In the only foreign capital named after a U. S. President—Monrovia of Liberia— Frederick Pomeroy Hibbard, a white Texan who for 15 years has been running diplomatic errands for the U. S. State Department, last week looked into the face of a pale chocolate-colored, mustachioed little Negro and addressed him as "Your Excellency." Liberia's President Edwin Barclay visibly swelled with satisfaction. Legation Secretary Hibbard was informing him that the U. S. was, after a five year break, granting diplomatic recognition to Liberia. In Washington Secretary of State Hull also swelled with satisfaction: he had shown that the U. S. was more potent than the League of Nations.
For several reasons a bad diplomatic situation in Liberia is usually much worse than a bad situation anywhere else: 1) Political respect for 12,000,000 U. S. Negroes requires that the post of U. S. Minister to Liberia shall be held by a Negro, and having a Negro Minister, though stoutly backstopped by a white legation Secretary, does not simplify the art of diplomacy. 2) When the Secretary of State wants to send an emissary to Liberia, he is lucky if there is a ship sailing for the African West Coast within a month, luckier still if the emissary reaches Monrovia in less than another month. 3) When the emissary lands in a surf boat at Liberia's harborless capital, he finds a dirty, ramshackle tropical town whose inhabitants consist of about 100 whites, 10,000 blacks, and 1,000,000 rats, where a one-year tour of duty is considered the equivalent of three years at Warsaw or Moscow. 4) The emissary's job is to deal with a Government controlled by perhaps 20,000 purse-proud Afro-Americans (who comprise most of the "landholders of Negro blood," the only qualified voters according to the Liberian Constitution) who for the last century have never succeeded in controlling the million or more Afro-Africans who inhabit Liberia's 43,000 square miles of equatorial jungle. 5) If everything does not go well in Liberia, it is just too bad for the U. S. State Department which is held responsible by the world at large. For Liberia was founded over a century ago as a colony for freed Negro slaves from the U. S., has a Government with a President, a Senate, a House of Representatives and all other U. S. fixings. U. S. honor cannot afford to let the British from Sierra Leone or the French from the Ivory Coast step in and clean up.
During the last five years conditions in Liberia have been salt in the wounds of the State Department. The British objected that the rats in Monrovia were so bad that bubonic plague was prevented from spreading through West Africa only by the fact that it had no harbor in which ships could dock; that a smallpox epidemic ravaged the interior; that the simplest health measures were unknown and Liberia might become a focus of infection for all Africa. This the U. S. State Department could believe. In 1929 U. S. Minister William Treyanne Francis died there of yellow fever.