to the United States, telling Roosevelt that the protectorate had been agreed to under duress. To convey the message he chose Homer B. Hul-bert, a Seoul missionary and editor, who agreed to make a secret trip to Washington. In America, however, Hulbert was able to see neither the president nor the secretary of state; the American position was that since the protectorate had been established, the emperor could not make his own representations. The fact was that the last years of the Yi dynasty had been so ineffectual that few Americans, outside of court favorites such as Allen and Hulbert, were sympathetic to the emperor. Most foreigners in Seoul looked with favor on the protectorate, while international opinion had been conditioned by the reports of observers such as George Kennan:
“The Korean Government . . . [comprises] (a) the Emperor’s Cabinet, consisting of nine ministers; (b) the sorcerers, soothsayers, fortunetellers, and mudangs or spirit mediums, who influence and often control legislation; (c) the governors of the thirteen provinces; and (d) the magistrates or prefects of the 344 prefectures into which the provinces are divided. All the official positions in classes (c) and (d) are nominally filled by Imperial appointment, but the selection of appointees is subject to court influence, “pull,” or intrigue, and, as a rule, the offices are sold to the highest bidder. Provincial governors pay from ten thousand to forty thousand Korean dollars for their places, and then not only recoup themselves but amass fortunes by robbing the defenseless people whom they are sent to govern. As there are no independent law courts, and as every governor or prefect is a judge as well as an administrator, a Korean who is robbed must seek redress from the robber. . . .
“The activities and operations of the existing Korean Government may briefly be summarized as follows: it takes from the people, directly and indirectly, everything that they earn over and above a bare subsistence, and gives them in return practically nothing. It affords no adequate protection to life or property; it provides no educational facilities that deserve notice; it builds no roads; it does not improve its harbors; it does not light its coasts; it pays no attention whatever to streetcleaning or sanitation; it takes no measures to prevent or check epidemics; . . . it corrupts and demoralizes its subjects by setting them examples of untruthfulness, dishonesty, treachery, cruelty, and a cynical brutality in dealing with human rights that is almost without parallel in modern times.*
As significant as Kennan’s excoriation of the Korean government was the fact that his judgment of the Korean people gave little hope of reform from within:
“The first impression that the Korean people make upon an impartial and unprejudiced newcomer is strongly and decidedly unfavorable. . . . The domestic environment and personal habits of the lower classes are filthy and repulsive in the extreme; the moony expressionless faces of the petty officials and gentlemen of leisure who saunter through the streets fanning themselves or smoking long-stemmed pipes show no signs of character or traces of experience; and the unemployed workingmen in dirty white cotton jackets and baggy trousers, who lie here and there on the ground with flies crawling over their closed eyelids, do not compare at all favorably with the neat, alert, industrious laborers of Japan. . . .
“As one’s field of observation widens, so as to take in country as well as town, and to include moral as well as physical and intellectual characteristics, one’s first impressions harden and one’s bad opinion of the people settles into a conviction. . . . They are the rotten product of a decayed Oriental civilization.”3
If Kennan was not an entirely impartial observer, articles such as his nonetheless made it difficult for Rhee to get much sympathy for his country in the United States. Moreover, it was true that when the Japanese resident-general arrived in Seoul in 1906, most foreigners there welcomed the change. Rhee graduated from George Washington in the spring of 1907, shaken by Korea’s fate and uncertain as to his own future. Although committed to the Methodist Mission Board to return to Korea on its behalf, he determined to do postgraduate work in the United States and was admitted to Harvard University.
At Harvard Rhee lived in seclusion, “forming no lasting friendships while there and entering not at all into the social life of the college.”4 His academic work improved, however, and he began to read extensively in international relations. When he received his master’s degree in the spring of 1908, unstable conditions in his homeland reinforced his new-found academic interests and prompted him to continue his education. At first Rhee decided to do graduate work at Columbia. At the last minute, however, a friend persuaded him to enroll at Princeton.
Rhee’s two years at Princeton appear to have influenced him more than any of his previous schooling. The president of Princeton at that time was Woodrow Wilson, whose later eloquence on behalf of national self-determination Rhee would often cite. As at Harvard, Rhee was withdrawn from the student body, but he became a faculty favorite. He attracted the attention of Wilson himself, who provided him with a letter of recommendation for speaking engagements which cited him as “a man of strong patriotic feeling and of great enthusiasm for his people.”5
Rhee received his doctorate in 1910, the year in which Japan formally annexed its Korean protectorate. By this time the Japanese were well on their way to making Korea a case study in the reprehensible aspects of colonialism. While humiliating the Korean people at every turn, they went about their plan to turn Korea into a major supplier of food and raw materials to their home islands. Physical improvements made by the Japanese were of little benefit to the Koreans; railroad construction was to facilitate the movement of exports to ports such as Inchon and Pusan, and sanitary measures were to make Seoul habitable for Japanese officials. As for the Koreans, it was already apparent that seldom had they ever been united for anything as they were united against the Japanese.
Even prior to annexation there were uprisings among the politically volatile Koreans. An insurrection by a partisan “Righteous Army” in 1906 was not brought under control for two months. The abdication of the emperor the following year brought riots and demonstrations in Seoul. In 1909, a young Korean nationalist assassinated the Japanese resident-general, Prince Ito, in Harbin. From July 1907 to the end of1908, according to Japanese figures, nearly 15,000 Korean insurgents were killed and nearly 9,000 taken prisoner.
Japan’s formal annexation of Korea came as something of an anticlimax. The Japanese made the abdicated emperor a prince in their own imperial household and bought off leading members of the Korean court with large monetary grants. But beneath the new trappings Korea was under the absolute control of a governor-general who was responsible only to the Japanese emperor and whose centralized control reached down to the smallest county and village.
Although Korea would have presented problems to the most skillful colonizer, so heavy-handed were the Japanese that they succeeded in unifying Korean nationalist sentiment after Korea’s own nationalists had failed. Japanese economic exploitation was so overt that it could be recognized as such by the simplest Korean peasant. The scheme of a group of officially backed Japanese financiers to monopolize Korea’s underdeveloped land came in for bitter criticism after a number of tracts of land had been turned over at a fraction of their actual value.
Measures aimed at destroying Korea as a national entity were an unnecessary aggravating factor. Under the Japanese the Korean language was dropped from the school curriculum. Koreans were forced to adopt not only Japanese citizenship but also Japanese names. When he became president of South Korea, one of Rhee’s major concerns would be measures to preserve the country as a cultural and national entity in the face of any future encroachments by the Japanese and the Russians.
In the period immediately following his graduation from Princeton, Rhee appears to have seriously considered abandoning his role as patriot-in-exile. With Korea’s political fortunes at a nadir, Rhee’s missionary friends urged him to devote himself to church work. Rhee himself, having enjoyed his years in America, found it difficult to dispute those who pictured the fruitlessness of agitating for a lost national cause.
With mixed emotions Rhee finally accepted a job with the Seoul Y.M.C.A., a step which required his returning to live under Japanese rule. On his return to Korea in the winter of 1910, via Europe and Russia, he moved into the Rhee family home with his father. Although presumably under surveillance by the Japanese, Rhee was not molested.
Rhee might have continued in social work in his homeland