Title is fairly explanatory. Liberia must become a state of the USA, lasting until the modern day.
AHC: Make Liberia a US state
- Thread starter MichiganNationalist1837
- Start date
Yes. I just put this in before 1900 because that was when Liberia was founded.
Wasn't Liberia literally just a dumping ground for freed slaves?
I suppose if you can give the American colonial societies more power, they might use Liberia as a starting point, but it's hard to imagine a colony in Africa especially wanting to remain with the country that colonised it. Looking at America's track record as it expanded across the continent, it isn't much better than any other colonial power with regards to native peoples.
Plus, Liberia doesn't have very much strategic value either. Theoretically, if it did have strategic value, one could postulate that if it came under threat from an outside power the US might occupy it to preserve its interests and eventually turn it into a territory and then a state.
I suppose if you can give the American colonial societies more power, they might use Liberia as a starting point, but it's hard to imagine a colony in Africa especially wanting to remain with the country that colonised it. Looking at America's track record as it expanded across the continent, it isn't much better than any other colonial power with regards to native peoples.
Plus, Liberia doesn't have very much strategic value either. Theoretically, if it did have strategic value, one could postulate that if it came under threat from an outside power the US might occupy it to preserve its interests and eventually turn it into a territory and then a state.
If I remember, it was a volunteer project.
And basically that. There's no real purpose for the US to annex it; its interests were always projected south or west; Africa was out of its focus.
Best answer that I can imagine that the Civil War ends sooner than it did OTL with the South readmitted earlier, and racial tensions remain high. Eventually, it reaches the point where the general desire is to separate the slaves from the south in order to bring further stability to the Union. In consequence, the Homestead Act is expanded, and some head west. Santo Domingo is annexed and, reluctantly, some head there (as it may or may not be taken peacefully). And, with some confrontation with the now-established government in Monrovia, settlement there is reopened. This has to be due to an earlier end to the war; the US was not in the mood for any overseas adventures for a long time after the death and destruction of the OTL war.
Didn't the US historically cut favourable deals with Liberia in the late 19th century (at least) onwards that helped the Liberian economy stay afloat when it could've been annexed by France or Britain, or perhaps much reduced in territory? Maybe France or Britain can get the better of Liberia, the Liberians plead to the Americans for assistance, which maybe a more colonialist US is willing to look into, and after a series of diplomatic manuevers, Liberia is (re)annexed as a US territory.
Flash forward a few decades later, and Liberia develops a statehood movement and at some point in the late 20th century, Liberia actually gets statehood and becomes the 51st state.
Flash forward a few decades later, and Liberia develops a statehood movement and at some point in the late 20th century, Liberia actually gets statehood and becomes the 51st state.
Zachariah
Banned
First, some OTL info. Convinced that black people should have a permanent homeland in Africa, Marcus Garvey Jnr sought to develop Liberia- he launched the Liberia Program in 1920, along with plans to build colleges, industrial plants and factories "to manufacture every marketable commodity", and railroads as part of an industrial base from which to operate. Although his UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) wasn't solely a "Back to Africa" movement, the organization did work to arrange for migration for African Americans who wanted to go there. In late 1923, an official UNIA delegation which included Henrietta Vinton Davis, Milton Van Lowe and Robert Lincoln Poston, travelled to Liberia to survey potential land sites. They also assessed the general condition of the country, from the standpoint of UNIA members interested in living in Africa. By 1924, the Chief Justice J. J. Dossen of Liberia wrote to the UNIA conveying the government's support: "The President directs me to say in reply to your letter of June 8 setting forth the objects and purposes of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, that the Government of Liberia, appreciating as they do the aims of your organization as outlined by you, have no hesitancy in assuring you that they will afford the Association every facility legally possible in effectuating in Liberia its industrial, agricultural and business projects."
By this stage, Garvey had already been sentenced to five years in prison for alleged "business fraud" in the running of the Black Star Line (considered one of J. Edgar Hoover's first successes, coming as it did after a memorandum from the then special assistant's office stating that "Unfortunately, however, he [Garvey] has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation"). And in 1924, the Liberia Program was derailed, when the Liberian President unexpectedly ordered all Liberian ports to refuse entry to any member of the "Garvey Movement". This action closely followed the Firestone Rubber Company's agreement with Liberia for a 99-year lease of one million acres (4,000 km²) of land, assisted and subsidised by the American and European governments, at a price of 6 cents per acre, upon which to create the world's largest rubber plantation. Only two months earlier, Liberia had signed a deal to lease the same amount of land to the UNIA instead, at an unprecedented price of a dollar an acre ($247/km²). Upon his release in November 1927, Garvey was deported, and never allowed to return to the USA.
Firestone also provided a $5 million loan, quoted at a 7% interest rate, to the Liberian government to pay off its foreign debts, and to build the harbor needed by Firestone to export rubber from the plantation. However, this loan was given in exchange for complete authority over the government's revenues, which the Firestone Rubber Company would hold until the loan was totally repaid. The loan took a larger and larger portion of the Liberian government's incomes: it grew from 20% of the total revenue of Liberia in 1929, to 32% in 1930, to 54.9% in 1931, and nearly the whole national revenue of Liberia in 1932. An estimation made by a member of the American Legation in Liberia said that Liberia really paid a 17% interest rate for the loan, and Liberia only finally managed to repay the loans to the company (and wrest control of its own national revenues back from the Firestone Rubber Company) in 1952. And during the Great Depression, as rubber prices fell, Firestone stopped its development of the plantation, using just 50,000 acres in the end. By cutting wages in half, he deprived the Liberian government of tax incomes, and forced the government to miss a loan payment to the company in 1933. With his self-contrived cassus-belli, Firestone subsequently asked the US government to send a warship to Monrovia to enforce the debt payment, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rejected the "gunboat diplomacy".
Meanwhile, while imprisoned, Garvey had corresponded with segregationist Earnest Sevier Cox who was lobbying for legislation to "repatriate" African Americans to Africa. Garvey's philosophy of Black racial self-reliance could be combined with Cox's White Nationalism – at least in sharing the common goal of an African Homeland. Cox dedicated his short pamphlet "Let My People Go" to Garvey, and Garvey in return advertised Cox' book "White America" in UNIA publications. And in 1937, Garvey openly collaborated with the United States Senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, and Earnest Sevier Cox, in the promotion of a repatriation scheme introduced in the US Congress as the Greater Liberia Act. Bilbo, who was an outspoken supporter of segregation and white supremacy, and attracted by the ideas of black separatists like Garvey, proposed an amendment to the federal work-relief bill on 6 June 1938, to deport 12 million black Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. He took the time to write a book entitled Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization, advocating the idea. Garvey praised him in return, saying that Bilbo had "done wonderfully well for the Negro".
So then, what if the gunboat diplomacy had gone ahead earlier; and with the Liberian government having defaulted on its unpayable debts and having already effectively ceased to govern itself, Liberia were subsequently forced to secede its sovereignty to the USA? This provokes widespread outrage and civil unrest among the black community in America, and instead of leaving Jamaica for London in 1935, in the aftermath of this event, Garvey travels to either Liberia or neighbouring Sierra Leone ITTL- the UNIA has a resurgence, multiple successors to the Black Star Line are established to repatriate African Americans to Liberia with their headquarters in Monrovia (a subtle hint to Liberia's fate IOTL, where 70% of the Liberian economy comes from the number of vessels registered under its flag), and when Senator Bilbo presents the Greater Liberia Act in front of Congress in 1938, his proposed amendment to the federal work-relief bill is taken seriously, and a slightly toned-down version of the Greater Liberia Act is implemented.
An African American 'Trail of Tears' subsequently follows, with numbers which eclipse those of the forced removals of the Native American tribes to Oklahoma a century earlier; in the next few years, over a million African Americans are deported to Liberia, more than doubling the size of the Liberian population. WW2 soon puts pay to the state-sponsored federal repatriation scheme, but 'black flight' to Liberia continues, as Liberia's fledgling industrial base, output and young working population swiftly become critical to the Allies' war effort. During the war years, Liberia's economy mushrooms to surpass that of many US states, and becomes presented as a black utopia; support for pan-Africanism, then largely associated with communism, starts to become increasingly vocal, along with support for anti-colonial independence movements across the rest of Africa, and the establishment of a Pan-African Socialist State. Post-war though, as the Iron Curtain falls, the USA decides that it can't afford to let the now profitable territory of Liberia become independent for strategic reasons, fearing that its most left-wing territory would subsequently go red and that it could take most of the rest of Africa with it. And as such, Liberia is soon inaugurated as a fully-fledged state of the USA.
I will come up with a scenario further along with the comment, but will first outline the difficulties:
1. A Black majority state is not conceivable until the late twentieth century. In the 1960s, the status of the African-American majority District of Columbia was upgraded, and a campaign for statehood launched. To inject current political comment, the campaign for DC statehood was obviously cynical, the District doesn't even cover all the core urban area of the city of Washington, and the disenfranchisement could be remedied by simple legislation just abolishing the District, after which all its residents would become residents of Maryland and would be able to vote in Maryland elections. However, it would be harder to dismiss a campaign for statehood for the American-Africans in Liberia -if it was already a US territory or commonwealth. But this is not possible before the 1960s.
2. Liberia did not attract alot of settlement from emancipated African-Americans from the US, and the ones that did settle and their descendants formed a small elite over the larger native (non-American African) population. This would have to change too, so the descendants of American settlers form at least a large enough percentage population as do descendants of American settlers in Hawaii, which IIRC is about one third of the population.
The POD in this case is that the Liberian scheme is changed so that the US formally annexes the area and makes it a US territory. The Governor and his staff will always be White until the mid-twentieth century, however this has the virtue of inhibiting the development of a caste system with the descendants of the Black settlers on top of the system. Because the place is already a US territory, schemes for the resettlement of freed slaves get more support, especially when the Santo Domingo plan falls through. Unlike IOTL, the setters would still be on US soil and would remain American citizens, and the federal government would be investing more in Liberia than they did. So you get more settlement.
A campaign for statehood develops as part of the Civil Rights era changes, and the only difficulty is finding a potential all-white Republican state to pair it with. In the 1960s, the Democrats upgrade Liberia to commonwealth status, and use their supermajorities to push through a constitutional amendment not just granting three electoral votes to DC, but defining what "Commonwealths" are and igiving them electoral votes as well. This has the effect of making the Republicans more willing to concede statehood for Liberia as long as they get their balancing white rural conservative state. Once Democratic control is solidified in California, a solution is found in the "Jefferson" scheme, and a bright red relatively rural chunk of northern California gets detached along with a similar part of southern and western Oregon to form "Jefferson", while Liberia gets upgraded to statehood. This happens in the early twenty-first century.
Of course a side effect of the timeline I just outlined is a Gore administration in 2001.
But regardless of the details, the best way and probably the only way to get statehood for Liberia is to get them in as a territory right from the start.
1. A Black majority state is not conceivable until the late twentieth century. In the 1960s, the status of the African-American majority District of Columbia was upgraded, and a campaign for statehood launched. To inject current political comment, the campaign for DC statehood was obviously cynical, the District doesn't even cover all the core urban area of the city of Washington, and the disenfranchisement could be remedied by simple legislation just abolishing the District, after which all its residents would become residents of Maryland and would be able to vote in Maryland elections. However, it would be harder to dismiss a campaign for statehood for the American-Africans in Liberia -if it was already a US territory or commonwealth. But this is not possible before the 1960s.
2. Liberia did not attract alot of settlement from emancipated African-Americans from the US, and the ones that did settle and their descendants formed a small elite over the larger native (non-American African) population. This would have to change too, so the descendants of American settlers form at least a large enough percentage population as do descendants of American settlers in Hawaii, which IIRC is about one third of the population.
The POD in this case is that the Liberian scheme is changed so that the US formally annexes the area and makes it a US territory. The Governor and his staff will always be White until the mid-twentieth century, however this has the virtue of inhibiting the development of a caste system with the descendants of the Black settlers on top of the system. Because the place is already a US territory, schemes for the resettlement of freed slaves get more support, especially when the Santo Domingo plan falls through. Unlike IOTL, the setters would still be on US soil and would remain American citizens, and the federal government would be investing more in Liberia than they did. So you get more settlement.
A campaign for statehood develops as part of the Civil Rights era changes, and the only difficulty is finding a potential all-white Republican state to pair it with. In the 1960s, the Democrats upgrade Liberia to commonwealth status, and use their supermajorities to push through a constitutional amendment not just granting three electoral votes to DC, but defining what "Commonwealths" are and igiving them electoral votes as well. This has the effect of making the Republicans more willing to concede statehood for Liberia as long as they get their balancing white rural conservative state. Once Democratic control is solidified in California, a solution is found in the "Jefferson" scheme, and a bright red relatively rural chunk of northern California gets detached along with a similar part of southern and western Oregon to form "Jefferson", while Liberia gets upgraded to statehood. This happens in the early twenty-first century.
Of course a side effect of the timeline I just outlined is a Gore administration in 2001.
But regardless of the details, the best way and probably the only way to get statehood for Liberia is to get them in as a territory right from the start.
Seems kind of hard to do that; would Gore even be born under these circumstances? If the PoD is nearly two centuries prior, then I imagine that we'll recognize none of the movers and shakers of the twenty-first century. Also is the presumption that the state would be Democratic; just because 90% African-Americans vote for Democrats currently doesn't mean it will always be the case.
Plus, California would never agree to having a northern section be removed... that, and nearly all of California was Republican blue at the time (the switch from blue to red didn't occur OTL until the late 1990s). Between 1948 and 1992, California voted for the Democrats only once, and that was in 1964 (There might be some extenuating circumstances in that case) Republicans would be loathe to carve out a Republican state out of a Republican bastion and, again, it is not for the federal government to decide; the state legislature must approve such a maneuver. This goes back to the early Republic, where the US could not accept Vermont's addition to the Union because, technically, the counties were claimed by New York and New York had to accede to any state being created from its territory.
If we're putting a butterfly net over everything and assuming the world develops essentially as OTL, I would imagine that the US tries to encourage the various Micronesian protectorates to join as the 52nd state instead. If we assume that Liberia would be Democratic as you said, then a Micronesian state would be assumed to be Republican at the time (as was Hawai'i when it was admitted; Alaska was presumed to be the Democratic one), which also solidifies its footstep in the Pacific. Or, if we're imagining butterflies... Who knows. Maybe the US just took Micronesia from the Spanish during the Spanish American war? Maybe they have all of Samoa?
And I'm not too sure that a black-majority state couldn't have been created, if only through cynical methods. Santo Domingo's annexation was shy of one vote OTL; that's not something that is difficult to change. Have it go through, and once the US takes possession of the half of the island, they'll have a territory that is majority black. And, while they don't want blacks to have voting rights in the south (where, indeed, they comprised a majority of the population in some states), they might accede to blacks having voting rights in one state, where their influence on national politics limited. And, since the US would want to keep the naval base, there would be reluctance to let the island go. Not that all of the former slaves would go to either Liberia, Santo Domingo, or some other black territory. The South's economy would likely crash if it did (all of those sharecroppers leaving, along with such a substantial portion of its population? It would take extremely long to recover).
That alone might change the immigration patterns of the US as it secedes, as the South would need men for labor... What's the immigration at this time, Italians, Slavs, and Chinese (late 1800s). Be interesting what might come out of this.