Insurance & Presidents

Last week was U. S. Life Insurance Week, the third that that statistical indus-try has celebrated. Its slogan: "The sooner you plan your future, the better your future will be." Its symbol: a black owl with the words BE WISE emblazoned on its breast. About $200,000 was spent in advertising to make U. S. citizens worry about death or old age, and thousands of insurance men gathered in hundreds of groups to cheer for the law of probabilities, foundation of all insurance.

They also could, and did, cheer for life insurance's Depression record. During six Depression years U. S. life companies paid out $18,000,000,000 to policy holders and beneficiaries. Total assets of U. S. life companies increased 36% from $17,482,000,000 at the end of 1929 to $23,828,000,000 at the end of 1935. Some 63,000,000 U. S. policyholders own more than $100,000,000,000 worth of insurance, which is about 70% of the world total. Only a few relatively small companies failed in the six lean years. Even in the worst years 7% of the U. S. national income was delivered into the hands of insurance companies in the form of premiums. And to the delight of all insurance salesmen the volume of new business last year set an all-time record--$14,800,000,000.

The past year must also have set something of a record for the number of deaths among insurance presidents. Many insurance personnel changes occurred for other reasons. Leroy A. Lincoln violated a company up-from-office-boy tradition by stepping into the presidency of Metropolitan Life, world's biggest life company, after Frederick Hudson Ecker moved up to the newly-created post of chairman. President Lincoln entered Metropolitan as general attorney in 1918. The same progression occurred in Connecticut General Life, where Frazar B. Wilde was promoted from a vice-presidency after Robert Watkinson Huntington was made chairman. In Pacific Mutual President George Ira Cochran took the chairmanship, being succeeded by Alexander Nesbitt Kemp. Security Mutual Life of Binghamton, N. Y. picked Frederick D. Russell as president to succeed David S. Dickinson, who resigned. Carl L. Odell succeeded Gilbert E. Humphreys as president of Hercules Life, Sears, Roebuck's mail order company. Sears's Lessing Rosenwald is still chairman.

Death took the presidents of five life insurance companies. Though no one has yet been named to succeed Ulysses Sherman Brandt of Ohio State Life. Massachusetts Mutual elected Bertrand James Perry after the death of William Henry Sargeant last December. Hartford's Phoenix Mutual picked Arthur M. Collens, a clergyman's son, who had been vice president under the late Archibald Ashley Welch. Insurance tragedy of the year befell Penn Mutual's William Adger Law, who was accidentally shot and killed by his good friend Samuel Clay Williams, chairman of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., on a North Carolina hunting trip last winter (TIME, Feb. 6). Mr. Law's successor was William Harmstead Kingsley, who started in the company as an office boy in 1885 after graduation from Philadelphia's Girard College.

John Hancock Mutual, eighth largest U. S. life company, lost President Walton Lee Crocker last January, elected its gen eral counsel, Guy Wilbur Cox, to succeed him. President Cox is a member of a no table family. Brother Channing Harris Cox was a Republican Governor of Massachusetts from 1921 to 1924, now heads Bos ton's famed Old Colony Trust Co. Brother Louis Sherburne Cox sits on the Massachusetts Superior Bench. Brother Walter Randall Cox lives in Goshen, N. Y., is the most famed trainer of trotting horses in the U. S. In one Hambletonian, Goshen trotting classic, four Cox horses led the field. The Brothers Cox stem from pre-Revolutionary New Hampshire stock, were raised in Manchester, where their father was in business. John Hancock's Cox earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Dart mouth (Class of 1893). He then studied law at Boston University, was long a part ner of William Morgan Butler, onetime (1924-26) Senator from Massachusetts and campaign manager for Calvin Coolidge. Now 65, punctual, precise, New England-ish, Guy Cox likes to fish, farm, browse through his favorite authors, who include Horace, Catullus, Tacitus, Juvenal, Proust, Havelock Ellis.

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