Massachusetts Reports on Life Insurance,

SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE INSURANCE COMMISSIONER. of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Part II. Life And Accident Insurance.
BOSTON: Wright & Potter, State Printers, 1872

Policies Terminated in 1871.

Summary of Insurance Outstanding.

Aggregated summary of new business transacted by all the Life Companies represented in Massachusetts, during the last sexennial period, commencing with the extraordinary development of 1866:

Shameless Evidence of Foreknowledge

February 7, 1912, New York Times, TAKES CARNEGIE VAULTS.
Mercantile Safe Deposit Company Receives Transfer from the Original Buyers.

In accordance with the plan announced last month in THE TIMES by which the Carnegie Safe Deposit's Company's vaults at 115 Broadway were bought by a group of bankers identified with the Chase National Bank, the Guaranty Trust Company, and the American Exchange National Bank, who later took over the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company from the Bankers' Trust Company, the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company has increased its stock and purchased the Carnegie vaults from the original buyers.

The Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, which was formerly owned by the Equitable Life along with the Mercantile Trust Company, passed to the Bankers' Trust Company when the Equitable Trust Company absorbed the Mercantile Trust. Since the Equitable fire, which burned out the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, the boxholders have to a large extent transferred their patronage to the Carnegie vaults. The group of bankers who have turned over the Carnegie Company's old vaults to their recently acquired Mercantile Safe Deposit Company purchased the vaults from the State Banking Department, which is liquidating the bankrupt Carnegie Company, for $375,000. The vaults, which were built of armor plate by the Bethlehem Steel Company, originally cost in the neighborhood of $800,000, but until the Equitable fire were a losing investment. Attempts had been made by the State Superintendent of Banking Van Tuyl to sell them to the Guaranty Trust Company, which is building across the street, but engineers found that they were built so that they could not be taken apart and moved.

In reorginizing the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company under the new control the old President of the company, William Giblin, who narrowly escaped death in the fire, has been re-elected, along with former Vice President John B. Russell. Lawrence A. Ramage was elected Treasurer and will have charge at the new location.

The Nation - Index of Articles

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc52kcvf_592f3wvm5g5

Transcipts from: The Nation

April 16, 1868, The Nation, Editorial, Page 306, A National Bureau of Life Insurance.
April 11, 1872, The Nation, Report of the Insurance Commissioner of the Commonwealth of Massacusetts
December 12, 1872, The Nation, No. 389, Page 374, The Week, (Mutual's Proposed Reduction in Premiums)
January 2, 1873, The Nation, Correspondence , What Should We Pay For Life Insurance?
January 9, 1873, The Nation, The Magazines for January, "Savings-Banks Life Insurance," By Elizur Wright.
October 8, 1874, The Nation, No. 484, Page 228, The Week,
June 3, 1875, The Nation, Correspondence, Page 375, LIFE INSURANCE COMMISSIONS.
March 15, 1877, The Nation, Editorial, No. 611, Page 157, THE LIFE-INSURANCE FAILURES.
May 24, 1877, The Nation, The Week, Page 300, "The failure of the Continental Life Insurance Company,"
November 8, 1877, The Nation, Report, Page 292, Number 645,
April 5, 1883, The Nation, No. 927, Page 302, Book Review, Walford's Insurance Cyclopaedia,February 23, 1905, The Nation, Page 146, Vol. 80, No. 2069, Editorial, The Equitable Controversy,
June 15, 1905, The Nation, Page 472, Vol. 80, No. 2085, Editorial, The New Turn In the Equitable.
July 27, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2091, Page 68, The Week,
September 14, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2098, Editorial, Page 212, The Insurance Investigation,
September 21, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2099, Page 232, Editorial, INSURANCE AND POLITICS.
September 28, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2100, Page 252, CORPORATION ABSOLUTISM.
September 28, 1905, The Nation, Should Life Insurance Be Cheaper. Editorial,
November 23, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2108, Page 414, Editorial, A MISUNDERSTOOD STATESMAN.
November 30, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2109, Page 436, A LITTLE INSURANCE HISTORY.
November 30, 1905, The Nation, Vol. 81, No. 2109, Page 436, Editorial, "SOLICITOUS ABOUT NEW YORK."
January 18, 1912, The Nation, “THE EQUITABLE FIRE.”
January 18, 1912, The Nation, Vol. 94, No. 2429, Page 52, Fires and Human Nature.
February 27, 1913, The Nation, Vol. 96, No. 2487, Page 203, Literature. Precursors of Life Assurance. An Introduction to the History of Life Insurance.
May 20, 1939, The Nation, [Page 592] A Case Study in Reform,

January 15, 1912, Best's Insurance News, Volumes 10-12,

"Editorial : Two Lessons of the Equitable Fire," by A.M. Best Company,

TWO LESSONS OF THE EQUITABLE FIRE.

The recent destruction by fire in this city of the home office building of the Equitable Life Assurance Society has many lessons for insurance men. It is noteworthy that the Society carried no insurance on this building, the stated reason for this action being that the directors had two appraisals of their property, one of which showed that without the building it was worth $300,000 more than with the building; in other words, that it would cost $300,000 more than the value of the material in the building to raze it. Without entering into any discussion of the credibility of this statement, we direct attention to the fact that the company in its returns to the various State Departments did not report that there was no insurance on this building, for the excellent reason that the Convention statement form, representing the combined wisdom and experience of the Insurance Commissioners of the various States, does not require insurance companies to report to the Departments whether or not buildings owned by them, and carried in their statements as assets, are insured. This appears to be one of those extraordinary oversights which are only discovered through such an occurrence as the destruction of the Equitable Building. Certainly it would appear that if insurance companies are allowed to take credit in their statements for the value of buildings owned by them, which might at any time be destroyed by fire, they should be required to keep these buildings insured in responsible companies, and to report the facts to the various Insurance Departments concerning this insurance. Where insurance companies loan money on mortgage, they are required to have insurance policies payable to them as collateral security, and to report in their annual statements the amount of insurance carried. This information has not been required, however, where buildings have been owned outright.

The fire was confined to the Equitable Building, and did not spread to any of the structures across the four streets which formed the Equitable block. This was due principally to the facts that the burnable property within the building, though considerable, was small in comparison, for instance, to the stock, fixtures and other inflammable material contained in any large mercantile building; that all the buildings adjacent to that of the Equitable Life were of fireproof construction; and that the officers and men of the fire department gave their best thought and effort to conquering the fire, without hesitation risking even their lives. Chief Walsh, a fearless and experienced fire fighter, was killed "by being caught by falling debris while at work within the building. A strong wind was blowing at the time of the fire, and the temperature was so low that streams of water pumped on the building froze almost as soon as they touched it, in spite of the roaring furnace within. It is not pleasant to contemplate what might have occurred had this fire been on the windward edge of the dry-goods district, in which vast amounts of inflammable material are stored, with very few buildings of modern fireproof construction to act as fire breaks.

In other news:
page 5
Supervision of Companies
In a signed symposium in the Boston Globe last Sunday as to "which is the more desirable, National or State supervision of insurance," President Hall of the Massachusetts Mutual. Secretary W.H. Brown of the Columbian National and Samuel Davis, an agent of the Penn Mutual, argued in favor of State supervision, and George P. Field, president of the Boston Board and a member of the New England Policyholders' Protective Association of Equitable Life Policyholders, took the opposite view.

page 2
Germany Wants to Know.
A Berlin dispatch, dated July 7, says: "The Imperial Supervisory Office for Private Insurance Companies has demanded of the Equitable Life Assurance Society and Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York that they declare by August 1 in what manner they propose seperating their premium reserves on German policies from the general revenues and how they intend to invest them. The amounts affected are $7,500,000 of Equitable and $5,250,000 of Mutual."

The Troubles in Venezuela.

The Chronicle: a weekly journal, devoted to the interests of Insurance, Vol. XLII,
1888 - The Troubles in Venezuela.

To The Editor Of The Chronicle:
Sir: The following from the editorial columns of the New York Times is full of significance and of much interest at tikis time:

It is quite evident from the present advices that the election of Dr. Kojas Paul as president of Venezuela was not accomplished as harmoniously and quietly as had been at first declared. Armed resistance to it was attempted by General Crespo from the neighboring island of Trinidad as a base, and was responded to by a number of the people on the coast of Venezuela nearest to the island. The possibility of this result was indicated as long ago as last February by our Caracas correspondent, who wrote that a change had been made in the customary methods of election and that five of the candidates for the presidency had agreed to submit their claims to an electoral convention, while two others, one of whom was General Joaquin Crespo, had declined to do so. General Crespo was president of Venezuela in 1884 during one term in an interval between two terms of Guzman Blanco. The island of Trinidad is a favorite rendezvous of malcontents since il is under English sway and yet is but a short distance from the mainland. Official tidings now acknowledge that there was an outbreak, but declare that it has come to nothing and that the insurgent leaders everywhere are surrendering.

The president of Venezuela, it will be remembered, created Henry B. Hyde, the president of the Equitable Life, " Busto del Libertador," an act which many assert has had much to do with the present difficulty. One party thought that this conferring of titles upon Americans would give the United States too commanding a power in the Venezuelan republic. Again, it was argued that the new " Busto del Libertador " had agreed to insure the lives of the insurgents, giving eighty per cent off the first premiums and taking the balance in guano. This offended Crespo, but seemed satisfactory to Blanco, who of course expected assistance from the new" Busto del Libertador." Mr. Hyde"s sudden departure for Europe, as alleged, may have some connection with this difficulty, or it may not. His previous services, which rendered the conferring of the title a possibility, lead one to infer that "Busto del Libertador" is expected to materialize south—as the almanacs say—about this time. Bolivar.

From: The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism, The history and practices of the parasitic financial elite-- by: Eustace Mullins, 1984

CHAPTER FOUR: THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA

Brown Brothers Harriman

Harriman employed judge Robert Scott Lovett as general counsel for Union Pacific. When Harriman and Otto Kahn were summoned by the ICC in 1897, Lovett advised them to refuse to answer all questions about their stock operations. In 1908, the Supreme Court upheld their refusal to talk. The records of this case, SC No. 133 US v. UP RR, later disappeared from the Library of Congress. In 1911, the Equitable Life Insurance building, which contained all the records of the Union Pacific RR, burned, destroying all UP papers to that date.

Brown Bros. backed the B & O steamship line in 1887, and went into joint venture with J & W Seligman Co. on a number of South American loans. In 1915, Brown Bros. combined with J.P. Morgan to float a series of Latin American loans, which in many instances were followed by revolutions in the respective countries. In the Nation, June 7, 1922, Oswald Garrison Villard noted: "The Republic of Brown Bros with J & W Seligman had reduced Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua to the status of colonies with ruinous loans. Most of the loans were repaid in 1924."

This Is Your FBI: Brought to You by...Equitable Society Sponsorship

Equitable Sponsor: This Is Your FBI was a radio crime drama which aired in the United States on ABC from April 6, 1945 to January 30, 1953 for a total of 409 shows. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover gave it his endorsement, calling it "the finest dramatic program on the air."


Producer-director Jerry Devine was given access to FBI files by Hoover, and the resulting dramatizations of FBI cases were narrated by Frank Lovejoy (1945), Dean Carleton (1946-1947) and William Woodson (1948-1953). Stacy Harris played the lead role of fictional Special Agent Jim Taylor. Others in the cast were William Conrad, Bea Benaderet, and Jay C. Flippen.


This Is Your FBI was sponsored during its entire run by the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States (now AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company).

"The City of the Future." Appleton's Journal, 1872.

Jan. 6 to June 29, 1872, Appletons' Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, The City of the Future. Drawn by Harry Penn.



An illustration out of an obscure journal, but obviously a reference to the Equitable Building, which had opened in 1870, standing in just about the depicted relationship to the spire of Trinity Church on Broadway at Wall Street; in much the same way that 1974's The Towering Inferno was a cultural byproduct of the opening of the World Trade Center towers in the years preceding. Not very imaginative in either case---especially here in thinking the bustle was going to stay au courant into the future---but pretty nonetheless, and meaningful. However, a second illustration just came out spooky:



I don't know a specific publishing date beyond 1872, unless "page 156" can be dated in the series. I post this more to draw attention to a singular source online where I learned of this reference as I researched the Equitable Building and its demise. Being a particularly rich vein of American history, I found it odd that I had this field almost to myself, with a startling lack of attention from professional scholars or historians. It is this sort of energetic disposition I've come to see as a red flag.

However, there was one university source apt to come up in Google searches, in a collection of about 100 files, found at http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/1data/1912/Equitable/ We can see it's from Michigan State University, and looking further, note it's from the history department, and it likely belongs to a professor there, Alan Fisher, who teaches "Europe to 1500" and "The Middle East: Period of Ottoman Domination." But in a larger data dump of files we see areas of his overlapping interest.

I don't mean to be unkind, but if this is college level work than I'm glad I never went. The files consist of completely unedited snippets, without links or identifying data, from different media sources, along with some fresh-to-me material that came directly from the Equitable company's archives. One such file said simply:

Appleton's Journal 1872 pg. 6, Equitable archives
RG 4 Secretary's Dept. Historical collection
Art supplement - Appleton's Journal 1872 pg. 6
RG 4 Secretary's Dept. Historical collection

It wasn't hard to find a web site: Public Domain Images from Appletons' Journal of Literature, Science, and Art (Jan. 6 to June 29, 1872) and locate what I assume to be what the file was referring to. Several other files in this collection have been useful, but the research collection overall gives off an odor that raises my suspicions off syntheticism.

Too bad Mr. Fisher, or his students, didn't take the work a level deeper. This story has one of the most glamorous narratives in all of American history, no matter how you approach the material. So why does his half-assed effort just sit there, seemingly abandoned online?

I'll hazard a guess. This looks like historical blackmail to me. Perhaps an effort was undertaken--with immediate contact directly with the corporate officials and sources, to let them know "what was up." It seems clear to my paranoid mindset that the Equitable fire and building collapse afterward became a no-man's land and blaring silence. It was a chance reference to "Hyde's Equitable collapse" on a JREF thread that got me started on this topic, equally addictive as 9/11, and thank God, it was time to move on! And I have the whole thing almost to myself! Muhahahahaha!

Like that woman, what's her name, who got a faculty job at Yale after researching as an undergraduate, and then writing the definitive book, about the anarchist bombing outside of J. P. Morgan's headquarters on September 16, 1920, another historic episode fallen down the memory hole, and a subject which one might think would also come up with some frequency in the decade of cultural processing that has followed September 11th. (Do I need to be blunt here and say that it looks like J. Pierpont Morgan was the central anarchist in both episodes?)

The Sept. 12 issue of The New Yorker's Talk of the Town opened by mentioning the contemporaneous General Slocum disaster, which is only a warm body count when the Equitable collapse is red hot matching narrative detail! But then the magazine went and spoiled everything with an appalling piece by a NYPD detective, Edward Condon, who helped man the "bucket brigades at the smoking pile, where we sought to cart out nearly two million tons of scorched wreckage by the hapless handful as the voids exploded beneath us and the remaining structures shuddered, threatening to topple over on us."

I hope he wore a face mask while he posed.

There was a third illustration in Appleton's Journal, which seems like a continuation of their aerial theme



Read a satire on newly installed elevators published in an 1870's Evening Post, which I copied to a blog that follows this one, for a much more imaginative take on what the future might hold for a present that was no different than ours---in fact, apparently much worse. And if I misread Mr. Fisher, who instead should be praised for providing a nascent trail of breadcrumbs, then I'll apologize, but I'm not holding my breath.