MetLife: Civil War Limb Insurance, Dime Premiums and the Empire State Loan

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

MetLife began in 1863, when New York businessmen raised $100,000 to launch the National Union Life and Limb Insurance Company, which insured Union sailors and soldiers against wounds, disability and sickness. When the war ended it switched to standard life insurance in 1868 as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, then nearly failed after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Panic of 1873. In 1879 president Joseph F. Knapp imported Britain's industrial insurance model: working-class policies costing five to ten cents a week, collected door to door by agents. Within a year it had written a quarter of a million policies and pulled in nearly $1 million, and by 1909 it was the largest life insurer in the country. Its 1909 clock tower, marketed as "the light that never fails," was the world's tallest building until 1913. That steady stream of nickels and dimes financed the Empire State Building in 1929 and Rockefeller Center in 1931, and in World War II it put more than 51 percent of its assets into war bonds.

In 2000 the company demutualized, and its $6.5 billion IPO was the largest in U.S. financial history at the time. On September 11, 2001, 11 employees were trapped on the 89th floor of One World Trade Center until Port Authority staff Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz forced open a jammed stairwell door; in the aftermath the company put $1 billion into the stock market. It bought Travelers Life and Annuity for $11.8 billion in 2005 and AIG's Alico for $15.5 billion in 2010, while Snoopy served as its face for 31 years. After failing a 2012 Federal Reserve stress test it sold its banking unit to GE Capital, and it became the first non-bank to sue the government over a Dodd-Frank designation as a systemically important financial institution.

• The law of large numbers meant one missed dime from a factory worker barely registered across hundreds of thousands of policies.
• Its war bond holdings made it the largest single private contributor to the Allied cause.
• It also bought the Pan Am building during its post-IPO acquisition run.
• It paid fines over mortgage servicing issues and junk faxes while fighting its systemic risk designation.
• Its 1983 ideal weight tables tracked 4.2 million people over 18 years and set frame size by measuring elbow width.