U.S. helped Japan annex Korea: scholar

Although James and Shak make good points, as does Lirelou, I’m joining the latter on the fence until I’ve read this. But in the meantime, the needle on my BS meter is already quivering considering that this book wasn’t issued by a US academic (or even trade) publisher.

gbnhj:

Naomi Coehn’s biography is quite good, and is probably the only current account (there’s an older one from the teens or 20’s):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ.....mp;s=books

I think Sperwer can save us all W14,000 by posting a book review when he’s finished.

I may. In the meantime, here are a couple more howlers that further demonstrate the quality of Ms. Shaw’s historical judgment:

In September 1905, shortly after the conclusion of the Portsmouth Peace Conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War, President Roosevelt’s daughter Alice traveled to Seoul, after having stayed in Japan in August. Her visit is described in the Korea Review, whose editor Homer Hulbert is a particular favorite of Shaw’s because of his championing the cause of Korea, in a passage that Shaw quotes at length:

Miss Alice Roosevelt and party arrived at Chemulpo on Speptemmber 19th on the battleship Ohio. They came direct to Seoul on a special train over the Seoul-Chemulpo railway, engine and cars being decorated with American, Japanese and Korean flags. Many Korean officials, army officers and the Imperial Guard, military band, foreign diplomats and prominent civilians greeted the visitors on their arrival at the station, while all the streets were thronged with interested spectators. A royal yellow chair was placed at the disposal of Miss Roosevelt, while many state chars were provided for members of the party. Most of the houses in the city had been decorated with Korean and American flags, some of the latter lacking an occasional stripe or showing somewhat of a variety of color, but all bearing evidence of a uniform desire to honors the nation’s guest. On the 20th, Miss Roosevelt was received in audience by the Emperor, to whom also the other members of the party were presented, after which there were introductions to various Korean officials. On the 21st a garden party was given by the American Minister, where all American subjects and many others met Miss Roosevelt and the ladies and gentlemen of her party. On the 22nd, Miss Roosevelt met the native Christian women at Sang Dong church and was presented to a large number of the missionary body on the spacious lawn at Dr. W.B. Scranton’s. At the time, a leather bound Korean New Testament and hymn book were presented to Miss Roosevelt by Dr. H.G. Underwood, making the short presentation speech and Miss Roosevelt and Minister Morgan replying. A dinner at the German Legation, a horseback ride to Puk-han, a visit to the exercises of a Japanese girls’ school and many other engagements occupied the time of the party until the 29th, when a special train carried them to Pusan, the condition of the road after the flood, necessitating a stopover at Taegu, where arrangements had been made for their care at the missionary residences.

I have quoted this passage in its entirety, as it appears in Shaw’s book, in order to enable readers to appreciate the full effect of Shaw’s characterization of it, i.e.,

Alice Roosevelt’s very thorough biographer also failed to mention the trip to Seoul and it would appear for all practical purposes that this event was expunged from the record [sic].

…

I would suggest that Alice’s little known visit to Seoul kicked off what can only be called the closest event in American history that resembled the infamous and shameful Massacre of Glencoe that took place in the 17th Century in the highlands of Scotland.

I guess Ms. Shaw must be a Macdonald.

In the interests of fairness, I also note that Shaw later tries to climb down from this bit of preposterous hyperbole but, figuratively-speaking, doesn’t quite get her feet on terra firma:

Although the Koreans would not be directly murdered in their beds by their foreign guests they had so generously entertained, as were the Clan MacDonalds [sic] on that cold February night in Scotland so long ago, it can be clearly stated [!?!] that Miss Roosevelt carried the head of the Korean Emperor home in a basket, figuratively speaking.[!!??!!]

I agree with Neff that there is material in the book that is worth looking at, but it is a trial to sift through the dross of Shaw’s awful prose, artless innuendo the portentousness of which is inversely proportional to the slenderness and often the sheer impertinence of the matronly gossip she adduces as evidence therefor and her pervasive and usually misplaced moralism.

Here’s another howler:

Shaw reprints a substantial portion of a letter from one Lawrence Abbot, the son of the editor of Outlook and a member of its editorial staff to George Kennan, a writer for the journal (NOT the much younger diplomat). Abbot’s letter rehearses all the issues raised by the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, in particular the question whether Japan will create a modern Oriental Empire to replace China’s and act as the gateway through which the currents of modern civilization will flow into China and thus unleash social forces that will profoundly affect the entire world. He then goes on to to say to Kennan:

I hope you keep copies of your letters because your letter of June 30, in the list of articles which you suggest, gives exactly an epitome of what we shall want you to do for the Outlook during the fall and winter. Such topics as “The Yellow Peril”; “Japanese Newspapers”…”The Defects and Merits of the Japanese Character in General”; “The Influence of Good and Evil of Japan upon China and Korea”; “Japanese Municipal Government” all these constitute the very type of subject upon which we want first-hand information.

Shaw mentions that this letter is cited in an American academic monograph on US foreign policy as an example of TR’s growing anxiety about Japanese hegemony in Asia – (I guess we have to take her word for that, though it’s hardly clear how a letter by a young editor of a journal of opinion can be construed as representing the thinking of the President.)

But Shaw doesn’t find this convincing:

Even by stretching every brain cell of the imagination, one can hardly call the above letter an example of anxiety over Japanese plans for Asia.

I think it will come as news to many that the expression “Yellow Peril” is not an expression of alarm; but let Shaw finish:

Mr. Kennan would indeed deliver on his first assignment in October, but it would be along the theme of Korea’s danger to the civilized world, much like a cancer virus is a danger to the human body. As Hulbert would later write, there was nothing like it in all of literature; well, not until Nazi literature flooded Germany demoting Jews to a subhuman category.

This passage reeks even before it slides into the abyss of assimilating early 20th century Korea into the Jewish holocaust. First of all, it’s curious indeed that an article so allegedly demeaning of Korea is NOT quoted, so that the reader is invited to elide Abbot’s description of Japan as the “Yellow Peril” with Korea. Moreover, Shaw manages thus surreptitiously to attribute this view to TR himself.

Please excuse these periodic acts of bulimia; it’s the only way I can keep reading and annotating this dreck.

Many of the small events that Mrs. Shaw mentions in some detail are usually nothing more than footnotes in other books and it is refreshing to be able to read more than a footnote. Of course, as with any subject, you can’t rely on just one book to give you the complete story – you have to read many books and then form your own opinion. I think Mrs. Shaw has done that. She has given us her side of the story…provided citations for her data and her interpretation, and now it is up to us to dig deeper and form our own opinions.

I disagree. Mrs. Shaw doesn’t have a side of this story; she has no dog in the hunt. Her role – particularly as someone not personally involved in the events she describes and having the added advantages of both physical and especially temporal distance therefrom – is to sift through the evidence and present as “objective” an account as she can, demonstrating how it is supported by the evidence (and noting any thing her thesis can’t account for or that contradicts her theory). The purpose of a monograph such as this purports to be is to save everyone else the trouble of having to track down and wade through hard-to-find and mind-numbingly boring primary materials of the sort involved. That’s precisely what she and her publishers claim she is up to when they blurbed her book with the assetion that it is a work of objective scholarship (as opposed to, say, self-justifying recollections ideological polemic, etc.) That’s unfortunately also almost exactly what her book isn’t. Instead it’s a not very cogently argued diatribe that relies heavily on high moral dudgeon, preposterous claims of the unconstitutionality of American conduct (I wonder what her deceased husband – a noted legal scholar would have made of that particularly fatuous and unsupported element of her argument)and conspiratorial innuendo of endless conspiracies based on the fact that various people knew one another and in some cases went to the same prep school or dined together with John Hay and/or Henry Adams; I’ve heard more inspired gossip at a DAR meeting I once attended. Which, finally, is about of the same gravity as many of the small incidents that Neff mentions she relates, most of which – like a long account, quoting contemporary correspondence regarding which, no less, she gives of a motor car trip through Scotland by Andrew Carnegie – is just tediously irrelevant to the subject at hand, besides simply being intrinsically trivial.

Sperwer,

I take it you found no smoking guns? I’m curious to know which sources she used heavily.

Sonagi:

Sorry for the delayed response.

Nope, no smoking guns; Shaw’s firing powderless blanks.

Shaw finally gets around to stating her thesis clearly and concisely 278 pages into the 295 page miasma:

I would assert that under these clearly defined principles [sic - a typically meandering reference to the exceedingly high level abstraction that one should honor one's treaty obligations, and even this supported by a gossipy anecdote] the burden of guilt rests upom President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root [sic], for entering into a fraudulent [sic] arrangement with the Japanese Government to look the other way while ill-conceived, illegal and hastily-constructed statements were prepared under the guise of a legal protocol or treaty, to effect a military and violent takeover of a sovereign state to whom the Senate had pledged its good faith and perpetual friendship in 1882.

The violent nature under which this piece of paper was extracted was witnessed by the duly appointed ambassador of President Roosevelt to Seoul, who privately lambasted the Emperor of Korea for refusing to sign and yield to the sword pf Japan. These letters have already appeared in an earlier chapter.

Every known tenet of international law was flagrantly violated by the Japanese in attempting to force the Koreans to sign a document which would end their national existence, with the intention of controlling the people of Korea and their national wealth. Of course, various bodies have recognized this fact.

Putting aside her choice of Root rather than Secretary of War Taft, the actual co-author of the Taft-Katsura Memorandum – (Root, who was Secretary of War before Taft, only took office as SOS two days before the Taft-Katsura Memorandum was signed and two months before conclusion of the Treaty of Portsmouth, at which he played no role; the principal American participant was Herbert H. D. Peirce, third under secretary of state, and Rear Admiral William Mead, Commandant of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, who hosted the delegates outside the formal negotiations, which the Russians and Japanese insisted they handle directly between themselves with no third-party participation) – there’s really nothing new about her principal thesis, as here stated, which is perhaps why she waited to articulate it clearly until the end.

Nor is there anything particularly novel about her main subsidiary points.

For example, she repeatedly asserts that Roosevelt’s conduct was unconstitutional; (she also accuses him in passing, without the slightest regard for what might constitute colorable evidence, let alone the statutory definitions of the crimes she adduces, of impeachable perjury and general criminality for failing to regroup the Rough Riders and charge to Kojong’s defense). But this supposed constitutional issue is one that was bruited about at the time and which she appears to have derived from the early 20th century equivalent of “talking heads”, notably one Stephen Bonsal of The New York Times, whom Shaw (without support) describes as “one of America’s most erudite and respected journalists (Bonsal later was President Wilson’s private translator at Versailles; his qualifications as a constitutional law commentator are unspecified). Shaw makes a lot of additional allegations about US legal and constitutional principles, and Roosevelt’s purportedly impeachable violation of them, unsupported by any authority except her own nickel.

Similarly, her second main subsidiary allegation is that the driving motive for all the treachery she imagines – summarized by the title of her penultimate chapter: “Was It all About the Money?” – was also bandied about more or less contemporaneously. In place of any cogent argument to such effect, though, Shaw herself simply repeats the innuendo of Thomas Millard, a WAPO journalist, who published a series of articles, in 1908, about Japan’s fiscal problems resulting from her industrialization, militarization and war-making in China and against Russia. The same ideas were picked up and given an academic sheen in 1944 by Fred Harvey Harrington in “God, Mammon and the Japanese”, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Shaw states it this way:

It was not Emperor Kojong who bothered the world, dear readers, as George Keenan and Lyman Abbot and Herbert Croly and Hayashi would have had us believe. It was his gold; and his timber forests; and his fields and his coastal waters teeming with fish. That’s what bothered the world. That’s what cost Korea her loss of independence in 1905.

Despite this assertion and the “when did you last beat your wife’” rhetorical strategy of the chapter title, though, we’re left guessing “No” in answer to the question whether it was all about the money because Shaw never makes the case. She simply flings around a bunch of individually inconsequential facts, hoping they will all land on the bullseye or that the reader, distracted by her annoying predilection for impertinent gossip and the knowing nods and winks that litter her text, won’t notice that they are missing the board altogether.

I realize that the last itself is less than an detailed exposition of the deficiency of which it complains, but that would require an article of its own, the starting point of which would be a coherent and cogent specification of Shaw’s theory, followed by a careful sifting of the evidence for it and an analysis of the various allegations that constitute it.

In the meantime, befitting perhaps Shaw’s proud heritage, my overall verdict is the famous Scot’s one: not proven.

Of course there is a “Korean point of view”. Assuming there is actual (non-virtual) intelligent life there, there may also be a Narnian one – which undoubtedly would please the self-absorbed Korean mentality and its Korea, the belly-button of the world perspective. The question in any case is whether it is tenable. In this respect, the reliance of those Koreans (such as the mandarins of SNU responsible for publishing Shaw’s dribblings) is misplaced.

So is Aslan’s on the single (not many) American academic (not historian)cited by Shaw as not “contest[ing] the irrefutable facts that Roosevelt circumvented the treaty laws of the United States Constitution by his arrangement with the Japanese.” The individual in question, Robert Tarbell Oliver (b, 1904), was a paid member of Syngman Rhee’s staff, and a propagandist for Rhee’s efforts on behalf of Korean independence under Rhee. He later wrote a memoir/biography of Rhee, became a professor of speech and rhetoric at Penn State, and continued riding his Korean hobby horse until his dotage, when he stitched together a combination first-person and third-hand history of modern Korea based on his own experiences and a lot of intervening secondary sources.

There are thus no established irrefutable “facts” that Roosevelt et al “circumvented” the “treaty laws of the United States Constitution” [sic]. There are a bunch of facts upon the basis of which Shaw and others (for the most part, partisans, not qualified dispassionate historians) have tried to pitch that interpretation – for the most part, as in Shaw’s case, miserably unsuccessfully.

Finally, the case of Root. No one has questioned the fact that he was SOS in November ‘05; that’s an issue of your own imagining. I merely noted the oddity of Shaw’s singling him out as a culprit, when Taft was the principal executor of the policy of which she complains. In fact, by her own reckoning, the game was over even before Root became a member of Roosevelt’s administration; the proverbial horse was long gone, and all Root did was close the door. So, once again, Shaw’s lack of historical judgment makes itself apparent. But hey, if you want to indulge in a chest-thumping blame-fest, and a balanced assessment of the facts be damned, knock yourself out.

So, goodbye “aslan”; hello kitty.