Here, specifically, are the details of my encounter with the life-insurance institutions, and I pledge my word to my readers that they constitute all the facts in this connection. They are well known to the prominent men associated with the great companies whose duty it is to keep track of just such transactions. Whoever knows by experience of the incessant pursuit of business by the important insurance corporations need not be told that a man in my position has had his share of importuning by agents great and small. I have never sought life insurance, for it has not appealed to me as an investment, but on three separate occasions I have yielded to the persuasions of a friend connected with one of the big institutions and have considered the subject. The first time was in 1887, following a breakdown from overwork. This illness my friend used as an argument to induce me to take out insurance, and I went so far as to agree to submit to a private medical examination by the leading physicians of his company for the purpose of ascertaining if my breakdown, which for a brief time had left a trace of paralysis in my left side, would bar me. This examination was at my own expense, and it was expressly understood that, being private, it should not constitute a record. The physician pronounced me a perfect risk, but advised against going further inasmuch as a rigid rule of the company precluded them from granting insurance to any one who had suffered from this form of illness until seven years after the attack. I was not disappointed except on account of my friend.
Five years later his solicitation was renewed and I was assured that the officials of his company were so eager to have me that they would waive the seven-year rule, which still had two years to run. This time I went up before another medical examiner, and after the usual tests, was asked the stereotyped question if I had ever previously been rejected for life insurance. My friend replied for me—no. I, however, in spite of his protests stated fully the conditions of my previous examination, which the doctor assured me did not constitute an official rejection, and the application was filled out. In the conversation that ensued, the doctor said that it was safer to await the expiration of the seven years, and I being still indifferent, except to my friend's interest, accepted the apologies of the several people concerned for the trouble I had taken and let it go at that.
Four years later, in 1896, after the attack of appendicitis which I described in the December, 1904, instalment of "Frenzied Finance," again my good friend the agent came to me and used the incident of my narrow escape from death to impress upon me once more the desirability of having a large policy of life insurance. Those who have read the "System's" disclaimer, will remember that I had been blacklisted since 1892. There were the usual consultations with high officials of the corporation, and when all preliminary bargains had been arranged, I underwent a thorough examination in New York. This time, the seven-year term having expired, I was pronounced a perfect risk. But my latest illness had brought me up against another waiting rule, and once more the subject was abandoned after the usual expressions of regret and good-will. Since 1896 my connection with life-insurance companies has been about the same as that of a molasses barrel with the industrious flies in summer.
The interviews of 1892 and 1896 are both matters of record. My position in each instance was well understood, and several insurance officials who know the facts as well as I do have, since the publication of the company's statement, come to me and offered to back up my assertions with their own. American manhood is certainly not extinct when men are willing to sacrifice their careers to set a wrong right.
The manner in which the great companies have met my rejoinder to President McCall will afford my readers an excellent illustration of how the "System" goes after a man who has excited its antagonism.
A few days after the publication of the December issue of Everybody's Magazine, containing my fac-simile of President McCall's letter to policy-holder DeRan and his two letters to me, the Life Insurance Underwriters met and "resoluted" that I had applied for insurance in the New York Life Insurance Company in 1892, and being asked if I had ever been refused insurance, had replied in the negative. Investigation showed that I had been refused four years before by two other companies, whereupon my application was rejected and I was practically black-listed, and so could not secure life insurance in any American company. By way of corroborating this plausible story two letters, purporting to have been written by agents of the two companies to their head officers without my knowledge, were incorporated in the resolution. The letters stated that the writers could secure me for a large amount of insurance if the companies would accept the risk. The virtuous corporations were alleged to have replied that Mr. Lawson had been refused life insurance before, and for good reasons was not desired as a risk. This resolution was then published throughout the press of America in the news columns, and to all but those initiated in the desperate practices of the "System" and its votaries, it was conclusive evidence that an unprincipled man had been convicted, red-handed, of fraud.
You who read this statement of mine doubtless found the resolutions in your own paper, and thought it ordinary news-matter printed because of its public interest. This notice was an advertisement disguised as news, and inserted through the "System's" professional character assassinator, whose head-quarters are in Boston, a person who will occupy a prominent part in the chapters of my story wherein I treat of the crimes of Amalgamated. The publication cost the insurance companies $2.50 per line of the policy-holders' money, while advertisements that I insert in the course of my private business cost me but 75 cents per line.
HOW THE "SYSTEM" MAKES ITS PROFITS
It appeared that I had sinned still further, for had I not questioned the virtue and integrity of the New York Life's securities? To policy-holder DeRan, Mr. McCall had stated, over his own signature, that the New York Life did not and could not own stock securities. (See the DeRan letter on page 428.) I proved from the regular insurance reports that millions of the New York Life's bonds were no more than disguised stock securities, created by the new device of depositing stocks with a trust company at an inflated price and issuing against them a receipt which is arbitrarily called a "bond." I mentioned, as an illustration, the Northern Pacific-Great Northern-C., B. & Q. Collateral 4s, created out of the stock of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and other railroads. I could have selected a much worse type of security, just as, instead of the typewritten letter of Mr. McCall, I might have published others of a more personal nature.
Against me out sallied 2d Vice-President Perkins, brother of George W. Perkins, 1st Vice-President of the New York Life (J. Pierpont Morgan's partner), and at a banquet in Philadelphia boldly answered my aspersions by declaring that the bonds I named "are printed in the list of holdings which the company publishes in detail, and has published for the last five years, in order that its policy-holders may be informed of its affairs in the minutest detail." The convincing logic of this rejoinder the dullest will appreciate, but for a moment I must stop to remind Mr. Perkins that the publicity on which he plumes himself is really not an expression of the New York Life's individual frankness, but merely an observance compelled by the law.