TY - JOUR
AU - Chang,, Kornel
AB - Two years into the occupation and the United States had made little progress on the political, economic, and technical problems ailing the southern zone of Korea. These problems ranged from rice and electricity shortages to soaring inflation to an internecine power struggle that sharply divided Koreans. The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee wrote a scathing assessment in 1947 of the occupation government's performance: “Thus far the U.S. has done little more than hold its own in South Korea. The operation to date has been improvised from day to day to prevent complete collapse, and has left almost untouched the most basic problems.” The study cited the American occupation's mismanagement of the economy, its failures to enact land and labor reforms, and its support of unpopular rightists. The report presented Americans with a stark choice: “the United States is obliged to decide whether it will continue to occupy the South for an indefinite period, or whether it will withdraw and permit the Soviet Union to dominate the entire peninsula.” If the United States chooses to remain, the report warned sternly, “it will have to face up to the responsibility it is assuming in regard to the Korean people.”1 Given the array of seemingly intractable problems facing the occupation government, the prospects of turning things around in Korea appeared doubtful at best. But withdrawing and thereby ceding the peninsula to a Soviet-backed regime seemed equally difficult to fathom (although some strategists in the War Department did call for the United States to cut bait in Korea). Caught between bad and worse options, American officials improvised a third way that would allow the United States to draw down its forces while maintaining a foothold in Korea: the United States called for elections with the intent of establishing a separate, anticommunist client state in the South. Shortly after the May 1948 elections, a constitution was ratified, and three months later a formally independent South Korea, led by on-again, off-again ally Syngman Rhee, was inaugurated. Since the publication of Bruce Cumings's The Origins of the Korean War (1981), scholars have analyzed the occupation period almost exclusively as a moment leading inexorably to the Korean War. Challenging conventional wisdom, which identified the war's beginnings with the June 1950 Soviet-sponsored invasion, Cumings argued instead that the Korean War was a civil war fought between Koreans to come to terms with the legacies of Japanese colonialism. As such, the war's origins, he contended, could be discerned only as part of a longer historical process. In Cumings's analysis, the division of the country in August 1945 and U.S. policies enacted immediately following it exacerbated and entrenched divisions within Korean society, ensuring the emergence of separate regimes on the peninsula, which, in turn, made the outbreak of war inevitable. Historians have subsequently challenged Cumings's account by identifying different “origins” moments and assigning responsibility for the war differently. Yet for all their differences, which are far from minor, these studies of the occupation have the same goal: to investigate the origins of the Korean War and the Cold War.2 Joining a broader scholarly effort to take off the Cold War lens in our study of postwar history, this article reframes the U.S. occupation of Korea as a decolonization moment in which the United States established the foundations for a postwar empire. In doing so, this article makes interventions in decolonization studies and the history of U.S. empire. Led by Odd Arne Westad's seminal book, The Global Cold War, scholars have examined liberation struggles in the global South, showing how these fights were shaped—and often distorted—by realities both within and outside the Cold War. But these studies still tend to privilege Cold War flash points, such as Vietnam and Algeria, where “the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.” This mode of studying decolonization has largely limited the struggle over self-determination to European colonies, as if the United States did not have its own colonized subjects and overseas territories demanding sovereignty and rights after the war. As a result, the unwinding (and make-over) of the fourth-largest empire, by Daniel Immerwahr's calculations, have been largely left out of the historical narratives of decolonization. The Global Cold War, for example, does not devote a single chapter to a U.S. colony, territory, or occupation. This blind spot has obscured the “Asian Spring” that swept up the region in a brief moment of boundless liberatory possibilities after the collapse of Japanese rule, when newly emancipated peoples imagined wide-ranging visions for independence before the Cold War became a reality.3 The literature on U.S. empire, in contrast, has engaged overseas territories, showing how these areas served as sites for a worldwide military basing system through which America projected power on a global scale. But these accounts of what scholars have called an “empire of bases,” an “archipelago empire,” and a “networked empire” mostly ignore the process of decolonization. Consequently, we have yet to fully appreciate the way the building of an informal, deterritorialized postwar empire required the United States to divest itself of its colonies and occupied territories and provide them with what Alexander Aleinikoff calls a “semblance of sovereignty.” This pivot to decolonization would enable the United States to exert imperial power through the sovereignty of others in the postwar epoch.4 Yet how the United States would apply the principle of self-determination following the war remained uncertain. By signing the Atlantic Charter in 1941, the United States endorsed the idea of self-determination as a basic principle of international order. Being on the side of self-determination seemed part and parcel of fighting the “good war,” and it reinforced America's sense of itself—its national identity—as a champion of subjected people. However, as the war's end drew near, U.S. postwar planners, spurred on by their doubts about colonial people's capacity for self-rule and by a desire to appease their European allies, rushed to limit the scope of self-determination by carving out exceptions for the British, French, and Dutch Empires. In the words of one historian, Americans “wanted to have their Atlantic Charter and retreat from it too.”5 Uncertainty about which people would be eligible for self-determination and under what conditions left its meaning in flux and open to interpretation. The colonized world understood the Atlantic Charter as a broad call for the end of empire, and the promise of self-determination inspired liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Postwar American plans for a gradual and limited decolonization would therefore run up against the hopes and aspirations of colonized people, who held diverse—and often more capacious—ideas about independence. These differences over the process and pace of decolonization triggered local and global struggles, as peoples and states across multiple sites—from battlefields to meetings of international organizations—fought bitterly over the terms of self-determination. The United States faced the challenge of decolonization wherever it took over from the Japanese, including the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Korea. Yet these overseas colonies and territories are better known collectively as points within a network of U.S. postwar power projection, some as client nation-states, others as trusteeships and protectorates, and others still as federated states. Ann Stoler identifies this pattern of differential incorporation as a strategy to produce “blurred genres of rule,” reflecting an imperial polity “in active realignment and reformation.” But because scholars have headed straight for empire, we have precious few details about the process that lay between the “colonial” and the “post.” And so we know very little about what people in these overseas colonies and territories envisioned for independence or how the United States, as the ruling power, responded to their aspirations. Recovering these decolonization stories would be worthwhile in its own right. But they would also provide insight into the struggles that shaped how overseas territories transitioned out of colonialism and into a postwar American imperium.6 Examining the contest over independence in U.S.-occupied Korea, this essay shows how Americans adopted decolonization as a novel strategy of empire building after struggling to meet Korean aspirations for liberation. In Korea the collapse of the Japanese Empire released long pent-up aspirations for self-determination and revolutionary change. Drawing on published Korean sources, this essay begins by briefly examining the different ways Koreans imagined independence and how they sought to actualize their postcolonial aspirations in the immediate aftermath of the war, revealing a moment ripe with promise, idealism, and uncertainty. The entry of American forces, however, complicated and, ultimately, narrowed the effects of Korea's “Asian Spring.” This essay therefore attends to both the postwar emancipatory opportunities and the ways they were sharply foreclosed. As successors to an “evil empire,” Americans promised to do for the Koreans what the Japanese had not: lead them into independence. But this was not an easy promise to fulfill. Americans faced competing visions of liberation as well as an emerging superpower rivalry both on the peninsula and beyond. They compounded their difficulties by suppressing the most far-reaching efforts to democratize Korea—plans that involved the redistribution of land, resources, and authority as a remedy for the injustices of Japanese colonial rule. This decision to forestall and roll back radical changes generated widespread discontent in the South, to which the occupation government responded with neocolonial violence, which further demoralized Koreans and divided American officials. Boxed in by Korean aspirations for independence, on one side, and Soviet intransigence—real and imagined—on the other, U.S. officials adopted democratization as an exit strategy and a technique of decolonization management. Elections supplied South Korea a “semblance of sovereignty” and provided political cover for an imperial end game that would keep the southern half of Korea within America's sphere of influence without the liabilities of a formal military occupation. Establishing a separate regime in the South also fit into the United States’ broader regional strategy that involved rehabilitating Japan and restoring the prewar order in Northeast Asia. Koreans, however, resisted this exit strategy. This opposition came mostly from the left, but some Koreans associated with the Right feared the elections would leave the country permanently divided. The plan was also constrained and complicated by international monitors and Syngman Rhee and his followers, who, in pursuing their own shifting agendas, shaped the outcome in ways unexpected and unwelcomed by U.S. officials. Ultimately, however, the United States used its considerable military and diplomatic powers to push through the election of an allied, anticommunist regime, though not one nearly as pliable as American officials would have liked. This essay chronicles America's struggles in Korea as a decolonizing power with global ambitions and shows how the United States deployed democratic proceduralism to pivot from decolonization to empire. In doing so, it provides insight to how an empire without colonies was built upon the foundation of decolonization without liberation. Korea's Asian Spring During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had proposed to establish an international trusteeship in Korea. Under his plan, the great powers—the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union—would jointly administer Korea until it was ready to assume independence. But his European allies, who were keen on reclaiming their colonies at war's end, balked at the idea, as did some members of his administration, leaving Roosevelt's principal method for managing decolonization in limbo. Korea's path to independence became more uncertain with Roosevelt's death and the sudden collapse of Japan in 1945. Virtually overnight, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mad scramble began for the Korean peninsula. Although the Red Army was the first to arrive on the scene in August 1945, the Soviet Union agreed to partition Korea into American and Soviet occupation zones. Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur ordered the Twenty-Fourth Corps of the U.S. Tenth Army in Okinawa, commanded by Lt. Gen. John Hodge, to occupy territories south of the thirty-eighth parallel, setting the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula that remains with us today.7 In the weeks between Japan's surrender and the entry of American forces, the Korean People's Republic (Kpr), a polyglot assemblage of communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Christian socialists, and social democrats, had taken control of large swaths of the country. Local branches of the Kpr, known as People's Committees, maintained public order and services and functioned as the temporary government in the South during the interlude. Broadly speaking, a wartime record of resisting the Japanese helped the Kpr secure broad popular support following Japanese surrender. The Kpr hoped to channel and organize the revolutionary energies unleashed by the collapse of colonial rule. The party's goal was to present a united front to incoming Americans, but corralling the wide-ranging aspirations of the Korean people proved difficult.8 Open in new tabDownload slide This September 1945 photograph shows Koreans waving the Korean national flag and the U.S. stars and stripes in celebration of their nation's independence from Japan. “70 Photographs Reflect Joy of Independence,” Aug. 14, 2015, Korea.net, http://m.korea.net/english/Government/Current-Affairs/National-Affairs/view?affairId=478&subId=507&articleId=129310&viewId=16105. Courtesy National Archives. Open in new tabDownload slide This September 1945 photograph shows Koreans waving the Korean national flag and the U.S. stars and stripes in celebration of their nation's independence from Japan. “70 Photographs Reflect Joy of Independence,” Aug. 14, 2015, Korea.net, http://m.korea.net/english/Government/Current-Affairs/National-Affairs/view?affairId=478&subId=507&articleId=129310&viewId=16105. Courtesy National Archives. Ordinary Koreans took self-determination into their own hands in the days and weeks following Japan's surrender. Korean workers seized control of Japanese-owned factories and those of Korean collaborators. The take-over of Japanese properties started spontaneously in a few factories but quickly caught on with laborers across Korea, eventually developing into a loosely coordinated workers’ self-management movement. By November 1945, workers’ control committees had taken over managerial functions in more than seven hundred factories, with approximately eighty thousand workers participating in the movement. Some workers imagined the seizures as the beginning of a socialist revolution in which they would be freed from colonial rule and its twin, capitalist oppression. For others, taking over the factory floor was more about bread-and-butter issues—higher wages, better working conditions, and more control over their labor. They may have viewed their actions in anticolonialist terms, but upending capitalist relations was not necessarily the goal. For these workers, liberation was less about revolution and more about reform.9 Open in new tabDownload slide In September 1945 this crowd of Koreans in Seoul cheered the arrival of Allied soldiers and the end of decades of Japanese occupation and rule. “70 Photographs Reflect Joy of Independence,” Aug. 14, 2015, Korea.net, http://m.korea.net/english/Government/Current-Affairs/National-Affairs/view?affairId=478&subId=507&articleId=129310&viewId=16105. Courtesy National Archives. Open in new tabDownload slide In September 1945 this crowd of Koreans in Seoul cheered the arrival of Allied soldiers and the end of decades of Japanese occupation and rule. “70 Photographs Reflect Joy of Independence,” Aug. 14, 2015, Korea.net, http://m.korea.net/english/Government/Current-Affairs/National-Affairs/view?affairId=478&subId=507&articleId=129310&viewId=16105. Courtesy National Archives. Similar tensions existed among Korean peasants, who pursued independence in different ways. For most peasants, acquiring lands they could call their own was their highest aspiration for liberation. The peasant protagonist, Han Saengwŏn, from Ch'ae Mansik's classic 1946 short story, “Non Iyagi,” evoked this widespread hope of the Korean peasantry. “To think that … the land he had turned over to the Japanese, like a dream, would be returned and be his again. … There could be nothing in this world so wonderful and rare.” Many peasants made this dream a reality by seizing lands formerly owned by the Japanese and those of Korean collaborators. They established local peasant unions, committees, and federations, which provided a degree of order to the process. But this occurred after the fact: the land seizures had been largely spontaneous. Notions of compensatory justice and of what was rightfully due to those who worked the land—the idea of land to the tillers—inspired the take-overs.10 Yet not all peasants took this course of action. Some tenant farmers renegotiated lower rents, which in many cases had called for 60 percent or more of the season's harvest. Others who had worked—and lived—with the uncertainty of land tenure obtained long-term security from their landlords. Some peasant tenants extracted concessions that included shifting the cost of fertilizer, water, equipment, and taxes to the landlord. They engaged in these activities both individually and collectively with other peasant families and villages. After the fall of Japan, “an average of about one person per peasant household joined the unions,” writes Gi-Wook Shin. “Yet no national organization sponsored this union growth; peasant unions were localized, and their organizational strength and radicalism varied greatly.”11 Some communists and socialists within the Kpr viewed the spontaneous mobilization and its lack of ideological purity with suspicion, revealing a fissure between party doctrine and the diffuse social movement. Doubting the capacity of the rank and file to lead revolutionary change, and afraid the workers’ actions might antagonize the incoming American occupiers, the communist vanguard distanced itself from, and in some cases actively discouraged, workers’ efforts to seize the factory floor. But Korean workers pursued self-management anyway, seeing it as the way of realizing the promise of liberation. As Hwasook Nam explains: “The labor movement of the immediate postwar years was not created by the Communists from the top down, and workers harbored a much more complex mix of aspirations and desires than the Communist leadership.” Nearly four decades of Japanese colonial rule had incubated kaleidoscopic and conflicting visions of the nation.12 Narrowing Independence The entry of American occupying forces in September 1945 complicated, and, ultimately, narrowed the range of possibilities for independence. The occupation's top command, especially General Hodge, viewed with suspicion the revolutionary ferment and the calls for sweeping social changes, believing them to be communist inspired. American forces dissolved the Kpr and the people's committees and threw their support behind reactionary rightists. This meant shifting the balance of power back to landlords, industrialists, and colonial bureaucrats—people associated with Japanese colonial rule and counterrevolution. As Cumings has argued: “The Occupation made critical choices … that shaped the conditions in which a rightist autocracy could emerge triumphant more than two years later.”13 Identifying the factory and land take-overs with social upheavals initiated by the Kpr, U.S. occupying forces disbanded the workers’ control committees and reappropriated the Japanese-owned lands that had been seized by Korean farmers. The military government took custody of Japanese properties and placed them under the authority of American advisers. Ambivalent about grassroots workers’ industrial control, the communist party in the South offered little resistance as occupying forces began purging workers from management. American advisers initially tried to replace workers’ control committees with Japanese managers and technicians, but the liberated Koreans made it clear that they would not tolerate their former colonial overlords as supervisors. The United States repatriated Japanese personnel back to Japan soon after the public outcry, though some remained in Korea for months, and even years, to advise the military government.14 Open in new tabDownload slide This map shows South Korea, its provinces, and some of its major cities. Open in new tabDownload slide This map shows South Korea, its provinces, and some of its major cities. The decision to keep Japanese managers to run the factories was a microcosm of the American tone-deaf occupation policy broadly conceived in Korea. The military government revived the colonial bureaucracy—now staffed by Koreans who had worked directly under the Japanese—with a few cosmetic changes. Occupation officials insisted that the policy was necessary because not enough skilled Koreans without the taint of Japanese collaboration remained to manage things. The labor adviser to the military government, Stewart Meacham, found this argument wanting. “It may very well be that we have permitted the loss of Japanese technicians to loom larger in our minds … than it will prove to be in fact,” he observed. “In our country where it is not uncommon to exclude Negroes from the more highly-skilled positions in industry, it is by no means rare to find a Negro helper ‘breaking in’ his white boss. The know-how is there, but the opportunity is denied. There is real reason to believe that something of the same thing will prove true of the Koreans.” His comparison to African Americans was highly suggestive of the deeply rooted assumptions concerning colonized people that shaped American policy in Korea (imperial habits of the mind die hard, if they ever do). In either case, the military government made little effort to introduce new administrative structures that might signal a real departure from the colonial past.15 The decision to maintain the status quo in the area of policing was probably the most damaging one to U.S. prestige in Korea. During the forty-some years of Japanese occupation, the Korean National Police (Knp), the single most hated institution under Japanese colonial rule, had developed intelligence-gathering, surveillance, and repression capacities to control the native population. Occupation officials decided to throw their support behind the rightist Korean Democratic Party (Kdp), seen as the only reliable anticommunist partner, and they worked with the Kdp to reconstitute the Knp as an arm of the right. With the support of the military government, rightists revived the organizational capabilities of the colonial police system to suppress leftist and center-left activists and their organizations. By late 1946, most prominent Korean leftists were either in prison or underground; in this respect the military government's policies were a success. However, reviving the Knp came at enormous cost to American prestige in Korea. Richard Robinson, the head of the military government's Information Section, believed that “the police did more to ruin the reputation of the United States in Korea and the way of life for which it stands than any other one thing, thereby immeasurably strengthening the Communist appeal.”16 Some American advisers wanted to see the police reined in and partisanship eliminated from the force. In late July 1946, Robinson and Lt. Col. Rankin Roberts investigated allegations of police misconduct in the east coast provinces of Kangwon, North Kyongsang, and South Kyongsang. Their investigation uncovered a wide range of abuses, including “injustices in rice collection, jail conditions, treatment of prisoners, and police censorship.” In perhaps the most damning part of their report, Robinson and Roberts described a Korean detainee subjected to water torture. Officials later discovered that this was not an isolated incident. The Provost Marshal's office affirmed that “scores of prisoners in Pusan had been tortured into confession.” But these reports of police torture and brutality were ignored by the occupation high command. As a Justice Department adviser recalled: “The Military Governor ordered American advisers in the Department of Justice not to interfere.” The high command regarded the use of colonial police practices as a necessary evil in the fight against communism. “Though much of the police methods of crime detection and law is still of Jap vintage,” U.S. advisers admitted, “out of necessity they must be used.” The legal consultant Roger Baldwin, who was invited to Korea in 1946 at the request of General MacArthur, believed the “fear of Communism has in fact become fear of democracy.”17 The failure of U.S. occupation policy was not, however, simply a story of anticommunism gone awry. Americans, almost to a person, believed that Korea's path to independence would be paved by liberalism—liberal democracy and markets—although they were sharply divided on the political and economic forms it should take (New Deal, libertarianism, etc.). So when occupation officials dissolved the workers’ control committees, it was not only because they smacked of communism but also because Americans had their own ideas about what constituted workers’ rights. For Hodge and his senior staff, the classic liberal vision of “free labor,” in which a worker possessed the inalienable right to engage in the employment of his or her choosing was labor rights. The occupation government passed Ordinance Number 19, which enshrined a free-labor regime in the southern zone of Korea: “The right of any individual or group of individuals to accept employment and to work unmolested shall be respected and protected. Any interference with this right is unlawful.” With a stroke of the pen, Hodge and his conservative advisers believed they had democratized labor relations in southern Korea. As part of this administrative vision, officials also established a board of experts to settle labor disputes. The National Labor Mediation Board consisted of five voting members, chosen by occupation officials, whose decisions were final and binding on all parties. Emphasizing industrial revival, the military government in October 1945 also made it illegal for laborers to strike and for employers to lock out workers.18 This technocratic liberal approach to labor relations, which purported to be ideology-free, fell far short of the expectations of Korean workers. For a group who had seized Japanese properties as an act of compensatory justice, the “right to work” would not be enough. U.S. officials chastised Korean workers for politicizing labor relations with their calls for self-management, and the officials took their demands as a sign of the workers’ “colossal ignorance on all phases of labor relations procedures.” But it was not just Korean workers who were disappointed with these labor reforms; liberal advisers also criticized the measures for not being far reaching enough. Owen Jones, whose Korean Department of Commerce had jurisdiction over labor issues, contended that the rights outlined by Ordinance Number 19, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, were hollow without the authority to strike. Jones also noted that without police reform, workers’ right to organize without interference was a dead letter. Indeed, his colleague Meacham documented numerous cases of the Knp suppressing labor-organizing activities. Jones proposed a raft of labor reforms in the spring of 1946, including empowering workers to strike in some instances and a policy that would ban the police from interfering in labor affairs. Hodge and his inner circle of advisers rejected Jones's liberal reformist agenda.19 Yet, for all their differences, conservative and liberal advisers shared a belief in the universality of a market economy based on the sanctity of private property and the inviolable division between owners and workers. No adviser, besides Meacham, seriously entertained worker self-management as an option, which put even the most liberal New Deal reformer at odds with a majority of Korean workers. Thus, it was not clear that any liberal vision of modernity could have accommodated the wide-ranging hopes and ambitions of Korean workers. In any case, the military government's Department of Labor, which was formed in the spring of 1946, admitted that the promise of labor emancipation was “never quite realized” and was of “limited effectiveness in convincing labor in South Korea that the labor policy of the Military Governor and agents charged with effectuating it represented any significant change from that existing under the Japanese Governor General.”20 The assumptions guiding U.S. labor policy also informed the decision to liberalize the rice market in Korea. Previously, the Japanese colonial state, to ensure a surplus to feed the home islands, had tightly regulated the Korean rice market through a system of rationing and price controls. Military experts thought that Korean farmers would act “rationally” and reinvest profits to increase domestic rice production. This blithe assumption overlooked realities on the ground in Korea. Korean farmers, accustomed to subsistence living, used their surpluses to eat more and work less. Wealthy landlords and government officials smuggled rice to Japan, where it fetched premium prices on the black market. According to one estimate, one-quarter of the 1945 rice harvest was smuggled out of Korea. The free market policy resulted in overconsumption and speculation that turned a bumper crop in the fall of 1945 into a shortage that would require foodstuff imports from the United States. In March 1946 the military government reverted to the Japanese method of rationing and drastically lowered the minimum Korean daily diet. Hugh Borton, chairman of the Japan-Korea Secretariat of the Department of State, confessed that: “What evidence we have seems to indicate that the Russians are doing a better job of feeding the Koreans in their zone than we are in ours.” The rice shortage led to a surge in inflation that crippled the economy. Between September 1945 and August 1947, the cost of basic food had increased over one hundred times, while wages rose less than ten times. Earnings failed to keep up with rising prices because the military government, in an effort to slow inflation, imposed strict controls on wages. Wage and price controls placed an undue burden on Korean farmers and workers.21 Beyond these problems still loomed the issue of land reform. In an overwhelmingly agrarian society, where a majority of the peasant population had toiled as tenant farmers under Japanese occupation, the promise of liberation would not be realized until long-suffering Koreans had access to lands they could call their own. But after the military government took into custody farmlands formerly owned by the Japanese and those of absentee Korean landlords, virtually no progress was made on this front. The choice by the United States to back the Kdp paralyzed the agrarian reform effort, despite liberal voices within the military government calling for swift action. Land reform would entail stripping lands from Korean landowners, a core constituency of the Kdp. Members of the Kdp gave lip service to the idea of land reform—because it was politically untenable to be against it in Korea—but behind the scenes they did everything they could to stymie it. And the military government, outside of a handful of New Dealers, did not view it as urgent. When a journalist asked a Captain Price, the officer in charge of rice collection for the military government, “if anything was being done about land reform,” his response was: “Land reform? That's not important. Remember that the present system is the system they're used to.”22 Land reform was no easy issue. There were thorny policy questions such as how to define “collaborator” when considering whose lands would be subject to appropriation and redistribution. Nevertheless, the lack of progress on the land question demoralized Koreans in the South. To make matters worse, the North Korean Provisional People's Committee announced a plan in the spring of 1946 to redistribute lands owned previously by the Japanese and those of Korean collaborators to landless tenant farmers and peasants with small land holdings. With this act, according to a U.S. State Department study, “the north Korean government gained an important propaganda weapon in its campaign against the south.” The United States tried to revive land reform shortly after this announcement but now faced resistance from Koreans who had doubts, sown by months of paralysis and dysfunction, that the military government could fairly and competently redistribute lands.23 Not only did the United States face formidable challenges in Korea, resulting from the sudden collapse of Japanese colonial rule and the partition of the peninsula, but its responses, informed by an anticommunist technocratic liberalism, also worsened—and, in some cases, created new—problems. This generated a downward spiral from which the military government would never recover. Summing up the situation in the southern zone of Korea, an American adviser put it this way: Korean confidence in the United States has been badly shaken. Her hope for early unity and independence has almost disappeared. Her landless farmers are still without land they can call their own. The Japanese police are gone but their despised Korean colleagues whom they trained still run the National Police. Industrial workers still do not have the opportunity to choose freely their own representatives. While those who grew rich under the Japanese have retained and even enlarged their riches, those who work on the land and in the factories suffer from inflation-produced poverty of fantastic proportions.24 The Autumn Strikes In the summer of 1946 Hodge reported a dire situation to General MacArthur, his commanding officer in Tokyo: “The general morale of Koreans is at a low ebb.” “The critical food and housing situation, the vanishing stock piles of Japanese goods and raw materials with little change in sight for substantial replenishment, is combined with highly uncertain but locally little understood international situation, tends to make the Korean people panicky and ready to believe any rumor.” Continuing his assessment, Hodge explained the Koreans’ perception: “the Americans have been here one year and the physical benefits there from do not yet equal those under Japanese rule.” Later in his report he went on to belittle this sentiment, attributing it to “childish” Korean thinking. “In all consideration of Korean problems, the character, psychology and temperament of these people is a vital factor … All are individualists of a high order … are highly volatile and excitable over trifles and can easily reach such a point of frenzy over real or fancied wrongs that they do not listen to reason. They are opportunists of a high order, with a low degree of personal integrity.”25 Koreans, however, as if in rebuttal to Hodge's confidential assertions, rejected the notion that they were to blame for their problems. An August 1946 editorial in the Chosun Ilbo newspaper asked the general to consider “the present situation in Korea,” where the “Korean people are now suffering more than they ever did under the Japanese rule.” The editorial attributed the difficulties in the South to the ignorance and misguided polices of the occupation government. “We believe that the Military Government in Korea has not been successful in its efforts, and that this failure is due to your country's lack of understanding concerning Korea, the interpreters’ administration, the permission of free economy without any preparation and to your wavering policy.” “These accusations against the Military Government in Korea,” the editorial opined, “are not slanderous but true.” A poll taken by the Department of Public Information in late 1946 captured the steep decline in American prestige, showing more than half the Korean respondents preferred Japanese colonial rule to U.S. occupation. This was a shocking reversal for a group who only a year earlier had been hailed as liberators.26 Occupation authorities were at a loss on how to improve conditions in the southern zone of Korea. Ideally, the United States wanted to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union for a unified Korea, which they would jointly administer until a Korean government could be established that they both recognized. At the Moscow Conference in December 1945, the two powers had agreed to a road map for Korean unification. However, subsequent meetings of the U.S.-Soviet Joint Commission to implement the process broke down, collapsing in an emerging Cold War atmosphere of mutual suspicion and recrimination. By mid-1946, Hodge thought that an agreement with the Soviet Union was impossible. He suspected the Soviets of intentionally stalling to run out the clock on the U.S. occupation, because they knew how dire the situation was in the southern zone and believed that in time, the Koreans themselves would force out the Americans.27 The crisis deepened in the fall of 1946, when strikes in protest of U.S. occupation policy broke out across the southern zone of Korea, which were followed immediately by peasant uprisings in North Kyŏngsang, South Kyŏngsang, and Chŏlla Provinces. There had been signs of discontent leading up to these upheavals, but the military government largely ignored them. By the spring of 1946, reports were common of workers making demands for higher wages and bonuses, threatening to stop work unless egregious supervisors and managers were removed, and seeking a percentage of the goods they produced. Korean factory owners and managers responded to the spike in labor activism with repression, relying on the Knp to stamp out dissidence. “In the face of this situation,” the director of the newly formed Labor Department explained in 1946, “attempts at collective bargaining were meaningless and it was equally meaningless to encourage the formation, let alone require the registration, of democratic labor unions, which were prohibited by Ordinance interpretation from using the recognized methods of trade unionism.”28 Sensing the rising discontent among the rank and file, the communist-led union, the Chonp'yong, organized workers to fight against management and occupation policies in the summer of 1946. In textile mills, railway yards, construction sites, and mines throughout the South, Korean workers, most with the support of the Chonp'yong, demanded higher wages, improved working conditions, and a percentage of the goods their factories produced, as well as the rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. By this time, the Chonp'yong had established branches in all the major cities in the South including Seoul, Incheon, Samcheok, Taejŏn, Taegu, Pusan, Masan, Chŏnju, Kunsan, Kwanju, and Mokp'o, boasting a membership of nearly a quarter of a million spread over one hundred locals.29 On September 15 the Southern Korean Railway Workers Union (a Chonp'yong affiliated union) submitted a list of demands to the Department of Transportation. The list was mostly boilerplate, including increases in wages, family allowances, and rice rations, but it also contained political demands, including the freedom of press, speech, and assembly and the right to organize and strike, and it revived demands for worker managerial control of the railroads. U.S. officials in the Department of Transportation simply ignored the demands, and after a week, union delegates requested that the military governor intervene to mediate. This appeal was also ignored. On September 23 between seven thousand and eight thousand railway workers in Pusan went on strike. Several hours later, the entire membership of the Railway Workers Union, approximately thirty-six thousand workers spread across the South, struck, bringing railroad transport to a halt.30 The next morning, Military Governor Archer Lerch took to the airwaves to declare the strikes illegal. He announced that because the military government owned the railroads, the railway workers were government employees and as such were prohibited from striking. Lerch warned the striking workers that they would be arrested if they did not immediately return to work. Despite these threats, the strikes spread in the following days, resulting in a general strike of over 300,000 workers from almost every industry, including communications, electrical, printing, shipping, construction, and textile.31 Hodge ordered the Knp and allied rightist youth to crack down on worker protest. The campaign to suppress the strikes began in Pusan, where seventy policemen, with the support of American troops, arrested union leaders and forced railway workers back to work. On September 30 an armed force of two thousand policemen, accompanied by American military police officers, violently broke up the strikes in the railway yards in Seoul. Workers fought back but were eventually overwhelmed. By the end of the day, one worker was killed, another forty were injured, and about 1,700 workers were arrested. As the director of the Department of Transportation later put it: “We went into that situation just like we would go into battle. We were out to break that thing up and we didn't have time to worry too much if a few innocent people got hurt.”32 Justifying the brutal response, Hodge insisted that the strikes were of a “purely political character,” the work of “dangerous anarchists.” “There is absolutely no reason,” he declared sternly, “for disorders in connection with legitimate labor disputes.” Korean workers, however, disputed Hodge's characterization of the labor rebellion. “Despite General Hodge's attempts to blame these revolts on a ‘small agitator group,’” one worker wrote, “the real reasons for the uprisings are clear.” “Our struggle for good wages, our struggle against ‘rice collection,’ our peaceful people's demonstrations have been suppressed.” Korean labor activists and workers insisted the strikes stemmed from legitimate grievances and were part of a broad struggle to realize the promise of social justice in a liberated Korea. In his diagnosis of the September railway strikes, Meacham opined that they were initiated reluctantly and as a desperate last resort. The war of attrition that the factory managers, police and Americans were carrying on against the [Chonp'yong] organization had reached a point where its life was at stake. It decided to attempt to mount a counterattack. This decision grew out of a series of rebuffs it encountered in trying to get the American Director of the Department of Transportation to sit down with Chong Pyong committee and negotiate regarding such matters as a larger rice ration, wage increases, etc. When these demands were met with a casualness that amounted to open contempt it was decided to call a strike.33 The Chonp'yong was far from a monolithic bloc, but few American officials were willing or able to grasp the complex intragroup dynamics that made up the Korean resistance. This Manichean view prevented occupation officials from seeing how their own policies created a self-fulfilling prophecy. As one Korean labor activist interviewed by the legal adviser Baldwin explained: “We do not support the Communist Party dictatorship.” But he also added that the unions could not get anywhere with the occupation government. “All our activities are suspected as Communist. The army stops our strikes. Our demonstrations of protest at public meetings are regarded as riots and our leaders are arrested,” despaired Kim Tong Suk. “Any meeting they don't approve is illegal. Any speech they think is anti-American is illegal. You can't criticize a thing the army does without going to jail. The Korean police work hand in glove with them.” Baldwin's own investigations “confirmed most of what the leftist said.” He found that: “The actual Communists among them who want a single-party Communist state allied with the Soviet are comparatively few. But the military officials are making more of them daily by their policies of suppression.”34 The repression against workers triggered sympathy uprisings throughout the southern zone of Korea. In Taegu, for example, sympathy strikes broke out with hundreds of demonstrators marching in support of workers during the first week of October. The peaceful demonstrations convulsed into an orgy of violence after the police killed an unarmed demonstrator. The killing set off a chain of events in which protesters seized the Taegu police station and brutally murdered fifty policemen. Similar cases of violence against the police occurred throughout North Kyŏngsang, South Kyŏngsang, and South Chŏlla Provinces. The long-smoldering hatred of the police, dating back to the colonial era, had burst into a conflagration of revolutionary violence. A postuprising analysis by a U.S. adviser to the police revealed: “The public's ill-feeling toward the police, which police abuse of power had engendered, became a potent factor in the riots and quasi-revolt which swept South Korea in October 1946.” In a pattern predictable by now, the military government sent in American troops, alongside the Korean police, to put down the uprisings. It would be weeks, and in some places months, before military and police forces pacified the unrest. The occupation's efforts to put down the worker and peasant uprisings institutionalized a police state in the South.35 Scrambling for a Way Out By 1947, a palpable sense of resignation and gloom had settled over the American occupation, with one State Department official remarking, “whatever we do now in Korea is bound to be bad. Our only hope is not to do worse.” That same year, the occupation's erstwhile ally, the rightist partisan Syngman Rhee, whose main appeal for the United States was that he was free from the taint of Japanese collaboration, started a public campaign to oust Hodge as head of the military government and to demand elections establishing a separate Korean government in the South. Boxed in on one side by Korean aspirations and by Soviet intransigence—real and imagined—on the other, the military government, with the support of the State Department, referred the issue of Korean independence to the United Nations (Un).36 For much of the occupation, liberals in the State Department criticized the military government for botching the administration of Korea by “ignoring established policies and supporting self-defeating rightwingers in Seoul,” but rarely did they offer policy alternatives. Nevertheless, the State Department had a vested interest in securing an American-friendly regime in the South. By 1947, policy makers envisioned Korea as part of a grand regional strategy—dubbed the “great crescent” by Dean Acheson—in which a rehabilitated Japan would assume a major role in U.S.-Pacific security. These plans involved “making southern Korea a hinterland for Japanese industry and a frontyard of Japanese defense.” Restoring the prewar order in Northeast Asia was thought to be the best way of promoting political stability and prosperity in Asia to contain communism. Thus, securing South Korea as an anticommunist bulwark was crucial to the plan.37 After two years of fighting over nearly every aspect of occupation policy, conservative and liberal advisers finally agreed on something: an exit strategy. Hodge and his military advisers, tired of taking all the blame for the occupation's failures, floated the idea of withdrawing from Korea before the plan to submit the Korea question to the Un was even proposed. Cold War liberals, while having earlier criticized the military government's hard-line approach, now believed securing half the peninsula was necessary to contain the spread of communism, even if it meant indefinite partition. They agonized over the decision, to be sure. Owen Jones, who had returned to Korea as part of an economic mission led by Arthur Bunce, went back and forth on the plan, expressing deep ambivalence. “I'm not at all certain that history will be any more charitable to us than to the Russians,” Jones recorded in his diary in July 1947. “Somehow I'm left with the feeling that had we not had such an overwhelming fear and distrust of the Russians, we might have fared better.” But in the end, Jones adopted the Cold War line, conceding that “the Russian advance must be stopped and Korea is just another of the many places where we have to draw a line and stop it.”38 The principals involved had an accurate sense of how the exit strategy would unfold: the Un would establish a separate government in the southern zone of Korea, leaving the country divided indefinitely; and the election held in the American zone would give Rhee and his rightist supporters “the majority of the seats in the new assembly.” Why did liberal advisers go along with a plan that would leave the country divided and usher into power the unsavory Rhee, with his known authoritarian tendencies? As Bradley Simpson has noted, American officials “largely conceived of self-determination in liberal, procedural terms, as democratic self-rule by free individuals.” From this conception arose the idea that communism was fundamentally antithetical to individual freedom and rights. The exit strategy, they reasoned, would preserve Korea's right to self-determination by saving half of Korea from a full-scale communist take-over. This was the “Cold War logic of self-determination,” which “led successive U.S. administrations to support territorial division in Germany, Korea, and Vietnam.” The Americans’ decision to support the plan, warts and all, also reflected their faith in the redemptive possibilities of the democratic process. They imagined the elections as a first step toward liberal democracy and viewed the election of Syngman Rhee as its unavoidable birth pangs. Sponsoring elections seemed like the least bad option and gave the United States a way out.39 Staging Democracy In November 1947 the Un General Assembly, despite strident opposition from the Soviet Union and its allies, voted in favor of holding a peninsula-wide election in Korea. As part of the resolution, the Un created the Un Temporary Commission on Korea (Untcok). Comprising representatives from Australia, Canada, China, El Salvador, France, India, Philippines, and Syria, Untcok was to monitor the elections and report back to the General Assembly. The commission departed for Seoul in January 1948 with the mandate to “facilitate and expedite” elections to establish a national government of Korea. The Soviet Union maintained its earlier stance and rejected the Untcok's offer to oversee peninsula-wide elections, accusing the commission of doing the bidding of the United States. Instead, Soviet officials offered to withdraw from Korea, if the United States was willing to do the same. Americans quickly rejected the Soviet proposal to withdraw simultaneously.40 Stalemated, Untcok was forced to decide whether or not to go forward with elections in the southern zone alone. Representatives from India, Canada, and Australia expressed concern that a separate election would undermine efforts to reunify Korea and would leave the peninsula permanently divided. They also doubted the prospects for a democratic election in the South. But delegates from China, El Salvador, and the Philippines argued that the lack of Soviet cooperation left them no choice but to endorse holding a separate election in the southern zone. Meanwhile, the occupation government, seeking to present a separate election as a foregone conclusion, set a date for the elections without consulting the Un. Behind the scenes, U.S. statesmen and diplomats pressured their noncompliant allies in the Untcok to support a separate election.41 Back in November 1946, Koreans had participated in their first election under American occupation when they voted for members of the South Korean Interim Legislative Assembly (Skila). U.S. officials saw those elections as an opportunity to introduce Koreans to representative democracy and boost the flagging support for the United States in Korea. But the 1946 elections were marred by intimidation and vote rigging, resulting in a sweeping victory for the far right. According to Lt. Leonard Bertsch, political adviser to General Hodge, the election “was so rigged as to elect fascists, run by ward-heads who got the family seals and voted them, with threats to vote right or lose their [rice] rations.” Koreans not on the far right erupted in protest, demanding the results be annulled. Under pressure, Hodge appointed half of the ninety-member assembly from a slate of moderate candidates; even so, the Korean interim assembly remained heavily tilted in favor of the right. George McCune, the head of the State Department's Korea desk, noted the similarities between the November 1946 elections in the South and elections in the North that same month, noting how they both established “puppet states” on the peninsula.42 Untcok representatives—in particular, those from Australia, Canada, and India—feared a repeat performance in the upcoming May 1948 elections. They doubted that the conditions for free elections existed in the South, noting trials without juries, restrictions on free speech and the rights to assembly and association, detention of thousands of political prisoners without due process, the lack of habeas corpus, and, their biggest source of worry, the police state. Untcok perceived that the environment favored “the major parties of the right, since they appear to have the advantage of some influence in the South Korean administration, have been able to develop an effective network of organization covering the whole country.” Yasin Mughir, the Syrian representative, put it more bluntly, characterizing right-wing activity as “strong” and “blatant” in Korea.43 In January 1948 representatives of Untcok interviewed members of the military government, Korean civil authorities, police officers, provincial and district-level election committees, and candidates who had announced their intention to run for political office. To get a fuller picture, they planned also to interview leftist and center-left figures, including the head of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the chairman and chairwoman of the Kpr, the Farmer's Union, and the Women's Democratic Alliance. But these people “were either in prison, under order of arrest, or under some form of police surveillance.” And despite being given full immunity, “none of the persons concerned accepted” requests for interviews, citing a “lack of confidence in the assurances given by the authorities.”44 Open in new tabDownload slide This January 8, 1948, photograph shows one of the archways built in the southern zone of Korea to welcome the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea. The commission was created in late 1947 to oversee elections for a national government for the peninsula. Courtesy United Nations, photo #187645, https://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/187/0187645.html. Open in new tabDownload slide This January 8, 1948, photograph shows one of the archways built in the southern zone of Korea to welcome the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea. The commission was created in late 1947 to oversee elections for a national government for the peninsula. Courtesy United Nations, photo #187645, https://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/187/0187645.html. In a presentation to the commission on February 25, U.S. legal advisers Charles Pergler and Ernst Fraenkel defended American policy. They highlighted the efforts to promote equality and combat the discriminatory legacies of Japanese colonial rule. Pergler cited the numerous Japanese laws that had been abolished under the military government, including those that discriminated on the basis of race, religion, and nationality. In his testimony, Fraenkel focused on the progress being made toward reforming the police. However, in the questioning period, skeptical representatives kept coming back to the issue of the police. The Australian representative, S. H. Jackson, remarked that “the police we have here are, for the most part, Japanese-trained. They have been operating under Japanese regulations, and their best material is Japanese trained material.” Fraenkel acknowledged the colonial character of the police force but justified the continuity on practical grounds: “the Japanese did not permit the Koreans to study matters which had some practical significance … we just did not have the people here, and in that managerial vacuum we had to take the people we had.” George Patterson, from Canada, followed up by asking whether it would be possible to “go much further in removing these policemen?” Neither adviser addressed the possibility of purging colonial-era police personnel, probably because they knew Hodge would never allow it.45 Finding conditions unacceptable for free and fair elections, Jackson drafted a resolution that would have effectively ended Untcok's role in Korea. Because the elections, he observed, “are now under the control of a single party,” he believed Untcok should withdraw immediately from Korea if the Un did not want to be responsible for validating a tainted election. Patterson supported the resolution, rightly believing that an overwhelming majority of Koreans opposed a separate election in the South. He also feared that if Untcok did not withdraw immediately its members would be left sanctioning a rigged election. But Jackson's resolution was rejected, and Untcok was ordered to stay and monitor the elections in the South as scheduled.46 Obliged to observe the elections, Untcok pushed the occupation government to pass a series of reforms. These included decentralization of the Knp, release of all political prisoners, protections of civil liberties, and requirements that elections be held on the basis of adult suffrage and by secret ballot in an atmosphere where rights of free speech, press, and assembly were protected. Hodge agreed to all the proposed reforms, save for one: he was adamant about maintaining the organization of the police force. Making his case before the commission, Hodge testified: “The police have had wide power. They have to, in a war or in an occupation under conditions we face here. As I explained to you, we have had continuously to wage what might be called a war against subversion, and the active forces need wide power or they could not function.” However, to allay the commission's concerns, he promised that “every effort is being made and will be made to exercise proper control over and direct the activities of the police toward free elections.”47 Reforms were announced one after the other over the span of a few weeks. The first, made on March 20, dealt with new criminal procedures in which the military government prohibited, among other things, arrest without warrant except in certain specified cases. And in these “special” cases, detainees could not be held longer than forty-eight hours, unless a warrant was issued. This was followed by an order from Hodge that pardoned 3,140 political prisoners, many of whom had been held without due process. Thousands of other political prisoners, most of them confined for labor protest, however, remained languishing in prison. Finally, in a dramatic public appearance that was more reminiscent of his charismatic superior, General MacArthur, Hodge proclaimed a Bill of Rights in which he enunciated the inviolable liberties of the Korean people. Principal drafters of the Korean constitution (and later scholars) emphasized the inspiration of Hodge's declaration, unaware of the external pressure that brought it about.48 Adding to the urgency, in April 1948 President Harry S. Truman set a timeline for the withdrawal of American forces in National Security Council Report 8 (Nsc-8): “Every effort should be made to create conditions for the withdrawal of occupation forces by 31 December 1948.” Obtaining Un approval for the upcoming elections, which would be based on Untcok's recommendations, was key to a face-saving withdrawal from Korea. And there was no plan B; this was it. Indeed, when a reporter, in an off-the-record press conference, raised the possibility of the commission rejecting the election results, Hodge answered: “If the Un should reject it, I don't know the answer. It would be pretty hard after all the promises, all the hullabaloo on the election, to tell the Koreans, well, you have two hundred elected people, now they are no good to you.” As a result, he did not think “anything like that will happen.” Hodge's response revealed that Korean support for the elections was being assumed as a given, but this was not the case.49 Resistance to the separate elections came from both the Left and the Right, though mostly from the former. In Cheju, the island province off the southwest coast of Korea, residents associated with the South Korean Labor Worker's party (Sklwp) organized armed resistance to the elections. “Today, on this day of April 3, your sons, daughters, and little brothers and sisters rose up in arms for the reunification and independence of our homeland, and for the complete liberation of the people.” The rebels described the U.S.-sponsored election as an imperialist plot to subvert the will of the Korean people. They imagined their resistance as a defense of Korean sovereignty, a “save-the-nation-movement.” “We must risk our lives for the opposition to the betrayal of the country and the unilateral election and government.” They appealed to the people of Cheju to “rise up along with us, responding to the call of the country and its people.”50 Starting on April 3, armed guerrillas systematically attacked police boxes, raided elections offices, and intimidated election workers. As one U.S. official reported: “Difficulty developed in holding the election on Jeju because of the reluctance of election officials to open polls or to handle any election material because of fear of communist reprisals.” Indeed, voter registration in Cheju was by far the lowest among all the provinces in the South. Fearing the guerrillas would upend the upcoming elections, the military government sent 1,700 police and three constabulary battalions from the mainland to suppress the rebellion and restore order. But any hope of settling “the situation” with a show of force, as one U.S. commander confidently predicted, was quickly dashed. Instead, American-backed forces became mired in a protracted campaign against the rebels that left in doubt the ability to hold elections in Cheju.51 The second major challenge to the elections came from a “Unity Conference” held in Pyongyang in northern Korea from April 19 to April 23. Earlier that spring the Soviet Politburo authorized the North to convene a gathering of southern and northern political leaders to discuss the reunification of Korea. The event drew over two hundred delegates from the South, but it was the attendance of two prominent rightist nationalists, Kim Ku and Kim Kyusik, that gave the conference an aura of legitimacy. The two rightists saw the conference as the last and best chance to stave off permanent division of the country and stop their rival, Rhee, from seizing power in the South. For these two longtime nationalists, the promise of national self-determination could not be realized under a divided Korea. If Americans viewed communism as an enemy to self-determination, the two Kims viewed partition as an equal, if not greater, threat. Kim Shin, the son of Kim Ku, who accompanied his father to Pyongyang in 1948, recalled the reaction to his father's speech at the Moranbong Theatre: “The audience clapped passionately when father said he was against a separate government in the South.”52 The conference ended with a resolution that called for a boycott of the southern elections and an immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops, with peninsula-wide elections to immediately follow. The resolution accused American authorities of holding “a unilateral election in South Korea for the purpose of delaying the unification and independence of our fatherland.” It further declared that: “The Korean people have ability to establish a united, democratic government with their own hands without any interference from any foreign nation.” American officials dismissed the conference (and the resulting resolution) as nothing more than a political stunt designed to undermine the elections in the South and make the United States look bad. Furious with Kim Ku and Kim Kyusik for lending their prestige to a “propaganda event,” Hodge deemed the two men, who had formerly rivaled Rhee, persona non grata upon their return, which resulted in their marginalization from Korean public life.53 Despite these challenges, the occupation government pressed forward with the elections, and on May 10, 1948, millions of Korean men and women made their way to the polls. The thirty-member team from Untcok fanned out across the southern zone to observe the elections, but, given their small number, they could only monitor one or two major cities in each province. Throughout the day, Untcok representatives observed electoral irregularities and fraud, and they received complaints of threats and interference from police and rightist youth groups. Nevertheless, Liu Yuwan, the representative from China, thought the elections, on the whole, went smoothly, and pronounced himself “satisfied with the orderly manner in which the elections were conducted.” He pointed to the impressive turnout—close to 93 percent of registered Korean voters cast a ballot—as evidence of vibrant participatory politics.54 Open in new tabDownload slide This photograph shows a Korean woman voting in the May 10, 1948, elections that created the South Korean national government. “70 Photographs Reflect Joy of Independence,” Aug. 14, 2015, Korea.net, http://m.korea.net/english/Government/Current-Affairs/National-Affairs/view?affairId=478&subId=507&articleId=129310&viewId=16105. Courtesy National Archives. Open in new tabDownload slide This photograph shows a Korean woman voting in the May 10, 1948, elections that created the South Korean national government. “70 Photographs Reflect Joy of Independence,” Aug. 14, 2015, Korea.net, http://m.korea.net/english/Government/Current-Affairs/National-Affairs/view?affairId=478&subId=507&articleId=129310&viewId=16105. Courtesy National Archives. In Cheju, however, a boycott of the elections as well as the threat of violence resulted in far lower voter turnout (62.8 percent compared to 95.95 percent nationwide). In the days leading up to the elections, rebels called on (and in some instances, coerced) residents to escape to one of the mountains on the island or to hide out in one of its forests to avoid participation. Despite the additional security detail on election day, rebels also successfully executed hit-run raids on polling places to suppress the vote. Hodge dismissed the election results in Cheju as an outlier, the product of “outside” communist agitators. Other U.S. officials, however, disagreed with his assessment: Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward believed “the uprising was caused by people's hatred of the police” and thought “the riots will continue until provocative causes are removed.” On May 26 Military Governor William Dean declared the election results from two voting districts on Cheju invalid and rescheduled new elections for June 23. This new date for the elections proved to be overly optimistic—new elections did not take place for a full year because security forces needed that long to pacify the island.55 Open in new tabDownload slide After much uncertainty and debate, the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea validated the May 10, 1948, elections in the southern zone of Korea, acknowledging the establishment of the Korean National Assembly in June. This photo shows members of the committee on October 1 working on their final draft report for the United Nations General Assembly. Courtesy United Nations, photo #187638, https://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/187/0187638.html. Open in new tabDownload slide After much uncertainty and debate, the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea validated the May 10, 1948, elections in the southern zone of Korea, acknowledging the establishment of the Korean National Assembly in June. This photo shows members of the committee on October 1 working on their final draft report for the United Nations General Assembly. Courtesy United Nations, photo #187638, https://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/187/0187638.html. To no one's surprise, the general election results showed the political parties allied with Syngman Rhee had won a majority in the new assembly. The newly elected body first convened on May 31, 1948, and selected Rhee as Chairman of the Assembly by an overwhelming margin, making him the de facto head of the new government. On June 11 Rhee contacted Untcok to formally notify it of the establishment of the National Assembly in South Korea. This first official communiqué as chairman was met with a long silence. Untcok members were divided over validating the elections. The representatives from Australia, Canada, India, and Syria argued that the elections “were not held in a sufficiently free atmosphere to earn the approval of the Commission.” McCune offered a similar assessment, explaining that the “moderate view, widely held, was that elections should not be accepted as a free expression of the Korean will.” Nevertheless, the deeply divided commission acknowledged the establishment of the Korean National Assembly on June 25, and five days later it released another statement saying that the elections “are a valid expression of the free will of the electorate in those parts of Korea which were accessible to the Commission.”56 A sense of relief washed over the military government. Untcok's long period of silence had cast doubt on whether it would recognize the election results, but the commission's announcement at the end of June broke the tension. Hodge and his conservative advisers confidently continued with their exit strategy, which would allow U.S. military forces to withdraw in a few short months while maintaining American national interests on the peninsula. But the optimism generated by the elections did not last long. Several weeks after the elections, American legal experts and senior advisers found translated copies of the Korean constitution on their desks. They were stunned with what they read: core principles that they had tacitly agreed upon with members of the Korean drafting committee and Rhee himself were either absent or substantially changed. Liberal reformers felt particularly blindsided. As Bunce explained: “the original document, which pays homage at least to liberalism, was altered beyond recognition in committee, and the resulting compromise draft which made its way to the Assembly floor provided for a presidential dictatorship rooted in economic oligarchy.”57 Strongman Rising Shortly after the elections, before the first draft of the constitution had been prepared, U.S. military advisers had met informally with drafters and leaders of the major political parties, including Kim Songsu, Shin Ikhui, and Syngman Rhee, to establish basic principles that would guide the writing of the new constitution. In these conversations, American legal advisers advocated for a parliamentary system with powers vested mostly in the legislative body. Under their proposal, the president would largely be a figurehead. Apart from the system of government, occupation authorities were willing to grant Korean drafters wide latitude. The Koreans involved in these discussions agreed in principle to a parliamentary government with a British-style cabinet system. Kdp leaders pushed for a parliamentary model, hoping it would check Rhee's growing ambition. The Kdp had provided Rhee with a political base upon his return to Korea after a forty-year exile. In return, Rhee's affiliation with the Kdp gave a party of landed and business elites, struggling with its collaborationist past, a much-needed shot of nationalist prestige. The demise of the left, however, stripped them of a common enemy that had held the uneasy coalition together. Relations between Rhee and the Kdp soured further in the summer of 1947 when Kdp leaders defied Rhee by supporting the negotiations of the U.S.-Soviet Joint Commission. They eventually found themselves on the same side again, demanding a separate South Korean government, but the rift remained and grew wider during the constitution-making process.58 The drafting of the Korean constitution formally began on June 3, when the constitutional committee, consisting of thirty of the newly elected assemblymen and ten legal experts, convened its first session. Professor of law Yu Chino, Prosecutor General Yi In, Vice Minister of Justice Kwŏn Sŭngnyŏl, and Minister of Justice Kim Pyongno, led the drafting process. The principal drafters were products of the Japanese educational system. Yu Chino received his legal education at the Keijō Imperial University in Seoul and Kim Pyŏngno and Yi In graduated with law degrees from Meiji University in Japan. Other than Yu Chino, members of the committee had little knowledge or experience with constitutional law. The formal process, from drafting to ratification, took less than forty days, a fraction of the time it took in occupied Japan and Germany.59 Between June 3 and June 23, the committee met sixteen times to draft a constitution to submit to the National Assembly for ratification. Yu Chino had drafted a constitution beforehand to serve as the basis for debate. His draft made the parliament, and not the executive, the chief organ of state power. Throughout the debate, members of the Kdp fought to keep Yu's governmental structure in the constitution. The committee was making good progress until, without warning, Syngman Rhee attended the June 15 meeting of the drafting committee. At the meeting, Rhee made his desires for a presidential system known for the first time. Just a week earlier, Rhee had told members that he would accept the will of the National Assembly on the constitution. Now, however, rehearsing earlier arguments, he insisted that a strong presidency best suited South Korea's needs. Despite Rhee's impassioned appeals, a majority of the committee held firm on a strong parliamentary government. Rebuffed, Rhee took his demands to the National Assembly several days later, where he put forth a resolution calling for a special session of the National Assembly to negotiate and finalize the constitution. He planned to use the special session to force through a strong executive system, but his resolution was soundly defeated by a vote of 130 to 12.60 On June 21, two days before a draft of the constitution was due to the National Assembly, Rhee announced to the committee that he would not take any official position under the current constitution. He spoke ambiguously of instead playing a prominent role outside of government. According to the historian So Huigyong, this was a thinly veiled threat to engage in antigovernment activism, which would undermine the legitimacy of a new government. In this move, Rhee had considerable leverage. His withdrawal would have thrown Korean politics into turmoil and sowed further doubt in the minds of the Un observers, who had yet to recognize a new South Korean government. More importantly, the right simply had no one who could rival Rhee. One potential alternative, Song Chinu, had been assassinated in the winter of 1945, and other possible candidates such as Kim Ku and Kim Kyusik refused to take part in a separate South Korean government. In a desperate act, Hodge brought back the frail octogenarian So Chaepil to Korea in 1947—he had lived in exile in the United States for over fifty years—but his candidacy was ridiculed and quickly dismissed. Kdp officials therefore quickly capitulated to Rhee's demands for a strong executive government. On June 22, following a lengthy discussion between Kdp bosses and the drafting committee, members revised the constitution to accommodate Rhee's wishes.61 Behind the frantic pace of the constitution-making process was the occupation government. Their tight timetable was necessary to meet the year-end deadline for withdrawing American forces from Korea, which was scheduled to commence on August 15. The military command also rushed the constitution so the Americans would be able to present the new South Korean government as a fait accompli to Untcok. The dissident members of Untcok saw through the strategy but thought there was little they could do to stop it. “Syngman Rhee temporary chairman of Korean Assembly favours the earliest formation of national government,” Jackson reported to his Foreign Ministry. “His view is likely to prevail, Korean constitution has been approved.” On July 20 the United States reported to the Un that all requirements for recognition had been fulfilled.62 Several days earlier, the constitutional expert Pergler had performed the first review of the ratified document. He found critical defects in the new constitution. Pergler criticized the phraseology “as specified by the law,” which made the guarantees of free speech, press, assembly, and association all but “meaningless.” It was exactly this kind of hedging language that had prompted the U.S. occupation authorities to take over the constitution-writing process in Japan. He also expressed reservation with Article 57, the so-called crisis clause, which conferred extraordinary powers upon the president in “time of civil war or in dangerous situation arising from foreign relations or in case of a natural calamity or in event of a grave economic or financial crisis.” This language, Pergler commented, “is rather reminiscent of the unfortunate Art. 48 of the German Weimar Constitution. It also is a repetition of Art. 8 of the defunct Japanese Constitution which provided that ‘the Emperor in cases of urgent necessity to maintain public safety or avert public calamities issue … imperial ordinances in places of laws.’”63 Bunce also skewered the constitution for its undemocratic features. In particular, he slammed Article 87, which brought “any enterprises having public character” under the authority of the government, as “the most dangerous politico-economic provision of the constitution.” Through this article, he worried “the railway system, the post-office, every bank and insurance company and public utility in South Korea could become subject to allocation as a reward for political service, with disastrous results to public interest.” Bunce feared a command economy would only aggrandize the power of an imperial presidency.64 This outcome, according to the political adviser Joseph Jacobs, was the result of a rightist civil war in which Rhee and his allies had emerged triumphant. “From the foregoing, it is not too much to say that Rhee has deliberately fostered this spirit and is now seeking to reduce the Hankook Democratic Party [Kdp] to a negligible force and the remainder of Rightists to dutiful lackeys.” “With vast powers of industrial and financial control in his hands, together with the prerogatives of patronage,” Jacobs predicted Rhee would eventually “wean away wealthy Hankook supporters and wreck the one substantial opposition to his rule.”65 American officials were correct to describe Rhee's constitutional maneuverings as a power grab. They missed, however, how an imperial presidency fit into his overarching nationalist vision and obscured the role that American actions had played in paving the way for authoritarian rule in the South. Rhee's aim in establishing a separate southern government was to create a base from which to eventually absorb the North and fulfill his life-long dream of ruling over a unified Korea. The chance to realize his vision only arose when the United States instrumentalized democracy promotion as an exit strategy. Occupation reformers wrote electoral laws, developed voting procedures, and advised on the writing of the constitution, all in an effort to gain international recognition for a separate southern government that would formally end the American occupation. Yet, in doing so, they sanctioned a sham election and created an opportunity for a would-be autocrat to seize power.66 Open in new tabDownload slide This photograph from 1945 shows, left to right, Syngman Rhee, Kim Ku, and Gen. John Hodge. General Hodge was the U.S. military governor of the southern zone of Korea from the end of World War II until Rhee became the first president of South Korea in 1948. Kim Ku, at the time of this photo, was the head of the provisional government of Korea in exile. He refused to participate in the new South Korean government. Reprinted from Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: Kmg in Peace and War, ed. Walter G. Hermes (Washington, 1988), 8. Open in new tabDownload slide This photograph from 1945 shows, left to right, Syngman Rhee, Kim Ku, and Gen. John Hodge. General Hodge was the U.S. military governor of the southern zone of Korea from the end of World War II until Rhee became the first president of South Korea in 1948. Kim Ku, at the time of this photo, was the head of the provisional government of Korea in exile. He refused to participate in the new South Korean government. Reprinted from Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: Kmg in Peace and War, ed. Walter G. Hermes (Washington, 1988), 8. Conclusion What Janet Poole has called the “disappearing future” reappeared for Korea with the end of Japanese colonial rule. Postcolonialism once again became imaginable for Koreans. To be sure, there was no pristine vision of liberation that all Koreans shared. But if this immediate postwar moment meant anything, it represented a singular opportunity for Koreans to fight over and work out the meaning of independence. “Those who try to isolate democracy from conflict,” as Greg Grandin reminds us, “usually underestimate the entrenched and intransigent nature of the forces allied against a more equitable distribution of resources and power.” American occupying forces arrived in this atmosphere of idealism, hope, and uncertainty, and proceeded to narrowly circumscribe what independence could entail. They promoted a vision of liberal modernity that emphasized order, efficiency, and security, and those goals clashed with the aspirations of most Koreans, who, despite their differences, envisioned more far-reaching changes as part of their emancipation.67 But as occupation failures mounted, and Korean resistance to occupation policies grew, the military government reconstructed the former colonial system of social control and empowered counterrevolutionary forces. New Deal advisers within the military government objected to this hard-line approach, but worsening conditions in the South and escalating tensions with the Soviet Union boxed them in, leaving those officials with fewer and fewer options. And by 1947, the United States favored a neocolonial strategy that would contain communism and secure U.S. dominance in Northeast Asia. The U.S.-sponsored elections bequeathed the South its sovereignty but with an authoritarian at the helm. Ernst Frankel, the legal adviser who had worked concertedly to legitimize the May 1948 election, saw the gross despotism of the Rhee government up close: “The jails in Seoul are overcrowded with political prisoners. Six weeks ago I inspected a police jail in Incheon. The prisoners there were living under conditions which I hesitate to describe in this letter.” Writing from Tokyo in June 1950, after being evacuated from Seoul before the start of the Korean War, Fraenkel confided to his colleagues: “our policy in Korea is bankrupt.” Betraying a sense of regret, he acknowledged: “It is to a large extent our fault.”68 The U.S. occupation's management of Korea's transition out of colonialism was plagued with tensions and contradictions. Guided initially by unexamined assumptions of what a free people should want, America's commitment to Korean independence was complicated and, ultimately, superseded by the United States’ global ambitions. Americans faced this dilemma everywhere they succeeded the Japanese. And judging from the results, which ranged from an independence denied (in the case of the Marshall Islands) to the displacement of indigenous peoples (in the case of the Chamorro in Guam) to the backing of corrupt dictators, the United States seemed to do no better in these other places at detaching its interested policy from the decolonization process. No matter the original intentions, virtually all of the extraterritorial spaces inherited from the Japanese became incorporated into a broad hegemonic project in which the United States projected global power through the ambiguous and partial postcolonial sovereignty of others. An empire without colonies was built upon the foundation of decolonization without liberation. Notes I am grateful to Daniel Bender, Karen Caplan, Susan Carruthers, Paul Chang, Bruce Cumings, Carter Eckert, Takashi Fujitani, Chie Ikeya, Daniel Immerwahr, Ju Yon Kim, Nuri Kim, Suzy Kim, Erez Manela, Mae Ngai, Albert Park, Timothy Stewart-Winter, Jessica Wang, Barbara Weinstein, the late Marilyn Young, and to the JAH's anonymous readers for their advice, suggestions, and support, and Joan Cho and Mi Hyun Yoon for research and translation assistance. I also thank Benjamin Irvin, Stephen Andrews, and especially Judith Allen for their thoughtful guidance through the review process, and Kevin Marsh for his expert copyediting. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dean Jan Ellen Lewis. Footnotes 1 “The Economic Objectives of the Occupation,” 1947, p. 10, box 41, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command, Rg 554 (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.). 2 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947 (Princeton, 1981); William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, 1995); Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1945–1950: A House Burning (Lawrence, 2005); Wada Haruki, The Korean War: An International History (Lanham, 2014); James Irving Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (Honolulu, 1985); Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (New York, 2013). 3 For interventions calling for histories outside of the bipolar Cold War frame, see Matthew Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review, 105 (June 2000), 739–69; Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, N.C., 2010); Henoik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York, 2010); and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 396. A review of the literature on U.S. foreign policy in the global South reveals this focus on European empires. See Robert J. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–1949 (Ithaca, 1981); Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, 2000); Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York, 2002); Jason C. Parker, Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962 (New York, 2008); Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, 2008); and Fredrick Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (New York, 2012). On the fourth-largest empire calculation, see Daniel Immerwahr, “The Moon Landing: Twilight of Empire,” Modern American History, 1 (March 2018), 129–133. I thank Daniel Immerwahr for the term Asian Spring. On the social construction of the Cold War, see Masuda Hajimu, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); and Immanuel Wallerstein, “What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretive Essay,” in The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, ed. Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu, and Michael Szonyi (Boston, 2010), 15–24. 4 Catherine Lutz, ed., The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (New York, 2009); Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, 2009); Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), 13–42; Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America's Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill, 2012); David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York, 2015); T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review, 116 (Dec. 2011), 1348–91. 5 Brad Simpson, “The United States and the Curious History of Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History, 36 (Sept. 2012), 679. Historians have disagreed about the United States’ commitment to self-determination. See Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America; Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, 2004); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); and Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, 2012). 6 Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture, 18 (Winter 2006), 125–46, esp. 138; Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, 2014), 4. 7 On Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan for a trusteeship and the plans for partition that immediately followed the end of the war, see Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, I, 104–9. 8 Ibid., 68–100. On competing visions of liberation and how they fractured Korean workers and peasants, see An T‘ae-jŏng, Chŏson Nodong Chohap Chŏn'guk P'yŏngŭihoe (The National Council of Korean Labor Unions) (Seoul, 2002); Cho Sun-gyŏng and Yi Suk-chin, Naengjŏn ch‘eje wa saengsan ŭi chŏngch‘i: Mi kunjŏnggi ŭi nodong chŏngch‘aek kwa nodong undong (The Cold War system and the politics of production: Labor policy and labor management during the U.S. military government in South Korea) (Seoul, 1995); and Jang Sanghwan, “Nongji gaehyeok gwaheong e gwanhan siljeungjeok yeongu” (An empirical study on the process of land reform in the area of South Korea), Gyeongje sahak (Seoul), 8 (1984), 195–272. 9 On workers’ factory self-management movement, see Kim Muyong, “Haebang chikhu nodongja kongjanggwalliwiwŏnhoeŭi chojikkwa sŏnggyŏk” (Organization and characteristics of the Workers’ Factory Self-Management Committee immediately after liberation), Yŏksayŏn'gu (Seoul) (no. 3, 1994), 81–145. An, Chŏson Nodong Chohap Chŏn'guk P'yŏngŭihoe, 56–75, 422–32; Cho and Yi, Naengjŏn ch‘eje wa saengsan ŭi chŏngch‘i, 96–106. 10 Ch'ae Mansik, “Non iyagi” (The rice paddy story), in Han'guk sosŏl munhak taegye 15: T'aep'yong Ch'onha Oe (Korean literary fiction collection, vol. 15: T'aep'yong Ch'ohnha and others) (Seoul, 1996), 402–25. On peasant responses to liberation, see Jang, “Nongji gaehyeok gwaheong e gwanhan siljeungjeok yeongu”; Kim Seongho et al., Nongji gaehyeoksa yeongu (Studies on the history of land reform) (Seoul, 1989); Hong Sŏng-ch‘an p‘yŏn, ed., Nŏngji kaehyok yŏn'gu (Land reform research) (Seoul, 2001); and Lee Yong-ki, “Taking Another Look at Land Reform in South Korea: A Focus on Kinship Networks,” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, 26 (June 2013), 103–28. I have translated into English quotations from Korean-language sources. 11 Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (New York, 2003), 75. Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea (Seattle, 1996), 145. 12 On the communist intelligentsia's response to the workers’ self-management movement, see An, Chosŏn Nodong Chohap Chŏn'guk P'yŏngŏihoe, 422–32; and Cho and Yi, Naengjŏn ch‘eje wa saengsan ŭi chŏngch‘i, 96–106. Hwasook Nam, Building Ships, Building a Nation: Korea's Democratic Unionism under Park Chung Hee (Seattle, 2009), 31. 13 Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, I, 135. 14 “History of the Department of Commerce,” [1947], p. 19, box 13, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command; Cho and Yi, Naengjŏn ch‘eje wa saengsan ŭi chŏngch‘i, 96–106. 15 Stewart Meacham, Labor Adviser to the Commanding General of the United States Armed Forces in Korea, “Korean Labor Report,” Prepared for the Secretary of Labor, Nov. 1947, p. 7, folder 2, box 1 (American Friends Service Committee Archives on Korea, Philadelphia, Pa.). 16 Richard Robinson, “Betrayal of a Nation,” 1960, unpublished manuscript, p. 147 (Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.); “Robert-Robinson Investigation, July 1946,” box 22, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, I, 158–69. 17 “Robert-Robinson Investigation, July 1946”; Richard D. Gilliam, Usamgik Dept. of Justice Assistant Adviser interview by B. Stockton, G-2 History Section Xxvi Corps., Oct. 6, 1948, transcript, box 21, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command. Quotation from Roger Baldwin, “Test of American Democracy,” June 1948, folder 12, box 22, Roger Nash Baldwin Papers (Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.). 18 Official Gazette, Usamgik, Ordinance No. 19, Oct. 30, 1945, box 39, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command. 19 Owen Jones Diary, June 19, 1946, Diary 6/15/1946–3/16/1947 folder, box 4, Owen Jones Papers (Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mo.). 20 “History of the Department of Labor,” [1947], p. 9, box 62, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command. 21 Quotation from A. Wigfall Green, The Epic of Korea (Washington, 1950), 95. “History of the National Price Administration,” [1947], box 14, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command; John C. Caldwell, The Korea Story (Chicago, 1952), 22–23. 22 On land reform in the South, see Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 283–97; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, I; Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea, 144–80; Inhan Kim, “Land Reform in South Korea under the U.S. Military Occupation, 1945–1948,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 18 (Spring 2016), 97–129; and Mark Gayn, Japan Diary (New York, 1948), 401. 23 U.S. Department of State, North Korea: A Case Study in the Techniques of Takeover (Washington, 1961), 56. This document was originally published as a classified report in May 1951. 24 Meacham, “Korean Labor Report,” 11. 25 From Usafik, Korea from Hodge thru Cincafpac, Tokyo, Japan, Aug. 19, 1946, entry 463, box 249, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Rg 165 (National Archives). 26 Quotation from George M. McCune, “Korea: The First Year of Liberation,” Pacific Affairs, 20 (March 1947), 16. Robinson, “Betrayal of a Nation,” 82. 27 From Comgenusafik Seoul Korea sgd Hodge to War Dept (Pass to State), June 14, 1947, entry 463, box 250, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs. 28 “History of the Department of Labor,” 8. 29 On the Chonp'yong, see Meacham, “Korean Labor Report”; and Nam, Building Ships, Building a Nation, 31. 30 Seoul Times, Sept. 24, Sept. 28, 1946. 31 On Archer Lerch's announcement and the spread of the strikes, see the report of the American Committee to Aid Korean Trade Union's Report, entry 463, box 250, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs; and Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, I, 352–56. 32 Meacham, “Korean Labor Report,” 34. 33 Statement by Lt. Gen. John Hodge, Oct. 14, 1946, box 62, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command; “A Korean Worker Writes to His American Friend,” as part of the report of the American Committee to Aid Korean Trade Union's Report, entry 463, box 250, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs; Meacham, “Korean Labor Report,” 34. 34 “Why We Fail in Korea,” Dec. 1947, folder 12, box 22, Baldwin Papers. 35 On the factors leading to the Taegu uprisings, see Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, I, 356–62; Gi-Wook Shin, “The Historical Making of Collective Action: Korean Peasant Uprisings of 1946,” American Journal of Sociology, 99 (no. 6, 1994), 1596–1624; and “History of the Department of Police,” [1947], p. 34, box 22, Records of General Headquarters, Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, and United Nations Command. 36 Quoted from Roger Baldwin, “Why Democracy Fails in Korea,” New Leader, Jan. 24, 1948. Millett, War for Korea, 110–12. 37 William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Policy, 1947–1955 (Madison, 1984); Michael Schaller, “Securing the Great Crescent: Occupied Japan and the Origins of Containment in Southeast Asia,” Journal of American History, 69 (Sept. 1982), 392–414; Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. II, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton, 1990), 50, 59. 38 Jones Diary, July 28, July 23, 1947, Diary 7/20/1947–4/7/1948 folder, box 4, Jones Papers. 39 General [John] Hodge to Secretary of State, Nov. 21, 1947, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7125, 895.01, General Records of the Department of State, Rg 59 (National Archives); Simpson, “United States and the Curious History of Self-Determination,” 684, 685. 40 On the decision to hold elections and the Soviet reaction, see United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 1 (Lake Success, 1948), 27; John Price, “The ‘Cat's Paw’: Canada and the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea,” Canadian Historical Review, 85 (June 2004), 297–324. 41 United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 1, 27; Price, “‘Cat's Paw.’” 42 “Interview with Lieutenant Bertsch,” [1947], folder 8, box 18, Baldwin Papers; McCune, “Korea,” 7, 17. 43 United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 1, 13, 18; Voice of Korea, March 20, 1948. 44 United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 1, 34. 45 United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 3 (Lake Success, 1948), 24, 32. 46 Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, II, 75–76. 47 Hodge to Brig. Gen. William Dean, March 24, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7391, General Records of the Department of State; United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 2 (Lake Success, 1948), 70; “Report on United States Military Government's Activities in Connection with the Korean Election of May 10, 1948,” Joseph Jacobs to Secretary of State, July 22, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7390, 895.00/7–2248, General Records of the Department of State. 48 According to Seoul newspapers, 70% of all prisoners were being held for violations of strike laws. See Roger Baldwin, “Chaos in Korea,” [1947 or 1948], 3, folder 14, box 22, Baldwin Papers; Park Chan-Pyo, “The American Military Government and the Framework for Democracy in South Korea,” in Korea under the American Military Government, 1945–1948, ed. Bonnie B. C. Oh (Westport, 2002), 123–49; and Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel Hill, 2007). On reforms and the number of prisoners pardoned, see “Report on United States Military Government's Activities in Connection with the Korean Election of May 10, 1948.” 49 Secretary of the Army Royall to Secretary of State, June 23, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948 (6 vols., Washington, 1969–1972), VI, 1225–26; Press conference of General Hodge (off the record), May 7, 1948, box 1, Joseph Jacob Papers (Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford, Calif.). 50 Kim Bong-hyeon and Kim Min-ju, Cheju-do imnindŭl ŭi 4.3 mujang t'ujaeng sa-Charoyo-jip (The history of the April 3 armed struggle of the Jeju people) (Osaka, 1963), 84–85. Quoted in National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident, Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4·3 Incident Investigation Report (Jeju, 2014). 51 Jeju 4·3 Incident Investigation Report, 263; “Report of Activities at Cheju Do Island,” April 29, 1948, entry 11071, box 68, Records of U.S. Army Operational, Tactical, and Support Organizations (World War II and Thereafter), Rg 338 (National Archives); John Merrill, “The Cheju-do Rebellion,” Journal of Korean Studies, 2 (1980), 139–97; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, II, 250–259; Millett, War for Korea, 142–48. 52 Political Adviser in Korea Jacobs to Secretary of State, April 9, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, VI, 1177–78; Kim Shin, Choguk ŭi hanŭl ŭl nalda: Paekpŏm ŭi adŭl Kim Sin hoegorok (Flying in the sky of my homeland: The memoirs of Kim Shin, the son of Baekbeom) (Paju, 2013), 113. 53 Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960 (New Brunswick, 2002), 45; Political Adviser in Korea Jacobs to Secretary of State, May 3, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, VI, 1185, 1188. 54 “United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea: Report of the Sub-Committee on Methods of Observation of Elections,” March 19, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–49, box 7390, General Records of the Department of State; “Observation of Election in South Korea of Korean Representatives Which Shall Constitute a National Assembly and Establish a Government of Korea under Resolutions Adopted by Un General Assembly on 14 November 1947 and Participation of United States Army Forces in Korea Therein, 14 November to 26 August 1948,” 1948, ibid.; “South Korea Turns Out 85% Vote despite Terrorism That Kills 38,” New York Times, May 11, 1948, pp. 1, 13. 55 “Letter from Ward to Brown,” May 19, 1948, box 3, Rothwell H. Brown Papers (U.s. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.). 56 “Korea Vote ‘Noted’ by U. N. Commission,” New York Times, June 27, 1948, p. 12; George M. McCune, “The Korean Situation,” Far Eastern Survey, 17 (Sept. 1948), 199. United Nations, First Part of the Report on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, Volume 1, 46–47. 57 “Political Summary for June 1948,” entry Cdf 1945–49, box 7390, 895.00/7–1248, General Records of the Department of State; Arthur Bunce to Secretary of State, Aug. 3, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7395, 895.011/8–348, ibid. 58 Yu Chino, Na ŭi Insaenggwan: Chŏlmum I kitch'ilttae (My view on life: The days when youth vigorously flaps its wings) (Seoul, 1984), 219; Chong Pyongjun, Unam Yi Sŭng-man Yŏn‘gu (Research on Unam Syngman Rhee) (Seoul, 2005), 652–67. 59 Sŏ Hŭigyŏng, Taehanmin'guk Hŏnbŏpŭi T'ansaeng (The birth of the constitution of South Korea) (P'aju, 2012). 60 On the drafting and debating of the constitution, see ibid. On the vote to defeat Rhee's resolution, see ibid., 294–95. 61 So, Taehanmin'guk Hŏnbopŭi T'ansaeng, 295; Chong, Unam Yi Sŭng-man Yŏn‘gu, 693; Jacobs to Secretary of State, Aug. 16, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7390, 895.00/8–1648, General Records of the Department of State. 62 [S. H.] Jackson to Department of External Affairs, June 26, 1948 in Australia and the Postwar World: Beyond the Region Documents, 1948–49, ed. Pamela Andre (Canberra, 2001); Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs Butterworth to Under Secretary of State Lovett, July 20, 1948, memo, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, VI, 1248. 63 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999), 353–55; Charles Pergler to Military Governor, July 16, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7395, 895.011/7–2648, General Records of the Department of State. 64 Bunce to Secretary of State, Aug. 3, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–1949, box 7395, 895.011/8–1648, General Records of the Department of State. 65 Jacobs to Secretary of State, Aug. 16, 1948, entry Cdf 1945–49, box 7390, 895.00/8–1648, ibid. 66 Chŏng, Unam Yi Sŭng-man Yŏn‘gu, 181. 67 Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (New York, 2014); Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004), 16. 68 Ernst Fraenkel, “Evacuation from Seoul,” June 30, 1950, Ar 4348, folder 11, box 1, Marta Fraenkel Collection (Leo Baeck Institute, New York, N.Y.). © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. 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TI - Independence without Liberation: Democratization as Decolonization Management in U.S.-Occupied Korea, 1945–1948
JF - The Journal of American History
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