Before He Was a Politician, He Was a Scholar — Syngman Rhee's Learning Began in Prison

Syngman Rhee.

For most people, that name calls up one of two images.

Founding president — or a dictator obsessed with power.

Praise or condemnation, the verdict always ends with Rhee the politician.

But that verdict misses something entirely.

In 1923, an article appeared in a small Korean-language magazine he had founded in Hawaii.

It laid out, point by point, exactly where the Soviet system would break down.

Ten years later, Britain's most celebrated intellectuals would write the opposite.

In August 1941, he published a book in New York.

It made a single claim.

Japan will attack the United States.

Three months and twenty-two days after that book was registered for copyright, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Where communism would break down, and where Japan was headed.

He identified both dangers in advance, and he was right both times.

People usually call this sort of thing a "prophecy."

This channel will not call it that.

A prophecy explains nothing, but an analysis can be traced back to where it came from.

So today we look not at Rhee the politician, but at Rhee the scholar.

And if you follow that scholarship back to where it began, you arrive somewhere unexpected.

A prison.

1899.

At twenty-four, Syngman Rhee is imprisoned in Hanseong Prison.

The circumstances of his arrest were these.

His name came up in another prisoner's deposition.

Kang's case was a charge of plotting to overthrow the government behind Pak Yeong-hyo.

In July 1899, the judgment came down.

Yet the same judgment also carries this passage.

It records that there were no circumstances amounting to guilt, and then hands down a life sentence.

The widely repeated story that he was sentenced to death and then had it commuted does not appear in the primary record.

What is confirmed is one hundred strokes and penal servitude for life. That is all.

What is repeated and what is recorded must be kept apart.

Let us look at what a man given a life sentence at twenty-four did inside that prison.

In October 1902, he founded a school inside the prison.

He taught the inmates scripture and hymns.

That January he opened a library within the prison.

And from April 1903 to February of the following year, he compiled a dictionary.

A New English-Korean Dictionary.

An English-to-Korean dictionary, glossing English headwords in Korean.

Let us be precise here.

This dictionary was never finished.

He wrote from A through F and stopped.

The handwritten manuscript survives today at the Syngman Rhee Institute of Yonsei University.

There is a reason for dwelling on an unfinished manuscript.

The very fact that a man locked in prison began compiling a dictionary tells you what kind of man he meant to be.

A dictionary is not something you make for yourself to read.

It is something you make so that those who come after you can read a world written in English.

He stopped the dictionary because of another manuscript.

In June 1904, in that same prison, he wrote a work of political thought entirely in the Korean script.

Dongnip Jeongsin — The Spirit of Independence.

And this manuscript did not become a book right away.

It was first printed six years after he finished it, in February 1910, at the Daedong Publishing House in Los Angeles.

Nor did he keep his words confined inside the prison.

From his cell he sent unsigned editorials to the newspaper Jeguk Sinmun.

A man behind walls was still speaking to readers outside them.

We should also look at why The Spirit of Independence was written in pure Korean script.

At the time, the default for an intellectual's writing was Classical Chinese.

Write in Chinese and the educated read you; write in the Korean script and everyone outside that circle reads you.

Choosing pure Korean script tells you whom he had decided his readers would be.

The dictionary, the newspaper editorials, the vernacular manuscript — they all point the same way.

Every one of them turns what he knew into a form someone else could read.

The prison school and library, the dictionary, the editorials, and the manuscript.

These five years made him.

The goal he set was a single one.

That Koreans be not another nation's subjects, but masters of their own country.

In August 1904, a royal decree came down and the prison gates opened.

He walked out after five years.

Here we should state this channel's point of view.

The young intellectuals of the late Joseon period have long been lumped together under a single name.

The enlightenment faction — and the label of pro-Japanese collaboration attached behind it.

But what they knew and what they were trying to do has gone almost unread beneath that label.

Syngman Rhee was one of that generation.

And these five years, in which he turned a prison into a school, make him stand out even within it.

In the winter of the year he left prison, he departed for the United States.

He carried with him the question he had formed behind bars.

A bachelor's degree from George Washington University in 1907, a master's from Harvard in 1908, and in 1910 a doctorate from Princeton.

He was thirty-five.

Syngman Rhee was the first Korean to receive a Ph.D. from an American university.

His dissertation was titled "Neutrality As Influenced by the United States."

It traced how the rights of neutral states and the principle of free commerce had been established, from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 through the Civil War era.

Open the table of contents and you see exactly what this dissertation was holding onto.

Chapter One is the history of neutrality before 1776.

And these are the headings listed beneath it.

Freedom of neutral commerce.

Ownership of cargo and vessels.

The scope of contraband of war.

Blockade.

The right of visit and search.

And the jurisdiction of neutral states.

Chapter Two covers 1776 to 1793 — how the European powers actually behaved in that period.

All of it asks the same thing from different angles.

Among great powers at war, how far may anyone touch the ships, the cargo and the territory of a nation that is not in the fight?

Think of Korea in 1910 and it becomes clear what kind of question this is.

Seen from a country that lost its diplomatic sovereignty in 1905 and lost the country itself in 1910, whether a weak nation's rights are recognized as a principle of international law was a matter of survival before it was a subject of scholarship.

The dissertation ends like this.

The accomplishments he means are the development of the law of neutrality in wartime, the guarantee of peaceful intercourse between nations during war, and the enlargement and safeguarding of the freedom of neutral commerce.

In the body of the dissertation he quotes the assessment of John W. Foster, a former United States Secretary of State.

What this dissertation covers is exactly what the source says it covers.

It is a degree thesis, an academic work on one branch of international law.

That said, this channel takes the view that the purpose of writing it was not scholarly completion but laying an intellectual foundation for Korean independence.

The reason lies in the subject of the dissertation itself.

The question he seized on was this.

How does a weak nation stand among strong ones?

Can the rights of small and neutral states take their place as principles of international law, even over the opposition of the great powers?

For a Korean holding that question in 1910, it could not possibly have been someone else's story.

The question he formed in prison had become a doctoral dissertation.

And on 11 September 1919, after the three provisional governments merged, Syngman Rhee was proclaimed elected as the first provisional president.

Nine years after he wrote the dissertation.

The diplomatic line he chose for the rest of his life was precisely the principle that dissertation dealt with.

Moving the great powers by appealing to international law and public opinion.

It was not that he did not know the theory.

The man who had researched and set that principle down himself was trying to put it to work for his own country's independence.

So how accurate was that scholarship in practice?

The answer comes thirteen years later, in Hawaii.

September 1913, Hawaii.

Syngman Rhee founds The Korean Pacific Magazine and serves as its first publisher and editor-in-chief.

Even after leading the provisional government in Shanghai and returning to Hawaii in 1921, the weapon he took up was not a gun but type.

1 March 1923 — the first issue of the fifth year.

On those pages appears an article titled "The Right and Wrong of Communism."

The title itself is provocative.

Dangbudang — what is right and what is not right.

It is a declaration that he will neither praise communism wholesale nor reject it outright.

One point must be made clear.

Nowhere on these pages is the name "Syngman Rhee" printed as a signature.

The editor of the March 1923 issue was not him either, but Kim Young-woo.

Still, a number of scholarly studies classify this article as his.

He was the man who founded and carried the magazine, and a contributor who ran several unsigned pieces in every issue.

And we must remember what kind of year 1923 was.

In 1917, revolution breaks out in Russia.

The February Revolution brings down the Romanov dynasty, and that October Lenin's Bolsheviks topple the provisional government and establish Soviet power.

It was a declaration that they would build a classless society.

The news immediately shook intellectuals across the world.

A great many of the West's most celebrated thinkers called the experiment "the future of humanity."

Intellectuals in colonial Korea were no exception.

To people sick of a caste order and of the gap between rich and poor, the slogan "we all live as equals" sounded almost like a religion.

And Korea had one more circumstance layered on top.

Seen from a country that had been taken, a force had appeared at the center of the world that rejected imperialism head-on.

It was natural for the hope to attach that the power to help them win independence might lie there.

To write "beware the Soviet Union" in 1923 was to go directly against the air of the age.

In the middle of that fervor, Rhee does not deny the aim of the communist party itself.

He begins with the story of Korea's long caste order.

The caste system was abolished by law, he says, but the gap between rich and poor took its place.

And so he concludes.

This is the passage to watch.

Before he was an anti-communist, Syngman Rhee was a man who never once opposed equality itself.

What he took issue with was how equality was to be achieved — the method.

And from here is the real heart of this article.

He breaks the communist method into five parts and rebuts them one by one.

First, what happens if you divide up property by force?

It is the point that when effort is severed from result, the reason to make an effort disappears with it.

Second, what happens if you abolish the capitalists?

Removing the object of your hatred and producing someone to do the work that object did are two different problems.

Third, what happens if you abolish the educated class?

The moment you make an enemy of those who hold knowledge, the level of the whole society collapses with them.

Fourth, what happens if you abolish religion?

He saw it not as a matter of faith itself, but of the norms that hold people to being human.

And fifth, the sharpest point of all.

What happens if you abolish government, the military, the state?

This fifth point is effectively the conclusion of the whole article.

The self-contradiction of abolishing the state while in practice making everything depend on a single state — he had already put his finger on it.

And Rhee closes this article with his own country.

Independence comes before ideology.

For him communism was neither absolute good nor absolute evil, but something to be weighed by whether it helped Korean independence or not.

How early this article was becomes clear ten years later.

In 1931, the world-famous playwright George Bernard Shaw visits the Soviet Union and meets Stalin.

And two years after that, together with twenty other visitors who had been to the Soviet Union, he publishes an open letter in the Manchester Guardian.

One of the West's foremost intellectuals had walked straight into the very trap Rhee had warned about in print.

Sitting in a small magazine office in Hawaii, he had drawn that trap on paper ten years earlier.

It was the result of analysis, not sentiment.

Was this a coincidence?

Eighteen years later, he reads the age once again with the same accuracy.

This time the subject was not the Soviet Union but Japan.

15 August 1941.

At a Christian publishing house in New York, a book is registered for copyright.

The author is Syngman Rhee.

The title: Japan Inside Out.

The book said one thing.

Japan will attack the United States.

From the date of registration to the attack on Pearl Harbor is three months and twenty-two days.

We should also look at who wrote this book.

In June 1941, two months before the book appeared, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea appointed him its official representative to the United States.

This was not some odd document written by an anonymous exile.

It was a warning delivered to American readers, in that capacity, by the man the provisional government had installed as its channel to the United States.

What he saw was not only military power.

It was a system.

Could a country that worships its emperor as a living god become a civilization the world can stand alongside?

He judged that it could not.

So his opposition to Japan was not only national feeling.

It was a judgment about a system.

If what opened his eyes in prison was American democracy, this book set down its opposite.

And yet, when it came out, this book was barely read.

The reasons show how lonely a position he was standing in.

The United States of 1941 had no intention of entering a new war.

In a Gallup poll that April, those who favored fighting Germany and Italy were two in ten.

Nineteen percent in favor, eighty-one percent against.

Those are the numbers from four months before the book appeared.

The mood did not change much over the summer.

And to America, Japan was not an enemy but a long-standing friend.

In the Taft–Katsura understanding of 1905, the United States effectively acquiesced in Japan's domination of Korea.

It was an understanding that America would hold the Philippines and Japan would hold Korea.

So to an American reader this book was doubly strange.

It was a book saying war was coming, in a country that had decided not to fight one; and a book saying that a country it regarded as a friend was dangerous.

And the man who wrote it came from the very nation whose subjugation America had acquiesced in.

The morning of 7 December 1941. Pearl Harbor.

A book no one had read four months earlier began, overnight, to be read again.

Four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an American church newspaper introduced the book like this.

Those words came not when the book appeared, but only after Pearl Harbor.

One thing must be made clear.

He did not name Pearl Harbor specifically.

He got the direction right. That is all.

This channel will not call that a prophecy.

In 1899, there was a young man of twenty-four who began compiling a dictionary in prison.

In 1910, he wrote a dissertation on how a weak nation stands among strong ones.

In 1923, from Hawaii, he identified what the Western intelligentsia had missed.

In 1941, he read the age once more with the same accuracy.

These four scenes are not separate events.

They are the result of one man reading the world in one consistent way.

That way was this.

Look not at what a system promises, but at how that system actually operates.

The Soviet Union promised equality.

Instead of the promise, he asked what moves into the space where property, capital, knowledge, religion and the state have been removed.

Japan promised the order of a Greater East Asia.

Instead of the promise, he asked how far a system that sets a man up as a god can go.

It is the same method.

And he learned that method in prison.

Over five years of making a dictionary, sending pieces to a newspaper and writing a manuscript in the Korean script, what he acquired was not knowledge itself but a way of handling knowledge.

The young awakeners of the late Joseon period have long been bound under a single label.

What they knew and what they were trying to do has gone almost unread.

Syngman Rhee was one of that generation, and within it he was an outstanding intellect.

Before he was a politician he was a scholar who read his age, and a man who put that scholarship into practice.