Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

In 1908, San Francisco Koreans demanded a meeting with Durham Stevens, the Oberlin graduate foisted on the Korean government as a foreign affairs adviser by the Japanese, who was on his way to Washington, DC, to explain the emperor’s position. Stevens refused to retract a statement he made about the necessity of paternal control over the peninsula, and when he told the four Korean representatives that they had been gone too long to know what was really happening, they beat him with their chairs.