John D. MacArthur was an American businessman and philanthropist. He was an insurance and real estate magnate.
Background
John D. MacArthur was bornon March 6, 1897, in Pittston, Pennsylvania. He was one of seven children of William Telfer MacArthur, a coal miner who became a Baptist evangelist, and Georgiana Welstead.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the family relocated to Illinois, then moved again to Nyack, New York, in 1910. By this time the Reverend MacArthur's ministry had gained national prominence, and he often preached to audiences of 5, 000 to 6, 000 persons.
When his mother died in 1915, MacArthur left Nyack to rejoin his three elder brothers in Illinois.
Education
At age thirteen, John, a bright but headstrong student, entered the Wilson Academy in Nyack. Having earned failing marks and a reputation as a prankster, he dropped out of school after the eighth grade.
Career
MacArthur went to work as a salesman for his oldest brother Alfred's Central Standard Life Insurance Company. Three months later, he became the firm's top producer. In 1917, he sold a million dollars' worth of policies. Eager to enter World War I, MacArthur joined the United States Navy and then the Royal Canadian Flying Corps, but left both because he could not get the combat orders he sought. He later failed in an attempt to stow away on board a troopship.
Inspired by two newspapermen brothers of his Telfer, who owned Pioneer Press, a chain of suburban newspapers, and Charles, an award-winning journalist MacArthur worked briefly as a copyboy and then a cub reporter for the Chicago Herald and Examiner, but soon returned to a career in insurance. By 1927, he had become sales vice-president of State Life Insurance of Illinois, at an annual salary of $10, 000.
In 1928, he purchased Marquette Life of Jerseyville, Illinois, a small and ailing company, for $7, 500. At the time, Marquette listed liquid assets of less than $16. He moved its office to Chicago and rebuilt the company by selling insurance policies door-to-door during the Great Depression. The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange on Black Friday, October 25, 1929, and the ensuing financial chaos nearly bankrupted the life insurance industry.
Later in life, MacArthur recalled his cocky stance during the depression: "I had shot my mouth off to my brothers about making a big success, " he remembered, "so I couldn't throw in the sponge when things got tough. " His late entry into the business actually proved his salvation. MacArthur recalled, "I didn't have any assets, but I didn't have any liabilities, either, and the liabilities were destroying the big firms, " which could not economically collect premiums of less than $5.
MacArthur not only sold policies with $1 monthly premiums but also accosted people on Chicago's streets and sold them insurance for anything they could afford including their lunch money.
In 1935, seven years after acquiring his first company, MacArthur borrowed the money to purchase Banker's Life and Casualty for $2, 500, a move that almost put him out of business when four of the firm's policyholders filed claims during the first month of his ownership. His assets shrank to a bare $100, yet he survived and took advantage of the depression by selling policies to clients left stranded by failed firms.
In 1938, MacArthur launched an innovative system selling life insurance through the mail. He placed ads and mailed out thousands of flyers. The phenomenal response to this novel gambit underwrote his nationwide expansion. In the 1940's, MacArthur sold hundreds of thousands of low-cost policies. After World War II, his security-conscious customers bought more expensive coverage.
By the 1950's, Bankers Life was a virtual insurance empire. MacArthur was its sole owner. He repeated his formula of buying small, bankrupt insurance firms a dozen times or more. As of July 1958, his companies employed a sales staff of more than 5, 000, servicing 3 million clients with $5. 5 billion in policies.
Achievements
MacArthur made his fortune in the insurance business. He acquired the Bankers Life and Casualty Company in 1935 for $2, 500, then went on to build a business empire by acquiring many small insurance corporations. In the 1950s he signed famed broadcaster Paul Harvey as his company's radio spokesperson.
Personality
Ambitious, driven, and prescient enough to see a salary as a limitation to someone gifted with his sales ability, MacArthur, again with help from Alfred, struck out on his own. Fortune magazine anointed him one of the nation's richest business tycoons. His corporate philosophy of privately held assets allowed him total freedom of operation. "Go public?" he once exclaimed to an interviewer. "What for? This way I've got nobody to quarrel with. My life is a million times easier. "
MacArthur drove an old Cadillac, wore dripdry shirts, and always flew economy class; never failing to point out to more free-spending colleagues, "My tail fits nicely in a tourist seat. " The MacArthur moved to Palm Beach County, Florida, in 1958, and he began to invest in land, eventually purchasing over 100, 000 acres, about 25, 000 of them in Palm Beach County alone.
In addition to his insurance holdings and Florida land, MacArthur owned several development companies and shopping centers, hotels, banks, paper and pulp companies, 19 office buildings and 6, 000 apartments in New York City, publishing firms, and radio and television stations. Although MacArthur never gained the fame of his brother Charles or of his cousin General Douglas MacArthur, by the 1970's, he was one of the country's two surviving billionaires and certainly the more accessible.
In his sixties, MacArthur owned and worked from a small hotel, the Colonnades, in the minuscule community of Palm Beach Shores on Singer Island, on the north side of Palm Beach Inlet. A plain-living person who eschewed maids, butlers, chauffeurs, public relations men, and bodyguards, he held court each morning in the hotel's coffee shop with a band of cronies, running his financial empire from his breakfast table.
Whenever the Colonnades' staff was shorthanded, MacArthur pitched in wherever needed from the front door to the reception desk. Diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1970, MacArthur continued his workaday life.
During the recession of the mid-1970's there was a strip of bankrupt or near-bankrupt high-rise condominiums on the oceanfront in North Palm Beach. MacArthur purchased one of these buildings for a few cents on the dollar, slashed each unit's asking price, and gave every purchaser a Cadillac Sedan de Ville. At a time when condominium sales stood moribund in that community, he sold out his property in weeks. John D. MacArthur, "arguably the most successful salesman in history, " died in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Although he was known as a pragmatic and closefisted billionaire, his will directed the establishment of two philanthropic organizations: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to which he bequested $700 million, and the Retirement Research Foundation, both "for charitable and public service purposes. " He divided the balance of his estate, worth $70-$80 million, between his wife (half) and his children (one-quarter each).
Quotes from others about the person
With a rumpled shirt and baggy wash-and-wear slacks, MacArthur looks less like a billionaire than a retired postal clerk.
Connections
MacArthur married Louise Ingalls in 1919; they had two children. MacArthur divorced his wife early in 1937 and married Catherine Hyland, his secretary and bookkeeper, in 1938.
Father:
William Telfer MacArthur
Was a coal miner who became a Baptist evangelist.
Mother:
Georgiana Welstead
Grandson:
John R. "Rick" MacArthur
Died on June 4, 1956.
Is an American journalist and author of books about US politics. He is the president of Harper's Magazine.
Wife:
Louise Ingalls
Wife:
Catherine T. MacArthur
November 23, 1908 – December 15, 1981
Was an active participant in her husband's businesses.
Daughter:
Virginia MacArthur
Son:
John Roderick MacArthur
December 21, 1920 – December 15, 1984
Was a U.S. businessman and philanthropist in Chicago.
