Mutual Mills

In his high-ceilinged office-auditorium one morning last week sat Philadelphia's Mayor Samuel Davis Wilson. Overhead whirred the mayor's huge electric fans. Before the mayor sat between 300 and 400 indignant Philadelphians conscious that right was on their side. A young lawyer named Robert Dechert got up to deliver a careful speech. The bulgy mayor listened, cut him short, spoke for a few minutes in a voice so low that the electric fan had to be stilled. Then photographers' flash bulbs puffed as the mayor shook hands with Lawyer Dechert and his clients, the officers of Philadelphia's four renowned mutual life insurance companies, who became thus quietly victorious in one of the scariest episodes of their careers.

When Philadelphia's City Council met last fortnight it faced with unusual desperation the fact that Philadelphia's annual deficits have exceeded $10,000,000 for the last three years and show no signs of falling. Casting about for some way of adding substantial millions to the city's revenues, they fished out a plan first proposed five years ago but hitherto regarded as too drastic to touch. This was a tax of four mills on every dollar of most of the "personal property" (securities) held in Philadelphia by mutual savings banks and mutual life and fire insurance companies. This time the Council passed the tax and put it up to Mayor Wilson for approval.

Philadelphia seethed. The ordinance was obviously though not expressly aimed at four of the oldest and richest ornaments of the city's business life: Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. (Assets: $636,875,000), Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Philadelphia ($315,543,000), Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Co. ($112,438,000) and the Presbyterian Ministers' Fund for Life Insurance ($26,000,000). Most of these companies' investments and other assets are held at their headquarters in Philadelphia. Protesting that they were mortally threatened, the life insurance companies talked of moving to suburban Ardmore or Bryn Mawr, launched against the tax a high-pressure campaign seldom equalled in Philadelphia except by the bumptious mayor himself (TIME, Feb. 17, 1936).

In his soft speech at the hearing Mayor Wilson permitted the City Council to withdraw the ordinance, promised to veto it if it were ever submitted to him again. This apparently unqualified defeat was not so complete as it appeared. The Council had arranged a compromise whereby the insurance companies will accept a 2% tax on all premiums paid by policyholders living in Philadelphia. Penn Mutual will thereby pay about $100,000 annually. To the mayor this week was to go the honor of announcing this agreement.

Oldest. Most heartily pleased of Philadelphia's four life insurance presidents last week was Rev. Alexander Mackie of the

Presbyterian Ministers' Fund, a company which had once before been threatened with diversion of its policyholders' money and had at that time actually moved out of Philadelphia. The occasion was the British occupation of Philadelphia by General William Howe in the Revolution. Chartered in 1759 by Thomas Penn and Richard Penn, Proprietaries and Governors-in-Chief of the Province of Pennsylvania and counties of New Castle, Kent and Sussex upon Delaware, as "The Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of

Presbyterian Ministers," the Fund is now the oldest life insurance company in the world.-

Since 1910 the Presbyterian Ministers' Fund has insured clergy of all Protestant denominations, has about 12,500 policyholders with more than $60,000,000 insurance in force. It is governed by 60 '"corporators" who elect their own successors, select 18 of their number each year to serve as directors of the Fund. The directors elect the executive officers. WThen Corporator John Wanamaker tried 40 years ago to swing the Fund's business into the general life insurance field he was soundly beaten.

Tall, sandy-haired, crinkly-eyed President Mackie has held office since January 1936. Born in Frankford, Pa. 58 years ago, President Mackie went to Princeton Theological Seminary, spent a quarter-century in a church in a Philadelphia suburb called Sharon Hill, where he organized what is supposed to be the only church-owned country club in the U. S. complete with clubhouse, swimming pool and 18-hole golf course. He forged to the front in Fund affairs in 1930, when he fought a revival of the Wanamaker movement, won a court battle for a place on the board of directors. No crabbed theologian. Dr. Mackie thinks his troubles in handling preachers' insurance are virtually nonexistent. Overhead is slight because the

Fund employs no salesmen, investigates no more than one out of 500 applicants. The Fund does not issue policies for more than $35,000 and the average is around $3,000. Dr. Mackie estimates that the majority of his policyholders earn less than $2,000 a year. Clergymen live long, rarely commit suicide, and, says Dr. Mackie grinning, "darn few preachers are murdered by their wives."

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