(b. March 26, 1875, d. July 19, 1965)
For years after its end, Syngman Rhee’s leadership of South Korea, as described in the literature on the subject, has been described invariably, if quite fairly, as authoritarian, autocratic, inept, and corrupt. In the 1990s, a more nuanced view of the Rhee regime emerged in South Korea, one that came to appreciate the immense difficulties that the president of the First Republic faced, and gave Rhee credit as an effective and patriotic leader, in spite of his well-deserved ill repute. It was indeed largely thanks to Rhee that South Korea secured some of the largest disbursements of U.S. aid to a single country; Aid that was fundamental to the Republic’s survival after the devastation of the Korean War. The revisionists also pointed out that during his tenure, the Korean government passed land reform legislation, all the while South Korea saw the first signs of a growing postwar economy. Also considered commendable was Rhee’s complete refusal to reestablish economic links with Japan in the years so soon after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial control, although the diminishing returns of this obstinate stance became apparent soon enough.
And unlike a number of later South Korean presidents and their family members, evidence suggests that Rhee was not personally corrupt. This is especially remarkable in light of the vast corruption of the Rhee regime. So long as they had the essentials — perhaps in the sense that a vain, autocratic head-of-state and his wife could have understood that term — the first Korean president and his Austrian wife were apparently not obsessed with money, and had refrained from using their positions while in power to amass an obscene pile of cash for themselves. Considering the malversations of some later Korean presidents in this regard, Rhee probably deserves a fair amount of credit for this fact alone.
Despite this rehabilitation of his reputation, few other accomplishments can be attributed to Rhee’s tenure. Syngman Rhee will be probably be more remembered for his role in the political violence of post-liberation Korea, his abuses of power to shut out opponents, and his use of thugs, intimidation, and vote rigging to secure and hold the presidency; All were part of his effort to exercise complete control, and although Rhee never really attained this goal, it was not for a lack of effort.
After three years of working with Rhee during the American military occupation of southern Korea (1945–1948), the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency gave this assessment of their ally in Seoul soon after he became president of South Korea in 1948:
“Rhee has devoted his whole life to the cause of an independent Korea with the ultimate objective of personally controlling that country. In pursuing this end he has shown few scruples about the elements which he has been willing to utilize to for his personal advancement, with the important exception that he has always refused to deal with Communists. Rhee’s vanity has made him highly susceptible to the contrived flattery of self-seeking interests in the U.S. and Korea. His intellect is a shallow one, and his behavior is often irrational and even childish. Yet Rhee, in the final analysis, has proved himself to be a remarkably astute politician.”
Return to Korea
Syngman Rhee became leader of southern Korea after the end of the war with Japan, and at the invitation of the United States, which provided his return to Korea in October 1945 aboard Douglas MacArthur’s personal airplane. Prior to his move back to Korea, he had been a publicist for Korean independence, residing in the United States on and off for almost forty years, and had a stint as the first president of the Provisional Government of Korea in Shanghai, leading all of the major Korean pro-independence factions for six years in the 1920s. With his extensive stay in the United States, his Ph.D from Princeton, his lifelong commitment to Korean independence, and his ability to understand plain English, the United States government favored Rhee as someone with whom they thought they could work to lead post-liberation Korea. Thus, the seventy-year-old Rhee returned to Korea to spend the last quarter of his mature life as the leader of the southern part of a country that had gone through immense, wrenching changes since he had last left it in the 1920s.
The de facto policies of the separate military occupations of the USA and USSR on either side of the 38th parallel had created separate political realities for Koreans after 1945. Rhee entered southern Korea at a time when the US occupation authorities were in the process of disestablishing the spontaneously-formed Korean leftist governing bodies called “People’s Committees,” which had begun operating at the local level in the days after the Japanese surrender. This action gave breathing room to the Korean rightist who had largely collaborated with the Japanese, owned most of the wealth of the country, and occupied most of the positions in the colonial bureaucracy and police. As the structure and substance of the colonial apparatus (minus the Japanese) was largely maintained during the subsequent U.S. military occupation of Korea, the Korean right was essentially ensconced in power and rescued from a situation in which the Korean left would most certainly have dominated the politics of southern Korea if the United States had not intervened. With imported expatriate rightist politicians like Rhee, who had not worked with the Japanese, the Korean right had found prestigious candidates fit for political office. With the powerful Korean right, most of whom associated with the Korean Democratic Party (KDP), Rhee had found a constituency. The US occupation also soon favored Rhee among the short list of other “acceptable” Korean politicians, if only because the others did not work out. However, much of Rhee’s rise to prominence in South Korea was thanks to his own calculative ambition.
Although Syngman Rhee had found his constituents in the KDP, their coalition with Rhee was an uneasy one throughout his fifteen-year tenure, as they were often at odds with him over his growing dictatorial executive powers, among other issues. While Rhee may have enjoyed support from the Korean right in regard to his main (fantasy) policy objective of taking over the north by force of arms (Pukchin Tongil: “March North and Unify”), Rhee would alternately charge his political rivals in the KDP and others in the legislature as being either pro-Japanese or as communists when they did not heel to his will. The pro-Japanese allegations were a sore point for many in the KDP, since many had worked under the Japanese. Rhee used this fact to his advantage, but he also had to protect KDP members from these charges at times, and had to cultivate some of these same people politically, since he required their money and ability. Therefore Rhee often could not ignore their demands, either. Despite this, Rhee had no problem jailing members of the legislature, and indeed closing the entire body down, as he did in 1952.
Land Reform and a Changing Economy
One of the longest battles the southern right had with Rhee was over the control of wealth, particularly the allocation of resources. Early on, this revolved around one of the most important political problems of post-liberation Korea: The unequal land situation. Most of the land was owned by a traditional elite with local political power, while the land itself was often farmed by tenants paying high rents who dreamed of personal and reasonable land ownership. This gave rise to mass peasant support for leftist political organization in the countryside in the post-liberation south. Rhee and his rightist supporters, with help from the US occupation, fought against this leftist opposition in the south, beating it back: First from the capital, then in the provinces, culminating with a substantial victory over the left in the autumn harvest uprisings of 1946, and finally fighting against it at the village-level by 1947. The main agents of this leftist suppression were the Korean National Police and tactical units of the United States Army (units of the 6th and 7th Infantry Divisions), with support from right-wing thugs. By 1949, Rhee had 30,000 political prisoners in his jails, with 80% of all court cases being taken up against suspected communists.
Although Rhee and his supporters had pushed back the tide, the Korean president still wanted a wider base of support among the farmers of the south, sensing that a real effort to steal the thunder from the left would help to keep off-balance his constituent-rivals on the right. With help from the occupation authorities, Rhee accomplished two significant events that helped advance his cause: In April 1948, agricultural lands formerly owned by the Japanese were sold to Korean tenants, and in May, Rhee came out on top in free national elections, in which large numbers of farmers showed their support for Rhee and his new land policy. True to his style, Rhee used coercive measures at the polls, but they were probably the freest and fairest elections that he was to ever hold. The following year, a group of younger “radical” legislators succeeded in forcing passage of a land-reform law, extending the tenant-purchase program to all absentee-owned land.
The results were dramatic.
At the end of World War II, 3 percent of landowners owned 64 percent of the country’s farmland, but by 1956 the top 6 percent only controlled 18 percent, giving rise to a larger percentage of smallholders who could now finally keep the profits of their labors instead of continuing the cycle of poverty by using them to pay rents. The Korean war, through the ironic agent of the North Korean army, accelerated South Korea’s land reform efforts: During their brief occupation of the South in the summer of 1950, the communists instituted their own violent version of land reform, executing members of the landlord class, thereby unwittingly removing for the Rhee government some of those who had served as the main obstacle to the South’s own land reform efforts. Although not a single hectare of land was redistributed until after the Korean War was well underway (with Rhee seeking postponement of the land reform due to pressures from the still-powerful landowning classes), one of the most needed social reforms in the south had eventually materialized.
Although land reform was a major setback for some KDP members who were still tied to the land, many had begun to free themselves of land-based wealth and had gone into industry instead. In industry, the new South Korean government acted more as an ally to investors, by setting up protectionist walls to cultivate local industry through a focus on “import-substitution industrialization.” Thus, a new aspect to the tempestuous marriage of convenience between Rhee and the KDP developed in the era after the Korean War, with all the typical battles over control. However, the import-substitution economy of Rhee’s First Republic became the one of the foundations of South Korea’s survival after the Korean War. This nascent industrial development was helped along by an effective bureaucracy staffed by experienced and sincere career professionals who were mostly free of corruption, giving Korea a major advantage over other post-colonial states. The Rhee regime benefitted greatly from this technically competent group of people, and despite the hardships of the Korean War and its aftermath, the bureaucracy proved to be the backbone of the Rhee government and the cornerstone of the dynamic planned economic activity of the Republic in later years.
The “War President”
National security became a defining aspect of the Rhee years, if only for the fact that the North Korean attack in June 1950 had almost led to the defeat of the southern regime, which was only saved by outside intervention. The preeminence of national defense due to the Korean War also led to the nation’s military development taking precedence over all other aspects of government and national concern, making the military one of the few competent and invested institutions in the Republic. In view of Rhee’s frequently incontinent leadership and Rhee’s intentionally weak development of civilian government structures, this situation would have repercussions for South Korea in later years. The war also brought Rhee and his country back into closer relations with the USA, with which Rhee wrangled, often contentiously, to obtain the policy and military support he thought was necessary. Rhee also became a quick study on how the American government worked, and became rather adroit at pitting one U.S. agency against another for the benefit of himself and his government. While he had his backers in the U.S. government and military who understood him and his intentions, Rhee also raised the ire of several key officials and military brass, particularly with his stand against the armistice plan to end the war. Nothing would satisfy Rhee other than the complete destruction of Kim Il-sung’s communist government, and he could not stand to lose the golden opportunity to unify the country that the war presented. While the Chinese intervention in the winter of 1950–51 seemed to convince the United States to abandon its own goal of knocking out the Pyongyang regime, changes in allied fortunes never dissuaded Rhee. The American command became so frustrated with Rhee’s intransigence on the issue that they drew up contingencies to have him removed from power (“Operation Everready”) so that a more agreeable Korean executive could be in place for the signing of the armistice.
In the end, Rhee used the contention to his advantage and got the Americans to negotiate a mutual defense treaty with him in June 1953. With this guarantee in place, Rhee acquiesced to the United Nations concluding the armistice with the communist side the following month, although he refused to sign the document on behalf of South Korea, thereby precluding the possibility of a peace treaty. It is for this very reason that it is so often noted that Pyongyang and Seoul remain “technically at war”.
Postwar Survival
The result of the Korean War had saddled the Rhee government with incredible challenges to its survival. At the end of the war the physical damage alone was estimated at 3 billion U.S. dollars, while rapid inflation brought on by the cost of funding the war made the South Korean currency worthless by 1953. Rhee’s political legitimacy, which had first derived from his anti-colonial credentials, now rested on his leadership of the Republic during the war. However, his record was being challenged in the immediate post-war years by the country’s poverty and poor growth. During Rhee’s last seven years in office, the Republic’s per-capita income rose only 2.7%, while the per-capita income in North Korea for the same time period rose by 17.1%. Surprisingly, Rhee’s priorities were not about economic development but rather on securing, maximizing and manipulating the foreign-aid program on which the country relied. Aid from the United States alone comprised more than a third of the Republic’s budget, and was mostly comprised of consumption goods and raw materials which the government sold to help fund the treasury. Without engaging in any economic planning after the war, Rhee instead took personal control of much of the economy by exploiting political contacts in the use of imports, or encouraged speculation on multiple currency-exchange rates. While Rhee’s economic policies allowed South Korea to minimally survive in the 1950s, they also did much to discourage growth potential in production and exports. Essentially, the economic policies of Rhee’s First Republic were non-developmental.
Rhee’s politics also influenced his economic outlook for the nation, since his main political goal was still the Pukchin Tongil (March North and Unify) policy of forceful unification with the North. In his mind, Korea already had plenty of industry — it just happened to be in the northern half of the country. In short, Rhee did not want too much industrial development in the South, since in his view it would end up competing with the heavy industry of the North, which would eventually be under his leadership anyway in a united Korea. Political considerations also had Rhee keeping agricultural development to a minimum in order to stifle his political rivals in the countryside. Instead, Rhee preferred reliance on American PL-480 food assistance to keep the population fed and quiescent. While surviving on U.S. aid may have worked for a while, Rhee’s support from the urban population began to decline, due to their disgust with the corruption of the politicians and businessmen and the slow pace of economic growth. Increasingly better-educated and urban, the Korean populace had also started to grow tired of the politics of the First Republic, which historian Bruce Cumings characterized as similar to “postcivil war Spain, a diffuse authoritarianism following on the resolution of a central crisis in the body politic; a mundane politics of the Right content with acquiescence instead of positive support.”
The state of the nation’s security in the post-Korean War era was still tenuous, and although the South Korean army was in the highest state of readiness it had ever been, Syngman Rhee did his very best to maximize American defense commitments to Korea. Knowing that the Americans were concerned about the economic burden of maintaining a large Korean military (national defense comprised 50% of the Republic’s budget in this period), Rhee pressed for a modernization of his forces as a bargaining chip before agreeing to reduce their size. This included bellicose demands for the United States to arm his troops with nuclear weapons. After two very difficult years of haggling and stalling on the issue in 1956 and 1957, Rhee had once again negotiated more favorable terms for his government than the United States had originally planned: The Americans agreed to arm the U.S. forces stationed in Korea with nuclear-capable weapons (Honest John missiles and 280mm atomic cannons), with delivery by mid-1958. That same year, China announced that it would withdraw its large force from North Korea, making for a significant reduction of the military threat from North Korea. Rhee now had all the military security he needed. As it turned out, the real threat to his rule was his inability to provide economic security and honest elections for the citizens of the Republic.
Postwar Politics
Politicians from the Korean Democratic Party (although they changed the name of the party from time to time) still constituted Syngman Rhee’s only real opposition. While Rhee dominated his administration and tried to centralize the functions of government in his own office, his seemingly top-down control was subverted by fractures in the regime created by these politicians in the opposition and by competing centers of power. Still, Rhee was often able to manipulate the politicians, as he did in the National Assembly elections in 1954 by supporting one opposition group against another, using arrests, payoffs, and terroristic threats. This rebalancing of the legislature helped Rhee to make an amendment to the constitution to allow for his third run at president in 1956. The amendment “passed” only after some vote-counting sleight-of-hand by his allies. This time, the electoral antics created real anger among the public. Rhee was re-elected in 1956 nonetheless, but only because the opposition candidate died during the race. Still, real antagonism toward Rhee was revealed in the election results which showed that he had won only 56% of the vote, compared to 72% of the vote during his wartime re-election in 1952. The 1956 elections also brought in the opposition candidate Chang Myon as Vice-President in a separate race, and former Agriculture Minister Cho Bong-am, the author of the country’s 1949 land reform, who won 2.2 million of the total votes. From this time on, Rhee’s hold on power began to erode as he came under much more serious and persistent criticism from the opposition, and as a result of the pathetic performance of the economy.
The End of Rhee
With a stronger, vocal opposition, and with the legislature no longer rubber-stamping the president’s policies, Rhee and his allies became desperate. Rhee was probably behind an attempted assassination of Chang Myon in 1956. Three years later, Rhee had Cho Bong-am executed on trumped up charges of espionage. In an attempt to control public opinion and the politicians, Rhee re-instituted the appointment of local officials rather than through elections, and revised the National Security Law (NSL) in December 1958 to restrict political activity and press freedoms in the face of “communist infiltration and subversion.” The new NSL essentially deprived the people of South Korea of most of their civil rights. These actions convinced many in Korea and in the U.S. government that Rhee would attempt to hold onto power by any means necessary.
The popular reaction against Rhee’s corrupt and fraudulent practices in the March 1960 elections, in which Rhee again won re-election, can partly explain the end of the Rhee regime. The discovery of the body of a young student floating in Masan harbor with a teargas canister embedded in his skull can explain the rest. Certainly not helping matters was the fact that the economic recovery that had finally started in earnest by mid-1959 was squandered by the profiteering and political corruption of Rhee’s officials and members of the ruling party.
The beginning of the end was when Rhee and his supporters made far too obvious the rigging of the vice-presidential election in favor of Rhee’s running mate, Yi Ki-bung. Scattered demonstrations against the ridiculous “landslide victory” of the highly unpopular vice-president Yi soon took place across the country, including one in the city of Masan. A few weeks later in April, the body of that young student protester, discovered floating in Masan harbor, touched off a full-fledged revolt in Seoul: After right-wing thugs associated with Rhee had attacked university students who were demonstrating the boy’s death, a swelling throng of 30,000 people marched on the presidential mansion the next day, April 19th. Soldiers protecting Rhee opened fire, killing 125 students and wounding around a thousand. However, the crowd took over the grounds, with the army giving up its positions and later refusing to protect the government from further demonstrations. The president lingered in Korea for a week before resigning the presidency on April 27th. But letting go was hard for Rhee. In a last request to his staff, he asked that he be seen leaving the presidential mansion on foot, alone: Surely, the pitiful sight of an old man walking away would make the people feel sorry for him and ask that he go back to being president. Even his staff must have been tired of his chicanery, for they quickly bundled the old man into a car bound for Kimpo airport. As with his return to Korea, his exile from Korea was facilitated by an American (CIA) plane which took him to his final residency in Hawaii. It was there that Syngman Rhee died five years later at the age of 90.
The 100-Hwan Coin (1959), the Only South Korean Circulating Coin that Features the Face of a Korean President
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