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.

Ms. Shaw points out in the final chapter that a number of American historians did not contest the irrefutable facts that Roosevelt circumvented the treaty laws of the United States Constitution by his arrangement with the Japanese. She also points out that they covered for him. In addition she rather clearly traces the written cover-up in western sources of the Korean view point on what happened to her own independence- that has prevailed for a century.

Surely there are honest Japanese (and western) scholars who will accede to the idea that there was a Korean point of view.

One further matter, no one disputes that Elihu Root was not the Secretary of State by November of 1905. Any effort to discredit such a basic administrative fact raises many questions about what the critic hopes to achieve.

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.

The objective portrayal of US-ROK culture needs to be encouraged, as it should have been back then.

The US and Korean people are stamped from the same forge, shared blood in battle, and dream the same future together.

As a former general in Korea once said,
Kachi Kapshida!

http://72.14.235.104/search?q=.....amp;cd=133

Not sure if that will link it to the site or not…but it was on DreamWhiz News (April 29, 2007)and went to a great deal of effort to translate some of the posts.

I always respond in part by pointing out I am not “objective” - that I have a (strong) opinion on the topic - but I try to give justification for it along with source material on how my opinion came to be formed.

The question is whether the opinion is supported enough to justify itself - or - justify its level.

Through the quotes we’ve been presented, as well as tid bits from her elsewhere, we have a perfect right to begin forming our own opinions about hers.

Further reading and knowledge could alter our opinion, but there is nothing wrong with having (a negative) one with what is known so far…

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.

Ah, Sperwer, you’re not a real academic. Your just a neo-fascist trying to prevent the real academic from entering her accredited thoughts into the realm of ideas.

Irony noted, but in fact I have had a heavy dose of graduate academic training as an historian, albeit not in Korean studies, including at least what used to be required courses in historical research methodology and exposition.