Business: Northwestern Election

It seems inevitable that Calvin Coolidge must some day become president of a great life insurance company. For four months it looked as if the company would be Northwestern Mutual, whose trustees began trying in June to agree on a successor to the late President William Duncan Van Dyke, who died June 7. Last week with a message in his hand a trustee left the board room on the fifth floor of Northwestern’s marble headquarters in Milwaukee. Instead of going out to a telegraph office he walked down a single flight of broad stairs, down a long corridor and knocked at a door marked “Michael J. Cleary, Vice President.”Inside he delivered his message.

Vastly more disappointed than Mr. Coolidge, who had probably given little thought to the matter, were the two chief candidates within the company, small Vice President Frederick W. Walker, one-time construction engineer, and a salesman named Charles Edgar Albright, who is conceded to have sold more million-dollar policies than any man in the history of life insurance. (Some of his clients: Walter P. Chrysler Jr., Arthur Brisbane, Eugene Meyer, Freeman F. Gosden, Charles J. Correll [“Amos ‘n’ Andy”], Harry Frankel [Barbasol’s ”Singin’ Sam”] and many another radio celebrity.) Between the trustees’ deadlocked meeting in June and their session last week Candidates Walker and Albright successfully eliminated each other. Their supporters voted for Dark Horse Cleary to keep the job in Milwaukee.

Michael Joseph Cleary is the kind of man who likes his salesmen to call him “Mickey,” has a habit of taking them off into corners to tell them Irish stories. A small-town lawyer in Blanchardville, Wis., he organized two banks, fussed with insurance, then got into politics. Governor Emanuel L. Philipp made him his counsel, then Wisconsin’s insurance commissioner. He heckled the insurance companies enough to make them agree to the regulations now enforced, smiled enough to keep in the good graces of the companies. Northwestern made him a vice president in 1919. He is big, hearty, broad-shouldered, a nailer for work. Insurance people predict that under him Northwestern’s shiny marble tomb will lose some of its historic chilliness.

Northwestern Mutual was founded by a rawboned old adventurer who neverbecame its president. In Catskill, N. Y., in the 1840’s lived a maker of invalid chairs who called himself General John C. Johnston. Soon after Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York was organized he got a job with it, placed his chair near the office door, never let a prospect by. In 1857 he gathered together the 36 trustees required to start a life insurance company in Wisconsin. By the time he had collected the $200,000 needed to begin operations the trustees had decided they could do better without him. They gave him $700 for his work and a $5,000 policy on his life. Next year he died. In 1859 two policyholders of Northwestern Mutual were killed in a wreck that almost wrecked the company. President S. S. Daggett had to pay the claims out of his own pocket. Northwestern’s assets are now $1,000,000,000, only $100,000,000less than Mutual Life’s. New President Cleary will receive $60,000 a year. His predecessor got $75,000.