A version of this story appeared in the June 1, 1947 issue of Fortune. Some of the language in this article from Fortune’s archives reflects the cultural assumptions and biases of its era.
After Greece and Turkey, where the Russians are no more than interested neighbors, comes Korea, where the Russians are co-proprietors with Americans of probably the most unpopular occupation on earth. The Russians are contentious; the Koreans are destitute and irate; the Americans are ill at ease. In such circumstances the new program of aid, under discussion at Washington as this article went to press, is beyond effective argument. Almost any program would be. There is human suffering, which needs to be dealt with, and U.S. policy, which needs to be buttressed: talking soft to the Russians in Korea does not jibe with talking hard to them elsewhere in the world, and nothing talks like money. Besides, Korea is the particular proving ground for U.S. policies and intentions in the Far East, which to date have failed abysmally in China and progressed impressively in Japan. In Korea a little effort can go a long way to overcome the effects of failure in China and to show that the U.S. thinks as much of its friends as of its ex-enemies. In any case, U.S. policy in the Far East can hardly stand another failure, particularly in an area that is the key to Russia, China, and Japan.
The outward sign of Korean suffering is a plethora of foreigners. After forty years of exploiting, the Japanese have left, to be sure, but they left Korea stripped of goods, its soil mined, its fertilizer plants shut down, its trees cut for fuel, its economic patterns severed, and its fishing fleet decimated. Japan furnishéd technicians and managers, thereby stunting Korean industrial growth; Japan furnished government and education, thereby outraging the Korean spirit, a complex entity, neither Chinese nor Japanese, that is politically fiery. Then war ended; the Russians moved in from the north and the Americans from the south, and the thirty-eighth-parallel demarcation of their zones not only separated them but cut Korea in half, an amputation with instant economic effects. Both armies arrived with the slogans of liberators, but they stayed as occupiers, and the Korean spirit was outraged afresh. Korean refugees from northern Korea and Japan—two million of them—poured into the south. In the south food became scarcer; soap, matches, and light bulbs disappeared; the south found itself lacking coal, newsprint, power, and fertilizer. It 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. Ever since Korea’s liberation, political disquiet has compounded economic debility. The Koreans want to eat; they want to be free. They blame the Japanese; they blame the Russians; they blame the Americans.
To these various and pressing ailments the U.S. departments of State and War have attempted to fit their program of aid, which involves not simply a big economic program but a less-discussed and just as urgent political coup. The problems of Korean livelihood are to be overcome, Congress willing, by giving Korea during the next three years $540 million worth of fertilizer, machines, steel, cotton, medicine, trees, and training, for if the Korean pump can be primed, the flow of economic life can be started. The political coup involves trading in the old policy of passive hope that U.S.-Russian collaboration was just around the corner for one of getting down to work in the U.S. zone of responsibility in the south. This policy will soon be translated into a freely elected provisional government of south Korea, unless the Russians decide to let Korea be one country again. It is hoped that this measure of independence (refused heretofore because of worry over what the Russians might say), coupled with the measures of economic help, will convince Koreans that the Americans are really very well meant after all.
Small pump, big well
The well whose pump is to be primed was long fitted to the currents of Japanese economic life. The north sent raw materials to Japan and the south sent rice; they got in return a modicum of Japan-finished products. Finding new channels for the goods has been all but impossible because of war exhaustion and the thirty-eighth-degree split. Korea, to be sure, is overwhelmingly agricultural: three-fourths of her people are farmers. But farmers themselves need industry—if only for tools and fertilizer—and non-farmers starve without it, for they lack the wherewithal to trade for food. In south Korea alone there are 3,700 plants employing more than fifteen employees apiece, along with thousands of cottage industries, which turn out furniture, brass-work, cloth, lacquer, bread, candy, baskets, and the like—enough of them to account in normal times for 25 to 40 per cent of all south Korea production. But south Korea industry is engaged mostly in making finished goods. The raw materials, except for some graphite, tungsten, and gold, are in the north, and industry is starved for materials that are not crossing the thirty-eighth parallel. Even the soil is starved; Japan converted to war production the plants making fertilizer, and for ten years the Korean farmer got none; besides, the plants are in the north.
The $540-million plan does not provide for setting up any heavy industry or for the duplication of northern industries. It aims to give south Korea the fertilizer and raw materials it is not getting from the north, to furnish simple machinery, to rehabilitate railroads, to bring in necessary gasoline and oil and, in the first year, seven thousand-odd tons of medicines worth $8 million, $6 million in school supplies, and $15 million in civilian American bureaucrats. South Korea’s eight large and twenty small textile plants turned out before the war over 200 million yards of cloth a year. They lack cotton, wool, worsted, repair parts, dyes. Wanted: raw materials amounting to $10,500,000 for the first year. There are six power plants, which have had no repairs for four years and cannot produce their rated 197,600 kva; there is an 80 per cent complete hydroelectric plant, started by the Japanese, that cannot work until it has finishing touches. Even when it is finished, and even with power from the north included, there will still not be enough: wanted, $6 million for two steam plants. Everywhere there is the pattern of tangling shortages: almost no railroad ties, rails, repair parts, telephone poles, wire. Wanted: $8,700,000 in the first year. There is no oil. Wanted: $11 million worth of gasoline, kerosene, Diesel oil, lubricants, greases, and wax—almost 400 thousand tons. This is the specific sort of help inherent in all U.S. plans for economic aid—whether in the Near East or in the Far.
The biggest single item, after food, is fertilizer, 763 thousand tons of it, worth $23 million, plus a $2-million irrigation project (controlled irrigated land produces twice as much rice as uncontrolled), and $3,500,000 for forest products. The now boatless fishermen will get $4 million for marine materials and canneries. This project alone calls for bringing an entire industry, once the third largest of its sort in the world, back from nothing. It is hoped by these means to lower the food grants that are already being made through “disease and unrest” appropriations and that amount to almost 400,000 tons, 10 per cent of all Korean food. The State Department believes it possible to reduce the amount needed from $46 million in the first year to $15 million in the third. The Koreans will still not get fat; the aim is to increase the staple food ration of normal consumers from 1,550 calories a day during the first year to no more than 1,650 during the third—and at the same time take care of the natural increase of population.
An important part of the pump priming is the $6 million worth of textbooks, teacher training, special personnel, radios and films, libraries, and what not. This involves nothing less than creating a new school system and an entire set of new textbooks, both of which were once entirely Japanese. Education is no luxury; Koreans, held subservient by the Japanese, need especially technical training. Even today, under the limited “disease and unrest” funds of the current War Department appropriation, there are more Koreans in school than at any time in history. For special training in both administration and technology, the importation of bureaucrats is essential. The U.S. hope is to train Koreans quickly enough and intensively enough so that the managerial hiatus brought about by the exodus of the Japanese will be brief.
Getting the necessary men and materials is not enough. They must all be got to Korea (shipping costs for goods, $56,340,705), and in Korea they must be distributed. Such distribution is less complicated than, say, in Greece or Turkey, since there already exist the mechanisms of the U.S. military government for circulating supplies purchased under its “disease and unrest” appropriations. Everything goes into the United Services of Civilian Supply, which sells in Korean won either to government agencies or to individuals. The government, of course, is essentially the military government, staffed by Americans with appointed Korean opposite numbers. So is most of the economy: military government is responsible for all the ex-Japanese property, some of which has been leased to Koreans but most of which is operated through various military bureaus, wherein Koreans share functions but Americans take responsibility. Distribution through these channels involves, of course, nothing more than requisitioning and bookkeeping. Purchases by individuals, which are just as welcome as those of the government, are a little more complicated. The cloth manufacturer can get cotton or the boatbuilder lumber by filling in an application at one of the Civilian Supply offices—name, work, why wanted, etc.—and by paying in won. All won income will be kept in a blocked account; probably it will be handed over to a new Korean government. In any case, there is no way of translating it into dollars and it is of no use to the U.S.
All of this adds up to $225 million in the first year of the program (when $10 million from Korean exports will help pay for it), to $203,500,000 in the second year ($15 million exports), and to $156,500,000 in the third year (exports $20 million). The program does not look beyond the third year; if by that time the thirty-eighth-degree split is healed, all should be well. If not, Korea will probably face a $40 to $50-million deficit yearly. The sums for the three years seem small. In the first, the U.S. would spend only $78 million more than it is now spending, as the War Department formula goes, “to prevent disease and unrest.” What we are spending, the argument runs, just keeps Korea alive; a small amount extra may make it move.
Whether it is enough to make it move is necessarily a moot question. The proposed expenditures are a gauge of the pressure of the various shortages, but necessarily an incomplete one. Japanese statistics, never altogether reliable, departed into the realm of fiction during the war; a detailed industrial inventory of south Korea is only now starting, and it will take six months. Under such circumstances the tendency of men in the field is to overstate needs, the tendency of men holding purse strings to underfill them. In sum the final figures are not so close to what it is believed the Koreans need as to what it is hoped Congress will give them.
This inexactness in no sense robs the program of its strength. Whatever the figures are, they are not too high, but it is entirely possible that the relatively modest program they reflect may get Korea started toward that simple level of economic life that means prosperity in the Orient. There is probably no other country in the world where a little help can go so long a distance.
American record
This help does not reflect any activity of U.S. capital or enterprise. The State and War departments, far from becoming running dogs of U.S. business, are so anxious to avoid the stigmatic epithet of imperialism that they look forbiddingly upon private operations. This view is not the result of any prejudice against free enterprise or of any appetite for government operation. South Korean industry is largely state run because only the state can function as an interim owner in the absence of any elected Korean government at hand to distribute property in some accord with Korean sentiments. Besides, there is no government to decide whether and how U.S. business should be permitted to act—a decision that the War and State departments wisely enough refuse to make for a people who would be angry if they did not make it themselves. War and State will soon permit some airlines and some export activity, but nothing heavy, nothing measurable, nothing permanent. The question is not why U.S. business, which might measurably aid Korean recovery, is forbidden, but why there is no Korean government—and this question falls into the problem of politics, Russian and Korean.
Immediately, anything that the U.S. does do or doesn’t in Korea has to be fitted into the long-distance game of wits played across the thirty-eighth parallel. But, just as important, its acts and refusals to act result from more than half a century of singularly uninspired U.S. dealings with Korea, culminating in a year and nine months of occupation that can hardly be called successful. Korea, indeed, is not only a key spot for international political maneuver and judicious economic aid, but also for close U.S. self-examination of its fitness for its new role abroad.
The record looks good at the start. In the nineteenth century the U.S. insisted that Korea be treated as a completely independent power and that she be free of any trace of the younger-brother status that she maintained with China for a millennium and a half. It presently appeared, however, that this insistence sprang not so much from U.S. devotion to Korean independence as from pique and bewilderment over China’s semi-Confucian international system, which depended on cultural similarities, notions of virtue, and formalities of rank rather than on any of the devices of Western politics. At the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the key to which was control of Korea, Theodore Roosevelt felt no qualms in awarding Korea to Japan as a protectorate, a definite form of Western relationship that Japan considered synonymous with colonialism. The U.S. did not object. Until the Cairo Declaration, Korean independence was no concern of American policy, although individual Korean revolutionists found haven in the U.S. Cairo, however, called for a free and independent Korea, and Potsdam, to which Russia later subscribed, reaffirmed Cairo.
At the end of the war Russia and the U.S. met in the middle of Korea. Precisely why they met at the thirty-eighth parallel remains mysterious. It is said that it was a military decision on the spot, but the Russians arrived ten days before the Americans. It is said that it was another of the Yalta jokers, and that the split was a matter of formal high-level agreement. And finally it is said that the decision was made in Washington. But whatever is said, the decision reflected the then current enthusiasm that saw the Russian state as an entity pleasant to do intimate business with.
The end of the war and the deportation of the Japanese were considerable enough events to obscure for a time some of the consequences of this misstep, but shortly the misstep was followed by another. Confronted with an unyielding barrier at the thirty-eighth parallel, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge sensibly urged that the barrier be dealt with at top levels. The top levels set up a Joint Commission to work out a provisional government, in the course of which they not only tacitly formalized the thirty-eighth-degree split but also brought in the word “trusteeship,” a condition that, they declared, was to continue for five years. The Koreans were angered by the fact; they were horrified by the word, for the Americans who had proposed it at Moscow were unaware that it can be translated into Korean only as Japan’s word “protectorate” had been translated. The Korean sense of outrage speedily translated itself into parades, demonstrations, speeches, denunciations. The Joint Commission turned out to be just another committee. It was carefully sabotaged by the Russians and got nowhere. The thirty-eighth parallel became impassable.
In north Korea, the Russians proceeded to act as they pleased: the country became a police state run by Russians through Korean intermediaries; at elections 99.9 per cent of the voters dropped ballots into supervised black-and-white ballot boxes; conscription began of men between seventeen and twenty-five into a Russian-trained army, which by now may number 500,000 and at least numbers 100,000. The Russians have not given economic aid to their area; they have lived off the land; they have circulated their own scrip—and have made use in south Korea of the currency they called in in exchange. They still run certain men and parties in the U.S. zone, and these convinced hirelings do not hesitate at violence. And they still show no disposition to forget the thirty-eighth parallel and set up an all-Korea provisional government, called for by the December, 1945, Moscow Conference.
This indisposition, which Molotov emphasized in April at the foreign ministers’ meeting, is continued by Russian insistence that only such persons and parties as approve of trusteeship can be part of a government—a qualification that is met by no one anywhere in Korea except the Communists, who more than a year ago changed their line in the very middle of a parade that began against trusteeship and ended in favor of it. The indisposition is furthered by refusal to have any more than formal dealings with Americans—General Hodge tried in vain for months to get cooperation out of his Russian opposite number. And Molotov’s recent Moscow cry for a May 20 Joint Commission meeting was probably little more than a verbal decoy. The sole significant instance of interzone communication is the continued dispatch to the American south of hydroelectric power from the Russian north, for which payment is now being asked in food and electrical equipment.
For a long time U.S. policy, framed by a State-War-Navy committee with the help of reports from the field, saw no alternatives to a single-sided attempt to make the Joint Commission a success and to a sincere effort to provoke minimum Russian irritation. Unfortunately, it saw internal Korean politics as an adjunct to the play-ball-with-Russia dream. What seemed necessary within south Korea was a coalition of Communist front and anti-Communist parties that would not antagonize Russia and therefore not jeopardize the already defunct Joint Commission. This notion (it is not unlike the one that sent General Marshall off in a vain effort to reconcile irreconcilables in China) does not appear to have resulted from anything resembling low government conspiracy but rather from something closer to high public innocence, colored by ignorance of Korea and by the hangover of faith in U.S.-Russian cooperation long after the fact of it had vanished. Until recently there would have been no chance for an aid-Korea program.
One business of the occupation therefore was to sell a coalition of pro and anti-Communist parties to south Korea. Its main effort was an Interim Legislative Assembly, for which free elections were held. Forty-three anti-Communists and two pro-Communists were chosen—clearly no coalition. In an attempt to create one, the occupation itself appointed to the Assembly forty-five more persons of varying views, most of them at least tolerant of Communists. In terms of present Western practice the election was not ideal: family heads cast votes for village leaders, village leaders elected provincial leaders, and so on in somewhat the manner of earlier Western democracy. But the arbitrary U.S. appointment was worse: it touched off Korean anti-Communists, made Communism the big political question of Korea, and upset everyone who wanted a freely elected government. The U.S. forfeited in Korea the solid position it achieved in Japan by holding a free election and operating through the government chosen by it. The only possible excuse for this forfeit was that it aimed at keeping Russia from becoming more troublesome.
Old policy into new
Finally U.S. policy changed. It changed first as regards Russia, when it became clear that the pious hope for just-around-the-corner cooperation was empty. The U.S. began to consider alternatives. It would have been possible, despite Cairo and Moscow commitments, to complain that it was impossible to do business with the Russians and pull out of Korea altogether. Such a step would appeal greatly to the nationalistic sentiments of Koreans (though hardly to their sense of security), and it would generate great Korean pressure for a Russian departure. But a police state is proof against considerable pressures, and a U.S. withdrawal could very possibly intrude Russia even more prominently in the Korean scene. It would also have been possible to suggest joint withdrawal, which would put harder-to-resist pressures on Russia, for were she to refuse, she would bear all the not inconsiderable onus for both her own and the American occupations among a people, both north and south, whom she would like to addict to her way of thinking. From the U.S. point of view, however, this suggestion would be fool-hardy if Russia did not agree to disband the north Korea conscript army. Even then, Russia would only have to step a few feet over her border. The U.S. would have to step eight thousand miles and at a time when it had not made up for its past failures with any positive economic and political steps.
Besides, however much it met the Korean desires to be alone in their country, withdrawal would weaken the U.S. in the collision diplomacy being carried on with Russia throughout the rest of the world, and thus in the long run would weaken Korea also. It was too late to call upon fellow trustees China and Britain, except for formalities, and it was unwise to admit failure and expose Korea to the veto power of the United Nations. Admissions of failure, however profitable in the life of morals, spell bankruptcy in the life of politics. The only possible course in Korea was to forget Russia and do the U.S. best in the U.S. zone.
This new policy appeared proof against unpleasant surprises: the Russians, of course, could promptly suggest joint withdrawal, but such withdrawal would be very different from one proposed by the U.S. as an alternative to a program of aid. The program itself would not have to be abandoned: it could be turned over to a U.S. financial mission and considerable gain realized from it. This being the case, there was doubt whether Russia would make the proposal at all. There was doubt, too, whether Russia, who controls ten million of Korea’s thirty million people and is not insensitive to the opinion of the rest, would sabotage the U.S. program by pulling switches on the power she sends to the south. Were she to pull them, everyone in Korea would know the hand; no amount of propaganda could hide it or its aims. The U.S. settled for the program.
But when policy changed in regard to Russia, it changed also in regard to south Korean politics. Once it was decided to cease buttering the Russians, it became unnecessary to give them the sop of a synthetic coalition of pro and anti-Communist political parties. Gestures had already been made in the direction of the fervent Korean nationalism: Americans had been vacated from the main building of state at Seoul and Koreans had been moved in. Now it became possible to promise the speedy holding of free elections for a real south Korean government.
Old policy despite new
Policy has changed, but the change has not greatly affected the basic attitudes toward Korea built up among American personnel of the War and State departments while the old policy was in force. The old policy, unhappily, was one not only of opportunistic maneuver but of moral justification—justification for making “coalition” appointments instead of holding free and popular elections, about the only concrete step in Korean politics that the U.S. military government has any business to take. Consequently it became customary among many Americans in Seoul and among some in Washington to refer to Koreans who disliked coalition altogether as extreme rightists. Today it still is. Persons who do not mind dealing with both Communists and anti-Communists are still called centrists, and Communist sympathizers moderate leftists, the extreme left being reserved for the simon-pure.
This political relativism, which makes Communism the point of observation for the political universe, is hardly realistic. Syngman Rhee, important and long-time nationalist leader and the head of the “extreme rightists,” formally favors more freedoms than the Bill of Rights and the Atlantic Charter, and believes in the nationalization of all but small industry. Korean parties by and large all endorse the same political platform—trusteeship and Communism have been such big issues that the parties have had insufficient chance to develop varying attitudes toward strictly domestic problems. The parties are separate in their individual desires for power or a share of it, in their varying feelings of cold and warmth for the occupation, and in their varying emotions toward Communism. They also have different sorts of members— the better-off and the better-educated, for instance, are with the “rightists”—and there are groups of intellectuals, students, union workers, and women, all of whom could more easily present their varying views to the Korean public had not the issue of Communism been made so central in the Korean mind.
Korean politics, which are complex, have become confused, both to Koreans and to Americans, by being oversimplified. Kimm Kiusic, a sincere, scholarly man, not unlike Henry Wallace, amenable to a variety of political colorations, not overly aware that ideas are loaded, is considered by most Americans in Korea a centrist or a moderate, and has of late enjoyed more tacit support from General Hodge than any other politician. Unhappily he does not seem to have wide popular support, and certain men in Washington and in Seoul have had to convince themselves that there is a great group now outside politics that is soon to come forward in Korea—in much the same way that it has always been supposed to be about to come forward in the politics of almost all democratic countries. Another figure is Lyuh Woon Heung, a man close to the Communists who eats an occasion meal with non-Communists. Americans call him “left of center.” Koreans call him “the silver ax”—he looks well, but he won’t cut.
Self-determined Koreans
The one clear fact that always emerges in this political imbroglio is that the Koreans want to run the country for themselves. The authors of the new $540-million program, in particular Assistant Secretary of State John H. Hilldring and Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen, hold to this clear fact. They have avoided the naiveté of assuming that the recipients of gifts are usually thankful, and have attempted to meet Korean distrust of the U.S. by deciding to give the country sovereignty in almost everything but fact: particularly in the form of an elected, not appointed, government of the south, which could, if the Russians continue uncooperative, eventually speak in the name of all Korea. The men at the top do not look at Korea through the fixed, fictitious political grid created during the coalition period. But the top cannot exist without the bottom, and much of the information comes up through the screen of just such a grid.
On this confused scene walk two chief actors. The first, General Hodge, is authority in south Korea. An able soldier, an excellent negotiator with the Russians, he is neither by experience nor by predilection a politician. He does not like to issue over many orders, but he talks in tones that make it seem that he does. In public address to Koreans he often lectures, and he has looked upon some Koreans who disagree with U.S. policies as troublesome obstructionists. The second actor is Syngman Rhee, a lifelong professional agitator for Korean independence, with a long record of disagreement with the State Department. He disagreed over the prewar policy of appeasing Japan; he disagreed during the war when the State Department declined to recognize a free Korean government, of which he probably would have been President. He is not unlike General Hodge: he has many American ideas; he is convinced in his views and loud in his statement of them, strong in principles, as opposed to Communism in Korea as General Hodge would be in the U.S., altogether a man of considerable force who generates a great deal of emotion and who looks upon those who don’t agree with him as obstructionists. Furthermore he is a politician and as much concerned with the mind of the potential electorate as General Hodge is concerned with the smoothness of the administration of military government.
These discordant personalities, after jostlings over the issue of trusteeship (Rhee: the U.S. should get out), clashed so hard over the question of the coalition policy (Rhee: no truck with Communists) that, without viewing each other as enemies, they still view each other with a distrust that has survived the end of that policy and has therefore helped carry over the temper and the language of it. Dr. Rhee still remains, in the eyes of many Americans in Seoul, a rightist obstructionist, and upon this theme many officers and officials write variations to their own tastes; some have even charged him with having too strong an orientation toward American ideas. General Hodge, no doubt, would hoot at any such charge. Yet while banking on its-style democracy to build Korea in the face of Russian-style Communism, the U.S. command is at odds with the Korean who manages to be probably the most prominent politically and at the same time the most American ideologically. Certainly the U.S. should recognize no leader; but just as certainly it should not quarrel with any possible friend. Meanwhile in Seoul and in Washington men study a new policy, but many go on talking in terms of the old. From confusion of this sort the holding of free elections may rescue the U.S. position in Korea, but there is more unmeasurable risk involved in U.S. dealings with the Koreans over internal politics than there is, probably, in U.S. dealings with the Russians over the thirty-eighth parallel. There is not yet a solution to the problems of the Americans in Korea.
At home abroad
To be sure, Americans in Korea are not as a group ill intentioned. They are well intentioned, aware of it, and bewildered to learn that little children recite a nursery rhyme that, when translated, says:
Birdies, birdies, fly away home.
Do not sit on the pea vine, for
If you do the flowers will fall,
And many people will cry . . .
which, in effect, tells the Americans to get out of the country. For the problem is not one of intention but of information. Before they arrived in Korea, few Americans knew anything about the Far East—far stranger than Europe—let alone the country to which they were sent. Courses for military-government men have been hopelessly inadequate. Almost no Americans speak Korean, which has a simple, easy-to-learn alphabet. There is no foolproof system of finding out what the people think. G-2 can read letters and collect private opinions; each American can listen to the Koreans around him, but whom shall he trust? What is to be made of this ancient country, what of these men in the ridiculous straw hats, what of these people silent one moment and noisy in demonstrations the next?
The occupation has run polls, but it tends to distrust them because they have turned up answers that did not fit the artificial ideological grid that alone seems to make Korea understandable. A poll indicating popularity for a separate government for south Korea was called into question because there were loud outcrys from certain political groups. The accuracy of the polls, of course, is probably low; a scientific survey in a foreign and Oriental country is not easy. But other devices of intelligence are still rougher, and the American in Korea and the American in Washington wander amid the sands of conflicting ideas, notions, rumors, propaganda, guesses, out of which it is difficult to make sense without imposing upon them a preconceived framework of judgment—as, for instance, the simple measuring of a politician in terms of his distance from the Communists or from the military government or from life at home. Nostalgia substitutes for knowledge. Too many political parties, says an officer, forgetting that there are not simply two but many in the U.S. Ambition, says another, forgetting the price of government everywhere in the world. No genuine independent party, says still another, forgetting that one has never emerged in the U.S. The man in the field, unless he is unusually mature or unusually trained, measures politics by what he thinks they should be, not even by what they really are in the U.S. The problem of knowing what is going on in foreign countries is one of the hardest the U.S. faces in its new policy; and the problem is hardest in Korea, which is the least familiar country in which the U.S. is trying to operate.
Fear and condescension
It is a strange land, and the American wakes at night to hear an ancient man howling rhythmically in the streets to drive devils away. The evening wind carries temple music of unfamiliar and therefore unearthly sound. The American walks past hostile people known to be “the Irish of the Orient,” a people given to violence, and is ignorant of what they murmur. He is always and forever unhearing and unspeaking, and even when this veil is pierced by interpreters, themselves Korean, he doubts whether the interpretation is right, and he never knows, even if it be right, the motivation for what was said, the idea in the mind, the plan, the scheme, perhaps the attack—yes, even physical assault—hidden behind the spoken word. This is more than bewilderment, more than not knowing where to turn and whom to trust, it is the fear of a man away from home who does not know. The Koreans are not obsequious like the Japanese. Not wanting Americans in their country, they do not strive to put them at ease. They do not act toward an American as if overwhelmed by his superiority. Life in Japan, buttered by the enthusiastic deference of the Japanese, can be comfortable, and the dirt and poverty of the country can be dismissed as quaint. There is nothing quaint in Korea.
The fear is hidden; therefore the fear grows. Some men strike at their servants. Instead of conferring with Korean subordinates some issue orders to them. Some, perplexed by the records their Koreans keep or the actions they take, settle on the imperial rule of playing one off against the other in an effort to ensure honesty. The American complains to himself that Korea is the end of the line (it has been), that nobody cares (few did). Like the majority of his fellows, he bends his efforts to schemes for going home (few stay long) and settles down to sticking it out bitterly until the fortunate day of release. 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 problem of the Americans in Korea cannot be solved in Korea alone; it is a world problem long faced by other powers (and settled by embracing ideas of imperial superiority) and now faced by the U.S., which will have to settle it differently. Americans will have to understand the countries they serve. Koreans, Greeks, Turks, Chinese are not to be educated. Americans are. The problem can be solved only by selecting already mature officials not only out of government but out of industry, and by careful training of them, particularly in language. The only alternative is the attitude of condescension. It reaps native distrust and breeds foreign ignorance. It is the one into which Americans are now slipping in Korea.