The Will of Oxen and Horses

On March 5, 1956, the Liberal Party put Syngman Rhee forward as its candidate in the third presidential election, and Rhee answered by declaring that he would not run.

"I am already past eighty... I believe it is right that I step aside."

The very next day the government-sponsored organizations rose as one and demanded that he stand. At that, Rhee changed his tune.

"If it is what the people want, I would even take my own life."

Which was to say that if the nation wished it, he would run. Afterward the demonstrations only grew fiercer — rallies of every stripe, all of them begging Rhee to enter the race. The crowning spectacle came on March 12, when members of the ox-and-horse cart association hauled eight hundred carts through the streets of Seoul and called for his candidacy. Eight hundred oxen wandered the avenues and dropped their dung until the reek of manure hung thick over the city.

"Aigoo, what is this? The season when the air ought to smell of flowers, and all I get is dung and piss..."

Seo Gwang, who ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had stepped into the office, grumbled as he shut the window.

Once the ox carts had taken to the streets, the horse-racing association apparently could not bear to be outdone, and this time the horses came out as well. After the demonstrations that had pressed both oxen and horses into service, Rhee said this to the crowds still demanding that he run:

"This is hard going. Put it in writing."

At a word from the president, police and civil servants across the country went from house to house collecting signatures — signatures in support of Rhee's bid for a third term.

To Kijo, the whole performance called up the political theater of the Joseon court. When an aged king announced that he would lay down the throne, his ministers rose as one to insist that the time had not yet come and to beg him not to abdicate. Do otherwise, and you would be suspected of a treasonous heart toward the reigning king. The only course was to plead, with all your might, that he go on ruling.

The theater staged for Syngman Rhee gave birth to a new coinage: the will of oxen and horses. It was a jeer. If Rhee meant to run, the will of the people was not enough. He would need the will of the oxen and the horses, too.

On March 19 the Public Safety Bureau released a set of staggering figures.

Kijo cocked his head at the announcement. If the Bureau was to be believed, nearly the entire nation was longing for Rhee to run.

Four days after that release, Rhee issued a statement of his own.

It was the end of a long political show.

Once he had accepted the nomination, March 29 brought his eighty-first birthday, and a celebration as grand as the year before. Tens of thousands of students packed Seoul Stadium, sang Our President and Hymn to the President, and threw themselves into mass games for the delight of Rhee's eyes and ears.

This time, unlike the year before, Kijo was glad he did not have to hang a white banner on the Cheongsan Building. Inspector Kwak Young-joo of the Gyeongmudae police station had given his approval: the building was a handsome thing, he said, and it would do to let the president see it when the parade passed.

Is this even something that needs approving? Kijo wondered — but he did as Kwak Young-joo told him all the same. He supposed it was something, at least, that the man had not ordered them to scatter flower petals from the roof of the Cheongsan Building.

After the birthday the campaign began, little by little, to catch fire. The Democratic Party named Shin Ik-hee and Chang Myon its candidates for president and vice president, and started putting out that famous slogan.

From the party's central headquarters near Tapgol Park, We can't live like this — let's change it went out all day long, and the cry became, unexpectedly, a local attraction. Crowds flocked in just to hear it.

Stung, the Liberal Party answered fire with fire. They hung enormous speakers directly across the street and blasted a counter-slogan from morning to night: Change it, and you'll only live worse.

And then a legendary line of attack made its appearance, one that would be trotted out for decades to come.

The ugly habit had begun. Show discontent with the ruling party, and you would be treated as a Red.

Quite apart from the campaign now coming to a boil, Kijo kept his mind on making money — transport alongside Cho Choong-hoon, construction alongside Chung Ju-yung. He and Cho and Chung were still second-division businessmen, none of them yet standing out in the Korean business world, and true to that rank all three worked the ground themselves and looked after the sites in person.

Cho Choong-hoon went out with Ko Wang-chul to haul U.S. military freight, and Chung Ju-yung visited the job sites every day, trying to pay down the enormous debt the Goryeong Bridge had left him. Kijo left the steadier transport work to Cho and Ko and traveled the construction sites of the country at Chung's side. Along the way he got more than one taste of the young Chung Ju-yung's temper.

Drop in unannounced, and if Chung found a man loafing he cursed him to his face or drove a kick into his shin. When a heavy-equipment operator was dozing, Chung covered the distance in a single stride, slapped him across the cheek, and roared.

"You got any idea what that machine cost? Sprawled out there dozing, like you've got all the time in the world!"

It was Chung Ju-yung to the life — the tiger of the site, the King of Hell of the construction yard. Can he really do that...? Kijo wondered. But Chung's rule was a simple one. Treat a man who had done nothing wrong that way, and he would deserve a knife in him; against a man who was plainly in the wrong, it was allowed. Even the ones who took the blows had no answer for him. They owned the fault. It was, in every sense, a wild decade, the nineteen-fifties.

All the same, Kijo understood why Chung had no choice but to be that way. On the job sites of the day, anything like a work ethic was a shambles. Leave the men unsupervised and plenty of them would not lift a hand, dawdling as if the years themselves could wait. Fail to look the work over yourself and it was slapped together any which way, and a man as responsible as Chung Ju-yung could not let that stand. Violence among the laborers was an everyday matter. A skilled hand — a shokunin — would knock around an assistant he didn't like, a demodo, and the demodo would heap abuse on a gofer, a shita, or slap him across the face. In every respect a construction site was a wilderness, too rough for a mild-tempered man like Kijo to bring to heel.

After he had walked the expansion works at Gachang Dam in Daegu, Kijo turned to Ju-yung.

"President Chung, would you care to go have a look at the Samsung plant?"

He was curious about the Cheil Wool factory, an hour from the dam.

"Shall we?"

Chung Ju-yung's eyes lit, as if he too wanted a look at Lee Byung-chull's colossal mill, and he agreed at once.

Standing before Samsung's vast, up-to-the-minute wool factory, the two second-division presidents felt the distance between themselves and Samsung down to the bone. Smacking his lips, Chung Ju-yung said,

"Aigoo, President Lee Byung-chull's sitting pretty. Look at this. A whole different world from the likes of us, eating dust all day. Ha-ha!"

Kijo, seeing for himself a Cheil Wool plant that seemed a good ten years ahead of its time, was no less astonished.

"President Lee, let's push ourselves. We'll put up a big factory like Samsung's and do business that way."

At the enterprising Chung's words, Kijo nodded.

"I'm preparing a secret weapon."

"A secret weapon? What's that?"

"Early-strength cement."

"And what's that?"

"Cement that sets early. Use it, and you can shorten the schedule and cut the construction cost. We're going to try a trial run at Yeongwol before long."

"If it sets that fast, isn't it expensive? Seems to me it'd cost a fortune."

Kijo meant to produce early-strength cement at several times the price of the ordinary kind. It could be made on the same line. The catch was that you had to halt the regular process and scrub the machinery clean, and that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠took something like two weeks — but Kijo had a cement plant, and so it was a thing he could do.

"Expensive, yes. But we can take a great deal of time off the Gachang Dam. Subtract the price of the early-strength cement from the wages you save by shortening the job, and there ought to be money left over."

"If the figures come out that way, then we've got to try it. Samsung's off way ahead of us — we ought to do everything we can on our side, too. Ha-ha!"

Kijo and Ju-yung watched Lee Byung-chull's Cheil Wool factory a while longer, then went up to Seoul together.

By the time they had made the round of the country's job sites and come back to Seoul, it was May. Kijo took Sunrye, her belly grown heavy with child, down to the sandbanks of the Han for a breath of air. The election of president and vice president fell on May 15, not even a fortnight off, and three hundred thousand people had gathered on the sands to hear Shin Ik-hee, the Democratic Party's candidate.

"There are so many people..."

"You don't think this man is going to beat Dr. Rhee and become president?"

Kijo told her that it might be so. He knew how the election would end — that Syngman Rhee would win — but there were so many in that crowd who were sick to death of Rhee that he said it all the same.

Candidate Shin Ik-hee was fated to die two days later. On May 5, 1956, riding the train to a rally in Jeonju, he would die of a cerebral hemorrhage. Some said that had he lived, no one could have known how the vote would fall. Kijo did not think so. So long as Cho Bong-am and Shin Ik-hee failed to unite, and went on splitting the opposition between them, they could not beat Rhee. It was the same as Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung dividing the vote and failing to defeat Roh Tae-woo.

Nor did Kijo believe the talk that Rhee had had Shin killed. Shin Ik-hee was already a man who, at this very Han River rally that Kijo and Sunrye were watching from a distance, grew so excited by the size of the crowd that he went home and collapsed in a faint. His health was very bad.

In the cool shade of a tree Kijo fanned Sunrye and watched Shin Ik-hee speak. This was the man who, in 1946, had sent an assassin into the North to kill Kim Il-sung and had him throw a grenade. If he had removed Kim Il-sung then, perhaps the Korean War would never ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠have come... Kijo thought it as he watched him from afar.

As if Kim Il-sung were fated not to die, and fated to start a war, a Soviet officer snatched up the grenade that had fallen beside him and saved his life, losing a hand and an eye in the doing.

The politicians who dominated the nineteen-fifties were none of them ordinary men. Kijo could see why. In an age this harsh, how else would they have practiced politics, if not with their lives on the line?

When he had seen his fill of Candidate Shin Ik-hee's rally, he went home with Sunrye.

Ten days later, Rhee's victory was confirmed. He had won, and yet he was a winner put to shame. For all the Liberal Party's boast that he would be elected with eighty percent of the vote, he scraped into office with 52.5 percent, and no more.

People thought more highly of the 1.8 million votes that went to Shin Ik-hee, dead in the middle of the campaign. That was how many went to the polls and would rather vote for a dead man than cast a ballot for Rhee.

Cho Bong-am, who finished second, took two million votes of his own. And Lee Ki-poong — who had siphoned off military raw cotton to fill a campaign chest and then stood for vice president — lost to the Democratic candidate.

What followed was a fix too bleak for laughter: ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ruling party and opposition scrambled together into a single government.

Let them scramble. Kijo threw himself into the business. He cared for neither the Democratic Party nor the Liberal Party. Both were dens of pro-Japanese collaborators, and the Democratic Party's brief showing after April 19 had been disappointment itself.

He was simply glad that the noisy, sickening election was over and the streets had gone quiet. The alleys of Jongno filled again with children's laughter and the sound of them running at their games. No longer did the slogans drift through the air — We can't live like this; let's change it, and Change it, and you'll only live worse.