On April 4, South Korea’s constitutional court upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol, setting up new presidential elections in two months’ time. Yoon’s impeachment ends a political crisis sparked by the brief imposition of martial law in early December.
Yoon had blamed threats from Communist North Korea for his decision to impose martial law. Korea’s division into North and South has its roots in the period immediately after the Second World War, when Korea was freed from Japanese control and was occupied by uneasy allies—the Soviets and the Americans.
In 1947, Fortune went to Korea to cover the U.S. occupation, which two years in wasn’t going particularly well. South Korea, the unsigned article explains, “found itself full of U.S. officers and officials who knew nothing of Korea acting as heads of government bureaus, as mayors of towns, as executives in ex-Japanese businesses, and as experts in fields ranging from art to education. It did not accept them happily.”
Three years before the Korean War was to break out, U.S. officials, led by the stubborn and fervently anti-Communist general John R. Hodge, tried to develop South Korea’s agrarian economy and build a new democratic government. (Fortune charitably described Hodge as “neither by experience nor by predilection a politician.”)
Meanwhile, as Cold War tensions escalated, U.S. officials tried to set up their own zone in opposition to the Soviet-controlled, Communist regime north of latitude 38˚ N, or the 38th parallel. Different political groups in South Korea fought, sometimes violently, for control.
Almost 80 years later, “the largely forgotten American occupation following World War II has profoundly shaped South Korean politics and society,” says Kornel Chang, a history professor at Rutgers University-Newark and author of A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation. “U.S. policies spurred economic growth and set the stage for eventual democratization, but also bolstered authoritarian regimes in the name of stability, often at the expense of human rights.”
Indeed, Fortune observed in 1947, U.S. officials on the ground appeared to be flailing. “The U.S. Army has been generally skillful in adapting men to the U.S. Army; it has not been skillful in adapting them to the countries in which they serve,” the article notes.
The following year, a frustrated and tired U.S. began to pull out of the country, leaving South Korea in the hands of Syngman Rhee, its first president, who turned more authoritarian in the years to come.
The decisions made then continue to reverberate today—particularly in the wake of South Korea’s economic development and its more recent political crisis.
