Mr. Rhee Goes to Washington

Chapter 3 examines how Rhee and the Korean independence movement utilized this constituency to place pressure on American policymakers during the fight over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty and during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922. The chapter pays special attention to the common cause the Korean activists and their American supporters made with the so-called Irreconcilables in the US Senate. The Korean independence movement provided these senators with an “internationalist” justification for opposing the treaty and thus an answer to the charge that they were advocating isolationism. The Koreans in return received an airing of their views in the US Senate and even a vote on a Korean reservation to the Versailles Treaty. While scholars have examined the importance of the issue of the Shantung Peninsula to the case against the Versailles Treaty in the Senate, few have realized that it was the brutal Japanese suppression of the March First Movement that injected such passion into the debate over the Shantung. While Korean activists’ passionate invocations of the American mission during both the fight over the Versailles Treaty and the Washington Naval Conference did not result in any official policy changes toward Korea, they significantly shifted American perceptions of the Japanese colonization of Korea and brought much of informed American public opinion on the situation into sympathy with the Koreans.