Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T14:36:00.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Science of Difference: Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry, 1830–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Dan Bouk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Science of Difference examines life insurance companies' significant impact on the development of systems of human classification and discrimination in modern America. It pays closest attention to the tools employed by life insurance companies to enable and justify their discriminatory practices, tracing their evolution over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Companies used life tables to think about sectional difference prior to the civil war; they collected statistics to defend the propriety of racial discrimination; and they revolutionized risk by inventing the medical “impairment.” Drawing on company archives and personal papers, as well as a wide range of publications, the dissertation describes corporate research in the financial industry, argues for the importance of cultural factors in tracing business history, and shows how the industry built a national statistical community with tools designed to measure and price human difference.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 717 - 731
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Actuarial Society of America. Experience of Thirty-Four Life Companies upon Ninety-Eight Special Classes of Risks. New York: Actuarial Society of America, 1903.Google Scholar
Alborn, Timothy. Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Basye, Walter. History and Operation of Fraternal Insurance. Rochester, NY: Fraternal Monitor, 1919.Google Scholar
Beito, David T. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Random House, 1973.Google Scholar
Clark, Geoffrey. Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Dublin, Louis I., and Lotka, Alfred J.. The Money Value of a Man, 1st ed. New York: Ronald Press Company, 1930.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, Deborah Kay. The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890–1940. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Frederick L. The Statistical Experience Data of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Baltimore, MD, 1892–1911. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1913.Google Scholar
Hounshell, David A., and Smith, John K.. Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Keller, Morton. The Life Insurance Enterprise: A Study in the Limits of Corporate Power. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Klein, Jennifer. For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Lewin, C.G. Pensions and Insurance before 1800: A Social History. East Linton, UK: Tuckwell, 2003.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Donald. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Murphy, Sharon Ann. Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
New York Legislature. Testimony Taken before the Joint Committee of the Senate and Assembly of the State of New York to Investigate and Examine into the Business and Affairs of Life Insurance Companies Doing Business in the State of New York, 7 vols. New York: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1906.Google Scholar
Pinch, Trevor, and Swedberg, Richard, eds. Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Rothstein, William G. Public Health and the Risk Factor: A History of an Uneven Medical Revolution. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Sandage, Scott A. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Stalson, J. Owen. Marketing Life Insurance: Its History in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942.Google Scholar
Stevens, Albert Clark, ed. The Cyclopaedia of Fraternities. New York: E.B. Treat and Company, 1907.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Wynne, James. Report on the Vital Statistics of the United States, Made to the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. New York: H. Bailliere, 1857.Google Scholar
Yates, Jo Anne. Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate 1870–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.Google Scholar

Articles and Chapters

Czerniawski, Amanda M. “From Average to Ideal: The Evolution of the Height and Weight Table in the United States, 1836–1943.” Social Science History 31, no. 2 (2007): 273–96.Google Scholar
Davis, Audrey B. “Life Insurance and the Physical Examination: A Chapter in the Rise of American Medical Technology.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55, no. 3 (1981): 392–406.Google Scholar
Dubli, Louis I. “Life, Death and the Negro.” The American Mercury 12, no. 37 (1927): 37–45.Google Scholar
Dublin, Louis I., and Kopf, Edwin W.. “The Improvement of Statistics of Cause of Death through Supplementary Inquiries to Physicians.” Publications of the American Statistical Society 15, no. 114 (1916): 175–91.Google Scholar
Gill, Charles. “Actuary’s Report to the Board of Trustees of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York.” Reprinted in Emory McClintock, “Charles Gill; The First Actuary in America, pt. 4.” Transactions of the Actuarial Society of America 15 (1914): 258–64.Google Scholar
Glenn, Brian J. “Fraternal Rhetoric and the Development of the U.S. Welfare State.” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Fall 2001): 220–33.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Diane. “The Cost of Caring: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s Visiting Nurse Service, 1909–1953.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63, no. 3 (1989): 414–34.Google Scholar
“Historical Sketch of the Life of Charles Gill, Esq., Late Actuary of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York.” Journal of the Institute of Actuaries 6 (1856): 216–27.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Frederick L. “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.” Publications of the American Economic Association 11 (1896).Google Scholar
Hunter, Arthur. “Selection of Risks from the Actuarial Standpoint.” Transactions of the Actuarial Society of America 12 (1911): 1–17, 281–98.Google Scholar
Lassman, Thomas C. “Industrial Research Transformed: Edward Condon at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 1935–1942.” Technology and Culture 44, no. 2 (2003): 306–39.Google Scholar
Lehrman, William G. “Diversity in Decline: Institutional Environment and Organizational Failure in the American Life Insurance Industry.” Social Forces 73, no. 2 (1994): 605–35.Google Scholar
Levy, Jonathan Ira. “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905.” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (April 2006): 48 pars. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.2/levy.html.Google Scholar
McClintock, Emory. “On the Objects to Be Attained in Future Investigations of Mortality and Death Loss.” Transactions of the Actuarial Society of America 6, no. 24 (1900): 373–9.Google Scholar
Meyer, Roberta. “The Insurer Perspective.” In Genetics and Life Insurance: Medical Underwriting and Social Policy, edited by Rothstein, Mark A., 27–48. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.Google Scholar
North, Douglass C. “Life Insurance and Investment Banking at the Time of the Armstrong Investigation of 1905–1906.” Journal of Economic History 14, 226–246, no. 3 (Summer 1954): 209–28.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. “Life Insurance, Medical Testing, and the Management of Mortality.” In Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by Daston, Lorraine, 226–246. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Ransom, Roger L., and Sutch, Richard. “Tontine Insurance and the Armstrong Investigation: A Case of Stifled Innovation, 1868–1905.” Journal of Economic History 47, no. 2 (1987): 379–90.Google Scholar
Rogers, Oscar H. “Medical Selection and Substandard Business.” Proceedings of the Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors of America 2, eighteenth annual meeting (1907): 81–95.Google Scholar
Shepherd, Pearce. “Principles and Problems of Selection and Underwriting.” In Life Insurance Trends at Mid-Century, edited by McCahan, David, 47–66. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950.Google Scholar
Thornton, Tamara Plakins. ‘A Great Machine’ or a ‘Beast of Prey’: A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in an Age of Capitalist Transformation.” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 4 (2007): 567–97.Google Scholar
Wolff, Megan J. “The Myth of the Actuary: Life Insurance and Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.” Public Health Reports 121, no. 1 (2006): 84–91.Google Scholar

Reports

Homans, Sheppard. “Report Exhibiting the Experience of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New-York for Fifteen Years Ending February First, 1858.” New York, Novermber 1859.Google Scholar
New York Insurance Department and Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells LLP. “State of New York Insurance Department Report on Examination of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Regarding Response to Supplement No. 1 to Circular Letter No. 19 (2000).” Investigative Report, 2002. http://www.ins.state.ny.us/exam_rpt/metlifex.pdf.Google Scholar

Dissertations

Brown, Lawrence N. “The Insurance of American Negro Lives.” MBA thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1930.Google Scholar
Bryson, Winfred Octavus Jr. “Negro Life Insurance Companies: A Comparative Analysis of the Operating and Financial Experience of Negro Legal Reserve Life Insurance Companies.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1947.Google Scholar
Toon, Elizabeth. “Managing the Conduct of the Individual Life: Public Health Education and American Public Health, 1910 to 1940.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998.Google Scholar