From morning till night these insurance men throng William Street, most of them representing the brokers who feed the business into the great machine. And it is no wonder that the street is thronged, for the amount of detail requisite for every insurance effected is surprisingly great. Let us suppose that Brown, owning a building, desires to insure it. He sends his order to Jones, a broker who has solicited the business. Jones's clerk enters up the order and makes out a slip called a binder, which is an abbreviated form of contract insuring the customer until a complete contract in the form of a policy can be issued. This binding slip is given to a clerk called the placer, whose duty it is to place the risk, or in other words to secure the acceptance of the insurance by some company or companies. The placer then goes into the street, returning when his binder is completed by the acceptance of the amount desired, the name of each company with the amount assumed and the initials of its representative being signed in the spaces left for that purpose. Forms must then be prepared by the broker to suit the conditions of the risk and delivered to the companies, the rate schedule must be scrutinized to see whether in any way a lower rate can be obtained, and as soon as possible the policies themselves must be secured and delivered to the assured. The premium must then be collected and remitted, less the broker's commission, to the companies. And the broker's duty does not end even here. He must watch the risk for changes in occupancy, protect his client's interests in the event of a loss, and constantly fight like a tiger before the rating bureau to reduce the rate lest some alert rival offer his customer better terms.
All this detail is quite smoothly transacted, supposing the business to be in the companies' opinion desirable, but when the risk offered is what the street terms a "skate" or a "target," there is a sudden halt, and the completion of the binder becomes a more difficult matter. Then the really astute placer has a chance to demonstrate his efficiency. It is his function to persuade with winged words his adversary, the company's local underwriter or "counterman," that the stock of cheap millinery belonging to the Slavonic gentlemen with the unfortunate record of two fires of unknown origin and two opportune failures is even more desirable—at the rate—than the large line on the substantial office building which he half exhibits, holding suggestively back. It is his duty to place all his business, not the good alone, and generally he succeeds in eventually doing so, although some binders become tattered and grimy with age and from having been handed futilely back and forth over the company counters. The owner of many a Fifth Avenue dwelling would be surprised could he know that the insurance on his property had been utilized to force on some reluctant company a small line covering the sewing machines in Meyer Leshinsky's Pike Street sweatshop. Many an ingenious placer has had the binders of his very worst risks—that he had been totally unable to cover—freshly typewritten every morning in order to convey the impression that the order had that moment been secured by his firm and that the hesitating counterman to whom it was being presented with elaborate indifference was the first—the best friend of the placer—to whom the line had been offered.
On an eligible corner on the west side of William Street, at the very center of the Street's activity, stood, in the year 1912, a gray stone structure of dignified though scarcely decorative appearance. On the stone slabs each side of the doorway, old style brass letters proclaimed—if so modest an announcement could be termed a proclamation—that here were the offices of
THE GUARDIAN FIRE INSURANCE COMPANY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Over this portal gray walls rose to the height of eight stories. Such was the headquarters, from an external aspect, of one of the oldest, safest, and best of local companies, which invariably, for brevity, was known to friends and foes alike as "The Guardian of New York."
Entering the somewhat narrow vestibule, the visitor found himself in a small and gloomy hall, confronted by two debilitated grille elevator doors which seemed sadly to need oiling, the elevators behind which carried conservatively and without precipitancy those who wished to ascend. The two individuals who directed the leisurely progress of these cars were elderly men who, like most of those in the Guardian's employment, had been in the service of the company since it moved into the "new" building. This migration had occurred about the time that torch-light parades were marching up Broadway to the rhythmic cheers for "Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!" It is a melancholy truth that in a generation and a half eyes grow dim and limbs falter, but in the opinion of the Guardian's management the fact that a man was no longer as young as he had once been was no valid reason, unless he were actually incompetent, why he should not be allowed to continue doing the best he could. President Wintermuth himself had once been considerably younger, and he knew it. He called all his old employees by their first names, and unless there rose a question of fidelity, he would no sooner have thought of discharging one of them than he would have thought of going home and discharging his wife. Some of the older ones, indeed, antedated Mr. Wintermuth himself, and still regarded him with the kindly tolerance of the days when they were the cognoscenti, and he the neophyte, learning the ropes at their hands.
One of the oldest in tenure, but a man incurably young for all that, was James Cuyler, the head of the company's local department, in charge of all the business of the Metropolitan District, and an underwriter as well known to the fraternity as the asphalt pavement of the street. The Guardian's local department, which occupied the entire first floor of the building, except the elevator space, was a busy place from nine o'clock till five on ordinary days and from nine till one on Saturdays. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, Mr. Cuyler stood behind his long map counter, his genial but penetrating eye instantly assessing each man that approached, sifting with quick glance the business offered, and detecting almost automatically any trick or "joker" in that which his visitors presented. Most of the men across the counter naturally were brokers or their placing clerks, armed with binders on risks of all kinds, some good and many more bad, for the good risks are usually snapped up in large amounts by the first companies to whom they are taken, but the bad ones make their weary and often fruitless tour of the entire street. All of them, the good and bad alike, the placers commonly presented to Mr. Cuyler with a bland innocence which deceived that astute veteran not at all. The purpose of the average broker was to induce the Guardian to accept his chaff with as little wheat as he could possibly bestow, while Mr. Cuyler's, on the contrary, was to take the wheat and the wheat alone. The chaff he declined in three thousand manners, in every case fitting his refusal to the refused one, always bearing in mind that that worthy's affections must not be permanently and hopelessly alienated.
"John," he would say with a smile, "I'll write thirty-five thousand on that fireproof building for you, but I can't take that rag stock. I'd like to help you out, you understand, but I simply can't touch the class. Two years ago I wrote an accommodation line for Billy Heilbrun—some old junk shop in Sullivan Street—and she smoked for a total loss in about a month, and I can still recall the post-mortem I had with the President."
And under cover of this painful but purely fictitious incident he would whisk away the binder on the fireproof building, returning it signed with one and the same movement, and smiling a smile of chastened sorrow over his inability to assist his friend with the undesirable rag offering. Or else the office would see him lean forward impressively, and say, in a hushed whisper, across the counter: "Now, Mr. Charles Webb, you're wasted in the insurance business. If you have the cold nerve to offer me that old skate that's been turned down by every company from the Continental down to the Kickapoo Lloyds—well, you ought to be in the legislature, that's where you ought to be!"
"But here's something to go with it—to sweeten it up," the unabashed Mr. Webb would probably protest, producing another risk of equally detrimental description. Then Mr. Cuyler would turn.