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A Shovel & a Broom. Last week the citizens of Seoul, like their President, were busy appraising the damage, restoring things to their familiar order. Amid the honking, clattering confusion of U.S. jeeps, tanks and trucks, numberless Korean labor gangs placidly sorted out useful items from the rubble of war, hauled away debris on little sledges fashioned from sandbags abandoned by the retreating Reds. In front of the U.S. Embassy, beggar children pestered G.I.s for candy and adults approached U.S. officers with a hopeful plea: "I speak little English, want job with Americans. Interpreter, please. No broom, no shovel." Most of the would-be interpreters got jobs as "engineers," a title which seemed to remove the sting from the fact that they usually got both a shovel and a broom and instructions to go to work on Seoul's rubble. Busiest of all was the jam-packed black-market district where Koreans with enough won dickered energetically for soap, fur coats, G.I. pork & beans, streptomycin. The Communists had made a successful effort to stamp out the black market, but in so doing had stamped out the white market, too.
Seoul still had a long way to go before its revival was complete. More than 60% of the city had been destroyed and housing was desperately scarce. There was no water in the mains. There was no electric power. Trolleys stood idle on their tracks. In the railroad yards lay hundreds of bombed and burnt-out freight cars.
Most of Korea shared Seoul's troubles. The former Pusan bridgehead, which had a peacetime population of 4,000,000, last week was supporting an additional 2,000,000 refugees, all dependent on the state and the U.S. Army for food, clothing and shelter. In North Korea, as the war rolled toward the Manchurian border, the Republic would be saddled with the unwholesome works of bulky, red-faced General Terenty Shtykov, the U.S.S.R.'s proconsul, and fat, sleepy-eyed Kim Il Sung, the Korean Communist chieftain. The land the Communists had confiscated for "distribution to the peasants" and the industries they had nationalized would raise endless questions of ownership and compensation. The punishment or re-indoctrination of Communist leaders would demand much time and effort, although Rhee had announced a policy of no vengeance against North Korean soldiers.
A Gentleman & a Scholar. Half a dozen agencies, both U.S. and U.N., were prepared to help Korea. ECA was already taking a survey to determine how its funds could best be used for reconstruction. But in the eyes of Koreans, the first responsibility for solving their problems lay squarely upon slight, white-haired Syngman Rhee (rhymes with bee). Under circumstances that his scholar ancestors could not have imagined, Rhee was following, an old family tradition.
For the Korean aristocracy into which Rhee was born 75 years ago it was an immutable law that a gentleman should be a scholar and that scholars should govern the people. Rhee's father, a descendant of the Yi family* which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1910, saw to it that his son got a Korean gentleman's education in the Chinese language and Confucian classics. Rhee took to the traditional learning eagerly (he still writes classical Chinese poetry). He placed first in the Korean national examinations where young scholars won admittance to the bureaucracy.