Korean Studies pioneer

By Mark Peterson

In recent issues here, I have paid tribute to some of the founders of Korean Studies in America. Today I want to recall the contributions to Korean Studies of Spencer Palmer.

Palmer was a pioneer in Korean Studies earning his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation on early Korean-American relations. His specialties were in the political science of his dissertation work, Korean history in general and, as he settled in to his career, he found himself in the Religion Department at Brigham Young University (BYU) with research and publications in World Religions.

He was my undergraduate professor and one who inspired me to major in Asian Studies and to specialize in Korean Studies. I remember attending Korean Committee meetings with him at the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS).

His first exposure to Korea was in the army and belongs to what I call the second generation of Korean Studies specialists. The first generation is the early missionaries including Homer Hulbert, Horace Underwood, James Scarth Gale, George McCune, Alan Clark and some others. The second generation were those who were thrown into Korea through the army, but who wanted to make sense of their experience and became scholars in Korean Studies ― including Ed Wagner, Gari Ledyard, James Palais, Rob Provine and John Duncan. The third generation was dominated by the Peace Corps volunteers including David McCann, Ned Shultz, Laurel Kendall, Milan Hejtmanek, Mike Robinson, Carter Eckert and others. I am a part of the Peace Corps generation although I was not a Peace Corps volunteer. The fourth generation is dominated by Korean Americans. Of course, in each group there were others who came in from other traditions including the direct academic route. The fifth generation ― yet to come in the way I perceive it ― will probably be what we can call the K-pop generation?

Palmer arrived in Korea in 1953 as a freshly minted ROTC 2nd lieutenant and a chaplain. He arrived in Busan and was directly sent to the prisoner of war camp on Geoje Island where North Korean soldiers were being kept. He and I visited the site of the camp years afterward, in 1988, and while looking at a deserted landscape, he recalled the chaos of the camp that was there 35 years earlier. He described the three sections of the camp where the prisoners were divided into three groups ― hardcore North Korean communist soldiers, then soldiers that just wanted to return home to North Korea, and then those who indicated they would prefer to defect to the South. The third group attracted the sympathies of Syngman Rhee and he unilaterally released them, without consulting the Americans, and in response, North Korea refused to return some prisoners at the big prisoner exchange at the end of the war, including some Americans, saying they wanted to live in the workers' paradise of the North.

Palmer described that his first duty was, as a chaplain, to preside over a funeral service for two soldiers who had died the day before he arrived. The prisoners in the hardcore, highest security section of the camp had staged a riot to trick the soldiers into entering the barbed wire compound to break up the fight, only to be jumped by prisoners who took their weapons and shot them. And Palmer had to put together a funeral service for them. In those days, soldiers were buried in Korea, but in later years, most of the remains were repatriated to the States. And young 2nd lieutenant Palmer had a rude introduction to the death of war.

Palmer returned from Korea after the war to complete his Ph.D. studies at Berkeley and thereafter was hired by BYU. With a handful of Chinese and Japanese specialists he helped found a strong Asian Studies undergraduate program. BYU has a policy of emphasizing undergraduate education with the idea of sending its better students to the best grad programs around the country, and indeed Palmer's students entered graduate programs around the country, including me, when I entered the Korean Studies graduate program at Harvard.

Gradually, as BYU hired language and history specialists, Palmer left those areas and devoted his efforts more and more to the study and teaching of World Religions. He became the director of the David M. Kennedy School of International Studies, named after David Kennedy who had been secretary of the treasury and an ambassador to the United Nations, as well as a BYU graduate.

Palmer was a builder. After building the Korean Studies program at BYU he moved on to building other projects in World Religions and International Studies. But for me, his greatest contribution was in his early years where he helped me and my cohort of classmates develop expertise on Korean Studies. Thank you, Professor Palmer.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.

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