Introduction

The interplay between global, transnational, and local elements of anticolonial struggles intensified amid the tumultuous political climate during and immediately after World War I.¹

In his famous 14-point speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, outlining a post-World War I peace settlement, American President Woodrow Wilson stressed that the world needed to “be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions,” and “be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world” (Wilson 1918). Here and elsewhere, Wilson suggested the war’s resolution would fundamentally realign governance practices to prioritize the consent of the governed, quickly becoming the most prominent public figure to connect war discussions to concepts like the right of nations to self-determination. After the war ended, news of the 1919 Paris conference to negotiate specific settlement terms resonated well beyond its immediate participants, and Woodrow Wilson’s words in particular helped to galvanize anti-imperial struggles around the world. Historian Erez Manela has described 1919 as a global “Wilsonian moment,” saying:

The story of the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world is one about the role of power, both real and perceived, in the dissemination, adoption, and operationalization—the conversion into purposeful political action— of the new norms of international legitimacy and practice that Wilson championed. (2007)²

The March First Movement began in Korea nine years after the peninsula was formally colonized by Japan in 1910. After petitions to consider Korean independence as part of the Paris negotiations proved unsuccessful, movement organizers gathered in Seoul on March 1, 1919, read a prepared “declaration of independence,” and launched what would quickly become widespread pro-independence demonstrations throughout the Korean Peninsula and beyond. Protest activity continued for months before violent suppression by Japanese colonial authorities ultimately brought it to an end. Even by its own highly conservative estimates, the Government-General of Korea conceded that by the movement’s end, more than a million Koreans had participated in a total of at least 3,200 individual demonstrations, with official estimates documenting 533 Koreans dead, 1,409 injured, and 12,522 arrested between March and December 1919 (Chōsen sōjō jiken 1969, 438; Pak 2019, 399–408).³ In a far more scathing contemporaneous appraisal, Korean scholar Pak Yŭ-sik asserted that within the first three months of the movement, more than two million participants took part in demonstrations, resulting in a total of 7,509 deaths, 15,961 injuries and more than 47,000 arrests just among the demonstrators alone (Pak 1920, 2:26–43).

At every stage of this movement, from petitioning world leaders in Paris and drafting pro-independence writings to protesting in the streets, Koreans calling for independence used Wilsonian political concepts to link their specific critiques of Japanese colonization to pressing global concerns. Historians such as Manela have focused on how anti-imperial movements around the world used this rhetoric to convey the urgency of their cause to the international community. However, I assert that the importance of Wilsonian rhetoric was not limited to its utility in conveying Korea-specific concerns to the outside world. With that in mind, I have highlighted documents here that shed light on how this rhetoric shaped internal debates on the Korean Peninsula. Taken together, I argue that these texts demonstrate that during the 1919 March First Movement, interpreting Wilson’s words became an additional mode by which the stakes of Korean independence could be defined, articulated, and contested within Korea, as well as beyond its borders.

Pedagogical Context

I am a historian of both Korea and Japan, with a primary research focus on the Korean Peninsula under Japanese rule. At my small liberal arts college, I teach a general education course on modern imperialism and colonialism that I first designed to replace an “Introduction to Western Civilization” undergraduate requirement. The discontinued class influenced my own subsequent course design by heightening my commitment to unsettling the idea that a history of “Western civilization” could be told as a singular, cohesive narrative. My pedagogical goals throughout the semester, in very broad strokes, are two-fold, and will be familiar to historians of colonialism and empire and beyond. First, I highlight non-dominant voices and less common perspectives as I familiarize students with some of the critical major events in modern history. Second, I demonstrate the ways that current global norms, such the distribution of wealth and power, are often naturalized, even when they have colonial antecedents and result from contentious and hard-fought struggles that may continue into the present day. I look for examples of how the Japanese Empire might be “read” through the lens of everyday primary sources,⁴ and in keeping with the practices of historians of other regions, I stress critical reading of diverse sources, from primary historical documents to secondary scholarship to imaginative fiction, that help capture local and indigenous perspectives.⁵ I am aware, too, that the normative university classroom model itself is rooted in what Nathalia E. Jaramillo and Jillian Ford call “colonialist consciousness,” and as they note:

Colonial pedagogies seek to control bodies and bodies of knowledge. Disrupting these pedagogies of control requires both an exposure of their mechanics and a rewriting of the aims, forms, functions, and locations of relational meaning-making, which offer emancipatory alternatives. (Ford and Jaramillo 2023, 1–4)

Within this course, as we collectively study knowledge production, modes of authority, and challenges to hegemonic narratives in the historical past, I also ask students to think critically about these same ideas in relation to our shared present.

Amid these larger goals, I teach students to assess the role of rhetoric in the establishment, maintenance, and disruption of colonial hegemony. To do this, I highlight the diverse and competing rhetorical strategies used by colonizers and members of colonized populations. We study the language colonizers used to justify their presence, to naturalize hierarchies that supported their rule, and to solidify political control by casting colonized peoples as fundamentally incapable of self-governance. While avoiding the characterization of oppression and resistance as a simplistic binary, we also study how moments of colonial resistance commonly targeted the rhetorical strategies of imperialism directly by critiquing colonizers’ claims to cultural, political, and moral superiority; furthering narratives that de-naturalized or destabilized colonial rule; and subverting colonial tropes to argue that achieving self-rule was not only possible, but imperative.⁶

Domestic Dialogue in a Wilsonian Idiom

I have selected documents showcasing March First Movement-related voices from within Korea itself, be they from movement organizers and participants or colonial authorities, rather than focusing on areas other scholars have studied, such as overseas independence activities,⁷ Korean attempts to directly sway peace negotiations,⁸ or Japanese attempts to bolster support for colonial rule beyond the Korean Peninsula.⁹ Reading these documents together allows students to better understand the daily political tensions of life on the Korean Peninsula under Japanese rule, while also grasping how Wilsonian rhetoric informed interactions not only in the international arena, but within colonial Korea as well. Importantly, these documents show how this rhetoric did not introduce entirely new ideas to the Korean Peninsula; instead, they demonstrate that it was used to justify and amplify existing, on-going, site-specific debates surrounding self-rule.

Focused Readings

We begin by using Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Point Speech as a thought experiment, with students working to imagine what aspects might especially resonate with them if they were living under colonial rule in 1919. As we move into studying the March First Movement itself, I note that although those involved in organizing both the domestic and international components of the March First Movement diverged along religious, occupational, and political lines, both our Korean and Japanese sources were produced by elite, educated men, and thus only showcase select voices. Together we read the Declaration of Independence that was read publicly in Seoul on March 1, 1919, famously sparking the movement’s protracted demonstrations and protests against Japanese occupation of Korea. This declaration asserts that Koreans “claim independence in the interest of the eternal and free development of our people and in accordance with the great movement for world reform based upon the awakening conscience of mankind.” The Declaration of Independence counters Japanese claims that the take-over and governance of the Korean Peninsula has been a civilizing project for a people unable to modernize on their own. Instead, the declaration asserts that it is Japan, not Korea, that is behind the times, as “Japan’s scholars and officials, indulging in a conqueror’s exuberance, have denigrated the accomplishments of our ancestors and treated our civilized people like barbarians,” meaning that Koreans “must remedy the unnatural and unjust conditions brought about by the leaders of Japan, who are chained to old ideas and old forces and victimized by their obsession with glory.” The declaration aligns Korean self-rule, rather than Japanese colonization, with modernity, civilization, and progress, and urges that Korea’s independence be seen as a question of global, rather than local, security. The declaration describes Korean independence as not only benefiting Koreans, but “it will also guide Japan to leave its evil path…helping the cause of world peace and happiness for mankind, which depends greatly on peace in the East.” Thus, this document deploys Wilsonian rhetoric as a tool with which the central claims justifying Japanese colonization—that it was modernizing, civilizing, and welcomed by Koreans—could be dismantled, and the cause for Korean independence elevated into a global issue, as movement participants imagined that they “set forth on the changing tide of the world” (“Son Pyŏnghŭi” 1997, 336–39).¹⁰

The 1941 English-language book, Song of Ariran: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel, provides a critical counterpoint to March First Movement leaders’ optimistic views of Wilsonian ideology. In this work, journalist Helen Foster Snow, writing under the pen name Nym Wales, compiles first-person interviews with Kim San (Chang Chi-rak), a Korean independence activist who at the time was working closely with Chinese communists. In the book, Kim tells Wales that on the morning of March 1, 1919, one of his teachers encouraged the students in his middle school class to join the pending protests, telling them “every newspaper in the world will carry the story of our great mass demonstrations,” and that “when they hear of this in Versailles, they will not forget Korea” (1941, 20). For this teacher, Korea’s fight for independence was tied to Wilson’s words in particular. He reminds the students they “have all been told many times about President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.” Since the armistice was “granted only on the condition that the Fourteen Points be realized,” the teacher assures them Wilson “will defend Korea at the Peace Conference if we strengthen his hand by our peaceful demonstrations.” The teacher goes on to explain:

The Fifth Point says clearly that, on questions of colonial sovereignty, the interests of the colonial population shall have equal weight with those of the governments concerned… That means he will insist that the will of the people be respected. Let us make that will heard from heaven to earth! (21)

Wilson’s words, and the commitments they implied, were part of what made participating in the March First Movement exhilarating for Kim San at first and then devastating once the outcome of the peace negotiations became clear. By joining demonstrations and helping to produce protest writings, Kim says:

I believed that I was an important part of a great world movement and that the millennium had come. The shock of the betrayal from Versailles that came a few weeks later was so great that I felt as though the heart had been torn out of me. What pathetic, naïve creatures we Koreans were then, believing in words! (22)

After fleeing into exile following his involvement in protest activity, Kim tells Wales that “I hated Korea when I ran away that autumn day in 1919, vowing never to return until the weeping was changed to fighting slogans.” In assessing the March First Movement, Kim says:

Korea…wanted peace, and peace she got—after the “peaceful demonstrations” had been dispersed in helpless blood. She was a foolish old woman naively mouthing [a] feminine please to the great powers for “international justice” and a promise of “self-determination.” We were betrayed by her foolishness. I resented the accident of birth that made me the child of such shameful helplessness. (4)

In Kim’s highly gendered formulation, Wilson’s concepts did not just go unrealized. Instead, they actively undermined the March First Movement’s goals and hastened its failure by providing false hope that independence was achievable through ideology rather than through militant action. For Kim, it was overreliance on Wilsonian ideals that fueled “shameful helplessness,” exposed Koreans to bloody reprisals and ultimately ended in failure.

A far different take on this rhetoric’s applicability for Korea can be found in the Seoul Press, the only English-language newspaper published in colonial Korea and a de facto mouthpiece for the Government-General of Korea (Chosŏn Ilbo 2010). Historian Mark Caprio tells us that this paper was launched by colonial authorities “specifically to provide Seoul’s foreign residents with the ‘accurate’ information they needed to support Japan’s cause,” publishing articles that supported and justified Japanese colonial rule until its closure in 1937 (2011, 8–10). A May 1919 English-language pamphlet entitled “The Korean ‘Independence’ Agitation,”made up of a collection of reprinted Seoul Press articles, illustrates the strategies colonial authorities used to disavow the legitimacy of the March First Movement as an independence movement and to counter claims that it had garnered Woodrow Wilson’s support (1919).¹¹

A reprinted March 21, 1919, article entitled “Mischievous Rumours” expressly critiques attempts to connect Korean independence to Wilsonian political priorities, arguing that this folly serves as yet another indication that Koreans lack the necessary sophistication to govern themselves. “The Korean people,” the article claims, “know little of the world situation and are as credulous as children.” Indeed, “Only a few days ago it was rumoured that President Wilson was coming to Korea to rescue the Koreans from the Japanese yoke. . . . Incredible as it may seem, this foolish story was believed even by many who are usually considered intelligent” (5–6). Another Seoul Press article, originally dated April 10, 1919, responds specifically to a March 20, 1919, New York Times editorial that had argued, “in the present situation of a closely interrelated world a people which wants to rule itself may justifiably be asked to give some proof that it knows how to do it” (New York Times, 1919).¹² The article asserted that the fact that both Egypt and Korea were taken over by colonizing powers in the first place reflected their inability to rule themselves. The Seoul Press article replicated the original editorial’s language and logic, saying:

Japan will gradually guide the people and instill in their minds advanced political ideas and thoughts, but it is evident that were Japan to grant the Koreans autonomy all at once, Koreans would immediately fall into a state of anarchy, constituting a grave danger to herself. It is necessary for the benefit of the world at large that Korea be given enlightened rule from the outside. (“Japan’s Efficient Rule,” 22–23)

Thus, we can see that just as Korean independence activists used Wilsonian rhetoric to elevate their cause and to link it to global imperatives, so too did Japanese colonial authorities utilize US-led conversations about imperialism and self-rule to bolster their own authority.

Two contemporaneous literary works written by March First Movement participants who subsequently left Korea also further demonstrate how Koreans sought to represent the cause of independence to Western audiences. The semi-autobiographical novel The Grass Roof, originally published in the United States in 1931 by Younghill Kang (Kang Yonghŭl), and The Yalu Flows: A Korean Childhood, a memoir by Mirok Li (Yi Mirŭk), first published in German in 1946, based on serialized content from the early 1930s, and subsequently translated into English, both characterize Japanese colonization as unwelcome and highly destabilizing. Both works focus on the violence of Japanese imperialism, including in the context of the global violence of World War I, and both describe the experience of being present in Pagoda Park in Seoul when the Declaration of Independence was first read. In addition, these books offer different perspectives on why the March First Movement was compelling even to elite Koreans being educated in Japanese colonial schools and trace the repercussions of participating in pro-independence activism. In The Yalu Flows, Mirok Li succinctly highlights the contradictions within the Japanese colonial response to the March First Movement, saying:

There was bloodshed everywhere. . . . After the military suppression of the revolt, Tokyo [replaced the prior governor-general with] Admiral Saito, who introduced a policy of conciliation. He disarmed all the officials, who, whether tax collectors or teachers, interpreters or doctors, had hitherto worn uniforms and carried sabers. The secret police, the terror of the people, was dissolved and torture was prohibited. The salaries of Koreans were put on the same level as those of the Japanese, freedom of the press was proclaimed, Korean schools received equal status with the Japanese, and an imperial university was set up in Seoul. . . . In strange contrast to this conciliatory policy were the severe punishments inflicted on all participants in the March demonstration. The courts continued to sentence those whom they described as ‘disturbers of the public peace’ and the police continued feverishly to search out and arrest anyone connected with the movement. (1956, 159–60)

Here, Mirok Li addresses both the shorter- and longer-term responses of Japanese authorities to the March First Movement, capturing how first there was “bloodshed everywhere” as colonial authorities violently repressed protests, followed by both widespread general reforms and targeted prosecutions of anyone suspected of participation in pro-independence activities.

A second 1919 Seoul Press pamphlet, “Administrative Reforms in Chosen,” addresses these same reforms from the perspective of Japanese authorities. Unlike the previous pamphlet, which largely addressed March First Movement activism, “Administrative Reforms in Chosen,” includes substantive summaries and direct translations of public speeches and official policy directives issued by colonial authorities, as well as detailed explanations of policy reforms (1919). The combination of articles captures the duality between the expansive reforms and the heightened repression Mirok Li described. After an assassination attempt on newly appointed Governor-General Saitō Makoto, a September 4, 1919, article asserted:

If Korean malcontents think that the assassination of a few heads of the Government-General of Chosen will cow Japan and make her relax her hold on Chosen, they are indeed mistaken. Japan is determined to hold the peninsula at all costs and will not let it go. (“Dastardly Attempt,” 6)

A summarized account by a Japanese Peace Delegation member and naval captain seeks to correct “those Koreans, who, in their ignorance of world politics, labour under the delusion the Korean problem was made a subject of discussion at the Peace Conference” (“Administrative Reforms” 1919, 42). The article recounts the numerous ways nationalist attempts to raise awareness for the cause of Korean independence were thwarted. The majority of “Administrative Reforms in Chosen” focuses, as promised, on newly undertaken bureaucratic measures, actively shifting the focus away from Korean independence activism and towards Japanese bureaucratic efficiency as a way of emphasizing Japan as the rightful ruler of the Korean Peninsula.¹³

Conclusions

Connecting Wilsonian ideology to Korea’s 1919 March First Movement helps students understand how rhetoric can operate to both sustain and challenge colonial hegemony. As they study the March First Movement through this collection of texts that center local and indigenous lived experiences, students also gain insight into the political dynamics of the Korean Peninsula under Japanese rule. The Seoul Press pamphlets, for example, reveal ruling class rhetorical strategies aimed at reinforcing authority, silencing Korean voices, and disavowing independence activism. Meanwhile, a diversity of voices and viewpoints are reflected in the declaration that launched the March First Movement, Kim San’s narrative in Song of Ariran, and the memoirs of March First protest participants. There may have been no consensus about the implications of Wilson’s ideas for Korea, but as we have seen, his language informed not only international, but also domestic, discussions about Korea’s future.

As Rebecca Karl notes of Erez Manela’s discussion of a global “Wilsonian moment,” “the moment can be called ‘Wilsonian’ not because of Wilson, but because of what the anticolonialists made of it” (2008, 1474–76). In Korea, anticolonialists embraced this moment. Colonial authorities dismissed the possibility of Woodrow Wilson taking up the cause of Korean independence, but activists continued to choose Wilsonian language. Still, Wilson’s political formulations did not provide Koreans with novel revelations about the meaning of self-rule, and this rhetoric never supplanted the central and immediate concerns that consistently drove Korean calls for independence. In the bigger picture, Wilson’s rhetoric may have ultimately failed to deliver on its promises,¹⁴ but even so, it offered a framework that could be used to help claim political authority, to challenge colonial rule, and to make Korea’s struggles for independence legible to the larger world.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.