William Tubman
William Shadrach Tubman Vacanarat ( born November 29, 1895 in Harper, † July 23, 1971 in London) was 1944-1971 President of Liberia.
Youth
He was born in Harper, Maryland County, a descendant of freed and repatriated U.S. slaves. Tubman's father, the Reverend Alexander Tubman, was General of the Liberian army, former Speaker of the House and Methodist preacher. His mother Elizabeth was from Atlanta ( Georgia). He attended the primary school in Harper, then the Methodist Cape Palmas Seminary and then the Harper County High School. At 15, he enlisted in the army and participated 1910-1917 in several punitive expeditions into the superficial part controlled by the government in Monrovia hinterland.
Politician
Later he studied law with private teachers and was district attorney. He joined the True Whig Party, which was founded in 1860 as the Whig Party, Liberia had always ruled until the time from 1871 to 1878. As is customary for members of the derived by freed American slaves in Liberia upper class, he made simultaneously in administration and politics career. 1923 and 1929 he was the youngest member of the ten-member Senate.
After 1930, the then President Charles DB King, his vice president Yancy and indirectly Tubman were implicated as Yancys lawyer in a slavery scandal, which was examined by the League of Nations. All came back, Tubman was reelected in 1934 but in the Senate. 1937 to 1943 he was Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court. With the help of the outgoing President Edwin Barclay in 1944 he was president.
Churchman
Since 1928 he also served as a lay preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1944 he attended the General Conference of the United Methodist Church in Kansas City as a lay delegate.
President
As president, he devoted himself more than his predecessors the hitherto neglected hinterland. The restriction to two terms ( the American model ) has been repealed, the increasingly authoritarian leadership office in the 1960s led to sporadic unrest and coup attempts.
During his reign he was in the Liberian society worshiped at a controversial personality of the one and hated the other. This was probably mainly that Liberia under his government more changes had to subdue than in the entire previous century.
Among his most important policy objectives he had the economic liberalization of the country (Open Door Policy ), and the improvement of relations between the indigenous population and the Americo- Liberians, that the descendants of American slaves who formed the upper class in Liberia ( National Unification Policy) made. Especially the latter had already explained some of his predecessors to his political goal. The normalization of relations between these two communities had previously proved in Liberian history as a difficult task.
His reign lasted 27 years, which he ruled the country longer than any other president before or after him. In the presidential elections in 1955, 1963 and 1971, Tubman each scored record results by 100%.
Economic open-door policy
Especially his initiative on the question to open up the country to foreign capital and investors made the President on the controversial figure, especially since he had thus addressed a particularly sensitive issue. The disputes related to the economic opening of Liberia were in fact almost as old as the Republic itself, the disagreement over this question were so big before Tubman's reign that they in the past (at least as one of several reasons ) the first coup in the history of Liberia had brought, who caused the death of the former president, Edward J. Roye result.
Tubman but was firmly convinced that Liberia would not develop on its own economically, so he was an absolute advocate of liberalization, which earned him the accusation of his opponents, he would sell the land to foreigners. On June 22, 1955, she committed an assassination attempt on him, which he survived, however.
Despite all this criticism, the country could boast during his reign no less impressive economic achievements. While the investment boom of the 1950s, Liberia had to Japan even the strongest economic growth worldwide.
Tubman survived several assassination attempts. As Tubman died, he left the country with the largest merchant fleet and the largest rubber plantations in the world. The country had become Africa's major exporter of iron ore. Worldwide Liberia was actually the third largest iron ore exporter. While Tubman's reign in Liberia had been invested from abroad more than one billion U.S. dollars. In it the biggest foreign investment in Sweden were included since 1945, as well as the hitherto largest German investment in Africa.
Consequences of his economic policy
The rapid economic development and the training of more and more people had unleashed increasingly political forces that had been suppressed for over a century. While still alive, Tubman had recognized the dangers of the emerging forces and contradictions emphasized on several occasions. After his death, his predictions should repeatedly confirm tragically: in the eighties by the government of Samuel K. Doe and in the nineties by the brutal civil war which shook the country and eventually ended up in the terror regime of former President Charles Taylor. These political developments also destroyed the economic progress that had been achieved under President Tubman.