’s Syngman Rhee: An Unauthorized Portrait. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1960. A critical biography written in the aftermath of Rhee’s fall from power to provide general readers with the pieces missing in Robert Oliver’s earlier work.

Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. The leading American historical treatment of the internal politics of South Korea under American rule. Highly critical of American political leadership and United States’ sponsorship of the Right.

Han, Sungjoo. The Failure of Democracy in South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Scholarly treatment of the April, 1960, revolution, the Rhee legacy, and the regime that followed Rhee prior to the military coup of May, 1961.

Henderson, Gregory. Korea: The Politics of the Vortex. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. A detailed and richly annotated analysis of the patterns in Korean politics in the mid-twentieth century by a Foreign Service officer who worked alongside the Rhee government in the 1950’s.

Hong, Yong-pyo. State Security and Regime Security: President Syngman Rhee and the Insecurity Dilemma in South Korea, 1953-1960. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Focuses on Rhee’s post-Korean War policies, which Hong maintains were motivated by concern for the survival of both his nation and his presidency. Details the collapse of his regime after the 1956 presidential election.

Kim, Quee-yong. The Fall of Syngman Rhee. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies, 1983. A definitive study of the events surrounding Rhee’s exit from Korea, based on the author’s Harvard dissertation.

Lee, Hahn-Been. Korea: Time, Change, and Administration. Honolulu, Hawaii: East-West Center Press, 1968. A detailed study of public policy and administrative patterns in the Rhee years with stress on the trends leading up to the 1960 revolution.

Oliver, Robert T. Syngman Rhee and American Involvement in Korea, 1942-1960: A Personal Narrative. Seoul, Korea: Panmun, 1978. Rhee’s close friend and biographer compiled this collection of Rhee documents and comments on the most controversial aspects of his relations with the United States.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Syngman Rhee: The Man Behind the Myth. New York: Dodd Mead, 1954. An authorized biography and good source of personal information, though seriously flawed by lack of critical distance and numerous errors in historical detail. A basic source of Rhee’s life and movements.

Rhee, Syngman. Japan Inside Out. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1941. Rhee’s estimate of Japan under the militarists’ control and the likely effect of its imperial designs on its neighbors and the West. Useful as an example of Rhee’s political position and his approach to propaganda.