The life insurance industry’s long, strange silence about smoking and cancer

Excerpted from The Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society’s full online exhibit on life insurance and tobacco.

For nearly four decades from the mid-1920s to the early-1960s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company conducted a vigorous health promotion campaign in popular magazines to educate the public about preventing or reducing the risk for numerous diseases, including cancers, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, obesity, anxiety, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and even syphilis. Yet in spite of the growing evidence implicating cigarette smoking as a major cause of the rise in lung cancer — and actuarial evidence by the 1950s of a significant difference in longevity between smokers and non-smokers — there was no mention of smoking in any of the company’s frequent ads and pamphlets on the facts about cancer.

Not until after publication of the Surgeon General’s Report on smoking and health in January 1964 did the insurance industry provide an incentive to lower the cost of life insurance premiums, led by State Mutual of Massachusetts, which offered the first nationally promoted non-smoker’s discount.

This exhibition features health education advertisements and pamphlets by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; pioneering advertisements by State Mutual for a non-smoker’s discount on life insurance; fire insurance advertisements in which cigarettes are implicated as a major problem; and health insurance advertisements in which, like those for life insurance, the leading avoidable risk factor is unmentioned.

Curator’s Note: Three requests in April and May 2024 to Michel A. Khalaf, President and Chief Executive Office, MetLife, sent in care of Elizabeth Harish, MetLife Media Contact for U.S. Business, for a comment on the company’s historical silence on life insurance and smoking, were unanswered.

Cover image: Illustration added to a Detroit Publishing Company photograph c. 1910-1915 of The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (far left).