Document 24.4 Helen Stevenson, Letter from Korea, 1951

Helen Stevenson | Letter from Korea, 1951

American Red Cross worker Helen Stevenson wrote the following letter to her parents just weeks after she arrived in Korea. In her correspondence, Stevenson described her work for the Red Cross’s Clubmobile unit in war-torn Pusan. Stevenson later married a New Jersey governor and served in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1970s.

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We do not let South Korean soldiers come into the club. It seems that the higher-ups feel that we would be completely taken over by them. (Of this I am not convinced.) I am glad you can’t see the way that we as Americans treat the S. Koreans who work for us. It nearly kills me when I see some of the things they do to the S. K’s who work for the army, and there are a great many of them. In the first place we treat these people as if we were occupying them, as if we were or had been at war with them. That is not the case at all, as you know. One day an American Major friend of mine took me out of town to see the S. Korean Officers training school. Some American officers work out there with the S. K. officers teaching them American ways, tactics, etc. The Major told me that he had talked to these S. K. officers and the general opinion among them was that they resented very much the Americans being here. And that they wanted to see their country united and as long as it was UNITED they did not care under what kind or type of government. They also told this major that they knew full well that the Americans were here for their own interests and not in any way for the interests of Korea as a whole. The S. Koreans who work for us get about four dollars a month pay. They do not get any time off and they work over 12 hours a day. The price of their own food and clothing is terribly high and all the workers are so thin and sickly looking. We scream at them in English and then get furious when they don’t understand.

Source: Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler, eds., Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Dial Press, 2005), 608–9.

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