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FILE NAME Insurance Industry INS DATE 2000 DOC INS074 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION Profile of Frederick Hoffman THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 FRANCIS J. SYPHER Prescient and prolific in his writings F. L. Hoffman is finding new audiences 50 years after his death 1/11/03 1.52 PM In his day Frederick L. Hoffman enjoyed an international reputation as a leading authority on public health issues But like countless other notables whose fame seems unchallengeable while they are living Hoffman was abruptly forgotten after his death in 1946. In recent decades however his achievements have resurfaced as investigators have begun to take notice of Hoffman's uncanny ability to identify emerging health problems before anyone else For example in 1985 Paul Brodeur in a series of New Yorker articles on the asbestos industry called attention to Hoffman's early recognition that pulmonary disease is often associated with asbestos workers This analysis appeared in 1918 in Mortality from Respiratory Diseases in Dusty Trades Inorganic Dusts one of Hoffman's many studies published by the United States Bureau of Labor In another relatively recent study David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz authors of Deadly Dust 1991 discuss Hoffman's influential research on the dusty trades and especially his brilliant analytical survey in The Problem of Dust Phthisis in the Granite Industry under the imprint of the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1922 Hoffman also showed remarkable prescience in predicting that changes in smoking habits would have an important effect on public health In his massive study The Mortality from Cancer throughout the World 1915 he observed that cancer of the mouth occurred almost exclusively in men and he theorized that tobacco use was an important contributing cause At that time few women used tobacco It was only in the 1920s that women generally began to smoke in part as a gesture of emancipation and equality with men Later Hoffman published an article on the subject in the Annals ofSurgery 93 50-67 Cancer and Smoking Habits To those who regard the link between smoking and cancer as a breakthrough discovery of the 1950s and 1960s the report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Health appeared in 1964 the opening lines of Hoffman's article may seem surprising since they appeared in 1931 Possibly no phase of the highly complex cancer problem offers better opportunity for practical results than the general admitted correlation of excessive smoking habits to cancer of the buccal cavity pharynx larynx and oesophagus Medical literature makes record ofsome outstanding illustrationsfrom Emperor Frederick II of Germany to General Grant who are known to have died of cancer of the throat attributed to excessive habits of smoking Yet the question in general has not by any means been so fully elucidated by means of ascertainable and conclusive data as the urgency of the subject would suggest In fact I know of no really comprehensive statement of the whole question presenting modern facts suggested by the profound changes in smoking habits including the wide extension of the practice of cigarette smoking to a considerable ht p:/ w w.cosmos-club.org/journals/20 0/sypher.html ht p:/ w w.cosmos-club.org/journals/20 0/sypher.html http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.html Page 1 of 8 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 . proportion of women 1/11/03 152 PM Hoffman himself was a chain smoker almost never without a cigarette Nevertheless he probably would not have regarded his smoking as excessive and he never suffered from cancer BATTLING MOSQUITOES AND OTHER PROBLEMS Another issue addressed by Hoffman is the threat of mosquito disease which is emerging Hoffman had traveled widely in the American South and in Latin America and had been impressed by the discoveries of Sir Ronald Ross who won a Nobel Prize in 1902 for his analysis of malaria transmission Hoffman had also been impressed by the achievements of William Crawford Gorgas whose sanitary measures to control both yellow fever and malaria in the areas around the Panama Canal were critical to the successful completion of the Canal project in 1914 During World War I Hoffman began to publish a series of studies on malaria and he was active in the New Jersey Mosquito Extermination Association established to implement mosquito control programs and increase public awareness of preventive measures Such programs were so effective that malaria came to be thought of as an exotic tropical disease People generally forgot that malaria had occurred regularly in the early 1900s in the United States not only in the South but also as far north as Massachusetts Eventually the managers of the New Jersey mosquito commission now an office of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection found it difficult to obtain funding for their projects Since malaria cases had become so infrequent it seemed that mosquito control was no longer necessary Such may be the rewards for success But as Hoffman long ago pointed out and as recent outbreaks of malaria dengue fever and even West Nile virus an urgent health concern in New York these past two summers have made clear constant vigilance is necessary to prevent recurrences of mosquito diseases Hoffman also tackled the thorny issues of national health and pension insurance two issues that have a special relevance to the present In his extensive writings especially in 1919 and thereafter he adamantly opposed such plans His main contention was that they were fiscally unsound He also believed that they were socially unwise In his judgement it was better for individuals and for society as a whole if people relied on their own private initiative and resources rather than on governmental programs of assistance Interestingly his warnings have taken on new urgency in light of questions about the term solvency of the American Social Security system And national health care remains a controversial issue in the United States and other countries Even in Europe where national health and social assistance programs have traditionally been supported almost without question economic analysts are advocating that such programs should operate as one dimension of a three approach including contributions from organizations in the private sector and from investments by individuals on their own behalf On many other subjects Hoffman made accurate predictions For example in his series of articles on American air travel in the New York Times June 10- August 26 1928 he foretold that distance air travel was destined to supersede passenger travel by rail Another of his aviation predictions was that the development of airplanes for military use would entail a significantly greater number of civilian casualties in future wars His point was amply borne out in World War II with the devastating bombing of cities in England Germany and Japan http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.hhtp:/w.tcosm-club.omrg/journals/2l0/sypher.html Page 2 of 8 THE RED~ SCOVEREDPROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 1/11/03 1:52 PM THE BUSY MAN BEHIND THE BUSY TYPEWRITER Who then was Frederick L. Hoffman And how did he arrive at his prescient analyses For most of his life Hoffman was a professional statistician employed by the Prudential Insurance Company in Newark New Jersey His international reputation was fostered by representing the Prudential at important professional meetings such as the triennial International Congress of Actuaries He also published widely The bibliography of his books and articles runs to about 1,300 items including 28 major works of 100 or more pages And he wrote a huge amount of unpublished material including his reports to the president of the Prudential and a large quantity of business and family correspondence Hoffman also was a founder and board member of many prominent public health organizations such as the American Tuberculosis Association and the American Cancer Frederick L. Hoffman in an undated photograph Photo courtesy of Hoffman family archives and met many challenges Society From Hoffman's beginnings one might never have predicted such a career for him except for his intense scientific interests and his inner determination determination drive tremendous inner determination and drive to overcome all obstacles He truly was a made man who started out with few advantages Frederick Ludwig Hoffman or Hoffmann as the name was spelled originally was born in the duchy of Oldenburg in northwestern Germany on May 2 1865. His father Augustus Franciskus Hoffmann 1832- 1876 an accountant instilled in his son a love of learning and of scientific investigation However when Hoffman was ten years old his father died of consumption which was later to become a lifelong professional interest for the younger Hoffman The family had few financial resources to fall back upon although Hoffman's mother went to work and was proud of being among the first in her region to use a typewriter Hoffman was able to continue his schooling for a few years but his hopes of entering a university were ruined when he was told by his family that he had to quit school and go to work as an apprentice in some kind of mercantile business He tried various jobs as a shop doing menial tasks for shopkeepers in small stores but he hated the work For one reason or another he was repeatedly fired much to the disgust of his family who regarded him as a lazy dreamer and a stuck good nothing comparable language appears in surviving German letters written by his mother Hoffman in his German diary gives vivid details of his painful experiences He was slightly built weighing little over a hundred pounds and found it hard to do the lifting carrying and other physical tasks that were demanded of him He was also susceptible to cold he hated having to shovel snow and longed to be in a warmer climate Meanwhile Hoffman thought that his only hope for fulfilling his ambitions was to leave Germany somehow His youthful reading had fired his imagination with visions of adventure in exotic places such as Africa South America the South Pacific and the American West He sent numerous inquiries http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.html Page 3 of 8 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 1/11/03 1:52 PM to organizations that were establishing posts in new flung German colonies such as South West Africa now Namibia and German New Guinea now part of Papua New Guinea But Hoffman's inquiries came to nothing The competition for such assignments was intense and Hoffman lacked money connections and credentials He seemed to be an absolute nobody a condition that he was determined to overcome Finally after he had been fired from yet another menial position after only one day on the job as a polisher of table silver in a resort hotel he was living in the streets and nearly starving because he was too ashamed to go home again in disgrace But he was rescued by a relative and was lent enough money for the passage to New York where he arrived on November 28 1884 with the equivalent of about five dollars in his pocket He also had a letter of introduction to a German keeper in Manhattan and the address of a German who hada store in Cleveland Hoffman stayed in New York for only a few days before going to Cleveland where he was offered a job as a helper in a small general store in an immigrant neighborhood Again he found himself doing the kind of work that he had disliked in Germany but he was filled with hope and with determination to make use of the seemingly limitless opportunities that now lay open to him As soon as he had saved a little money he set off to wander through the South picking up work where he could find it staying while jobs lasted and moving on when they ended or when he began to feel restless again Even though Hoffman was living more or less like a hobo his imagination was thrilled by the new sights and experiences as he sailed down the Mississippi He saw mountains for the first time when he passed through the Appalachians During this period he also was learning English and reading widely in many fields pursuing a course of education that he soon put to use in his first publications THE WANDERER SETTLES DOWN In 1887 Hoffman became a shipping clerk for the Standard Oil Company office in Brunswick Georgia and there he met his wife Ella George Hay whom he married in 1891 after a long courtship mostly carried on through correspondence They had seven children of whom one died in infancy In 1892 Hoffman became an American citizen Hoffman first became interested in the insurance business in 1888. On a coastal steamer he had worked his way from Georgia to Boston to see a friend named Henry Carruthers whom he had met on a Mississippi riverboat With the help of a timely loan of a few dollars to tide him over he found a sales job in a store and one day quite inadvertently he happened to make an inquiry at the Waltham office of the Metropolitan Insurance Company The firm was always in need of industrial insurance agents men who would go into working neighborhoods to collect small weekly premium payments and nickels families for insurance policies that would pay a modest amount to cover burial costs Hoffman was hired and thus he began to work in the field in which he would make his career In 1890 Hoffman and Carruthers moved from Boston to Chattanooga where they opened their own brokerage business But in the depressed conditions prevailing in the Civil War South the venture was not successful The cash flow was too slow to generate enough commissions for them to get by on and they did not have enough capital to enable them to wait out the slow periods When the partnership broke up Hoffman went to work for the Life Insurance Company of Viginia in its Norfolk office http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.html Page 4 of 8 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK .. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 1/11/03 1:52 PM During this time Hoffman had made the acquaintance of Frances Morgan Armstrong who was helping to manage Hampton Institute founded by her husband in 1868. Hoffman became especially interested in the social position of Americans One of his first statistical studies was his article Vital Statistics of the Negro published in a Boston journal The Arena 1892. This work attracted the attention of the Prudential Life Insurance Company which in 1894 offered him a job in their statistical department in Newark He was to remain with the Prudential for nearly 40 years Hoffman's first book was The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro 1896 published in the United States by the American Economic Association and in England by Swann Sonnenschein His impulses in investigating this topic were primarily humanitarian for he saw then that the problem of race was one of the most urgent issues in American society But his views were heavily influenced by the prevailing racism and Darwinism of the time His research was based on the inadequate returns of the 1890 census in which Americans were undercounted Hoffman's statistical evidence suggested that the Negro was susceptible to many illnesses and constitutionally unfit for survival and was destined to die out This analysis was accepted by some but challenged by others including Kelly Miller an American scholar who wrote a lengthy review as the first of the series of Occasional Papers of the American Negro Academy in Washington DC 1897 Miller pointed out the shortcomings of the 1890 census and argued that Hoffman had not given enough weight to environmental conditions as an influence on Negro health and mortality Another factor in Hoffman's approach was the insurance companies practice of charging higher insurance premiums to blacks This practice was in violation of discrimination legislation in effect at the time Hoffman's study was intended at least in part to justify the practice of the insurance companies As his career developed Hoffman turned to the investigation of industrial accidents and occupational diseases which with the passage of workmen's compensation legislation were important to the insurance business Hoffman explored safety and environmental conditions in many industries and also began to take an interest in various minority groups especially Native Americans He began to campaign for better health care for Indians and on the basis of his statistical studies he urged the Prudential to accept them as insurable It is possible that these investigations of Hoffman's contributed to the eventual reversal of his position about Americans As reported in the New York Times of February 6 1926 he stated in a speech before the National Urban League that unfavorable influences on Negro health were environmental rather than racial An issue prominently studied by Hoffman in the early years of his career was the prevalence of dangerous conditions among workers in the dusty trades as industries were called in which manufacturing processes generated high levels of dust His investigations in this field helped bring about legislation to control sanitary conditions in the workplace At this time Hoffman also was active in the American Tuberculosis Association And in 1911 he was awarded an honorary doctorate LL.D. by Tulane University thus giving him the academic credentials that he had been denied access to in Germany during his early years Thereafter he was generally known as Dr. Hoffman One of Hoffman's most influential works was The Menace of Cancer an address before the American Gynecological Society in 1913. This was a call to arms intended to bring cancer out of hiding as a shameful condition that could not be discussed publicly and to make it a high priority for research and public health awareness Hoffman's statistical analyses of mortality had shown that http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.html Page 5 of 8 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET L. FREDERICK HOFFMAN 1865-1946 1/11/03 1:52 PM cancer was dramatically on the rise and his address led directly within weeks to the formation of the American Cancer Society Cancer was the subject of several of his most ambitious works including the volume San Francisco Cancer Survey 1924-1934 He had chosen San Francisco because the city had an exceptionally high cancer rate In his last major publication Cancer and Diet 1937 Hoffman argued that the diet of people in developed nations contributed to the high incidence of cancer And he pointed out that by contrast in less developed countries where people followed a simpler diet there was a much lower cancer rate His views were regarded with some skepticism at the time but his prescience is being demonstrated by the attention given to dietary considerations in present analyses of cancer as in a recent study by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research Food Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer A Global Perspective 1997 Throughout all of his research Hoffman worked on the assumption that to obtain accurate results one needed large quantities of exact statistical data scrupulously gathered according to uniform standards He was working at a time when sampling as we know it today was not practiced simply because there was insufficient data on which to base a representative sample In the insurance industry much of the rating was done by mere guesswork Hoffman saw the need for widespread uniform keeping as a preliminary requirement to the analysis of demographic trends mortality rates and public health conditions Throughout his life he campaigned for accurate recordkeeping in hospitals and in government offices concerned with vital statistics During his investigations he often had to start from scratch doing his own surveys and fieldwork designing and administering his own questionnaires and tabulating the results himself Eventually he had a staff of assistants in his statistical laboratory at the Prudential Nevertheless when he visited factories mines or tropical hospitals he learned for himself about every detail of the general conditions Another part of his method was to read extensively about the past and present of a new locality he was to visit When he arrived he would wander at random through the streets observing people their clothing build general appearance houses streets vegetation geography and climate in short everything that went into making up the environment He had an almost obsessive concern for obtaining hand detailed data about all his subjects of inquiry which is one of the reasons for his success ..BUT ..BUT NOT ENTIRELY The wanderlust never subsided and Hoffman delighted in his opportunities for travel During his youth in Germany he had longed to see the world In America he was able to find ways to fulfill that ambition Hoffman traveled all over North America to investigate conditions in mines factories and lumber camps He also traveled widely in Europe while attending congresses and meeting with government and industry officials to discuss insurance matters In 1921 he sailed through the Panama Canal to Peru and then went on an expedition overland across the Andes and into the lowlands of Bolivia and Brazil returning home to New York via steamer from Manaus In letters home Hoffman wrote vivid accounts of visits to remote known regions of the Amazon forest He described rushing down the rapids of the Madeira River aboard a balsa raft piloted by skilled Indian navigators while he clung to the boxes that contained his papers and his precious portable typewriter The idea of a simple vacation was unknown to Hoffman He lived for his work and his idea of http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.html htp:/w.cosm-club.org/journals/20/sypher.tml Page 6 of 8 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 1/11/03 1:52 PM * recreation was to take up a fresh subject for investigation But some of his happiest moments seem to the Indians of the Southwestern United States On one occasion he was made have been spent among admired Indian civilizations and was interested in the value of Indian a henrhboanlorreamreydiNeasvaajnodcmheideifcHienes which he investigated among the Quechua Indians of Peru Hoffman also enjoyed writing poetry unambitious and mostly unpublished and some of his most appealing the poems are on Indian themes such as one that he wrote while on a visit to the source of Mississippi near Lake Itasca Minnesota He exhorts the reader Scorn not the wiwin The Indian's medical art It teaches the path to goodness And long life to the pure in heart Hoffman made an air trip across Europe He visited Moscow and Leningrad about which he In 1927 series of articles for the Newark Evening News and the Peoria Star wrote favorably in a newspaper much conservative Republican and emphatically not a Communist but he admired the He was very a air at the time He noted that the Russian work ethic and the sense of optimism that was in the United States was far behind Europe in developing passenger air travel which he saw as the trend of the future He wrote similar travelogues about a trip to Mexico in 1926 in the Boston Herald and interestingly he had complimentary things to say about the populist clerical Calles regime In in the aftermath of disagreements about the conduct of the Bolivian expedition Hoffman 1922 with the Prudential although he remained on call as a consultant until resigned from his regular job Hoffman had met in Washington and Babson 1935. He had earlier impressed Roger Babson whom invited Hoffman to become dean of the new Advanced Department in Business of the Babson Institute in Wellesley Hills Massachusetts Hoffman filled this post from 1922 to 1925. From 1926 to 1929 he served as a consultant in research there He later became affiliated with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia where he wrote Cancer and Diet Hoffman spent his final years in San Diego where he had been advised to move for his health in 1938 Even though he was suffering from Parkinson's disease he continued to write and he published a study on lead and lead poisoning in the Monthly Labor Review November 1944 Early in 1946 Hoffman suffered a serious fall and he died on February 23 In his last Hoffman had enjoyed seeing his achievements honored In 1943 for example he was years the American Cancer Society's Clement Cleveland medal in recognition of his leadership in awarded death his name and his cancer research and in promoting cancer awareness But soon after his reputation sank into oblivion Hoffman had been a famous speaker and author regularly in Almost overnight he became a forgotten figure Perhaps as Andy Warhol was quoted newspapers minutes But as in Hoffman's case real achievement later to remark fame may last only fifteen lives and whether publicly acknowledged or not is always alive in its effects and in its capacity for on being appreciated by those willing to undertake historical investigations Recognition of Frederick Ludwig Hoffman's insights and achievements now seems assured Additional Resources Brodeur Paul Outrageous Misconduct The Asbestos Industry on Trial New York Pantheon 1985 Nineteenth Century Journal of the Haller John S. Jr. Race Mortality and Life Insurance Negro Vital Statistics in the Late http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypher.html Page 7 of 8 THE REDISCOVERED PROPHET FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946 1/13/03 1:52 PM History ofMedicine and Allied Sciences vol 25 no 3 July 1970 pp 247-261 Rosner David and Markowitz Gerald Deadly Dust Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth America Princeton Princeton University Press 1991 Sypher F. J. Hoffman Frederick Ludwig American National Biography Oxford University Press 1999 vol 10 pp 940-942 Thurber James Behind the Statistics The New Yorker July 1 1933 | Francis J. Sypher CC '86 lives in Manhattan and is completing a book about Hoffman #| 3 including a biography a survey of his work and a bibliography ofpublications by and about F. L. Hoffman http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypber.html http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/sypber.html htp:/w.cosm-club.org/journals/20/sypber.html Page 8 of 8