Public Health Chronicles (2006)

In May 1896, Frederick L. Hoffman, a statistician at the Prudential Life Insurance Company, published a 330-page article in the prestigious Publications of the American Economic Association intended to prove—with statistical reliability—that the American Negro was uninsurable. Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro was a compilation of statistics, eugenic theory, observation, and speculation, solicited by the Prudential in response to a wave of state legislation banning discrimination against African Americans. Race Traits immediately became a key text in one of the central social preoccupations of the turn of the century: the supposed Negro Problem. Numerous turnof-the-century tracts (including Hoffman’s) stipulated that minority racial groups were not only biologically inferior but also barriers to progress. Hoffman, a German immigrant, was one of the leading statisticians of his time and also a strong proponent of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.1 His application of mathematical tools to a social debate set a precedent for the use of statistics and actuarial science—two fields then in their infancies, which absorbed the biases and errors of their early participants. Though Race Traits was hailed by many as a work of genius, even in its own day critics attacked its racist premise and suppositions, noting that Hoffman’s sources were problematical and his mathematical analysis flawed. Hoffman’s work embedded racial ideologies within its approach to actuarial data, a legacy that remains with the field today. Yet when we examine the life of Frederick Hoffman, we find a person of great statistical prowess who made enormous contributions to the field of public health, contributions that make his foundational work all the more troubling. A discerning, tireless worker, Hoffman later published with remarkable prescience on malaria, industrial mortality, lead poisoning, and cancer. It was Hoffman’s work that first linked cancer to diet and tobacco use. Overall, he was a statistician prompted by humane motives. Hoffman helped found both the National Tuberculosis Association (later the American Lung Association) and the American Cancer Society.2 How could a person of such significant accomplishment have authored work as fraught with bias as Race Traits? Historian Nancy Stepan reminds us that, “The scientists who gave scientific racism its credibility and respectability were often first rate scientists struggling to understand what appeared to them to be deeply puzzling problems of biology and human society.”3 Hoffman received the distinct social, philosophical, and political mores of the society in which he lived; that he could and did transmit them in the writing of Race Traits goes without saying. Whether he was consciously racist when he authored his first major work is a matter for debate, but it is clear that he did not break from the predominant racial ideology of his time. A more useful line of inquiry is how and why the document became accepted as an important piece of scholarship in its day. What were the motives behind its publication, and what were the values that have come to inhere in the methods Hoffman developed with the piece? Given the piece’s historical importance, it is all the more pressing that we examine its influences, which are deeply embedded in the statistical methods Hoffman helped develop in this work and elsewhere. A critical look at Race Traits and the circumstances that surrounded its commission, author, and field proves useful in understanding the ways in which the social and political uses of statistical data can obscure wider understandings important to public health. At a time when the life insurance industry was expanding in both economic and social power, the publication of Race Traits helped counter a century-long struggle by African Americans to access the services and security provided by its policies. Prudential selected Hoffman to author this document because of his skills as a statistician and his racial outlook, and in writing it he served the insurance industry’s purposes by harnessing social ideology to mathematical methods.