Word: rhees
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite his scholastic success, Rhee did not enter the government immediately. By this time (1895), Korea, though still independent, was under heavy pressure from both the Russian and Japanese empires. Shrewdly concluding that a Western education and knowledge of English would be useful to a future Korean official, Rhee became a student at Pai Chai College, a Methodist mission school in Seoul. At Pai Chai he was exposed not only to English but to Christianity and Western political thought...
Privy Council & Prison. All three influences took hold. Rhee joined the Independence Club, a nationalist organization which demanded reform of the Korean monarchy and a constitutional government. He also helped found Korea's first daily newspaper, which fought bitterly against the growth of Japanese influence in Korea. Hoping to draw the fangs of the Independence Club, the bedeviled Korean Emperor Kojong appointed Rhee to the Privy Council, clapped 17 more of the club's leaders into prison. (Rhee later got them released.) In 1897 Rhee overstepped the bounds permitted a Privy Councilor by leading a student demonstration against...
...prison Rhee got the treatment considered fitting for top-rank political offenders. He was subjected to daily torture -finger mashing, beating with three-cornered rods, burning of oil paper around the arms. He wore a 20-lb. weight around his neck, was kept handcuffed and locked in stocks...
...imprisonment and that improved his lot considerably. The torture stopped. He was transferred to another prison, found that he could smuggle out editorials for his newspaper. In the long prison years he also wrote The Spirit of Independence, a book which seized the imagination of Korean patriots, helped establish Rhee as spiritual leader of the nationalist movement. By this time Rhee had become a Methodist-like China's Chiang Kaishek...
Harvard & Hunting Dogs. In 1904, after Rhee had been behind bars for seven years, the Russo-Japanese War began and in the confusion which gripped Korea a nationalist group temporarily seized control of the Korean government. Rhee was released from prison, headed for the U.S. as a special envoy of the new government. He tried to persuade President Theodore Roosevelt that Korea should not be handed over to Japan in the Russo-Japanese peace conference which Roosevelt had arranged. Roosevelt, Rhee remembers, "received me cordially" at Oyster Bay; but Rhee's request to attend the peace conference was refused...