4.19 as Authorized Protest

April 19th erupted in response to the corruption, misgovernment, and electoral violations of the Syngman Rhee regime. This chapter documents the ways in which students utilized school-based resources and the script for extraordinary vanguard action in staging the surprising protests of February, March, and April 1960. The vanguard schema, as a cornerstone of South Korea’s postcolonial discourse, furnished student demonstrators with nation-centered legitimacy that was bolstered by the victimization of high school student Kim Chuyŏl. Confirmation that Kim had been killed in the brutal police suppression of an early protest sparked the final – and most intense – round of student demonstrations in mid-April, including the massive protest in Seoul on April 19. The fierce public outcry forced Syngman Rhee to resign from office on April 27. By way of closing, this chapter reveals that actions and interpretations of April 19th reproduced the core ideological division between authorized liberal nationalism and unauthorized communism.

Narrating the Postwar Crisis

After the Korean War, South Korean publishers made steady progress in rebuilding the publishing industry, despite endemic material shortages and financial difficulties. This chapter introduces the three major postwar magazines that are used throughout the book – Sasanggye (World of thought), Sint’aeyang (New Sun), and Yŏwŏn (Women’s garden). Through an examination of the three monthlies, it relates the ways in which intellectuals and ordinary people gave expression to the major upheavals since the end of colonial rule, as well as the many challenges of the war and the postwar crisis. Deep-seated poverty, moral decline, pervasive anxiety, and the slow speed of recovery were their primary areas of focus. Although many South Koreans lived in despair, some writers put forth restrained expressions of hope that the crisis would soon abate.

Permissible Criticism

This chapter explores the space for permissible criticism under the authoritarian rule of Syngman Rhee and the Liberal Party. While constraints on public expression certainly did exist, they were by no means insurmountable. Through an examination of Sasanggye and other monthlies, the chapter reveals the common tactics that intellectuals used to express critical viewpoints on the regime, postwar politics and society, and the South Korean political settlement. Remaining within the limits of authorized liberal nationalism, cautious writers took pains to obfuscate their objects of criticism and blunt their political grievances by incorporating them into social-science explanations and encoding them into the nation narrative. The circulation of critical, liberal nationalist discourse in the national media enabled the mounting of public disaffection for the corrupt and ineffectual Rhee-LP regime, and thereby set the stage for April 19th.

Epilogue

During Park Chung Hee’s first term as president (1963-1967), regime ideologues incorporated selected elements of the wholesome modernization and student vanguard schemas into his gendered program to “Modernize of the Fatherland.” This program subordinated the position of women to that of men in the collective enterprise of rapid but uneven economic development. It also replaced the unreliable student vanguard with the notion of the militarized vanguard, which was to serve as the primary force for the interlinked projects of national defense and industrialization. On the other hand, progressive activists drew on unofficial memories of April 19th and the vanguard schema in staging antiregime protests in 1964-1965. In doing so, they consolidated the culture of noninstitutional youth protest that drove South Korea’s democracy movement (1964-1987).

Miracles Every Day?

April 19th, an extraordinary outburst in the mold of the paradigmatic March First Independence Movement (1919), took place in and through the transposition of memories of anticolonial resistance to postcolonial politics. Following the overthrow of the Rhee-LP regime, many public observers truly believed that the student protestors – and, by extension, South Koreans – had turned the corner out of the postwar crisis and into a new era of national history. This chapter examines post-event discourse on how to parlay the “spirit of April 19th” into a forward-looking program of wholesome modernization that effectively linked developmental policies of the democratic state to the everyday endeavors of upstanding citizens. It then turns to the aftermath of the May 16th military coup of 1961 to scrutinize Park Chung Hee’s partial assimilation of post-April 19th optimism into his ideological program during the incipient phases of his nineteen-year rule.

Wholesome Modernization

The postwar crisis encompassed a cultural crisis wrought by wartime devastation and the rapid influx of Euro-American things and ways. Among mainstream intellectuals, wholesome modernization was the preferred approach for overcoming this cultural crisis. This discursive schema was built upon the premise that South Koreans should adhere to a hybrid vision of culture that preserved the core elements of indigenous tradition, while incorporating selected, modernizing aspects of Euro-American culture. This chapter explores the women’s magazine Yŏwŏn alongside the popular films The Love Marriage (Chayu kyŏrhon, 1958) and A Female Boss (Yŏsajang, 1959) in order to demonstrate that this hybrid culture vision deliberately promoted the maintenance of male privilege for the youth generation. The cultural conservatism of wholesome modernization was multiply determined by historical and contemporary influences.

The Student Vanguard

The student vanguard was to serve as the core protagonist of postcolonial nation building. Prevalent in the 1950s, this premise was built upon ideologized memories of anticolonial resistance that provided a model for patriotic everyday action among postwar youths. This chapter starts by examining the ways in which middle school and high school textbooks called upon students to lead the process of postcolonial nation building by enacting the “spirit” of the March First Independence Movement (1919) and other extraordinary outbursts of anticolonial resistance. It then turns to Yu Gwan-sun (Ryu Kwansun, 1959)and Nameless Stars (Irŭm ŏmnŭn pyŏl tŭl, 1959), two historical films that put forth evocative representations of youth-driven independence activism. Like schoolbooks, these works and other contemporary historical films were designed to promote patriotic dispositions among postwar youths. The burgeoning of ideology and discourse on the student vanguard constituted a crucial condition of possibility for April 19th.

Introduction

After the Korean War, wholesome modernization and the student vanguard were central to South Korea’s postcolonial discourse on how (South) Koreans should move beyond the colonial era and the postwar crisis. Built upon pre-1945 nationalist discourse, this gendered pair of discursive schemas was specifically geared to producing female and male youth protagonists for the collective enterprise of nation building and development. This book explores the postwar dissemination of the wholesome and vanguard schemas and documents their usages in the landmark of the April 19th Revolution (1960) and the earliest phases of Park Chung Hee’s rule (1961-1979). The two schemas remained influential in national politics and society up through the 1980s. The introduction also discusses South Korea’s place in the global sixties.