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This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life following the March First Movement of 1919. The mass demonstrations not only forced Korea’s Japanese rulers to rethink their colonial policies on the peninsula, but it also proved to be a catalyst in bringing about a significant increase in organized resistance by Koreans within the country as well as abroad. The first republican government (in exile) in Korea’s long history came into being in the wake of the March First Movement, with Rhee as its president, even though he had not actively sought the job. An examination of the documents shows that Rhee was elected in absentia and was not even aware of his own ascendancy until well after the election occurred. As his first order of business, President Rhee sought recognition for the new Korean republic from the United States and other powers participating in the Paris Peace Conference, which had been in session since January 12, 1919.

This chapter details Syngman Rhee’s diplomacy with a president of the United States; studies at George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton; and his work for Korean independence. Not long after Rhee’s release from prison on August 7, 1904, the progressive leaders of his government asked him to use his specialized skills to serve the government in the nation’s time of need. On November 4, he departed the Korean Peninsula for the United States. He would spent much of his life living outside of the country of his birth, often embroiled in diplomatic efforts to promote Korea’s independence—efforts that brought him into direct contact with powerful political leaders and various heads of state in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere for more than five decades.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life during and after his stint as president of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG). Topics covered include the four men who opposed Rhee in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as his perception of each of them; setbacks in Rhee’s diplomatic efforts with the United States at the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921–1922; his impeachment by the Shanghai Provisional Government in March 1925; his decision to reshape the principles and direction of the Comrade Society of Great Korea to suit his needs, shifting its focus away from the importance of the Shanghai Provisional Government and placed instead on Rhee’s legitimacy as the sole leader of the Korean independence movement; and Rhee’s business ventures.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life in the 1940s. Topics covered include his diplomatic efforts in Washington, D.C.; lobbying of the State Department by the Korean–American Council; lobbying of the U.S. Congress by the Christian Friends of Korea; collaboration with the Office of Strategic Services; and diplomatic and propaganda efforts at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco. During the Pacific War, Rhee failed to obtain recognition of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) from the United States government despite the tireless diplomatic and propaganda campaign he carried out in collaboration with the Korean–American Council and the Christian Friends of Korea—with the full backing of the KPG and the Comrade Society. He attributed the cause of his failure to the deeply ingrained pro-Japanese and anti-Korean bias of the officials in the State Department.

This chapter focuses on Syngman Rhee’s rivals and critics. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Koreans in the United States saw the outbreaks of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the Pacific War between Japan and the United States in 1941 as opportunities to end Japanese imperialism in their own native land. A fever of independence arose among them in tandem with the resurgent Korean independence movement in China. Many of these Koreans openly expressed antipathy toward Rhee, labeling him “old and cranky”—and therefore hopelessly outdated. Rhee’s critics at the time were divided into two ideological groups. One was a conservative group whose members belonged to the Korean National Association of North America. The other major anti-Rhee faction was a progressive group affiliated with two left-leaning organizations: (1) the Sino-Korean Peoples’ League in Honolulu and (2) the Societies for Aid to the Korean Volunteer Corps in America.

This chapter details events following Syngman Rhee’s arrival in Hawaii in 1913. The islands served as the base for his nationalist activities for more than a quarter of a century, until 1939, six years before the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule. From 1913–1915 Rhee established a reputation as an exemplary Christian educator by concentrating on the education of the second-generation Koreans on the islands. In July 1918, he established the New Church (later named the Korean Christian Church), after he had severed ties with the Hawaii Methodist Episcopal Mission. Between 1919 and 1929, under the leadership of its second minister, Rev. M in Ch’an-ho (1878–1954), the Korean Christian Church in Honolulu became the most influential church among Korean residents in Hawaii.

This chapter examines the challenges and dilemmas in centralizing the national authority of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai and developing focused policies toward the homeland. Shortly after the formation of the KPG, a highly contentious power struggle arose between the Korean Commission in Washington D.C., under the authority of KPG President Syngman Rhee, and Korean immigrant organizations in America under the leadership of the Korean National Association. Though the conflict would be resolved by the end of 1919, the dispute exacerbated factional tensions within the KPG in Shanghai. In creating the KPG, nationalist leaders had sought to unify scattered Korean communities in exile into a single central administrative body and establish the KPG as the authentic sovereign of the Korean people. However, these efforts to create a national state within the diaspora presented serious challenges for coherent political action as a multitude of groups competed over determining who had the legitimate right to govern and lead the new nation. Ultimately, the KPG failed to develop a working consensus that could implement effective policies that addressed the multiple and diverse ideological and strategic perspectives on the liberation of Korea that arose from the diaspora.

This chapter details Syngman Rhee’s early life including his family background, education, imprisonment, and conversion to Christianity. Rhee (Yi Sŭng-man) was born in 1875 in P’yŏngsan County, Hwanghae Province, in what is now part of North Korea. As he grew older, he gradually became interested in the progressivism of the West and the need for political and social reform under the influence of North American Protestant missionaries, yet he also had a healthy respect for Korean customs and traditional East Asian modes of thought. Rhee became the first major Christian political leader in the annals of Korean history. His severe criticism of Emperor Kojong’s conservative regime led to his imprisonment at the age of twenty-four, where he accepted Jesus Christ and began the process of blending religion with his political beliefs.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life in the early 1930s. Still smarting from his impeachment by the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai in 1925, the bankruptcy of his Tongji Investment Company, and the subsequent Democratization Revolt in Hawaii in the early 1930s, Rhee saw a diplomatic opening in Japan’s advance into Manchuria. He hoped to take advantage of heightened anti-Japanese concerns in the United States and Europe—as well as in China and Korea—to press for the cause of Korean independence. He found significant backing on November 10, 1932, when the cabinet of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai asked that he travel to Geneva “for the presentation of the freedom of our Country and disclosing the Japanese [aggression] to her neighbor country contrary to the treaty with her neighbor” to the League of Nations. Rhee was formally appointed the head plenipotentiary of the Korean delegation. While in Geneva, Switzerland, Rhee met Francesca Maria Donner (1900–1992), an Austrian woman whom he married in October 1933.

Chapter 5 explores Korean lobbying during World War II. Rhee managed to build on the notoriety he received in the 1920s, but also to adapt his message to take advantage of the anxieties and ambitions of that moment. In the anti-Japanese environment after Pearl Harbor, Rhee was able to portray Korea as the first victim of Japan and to link Theodore Roosevelt’s betrayal of Korea in 1905 to the causes of World War II. Rhee’s assertion that Korean manpower could substitute for American manpower in the Pacific War was far-fetched to the point of deceitful, but it grabbed the attention of Americans with family members in uniform. Rhee’s lecturing, writing, and media appearances during the war turned him into a minor American celebrity and provided the Koreans with new allies across the United States. The complexity of alliance politics with China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, coupled with Korean factionalism, prevented the recognition of the Korean Provisional Government during the war. However, Rhee’s lobbying and the sympathy it aroused for Korea was a key factor behind the American decision to suggest the temporary division of Korea.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life following his return to Seoul on October 16, 1945. Topics covered include his attempts to bring order to the chaotic political situation and unify all factions under his leadership (October–November 1945); fighting trusteeship and cooperating with the U.S. military government (December 1945–June 1946); his push for an interim government in the South (June 1946–April 1947); promoting South Korean elections (May 1947–May 1948); and drafting a constitution and founding the Republic (May–August 1948). The constitution was proclaimed on July 17, 1948. Three days later the National Assembly elected Syngman Rhee president of the ROK with 180 votes. Rhee was formally installed as the president of the ROK on July 24. On August 15, 1948, the third anniversary of Liberation, the Republic of Korea was formally proclaimed.

This chapter argues that Rhee’s 1948 election as president was a tribute to his peerless competence and steadfast effort towards attaining Korean independence. He possessed ample qualifications to be president and won the support of the South Korean people and the U.S. government through unparalleled persistence and determination. Rhee also possessed qualities lacking in his political rivals of the time. In order to provide this wider breadth of understanding with respect to Rhee’s rise to become the Republic of Korea’s first president, the remainder of the chapter presents a ten-point summary of his political assets: (i) royal descent; (ii) superb intellect; (iii) messianic conviction; (iv) a patriot par excellence; (v) reputation building as the “father of the Korean nation”; (vi) fund-raising capacity; (vii) Machiavellian skills; (viii) a vision for nation building; (ix) support from compatriots; and (x) support from Americans.

This chapter details events following Syngman Rhee’s return to Korea in 1910, including his stint at the Seoul YMCA, his religious exile, and evangelical work in Japan. Back in Seoul, Rhee became the student department secretary of the Interscholastic Department in the Seoul YMCA, a position he held from October 1910 to March 1912. He also became the target of the Japanese police, along with many other important Christian leaders throughout the country on trumped-up charges. The ultimate motive of the Japanese officials who drew up the charges was to weaken the Protestant movement. When faced with the choice of staying in Korea and taking his chances with the Japanese colonial government, or traveling journey to Minneapolis and forge a new path in life somewhere in the United States, Rhee chose the latter. Rhee left Seoul on March 26, 1912, his thirty-seventh birthday. On his way to the United States, he stopped over in Japan for ten days to organize a “Gospel Band” among the Korean students and raise funds for a Korean YMCA building in Tokyo.

This chapter examines the United States' state building in South Korea that began in 1945, when it occupied southern Korea and sought to secure it against Communism and social revolution. It describes American efforts to establish an anti-Communist bulwark on the Korean peninsula by supporting the creation of a separate South Korean state in 1948, defending it in a three-year war with North Korea between 1950 and 1953, and propping up its shattered economy when the Korean War ended. The chapter also considers U.S. political support for the conservative nationalist Syngman Rhee, despite his indifference to development and democracy, throughout this period in the name of security. It suggests that the United States inadvertently helped strengthen Rhee's authoritarianism by giving him hefty military and economic aid.

Chapter 2 examines the lobbying activities of Rhee and the Korean independence movement in the immediate aftermath of the March First Movement and in the context of Woodrow Wilson’s embrace of self-determination as an American war aim. The Koreans used this new American interest in international affairs to expand their lobbying activities beyond those who had been involved in the American missionary effort in Korea. Through grassroots organizing, print media, and Chautauqua lectures, the Koreans established a small but influential constituency of American supporters who were willing to publicly advocate for the Korean cause.

With the collapse of the Korean Provisional Government and subsequent period of retrenchment, there was no longer a supreme authority to coordinate activities within the diaspora. Nevertheless, questions of state power and its uses continued to dominate the political concerns of all Koreans abroad. These questions however assumed a greater local significance as struggles over the right to leadership played out at the local level. At the same time, these local struggles were inextricably linked to larger diasporic processes in the independence movement. This chapter analyzes this dialectical relationship between local level community dynamics and diasporic processes at the global level through a close examination of the highly contentious legal battles within the Korean National Association of Hawaii in 1931 that grew out of struggles for community leadership in Hawaii. With no central sovereign authority of their own, Koreans in America turned to U.S. state structures to legitimate leadership within the community.

This chapter narrates the systematic efforts of nationalist leaders in the diaspora to establish a national Korean state in the aftermath of the large-scale 1919 March First uprising. Japan’s brutal suppression of the national uprising in Korea made it necessary for national liberation activities to be carried out from abroad, ushering in a new phase in the nationalist movement as the locus of political activities occurred largely outside the Korean peninsula. These activities resulted in the formation of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai, which developed out of multiple ideological and strategic strands within the diaspora. The globalization of American power following World War I empowered the U.S. component of the Korean diaspora to play significant roles, ideologically and organizationally, in defining the vision of a new Korean nation-state that was embodied in the KPG. For the next several years, the activities of the KPG would remain at the center of the national liberation movement.

This chapter studies the war’s impact on Korean national independence movements. The war had little direct impact on the population of the Korean peninsula. Koreans did not get involved in war, nor were they much interested in it. Nonetheless, the war marks a turning point in Korean history because it gave rise to Wilsonian promises of a new world order to be worked out after the war. When Korean nationalists learned of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points address and his subsequent declarations in January 1918, they were, like the Chinese and Indians, thrilled at the prospect and its implications for the future of Korea. Many Korean nationalists recognized “the Wilsonian moment” as an unprecedented opportunity for Korea and decided to take quick action to make the most of it. This chapter emphasizes the extraordinary journey Koreans shared with fellow Asians to shape their own national development.