ephemera

DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH INSURANCE?

     The concept of insurance is grand but over the years it has turned into such a menacing, tentacled monster that the companies that run them are more important than the people who are insured by them. Looking back at some of the advertising done over the years for the many different insurance providers and agencies, one wonders how something which was supposed to be beneficial could have become so vampiric. In the era of the advertising trade card, the graphics were idealic. They showed beautiful children and Venus-like women, or comic situations. Everyone was happy, as they knew they were insured and life was a better place because of it.
   As most antique dealers today are self-employed, it is very difficult and very costly to obtain health insurance. Matthew Thornton, which just a few years ago was rated in the top five HMOs in the country, was gobbled up by Blue Cross and as of June, will be dropping anyone that does not employ more than one hundred and one employees.  How many antique shops or auction houses, in this state or any other, have that large a staff? Not many, I am sure. Those who are self-employed are discriminated against because they are not large corporations; yet the large corporations are allowed to drop customers and not accept new ones who they consider too insignificant. Health insurance is more important than life insurance and yet everyone wants to issue you a life insurance policy.
   Another form of insurance that is difficult for antique dealers to obtain is coverage on their shops. Why are these so difficult to obtain when there are so many offers for life insurance in the mail every week? This information is impossible to ascertain from looking at vintage insurance advertising but affects many dealers, and subsequently their customers, as often it makes a shop prohibitively expensive (liability insurance). Even large group shops have to consider in this factor when charging dealers rent and subsequently the price that is charged for an item. No wonder so many shops and galleries have closed because dealers have opted to pull out and go onto the Internet. It also, means that they do not have to worry about pilferage, breakage, space or booth rental, or paying taxes.
     Unfortunately, no politician can afford to anger the powerful insurance lobby to make insurance available to everyone, let alone affordable for those who are self employed, like most of those in the antiques industry.  Interesting isn’t it, that corporations have more rights, and power than voters do. Yet, at one time it wasn’t like that; but then, that was a time before either you or I were born.
     Let’s look at the insurance companies of years ago. They would come by weekly and collect your premium. If you worked in a large factory you could pay for it there, as the agent would have a set schedule to come and do collections on payday. There were innumerable insurance companies in those days, some of which are still in business. Metropolitan Life Insurance is a name everyone will remember but how many of you remember the Dorchester Mutual Fire Insurance of Boston? Smaller companies were gobbled up by the larger ones, or folded, and all those little companies are a thing of the past. Perhaps they were a casualty of our gobble-up economy. Even before 1895 the larger companies were investing in stocks and bonds and gobbling up the smaller ones, which just couldn’t compete. So it would appear that while the times haven’t changed much, the advertising has.
 

Because Metropolitan Life is still extant and they do one of my favorite ads, "Get Met it Pays" with Snoopy and Charles Schultz’s gang of sagacious children, let us use them as an example. By the way, there are collectors storing away anything they can find with Charlie Brown and friends, which Met Life produced. These include calendars and trade cards that were given away to those who were potential customers and those who were already customers.

They were avidly collected along with the calendars of beautiful children they graced many a Victorian parlor.
      Let’s look at a few of the statistics they boasted of in 1889. For five cents a week, less than a penny a day, you would insure a child 1-13 for $15 to $115. 10 cents would insure a person 20 for $190. 25 cents would insure a person aged 30 for $360. Fifty cents would insure a 35-year-old for $610 or a 21-year-old for $930. At that time the company had 1,900,000 policies and was worth 6,287,781.35. It’s amazing the things you can learn from the backs of trade cards. I particularly like the quote "ESPECIALLY ADAPTED TO PERSONS OF MODERATE MEANS" which they emphasize. They charged men and women the same rate and they said no increase in rates. In 1896 the company had assets of 25,592,003.78. This was a fast growing company and certainly their advertising helped to sell them as much as their policies. The home office was in New York City in a large nine-story building, which took up an entire block. Pretty impressive. Back then the insurance companies were always bragging about all the money they paid out in claims. I’ve never seen a card that bragged about the fact they were making record profits or were lowering the amount of coverage. They often listed their assets, reserves, or surplus but those were the days before "quarterly earnings reports" and investors that wanted to see dividend rises each quarter or they would sell their shares. Perhaps the many companies were too discreet or the competition was too much for the companies to give their users too much information. Maybe, that is why the advertising was always sweet, happy, flowery, and "More than 8 million dollars already paid to members or invested for their future security." Today 8 million isn’t enough to pay the salary of a corporate CEO but in the 1890s that was quite a sum.
     It would be interesting to know just how much money some of these companies lost in the two stock market crashes. So many companies went under during those two crashes. Some of the companies that were in existence at the time were Prudential, John Hancock, Life Insurance Co. of Virginia, United States Industrial, Western and Southern, Provident Life. There will be some names that you will recognize as they are still in business, but others are long gone.
     Even back then, there were people like Charles Dickens who felt that the companies were charging too high a price for the common man to afford insurance. Can you imagine how much Bob Cratchit would have had to pay to get insurance for Tiny Tim? In today’s market, how much would his health insurance have cost him?
     In the teens and twenties, blotters became very popular and insurance companies actively gave them away as an incentive to subscribe. Often they had calendars on them. When the fountain pen fell out of favor and was replaced by the ballpoint, insurance companies switched over to wall calendars and desk calendars. They often imitated what the banks were doing and one will find thimbles, tape measures and rulers with company names. Pens and pencils were another of the advertising give-away gimmicks that were popular. Of course, the most highly prized early items were the beautiful pocket mirrors with a pretty picture and advertising on it.  Today, insurance advertising is collected on the merit of the artwork. Insurance collectors are a minority compared to other subject matter that were depicted on these items, with the exception of fire insurance items, which fall into a category almost by themselves. The amount of fake fire marks on the market today is more than if all of the originals had survived. One has to be much more careful than one does on paper items. Today’s printing process is very different from the early lithography; later items, on the whole, are not valuable enough to warrant reproducing at this time -- but then, there is no insurance against someone doing so in the future.