William Tubman
William Tubman was president of Liberia from 1944 until he died in office in July 1971, twenty-seven years, the longest of the republic. He was the Americo-Liberian lawyer from Harper in Maryland County who kept the True Whig Party's monopoly of the state that had lasted since 1878 and made it look, for a generation, like something else. The two policies had names. The first was the open door, by which Firestone's rubber concession of 1926 was joined by the Swedish and American iron ore mines at Bomi Hills and Nimba, so that by 1960 the country's exports had grown twenty-fold and its growth rate was, on paper, the second in the world after Japan's. The second was unification, by which the hinterland's peoples, nine tenths of the population, who had been governed by district commissioners and forced labour, were given the vote in 1946, seats in the legislature, and a president who toured their chiefdoms in a Homburg hat and took their daughters as wives. The coast's thirty families kept the cabinet, the courts and the money. He was Washington's man in West Africa, with the Roberts Field airbase and the Voice of America transmitter on his soil. He was a founder of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 who thought Nkrumah a dangerous fool, and the host of the Monrovia group of moderates in 1961. The rule was the party and the patronage, the Public Relations Officers who reported on everyone. There were the treason trials of 1955 and 1968, the constitution amended so that he could be re-elected six times, the yacht, and the birthday celebrated as a national holiday. It was, for the country he ran, a long calm. The price came due nine years after his death when Doe's sergeants shot his successor. He was born in Harper, the son of a Methodist preacher and general who had come from Georgia. He was a lawyer, a senator from 1923, an associate justice of the supreme court from 1937, and Barclay's chosen successor in 1943. He died in a London clinic after prostate surgery. Tolbert, his vice-president of nineteen years, took the office he was killed in.
- Lived: 1895 CE – 1971 CE
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
