Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to
the Welfare State:Ê Frederick L. Hoffman's
Transatlantic Journey¹

Beatrix Hoffman
Northern Illinois University

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, statistician and insurance executive, was a formidable opponent of the emerging welfare state during the Progressive Era. As a vice president of the Prudential Insurance Company of Newark, New Jersey, Hoffman led a relentless campaign against proposals for government-run compulsory health insurance between 1915 and 1920. While he acted in the interests of his insurance company employer, Hoffman's opposition also arose from his ardent beliefs about the nature of welfare states. Social insurance and other forms of state-organized assistance, Hoffman claimed, represented "alien governmental theories" based on "paternalism and coercion," especially since they originated in autocratic Germany, where in 1885 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had created the world's first sickness insurance system. "In so far as our right to oppose compulsory health insurance is concerned," explained Hoffman, "it [is] the duty of every American to oppose German ideas of government control and state socialism."2 In the anti-German atmosphere engendered by the First World War, his arguments had particular resonance.	1
Hoffman's condemnation of the German origins of social policy placed him in a distinctive position, for he himself was a German immigrant, born in northern Germany, who had arrived in the United States at the age of nineteen. Despite his German origins--and in some ways because of them--Hoffman successfully forged a personal and public identity as a fiercely loyal American and a protector of cherished national institutions against the threat of "state socialism" embodied in European-style welfare programs. Hoffman's miserable early years in Germany had led him to reject German ways, to embrace what he saw as Anglo-American ideas and values, and finally to seek a new life across the Atlantic. Even as he vocally renounced his homeland, Hoffman drew on his immigrant status and his familiarity with the "German mind" to rise to prominence as an expert on race and social reform and, after U.S. entry into the World War, to set an example of German-American super-patriotism.	2
Daniel T. Rodgers in Atlantic Crossings shows how Progressive reformers participated in a fluid and animated exchange of ideas between Europe and the United States, an exchange that belies the notion of American "exceptionalism."3 As an immigrant whose studies of European welfare states influenced American policy developments, Frederick Hoffman was a major participant in this transatlantic reform nexus. But rather than espousing internationalism, Hoffman used his transnational experiences to bolster his own brand of politically charged American exceptionalism. To Hoffman, European social policies were not models Americans should emulate, but negative, indeed repellent, examples against which American policies and identity should be constructed.	3
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