882.01 Foreign Control/288
Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs (Boal)
The British Ambassador called to ask about Liberia. He said he had received notice from his Government suggesting that he endeavor to persuade us to ask the Liberians and the Finance Corporation to cooperate in obtaining acceptance of the League Committee’s plan in Liberia. I told him that this was out of the question as far as we were concerned; that we considered both parts of the League plan to be bad, the first part was impracticable and the second was unjust. I said that we had not even transmitted the financial part of the plan to the Finance Corporation.
I pointed out that we had made certain reservations to the League Committee’s report and that particularly we had stated that unless some adequate solution was reached by autumn we would feel free to obtain our liberty of action.
We then discussed adviserships a little in theory. The Ambassador seemed to agree fully that to institute another series of adviserships of limited scope involving constant bickering with the Liberian authorities and a constant lack of authority in the hands of the advisership would be folly. I told him the League Committee’s plan was too expensive for a country like Liberia which was unorganized and had few revenues. I told him that we had felt right along that the sensible thing was to entrust administrative power to an individual and let him pick his own assistants. The Ambassador said that he felt that the League Committee was probably trying to make jobs for a number of their nationals. He said that in Sierra Leone and elsewhere the administrative control through one man who had pretty broad authority in organizing his own force was a practice and a successful one. He felt that the League Committee was not so constituted as ever to be able to work out a plan which would be feasible in our sense of the word; that [Page 738] any plan they made would be subject to all kinds of checks and reviews from the League as well as from the Liberian Government. I said that we might have to face the fact of a failure to get a plan which is workable on the part of the League Committee, especially as the Liberians themselves had been unwilling to agree even to that. In that case when the time came I said we might have to have a talk among those principally interested to see what could be done. He agreed, and we discussed the possibility that the British, the French and ourselves would in that event have to discuss matters with a view to preserving Liberian sovereignty by providing Liberia with an administration that would run the place properly more or less regardless of any initial consent by the Liberians.
When he left I had the very distinct impression that he himself felt very favorably toward the idea of an administration under one man’s leadership with a very flexible scope of work.