“Mortality as the Life Story of a People”: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896–1915

Abstract

Abstract: This paper examines the efforts of Frederick L. Hoffman—a statistician and actuary with Prudential Life Insurance—to chart African American proletarianization through actuarial narratives of race suicide in turn-of-the-century America. Drawing on works such as “Vital Statistics of the Negro” (1892), Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), and Hoffman’s voluminous personal correspondence, this paper details how the young actuary used the metrics of crime, race mixing, and the broadly defined “vital capacity” (a measure of respiratory health) to quantify the respective social, physical, and economic effects of African Americans’ transition from bonded to contract labour. With the rise of corporate industrial insurance, health—or more specifically death—became a key commodity in racial labour division. Positing mortality as the primary marker of racial health, actuaries such as Hoffman drew on the narrative discourses of evolutionary theory to quantify and monetize shifts in political economy through the rhetoric of race suicide. Paired with the narrative structures of scientific management, these actuarial narratives of racial health told stories of development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the constant tension between civilization and savagery. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the desire to maintain the hierarchies of white supremacy made the figure of the “vanishing Negro” an imperative of turn-of-the-century American political economy and a cautionary tale of the perils of racial decline in a rapidly modernizing world.