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More serious was the charge that Liberian President Charles Dunbar Burgess King, along with his Vice President and several Cabinet members, had been profiting by having their "Frontier Guard'' raid villages of their Afro-African countrymen, torture women and chiefs, seize black bucks and sell them into slavery in French Gabun and Spanish Fernando Po. When a League of Nations Commission verified the practice. President King and his followers, on stern advice from Washington, resigned. Next Liberia, under President Edwin Barclay, defaulted on its loan of $2,250,000 from Harvey Firestone. In 1925 when rubber was $1 per Ib. the State Department had encouraged Mr. Firestone to start a huge rubber plantation in Liberia and lend the African Republic money to pay off its European and other debts. Mr. Firestone planted 55,000 acres of rubber trees, built 100 miles of road (five times as much as Liberia had ever had before), hired thousands of natives at 25¢ a week, gave Liberia a brief boom. Then with Depression the Liberian Congress seized the revenues set aside to service the Firestone debt. The U. S. protested that this was contrary to the Liberian Constitution. Proclamations were posted that any Liberian Supreme Court Justice who held the Act unconstitutional would be assassinated.
Since the U. S. could not stop these occurrences, the League of Nations tried. Liberia is a charter member of the League, for it had joined the Allies one day during the War when a British warship anchored off Monrovia. The League found that Liberia, besides having no health service, had no budget, no accounts, no money, that its trouble was, as Lord Cecil put it, "the incompetence of the Government and corruption—but rather more incompetence than corruption." The League offered to send Liberia a Government adviser to set things right. President Barclay proudly declined. The League threatened to expel Liberia, then looked up its own constitution, found it had no authority to do so.
Last September U. S. Diplomat Hibbard took one of the least pleasant assignments in a career which had taken him from Poland to Peru. Only difficulty he was spared was the presence of a U. S. Minister at Monrovia. Charles E. Mitchell, the last to hold that post, had been retired because of the prolonged lack of recognition of Liberia. As Charge d'Affaires. Mr. Hibbard had spent long days in polite palaver with Liberian kinkywigs, long nights swatting mosquitoes and tropical vermin. Finally he proposed a deal: Mr. Firestone would cut interest on his Liberian loan from 7% to 5%; Liberia would frown on the slave traffic, try to do some-thing about disease; Secretary Hull would grant diplomatic recognition and send Liberia a minister; President Barclay would accept a "foreign" (i. e. white) adviser.