(2 of 8)
The capital city of Seoul is 80% uninhabitable. Public buildings everywhere lie in ruins, public utility services are makeshift, and two-thirds of the schools are unusable. Only in the South's gaunt era of Reconstruction after the Civil War is there a U.S. parallel to what Rhee and his people are up against. The economy is shot to pieces. Some 75% of all mines and textile factories have suffered severe damage. Those industries which can function lack parts for maintenance and equipment for repair. The draft has absorbed much of the country's youth, but there are still thousands of unemployed. Resourceful businessmen struggle with makeshift merchandise: they offer for sale cooking utensils fashioned from the aluminum of wrecked planes, buckets beaten out of old oleomargarine cans, canoe-shaped rubber sneakers made from worn-out truck tires, men's & women's clothing cut from discarded (and pilfered) U.S. Army uniforms.
A newly arrived U.N. officer, after a first look at Korean fashions, cracked: "U.S. olive drab seems to be the Korean national color." With thoughts hardly less superficial, thousands of soldiers have moved backwards & forwards over this small republic (slightly smaller than Indiana), fighting its invaders, and sometimes laying down their lives in its defense. Overwhelmed by the physical aspect of war, they have no means of assessing the stark inner tragedy. The U.N. soldier does not know that a Korean schoolteacher's salary will buy her only 16 lbs. of uncooked rice and ten cups of coffee a month; that a Korean doctor sells penicillin on the black market because his income is less than $10 a month.
Won & Lost. Last week in a moldering, pagoda-roofed hall in Pusan, once used by Japanese occupiers as a wrestling arena, South Korea's National Assembly met to consider measures for halting the galloping inflation which has made a sad joke of wages and salaries. Diesel oil and kerosene fumes from six U.S. Army space heaters mingled with the heavy smell of garlic in the rear of the hall, where several hundred curious but impassive spectators watched the proceedings.
Nine days earlier the government had announced a very simple expedient for curing inflation: withdraw the present currency (won) and replace it with a new currency (hwan), at 100 won for one hwan. The question which occupied the Assembly was what proportion of existing bank deposits would be temporarily blocked from this trade-in. As the government worded the bill, a wide assortment of Koreans, from black-marketeers to most of the political opposition, would have 75% of their funds frozen.
Finance Minister Paik To Chin, poised and confident in a neat brown business suit, thought he had the Assembly exactly where he wanted it. Then the Assembly threw its bombshell: practically all existing won, it decided, should be convertible into hwan. Rather than have any part of their own private funds blocked, many Assemblymen were prepared to wreck the government's chances of curbing inflation.
The fact that there was a semblance of order at all—in finance or in government—was still something of a miracle. It was due, in almost every respect, to a remarkable old man: President Syngman Rhee, 78, stern fighter for Korea's freedom over more than half a century.