A First-Hand Perspective of the Firestone Plantation in the Late 1970s

After graduating from Princeton in 1976 with a degree in civil engineering, I moved to Liberia to help with road construction projects as my main job, and to assist, in my spare time, with the development of our religious community there. I spend four years in the capital city of Monrovia, which was about an hour’s drive from the Firestone plantations. On some occasions, we went to visit members of our community in the outlying districts around Monrovia, including occasional visits to local members who lived next to, or within, the Firestone plantations.

I have never done any research into the history of Firestone in Liberia, so I claim no expertise in this area. I can only provide a snapshot of what I saw, while I was there in the late 1970s.

I can say that, at that time, I saw no evidence of any forced labor. I remember walking in the shade of rows and rows of rubber trees which had been tapped so that white latex sap of the trees dripped into small rubber cups. This liquid was periodically collected by local Liberian laborers. I never saw the inside of the plant to understand what conditions were like there, but I believe that most of the local labor was associated with the manual collection of the latex from the individual trees, rather than the processing of the latex inside the plant, which most likely was done with large scale machinery by relatively few workers.

I can say that I never saw any fencing that would have kept me out of, or kept workers in, the plantation. I never saw any guards to prevent people from leaving the plantation. (There may have been security guards around the offices and homes of the upper-level staff as a protection again thieves, but not for the purpose of preventing anyone from leaving the plantation.)

The houses that the Firestone company provided its workers were brick structures, which would have been considered rustic by Western standards. (As I recall, for instance, there were outdoor spigots for water, but no internal plumbing.) But to evaluate this properly, one would have to compare it to the alternative option of living in the villages, which normally had no plumbing whatsoever. There, water was carried in containers, often balanced on one’s head, from the nearest streams or, in some cases, from a well which the villagers had dug. Hot water was only obtained by heating it in a pan over a fire, and was seldom used except for cooking. (We lived in a comparatively modern home in the capital city, but even there, we lived without hot water for all four years. In a climate as warm as Liberia, where the cold water was never very cold, the absence of hot water was seldom a problem.)

The plantation houses were well-spaced, in an orderly layout, not as crowded together as was common in the Liberian-built capital city. But then, more space was available on the plantation.

I recall a conversation I had with one young man about why people would come to work here instead of remaining in their home villages. His answer was one that I had not considered: Life in the villages, which was typically supported by non-mechanized agriculture, was hard. And success often depended on the cooperation of the weather. Life on the plantation, with whatever drawbacks it may have had, was constant and did not depend on the weather. He, and the others I spoke to, were there by choice, not by coercion (unless one considers the weather as the agent of coercion).

I have to wonder whether Mr. Ort has ever been to the plantation in Liberia and lived there long enough to understand the conditions and options for its people. I wonder if he has ever lived in any of the Liberian villages (i.e. the non-plantation option). If he has not, I would highly recommend that he spend at least a couple of months there, and talk to a wide variety of people to understand their perspectives.

I was also rather surprised by Mr. Ort’s references to “white supremacy” in Liberia. Surely, he must know that the country was ruled by Americo-Liberians during the entire period from their settlement in the early 1800s until President Tolbert was killed by native Liberians in a coup d’etat in 1980. The Americo-Liberians were certainly not white. They were the descendants of the freed American slaves who decided to create their own country among the native Africans. They created a two-tiered society which was not entirely different from the two-tiered society they had left, except that both tiers, in this case, were black. While it is clear that the companies which later set up major businesses there were white-owned, they had to negotiate with the Americo-Liberian government for permission to operate. During my four years there, I rented a house from a native Liberian. As a white person, I was not allowed, by law, to own any real estate in the country.

All of this is to say that I think the situation there is a good deal more nuanced than what Mr. Ort seems to portray. I have no doubt that the Firestone Company made efforts to maximize its profits from its investments in Liberia. All companies do that. To judge whether that effort was taken to evil extremes would require an in-depth knowledge of the standards of the times, the other options available, and particularly an evaluation of whether the country would have been better off without the investment of the Firestones and other industries that went there. I’m not sure where such in-depth research would lead, but I suspect one would find a lot of self-interest on all sides, and blame that could be widely distributed.