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Reviews of Books
John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara
| Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872. By Eric Wertheimer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006. 207 pages. $50.00 (cloth).
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The American insurance industry began in 1721, when Philadelphia merchant John Copson opened the colonies' first insurance office. In Copson's office "persons of undoubted Worth and reputation" (3) affixed their signatures under a contract to insure a particular voyage and cargo. By the end of the eighteenth century, large public corporations eclipsed individual brokers such as Copson, and insurance became firmly entrenched as a major industry. In this ambitious study, Eric Wertheimer argues that underwriting took on profound social and cultural significance. The insurance contract, after all, transformed property into a written text. At once private and public, these texts created their own way of thinking about the world focused on value, risk, and loss. The poetics of underwriting, Wertheimer claims, influenced many early American writers who lived in their own commercial world that related words (texts) to profits and losses. |
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Wertheimer argues that American literature's relationship with underwriting first flowered in the work of Benjamin Franklin. He sees the underwriting spirit woven into Franklin's autobiography, with its "contract-like stability, all terms and conditions manipulable and each outcome strategically foreseeable" (35). Franklin knew that loss, defeat, and catastrophe could never be completely eliminated, yet he optimistically believed that men of virtue could minimize risk. In his essay on "The Morals of Chess," for instance, Franklin stressed the need for foresight, circumspection, and caution to avoid nasty surprises. Chess teaches men to look for success even in the face of previous errors and not "to despair of final good fortune upon every little check he receives in the pursuit of it" (48). Franklin took the underwriting ethic to a broader municipal level, where self-interested Philadelphians underwrote their city's future through charitable institutions and insurance companies. Reducing risk, in Franklin's view, benefited individuals as well as the wider community. Wertheimer argues that Franklin's "Silence Dogood" essays show how the underwriting spirit of "silent do gooding" is similar to the self-interest guiding Adam Smith's invisible hand. |
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For far different reasons, eighteenth-century slave and poet Phillis Wheatley also embraced a version of the underwriting ethic. Her early work was literally underwritten by a group of politicians, lawyers, and clergy who assured the buying public that her poems were indeed written by a slave born in Africa. Such reassurances buttressed her authenticity as a slave who was a poet yet also, according to Wertheimer, reflected the broader transformation in which property became texts and texts became property. Framed within New England's commercial culture, Wheatley's own poetry often focused on risk, loss, and redemption within Boston's mercantile community. A spiritual afterlife insured a material world filled with loss and tragedy, giving even the most religious sentiments a whiff of underwriting. Wertheimer goes so far as to argue that "Wheatley was perhaps the most economically astute poet in America at a time when economic tropes within poems were taken very seriously" (66). Such a conclusion makes sense within the underwriting framework. Who could better understand the space between text and property—as well as the tension between immediate personal catastrophe and heavenly assurances of redemption—than a slave forcibly taken from her home? |
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