On March 22, 1908, an American diplomat named Durham White Stevens encountered four young Korean nationalists in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, where he was staying. They had come to demand an apology.
The 56-year-old Stevens was a high-ranking representative of the Japanese government, which was in the process of annexing Korea and brutally suppressing Korean attempts to resist. As one of Japan’s top two representatives in Korea, Stevens had been dispatched to the United States to propagandize for Japan.
On his tour, Stevens justified Japan’s actions by arguing that it was bringing progress to a backward and corrupt land, that most Koreans welcomed the Japanese intervention, and that if Japan had not intervened, others would. “Korea is a natural bulwark of Japan,” Stevens told his American audience. “Its state of complete isolation ... invited aggression and possible conquest.”
Stevens gave interviews to the San Francisco newspapers defending the Japanese takeover of Korea. The Call newspaper reported that “Stevens denies that the Japanese are exploiting Korea for Japanese profit or that the revenues of the land are being used in maintaining an arm of Japanese office holders.”
Stevens said nothing about the brutal campaign Japanese troops were waging against Korean resistance forces, whom they slaughtered and summarily executed.
The Koreans who had come to demand an apology from Stevens felt betrayed. This was understandable, for Stevens’ pro-Japanese position contradicted the United States’ official stance. The U.S. and Korea had signed a treaty in 1882 in which Washington pledged to support Korea “if other Powers deal unjustly or oppressively” with it. But in 1905, the Roosevelt administration ratified a secret agreement in which the United States agreed to let Japan take over Korea as long as Japan allowed the U.S. to have its way in the Philippines. That same year, Japan made Korea a protectorate, the first step toward annexation. The U.S. had sold Korea out to support its own imperialist goals, and because it wanted Japan to serve as a check on Russia.