Wright, Elizur

(1804–85) abolitionist, insurance reformer; born in South Canaan, Conn. After graduating from Yale he taught in the early 1830s at Western Reserve (Ohio), but hostility toward his abolitionist activism led him to resign. Moving to New York, he helped found and became secretary of the New York Anti-Slavery Society (1833), edited its publications, and resigned (1839) to serve briefly as editor of a Massachusetts abolitionist journal. In 1846 he founded and became editor of The Weekly Chronicle (later purchased by the Free Soil Party); in this capacity, and later, as Massachusetts' insurance commissioner (1859–66), he fought for and won the enactment of insurance reforms that had wide impact on the U.S. insurance industry, including those that required companies to maintain adequate reserves. Although his reforms got him forced from his state office position by the industry, he worked as an actuary for insurance companies. He was also active in conserving the natural environment.

References in periodicals archive

Also inducted that same year was Elizur Wright, known by many as the Father of Life Insurance, and Solomon S.

Mutual insurance

Elizur Wright only did so to attack the American Colonization Society; he said its purpose was to draw away excess slaves who, if they continued to live in the American South, would depress slave values.

Theory's failure: Malthusian population theory and the projected demise of slavery

"Eclectic" ones such as Elizur Wright envisioned a coalition that included labor reforms, while "single-issue" men considered such concerns distractions from the central moral imperative.

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform

Elizur Wright, the influential former insurance commissioner of Massachusetts, complained that "each State touches every company which is national or aims to be; so that there is an impossibility in managing a national business, or regulating a national inter-state commerce in the States themselves by local boards." (25)

Going national: the life insurance industry's campaign for federal regulation after the Civil War

About the same time in Massachusetts, Insurance Commissioner Elizur Wright was concerned with the subtler kinds of fraud or injustice that he detected in the mathematical practices of the life insurance business in particular.

Annual checkup: the U.S. insurers' annual statement has evolved from a fraud detector into a critical tool for demonstrating solvency

Lawrence Goodheart's biography of Elizur Wright offers an excellent portrait of a complex and distinctive social reformer in the changing culture of the nineteenth century.

Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse

Prudent reserving and fair policy valuations, scientifically calculated, were the cornerstones of life regulation there, and one of the state's first insurance commissioners, Elizur Wright, is viewed as a pioneer in the field.

Protecting the pledge: the quest for cohesive U.S. insurance regulation spans three centuries, and an end to the journey still isn't assured